It appears they're not shipping source with the $29.95 version. From the Take The Feature Tour page, they state the following:
Lycoris Desktop/LX is currently priced at just $29.95. This includes 60 days of e-mail support and a 30 page installation guide. Desktop/LX Deluxe, which includes the source code and DevTools on two extra CD's, is currently priced at $39.95.
I seem to recall that this is not a GPL violation, because they make the source ISO available at the mirror sites (that's what I'm downloading now). The rule is (last I heard) a company doesn't have to ship the source along with the binaries, it just has to make it generally available in order to comply with the GPL.
Just wanted to take down a strawman before someone started ranting about having to pay an extra $10 just to see the source.
We're venturing slightly off-topic here, but I'd like to add to what you're saying.
I think as time goes on, more and more of our industries will move part or all of their operations off-shore. And I think there is one simple reason, in two words: Minimum Wage.
Why? Well, if the work a person can do is worth $2/hour to the company employing that person, then in the US, that person will be unemployed and collecting welfare (minimum wage being over $5/hour today).
However, the company still needs that work to be done. So they will do one of two things: move the work off-shore, where they can pay a reasonable price for that specific work; or automate the job so that machines can do it.[1]
It would be interesting to see if someone has done a history of the increase in the minimum wage versus the types of industries moving off-shore.
[1] - To bring this back on-topic, witness the tools available to us to solve programming problems that used to require a human. Debuggers, profilers, lint-type tools, etc. We even have some automatic code generators, like Visual Basic and Delphi, although they don't write the entire program (yet!). My prediction is that one day, not too far into the future, computers will be able to write their own software. "Genetic Algorithms" already produce vehicles and bridges that we never thought of, but which are well-adapted to their task. Once we have hardware and software that approaches the power of the human brain, it will then design a faster version of itself, ad nauseum, until we're eliminated to form a superhighway. DNA, 42, RIP.
I would say, "don't do it." (Or buy some vaseline, or any of a number of other warnings already posted here.)
It's too easy for them to take the idea and not pay for it. Even if it means they have to do some moderate amount of development themselves. Like another poster said, they may have all they need except one crucial piece which viewing your source code will give them.
I also have some anecdotal evidence. First off, look at Microsoft's history -- littered with the carcasses of "partners." You don't want to end up like one of them (Spyglass, Stacker, many more).
My own personal anecdotal evidence: I lost a large sum of money investing in LynkUs (their website is now gone, and I can't find it in Google's cache). They were a Tampa-area company which provided two-way paging service, useful for stockbrokers to communicate with all their clients at once rather than phoning each of them serially. It also had medical applications, which is what got them screwed over.
They are now a one-person company operating out from home; basically, a shell waiting for the lawsuit.
I'm still hoping that something will come of my investment, but as of right now it's a total loss. I pray that the same doesn't happen to your company. Be careful!
Several (not just one, several) attorneys should review this for you prior to you giving up the family jewels.
You pay more insurance because YOU got the ticket. Everyone pays a small amount to help pay for people like YOU.:P
You know, I tend to get about one speeding ticket a year.
However, the last accident I was in was over 6 years ago, and I was broadsided (i.e., it was not my fault).
I doubt there's a correlation between speeding and insurance risk.
However, I am certain there's a correlation between bad driving skills and insurance risk. Pity it's a little tougher to test for that.
I've been to Brazil. Their driving test is about 4 times as difficult as ours is. The people on the road know what they're doing. Very different from the "you breathe, you get a license" testing done here in the states.
I have a TiVO box and think it's great, but still watch ordinary TV because otherwise how would I ever find out what's new in the world?
I have a ReplayTV (a couple years old, model 2020), and I almost never watch live TV (I watched CNN live for a couple months, but "the war" is mostly over now, at least until we invade Iraq).
However, I've been catching new shows that I like, such as "24" and "Smallville" (damn them for scheduling those at the same time, I had to dust off my VCR!).
How? The former through advertising -- I use the 30-second skip button for commercials, but networks have gotten smart enough to put commercials for their upcoming shows in the advertising slot immediately before the show comes back on, and I generally rewind to see those ads. (They're also smart enough to put movie commercials first rather than, say, food or cleaning products which I would skip over. I almost never go to the movies, but it's nice to know what titles will be available to rent in a couple months.)
Smallville I had heard about, but a friend's recommendation started me watching. Back when "24" was broadcast Tuesday nights, then re-broadcast on Friday, I would record it on Friday and get Smallville on Tuesday.
