Your answer is essentially that he should not *want* to make any profits off his work...
Nonsense. I didn't say he shouldn't want to make a profit. I said that he shouldn't want to write software that isn't profitable. I hate to break it to you, but most software is crap. If it takes you five years to turn out a new version of ls(1), you're not going to become a millionaire, even if it's closed-source. His post seemed (and it might be a misinterpretation on my part) to suggest that he should be able to make a profit on anything he writes, just because it took him time and money to do it.
...that he should continue adding new innovations while his compettiors simply continue mooching and stealing his great ideas.
Even the parent didn't suggest he was trying to sell the software. The idea is that you give the software away, and make money selling services. These services can include customization (which has little-to-no value outside a particular client) and integration with legacy systems (ditto), among others. If he needs to charge slightly more than the competition to recoup his costs, the ability to say, "I'm the author of this tool" should help convince a potential client he's worth it. If he has to charge significantly more, then there's a chance it's not a profitable piece of software, and he shouldn't bother writing it.
What color is the sky in your world?
It's been my experience that the answer depends on such factors as time of day and local weather conditions (especially smog). Glancing out the window just now, it appears to be a pale gray.
Well, when I was thinking about services, it was for something a little more robust than "tech support." I imagined something more like adding new features, interfacing with legacy systems, etc. My job is developing software for corporate use, though, so maybe I'm slanted in my thinking.
There's a GConf setting to revert back to browser mode as default.
gconf-editor:GNOME::regedit:Windows
I mercilessly mock anyone who claims that regedit is a reasonable tool for an end-user to use to customize Windows. I guess I'll have to start sharing the hate.
In the real world, if I spend X years and Y dollars creating an innovative peace of software I need to at least recoup my expenses when trying to sell it as a service.
In "the real world," people don't just assume they deserve to recoup their expenses for no other reason than that they spent X years and Y dollars doing something. If you absolutely must turn a profit on something you did, you should make arrangements to get reimbursed before the fist line of code is ever written.
Another group however can just take what I wrote (since its released under the GPL) and under sell me on support costs since they have no development expenses to make up.
Unless your product is trivial (in which case, you don't deserve to support yourself on it), it will take time for your competitors to understand what the Hell your code does, and how best to complement it. In the meantime, the services you provide give you new ideas for adding yet more complexity. Not all consultants are created equal.
The topic is programming languages. Neither Slashdot, UTF-8, nor HTML serve as programming languages.
Even setting that aside, though, I still fail to see anything ironic. I don't speak Japanese, and I can't read or write Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana. Does that alone imply some kind of irony since I'm posting here? If so, how? Is it more ironic or less so that I have some knowledge of Devanagari, but absolutely none of Cyrillic?
Finally, HTML entities are for non-English alphabets, not languages. I have no difficulty, for example, posting what little French I know (je n'ai pas étudié le français depuis douze ans), and that is most definitely a non-English language.
[ how ironic that/. wont let you insert html entity refs ]
...because Slashdot is where HTML