So for a couple years it hadn't been an issue, but it's now looking like dual tuners must be in the next ReplayTV-type device I purchase. (Friends and Family Guy is a tough battle for Fox; perhaps they want to kill FG by putting it up against Friends? In my view Friends has been going downhill, so I don't both to VCR it.)
This got a little long, but I'm just showing through my own anecdotal life that the problem you describe is easily solvable without resorting to watching live TV.
Oh, and I wouldn't have thought to watch The Tick except that I saw it mentioned and discussed here.
On the surface, this may seem like a Good Thing(tm), but think for a second: Do you really want your walls recording everything you do, everything you say over the course of a day?
At first this produced a knee-jerk reaction "Of course not!"
But then I thought further. Weren't most of us taught that there's a "God" watching everything we do, judging us?
Perhaps pervasive computing is simply the technical term for "God 2.0".
David Brin had written about this many years ago. I tend to agree with him: people will get used to the technology, and deal with it. It'll be somewhat disruptive, but it's necessary -- the Powers That Be want to keep tabs on their equipment (including employees), and the police will want to be able to witness crimes "in action" after-the-fact, so cameras will appear everywhere.
Given that, it's better for us to maintain control and have cameras literally everywhere, including in the control rooms where the HR lackeys and police and politicians are doing their watching.
And with nanotechnology, the cameras become particles of dust. With the economies of scale that nanofabrication brings with it, this dust could cover the earth. Storage would become an issue, but again, nanostorage would save the day.
Well, college students don't have a lot of money for luxury items such as CDs anyway and the working public is a better (more stable, more money) market for the industry anyway.
An interesting side-note you bring up: music is being marketed more and more toward children. College students, teenagers, high-schoolers, middle-schoolers, etc.
Could part of the impetus toward music-sharing be due to this target market's economic situation? In the past, kids had to pry money away from their parents (or work minimum-wage jobs for it), in order to purchase music.
Now, kids can sample the music on-line prior to (or, in many cases, instead of) purchasing.
Also note that Napster came from a college student, a member of the under-capitalized target market.
In the late 80s major advertisers began to test their commercials for effectiveness at VCR "scan" speeds in addition to the usual testing done at realtime speeds. Commercials with too many jump cuts or too few still shots were required to be recut to make sense at high speed.
The excellent show "24" on Fox does something similar, I've noticed. At the beginning and end of commercial segments, they display the "current time" digitally, with a loud pinging noise as in clock ticking.
Lately, they've been "positioning" a mini-ad, with the "current time" for about 4 seconds. This is two "commercial-skip" presses into the commercial segment. The first couple times, I went back, but now I realize that commercial segments are at least 6 presses long, sometimes as many as 9.
So they're getting creative, but it only worked on me a couple times.
After Microsoft's incredible implementation of the recursive crash (anyone remember the crash recovery that crashed?)
We had a name for those: "TRA". This was when OS/2 crashed and started the panic, which prints "TRAP nnn" and other info, and then panics inside the panic handler. It would just get three letters out.
In retrospect we should have immediately fixed the trap report to read "nnn TRAP", and then those first three chars output would have been informative. Live and learn.
12,909,917 trillion ID's per person, equally distributed among all humans.
According to
this, the human body has 100 trillion cells. So I could mark each of my cells 129,099 times. (I wonder how many atoms per cell? Perhaps I could mark all my atoms...)
Sounds like a good-sized number. Too bad they didn't make a protocol out of it, though, so things could send a header (including length of subsequent data), etc. But then we get into price/performance...
He says he's not a pirate, but it appears he gives himself away (emphasis mine):
I am sick of your type of self-ritious attitude that marks everyone with an mp3 playback device, a cd burner, and linux or other non MS operating system as the pirates of the Carrabiean or Evil thieves. the cd's I bought ar my property, I can listen to them how I want, and I will...
If it is a hoax, what would be the point if it looked suspicious?:)
It certainly seems suspicious. Windows 2000 keeps popping up a Critical Update Notification which, when I download it, causes a blue screen (UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP, 0x7f (8,0,0,0)).
It has blue screened consistently five times now. I upgraded my video prior to the last time, so the problem wasn't ATI drivers (new one's nVidia GeForce 2 Ti).
If the Critical Update that Microsoft wants to install on my machine is any indication of their bug-fixing future, I don't see it happening.
It might sound like a small thing, but I've found many times that I'd like to look at an old version of a file, and I'm sure other students are no different; the point isn't so much to provide a backup service as it is to provide a file rollback service.
Sounds like something that could easily be done using CVS. Automated, even: user specifies which local files to store, and the system then submits them on a daily basis (or an interval specified by the user; or, even, an interval after the last write, like one hour so it doesn't store lots of little changes while the student's working, but when finished it'll store the end (or intermediate) result).
"they are not spending so much on promoting their 'server' versions anymore".
I'm sure you've heard of dot-NET.
Microsoft has not yet released a "server" version of XP. They will, and they plan to call it ".NET Server".
See Microsoft's site for more info. (They're currently on Beta 3, released Nov 11, 2001, so I'm guessing the final release isn't that far off; I couldn't find info on that, though.)
I'm too jaded to accept this as a genuine effort by Microsoft, which has left the security worry squarely on the shoulders of the client, to clean up their own mess and stop making them. I think there's an ulterior motive which we'll see later, like waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I've seen that ulterior motive being discussed already. I don't have pointers to the actual documents, but part of the settlement was for Microsoft to open their protocols except where it had to do with security.
So, in Microsoft's eyes, everything now deals with security.
Unfortunately, your letter will probably get short shrift, because the judge will recognize that you did not read the judgement, and will in fact consider your letter to be supportive of the judgement.
One word: "doh!"
But then after a bit of research, I don't feel so bad. See Dan Kegel's comments. Read down to "The PFJ Fails to Prohibit Anticompetitive Practices Towards OEMs":
The PFJ Fails to Prohibit Anticompetitive Practices Towards OEMs
I don't know that having the world at your finger tips with first class flights really fosters a scrap dog mentality. If necessity is the mother of invention, having everything at your fingers tips (as MIT is accustomed to) might inhibit creative thinking.
This is so true. I worked for a startup in the mid-nineties which was initially very underfunded (my first month there we didn't know if we could make payroll!).
The cool part? Because we had no money for the fastest machines and modems, we built our protocol to work well on the equipment we had. Once we released it to the world, it flew. I would bet that if we had had more money, and bought the fastest equipment, we wouldn't have been motivated to do as good a job -- simply because we wouldn't have seen the bottlenecks.
And if Microsoft pulled a stunt like that, you'd burst into flames. Hypocrisy like that instantly makes your entire point worthless.
Actually, there's no hypocracy. Microsoft is in the business of selling software. Their products should not "phone home."
However, AOL is in the business of providing a service. Their software does basically one thing: it phones home. (I.e., users of its software use the software to make a connection using a modem to AOL's servers, upon which the users are able to view AOL's content as well as the entire internet.)
So for me, as a Microsoft user I expect their software not to communicate with HQ. However, as a (hypothetical) AOL user, I would prefer that it communicate data about the system state and peripherals which needed to be used with its software, so that they could improve the service that I am paying for.
Of course, I would also prefer that the software ask the user's permission before sending any data. But I hope you see that I am not being hypocritical, because they are two separate uses of software.
However, perhaps you meant "if MSN pulled a stunt like that..." I'd answer that in that case, the two are equivalent, and I would not burst into flames as long as the user had to agree to sending the data, each time the data was sent.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wanted to take down a strawman before someone started ranting about having to pay an extra $10 just to see the source.
I was always partial to the maryann scale, myself.
I'm more worried about "This letter is confidential and cannot be shared with your attorney."
I think as time goes on, more and more of our industries will move part or all of their operations off-shore. And I think there is one simple reason, in two words: Minimum Wage.
Why? Well, if the work a person can do is worth $2/hour to the company employing that person, then in the US, that person will be unemployed and collecting welfare (minimum wage being over $5/hour today).
However, the company still needs that work to be done. So they will do one of two things: move the work off-shore, where they can pay a reasonable price for that specific work; or automate the job so that machines can do it.[1]
It would be interesting to see if someone has done a history of the increase in the minimum wage versus the types of industries moving off-shore.
[1] - To bring this back on-topic, witness the tools available to us to solve programming problems that used to require a human. Debuggers, profilers, lint-type tools, etc. We even have some automatic code generators, like Visual Basic and Delphi, although they don't write the entire program (yet!). My prediction is that one day, not too far into the future, computers will be able to write their own software. "Genetic Algorithms" already produce vehicles and bridges that we never thought of, but which are well-adapted to their task. Once we have hardware and software that approaches the power of the human brain, it will then design a faster version of itself, ad nauseum, until we're eliminated to form a superhighway. DNA, 42, RIP.
You said it!
code
oh, that too. ;-)
It's too easy for them to take the idea and not pay for it. Even if it means they have to do some moderate amount of development themselves. Like another poster said, they may have all they need except one crucial piece which viewing your source code will give them.
I also have some anecdotal evidence. First off, look at Microsoft's history -- littered with the carcasses of "partners." You don't want to end up like one of them (Spyglass, Stacker, many more).
My own personal anecdotal evidence: I lost a large sum of money investing in LynkUs (their website is now gone, and I can't find it in Google's cache). They were a Tampa-area company which provided two-way paging service, useful for stockbrokers to communicate with all their clients at once rather than phoning each of them serially. It also had medical applications, which is what got them screwed over.
They are now a one-person company operating out from home; basically, a shell waiting for the lawsuit .
I'm still hoping that something will come of my investment, but as of right now it's a total loss. I pray that the same doesn't happen to your company. Be careful!
Several (not just one, several) attorneys should review this for you prior to you giving up the family jewels.
You know, I tend to get about one speeding ticket a year.
However, the last accident I was in was over 6 years ago, and I was broadsided (i.e., it was not my fault).
I doubt there's a correlation between speeding and insurance risk.
However, I am certain there's a correlation between bad driving skills and insurance risk. Pity it's a little tougher to test for that.
I've been to Brazil. Their driving test is about 4 times as difficult as ours is. The people on the road know what they're doing. Very different from the "you breathe, you get a license" testing done here in the states.
Elmer, is that you? How's the wabbit?
It did not work for me.
Try "cypherpunks" in both fields. This worked for a long time, then stopped working, but I used it yesterday and it appears to be working again.
I think you have to specifically install the "unstable" portion of Debian -- unlike Windows, it won't do that automatically.
I have a ReplayTV (a couple years old, model 2020), and I almost never watch live TV (I watched CNN live for a couple months, but "the war" is mostly over now, at least until we invade Iraq).
However, I've been catching new shows that I like, such as "24" and "Smallville" (damn them for scheduling those at the same time, I had to dust off my VCR!).
How? The former through advertising -- I use the 30-second skip button for commercials, but networks have gotten smart enough to put commercials for their upcoming shows in the advertising slot immediately before the show comes back on, and I generally rewind to see those ads. (They're also smart enough to put movie commercials first rather than, say, food or cleaning products which I would skip over. I almost never go to the movies, but it's nice to know what titles will be available to rent in a couple months.)
Smallville I had heard about, but a friend's recommendation started me watching. Back when "24" was broadcast Tuesday nights, then re-broadcast on Friday, I would record it on Friday and get Smallville on Tuesday.
So for a couple years it hadn't been an issue, but it's now looking like dual tuners must be in the next ReplayTV-type device I purchase. (Friends and Family Guy is a tough battle for Fox; perhaps they want to kill FG by putting it up against Friends? In my view Friends has been going downhill, so I don't both to VCR it.)
This got a little long, but I'm just showing through my own anecdotal life that the problem you describe is easily solvable without resorting to watching live TV.
Oh, and I wouldn't have thought to watch The Tick except that I saw it mentioned and discussed here.
At first this produced a knee-jerk reaction "Of course not!"
But then I thought further. Weren't most of us taught that there's a "God" watching everything we do, judging us?
Perhaps pervasive computing is simply the technical term for "God 2.0".
David Brin had written about this many years ago. I tend to agree with him: people will get used to the technology, and deal with it. It'll be somewhat disruptive, but it's necessary -- the Powers That Be want to keep tabs on their equipment (including employees), and the police will want to be able to witness crimes "in action" after-the-fact, so cameras will appear everywhere.
Given that, it's better for us to maintain control and have cameras literally everywhere, including in the control rooms where the HR lackeys and police and politicians are doing their watching.
And with nanotechnology, the cameras become particles of dust. With the economies of scale that nanofabrication brings with it, this dust could cover the earth. Storage would become an issue, but again, nanostorage would save the day.
An interesting side-note you bring up: music is being marketed more and more toward children. College students, teenagers, high-schoolers, middle-schoolers, etc.
Could part of the impetus toward music-sharing be due to this target market's economic situation? In the past, kids had to pry money away from their parents (or work minimum-wage jobs for it), in order to purchase music.
Now, kids can sample the music on-line prior to (or, in many cases, instead of) purchasing.
Also note that Napster came from a college student, a member of the under-capitalized target market.
In the late 80s major advertisers began to test their commercials for effectiveness at VCR "scan" speeds in addition to the usual testing done at realtime speeds. Commercials with too many jump cuts or too few still shots were required to be recut to make sense at high speed.
The excellent show "24" on Fox does something similar, I've noticed. At the beginning and end of commercial segments, they display the "current time" digitally, with a loud pinging noise as in clock ticking.
Lately, they've been "positioning" a mini-ad, with the "current time" for about 4 seconds. This is two "commercial-skip" presses into the commercial segment. The first couple times, I went back, but now I realize that commercial segments are at least 6 presses long, sometimes as many as 9.
So they're getting creative, but it only worked on me a couple times.
I have a ReplayTV. TiVo experience may vary.
We had a name for those: "TRA". This was when OS/2 crashed and started the panic, which prints "TRAP nnn" and other info, and then panics inside the panic handler. It would just get three letters out.
In retrospect we should have immediately fixed the trap report to read "nnn TRAP", and then those first three chars output would have been informative. Live and learn.
According to this , the human body has 100 trillion cells. So I could mark each of my cells 129,099 times. (I wonder how many atoms per cell? Perhaps I could mark all my atoms...)
Sounds like a good-sized number. Too bad they didn't make a protocol out of it, though, so things could send a header (including length of subsequent data), etc. But then we get into price/performance...
I am sick of your type of self-ritious attitude that marks everyone with an mp3 playback device, a cd burner, and linux or other non MS operating system as the pirates of the Carrabiean or Evil thieves. the cd's I bought ar my property, I can listen to them how I want, and I will...
Ar, matey, indeed.
It certainly seems suspicious. Windows 2000 keeps popping up a Critical Update Notification which, when I download it, causes a blue screen (UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP, 0x7f (8,0,0,0)).
It has blue screened consistently five times now. I upgraded my video prior to the last time, so the problem wasn't ATI drivers (new one's nVidia GeForce 2 Ti).
If the Critical Update that Microsoft wants to install on my machine is any indication of their bug-fixing future, I don't see it happening.
I slipped into dyslexia reading that last word -- it appeared, for just a second, that he was talking about the power of pop-under advertising.
Sounds like something that could easily be done using CVS. Automated, even: user specifies which local files to store, and the system then submits them on a daily basis (or an interval specified by the user; or, even, an interval after the last write, like one hour so it doesn't store lots of little changes while the student's working, but when finished it'll store the end (or intermediate) result).
I'm sure you've heard of dot-NET.
Microsoft has not yet released a "server" version of XP. They will, and they plan to call it ".NET Server".
See Microsoft's site for more info. (They're currently on Beta 3, released Nov 11, 2001, so I'm guessing the final release isn't that far off; I couldn't find info on that, though.)
I've seen that ulterior motive being discussed already. I don't have pointers to the actual documents, but part of the settlement was for Microsoft to open their protocols except where it had to do with security.
So, in Microsoft's eyes, everything now deals with security.
Everything stays closed. Business as usual.
One word: "doh!"
But then after a bit of research, I don't feel so bad. See Dan Kegel's comments . Read down to "The PFJ Fails to Prohibit Anticompetitive Practices Towards OEMs":
So even though I didn't read the PFJ, as you state, my points have merit since they reflect exactly the problems presented by the above links.
This is so true. I worked for a startup in the mid-nineties which was initially very underfunded (my first month there we didn't know if we could make payroll!).
The cool part? Because we had no money for the fastest machines and modems, we built our protocol to work well on the equipment we had. Once we released it to the world, it flew. I would bet that if we had had more money, and bought the fastest equipment, we wouldn't have been motivated to do as good a job -- simply because we wouldn't have seen the bottlenecks.
And if Microsoft pulled a stunt like that, you'd burst into flames. Hypocrisy like that instantly makes your entire point worthless.
Actually, there's no hypocracy. Microsoft is in the business of selling software. Their products should not "phone home."
However, AOL is in the business of providing a service. Their software does basically one thing: it phones home. (I.e., users of its software use the software to make a connection using a modem to AOL's servers, upon which the users are able to view AOL's content as well as the entire internet.)
So for me, as a Microsoft user I expect their software not to communicate with HQ. However, as a (hypothetical) AOL user, I would prefer that it communicate data about the system state and peripherals which needed to be used with its software, so that they could improve the service that I am paying for.
Of course, I would also prefer that the software ask the user's permission before sending any data. But I hope you see that I am not being hypocritical, because they are two separate uses of software.
However, perhaps you meant "if MSN pulled a stunt like that..." I'd answer that in that case, the two are equivalent, and I would not burst into flames as long as the user had to agree to sending the data, each time the data was sent.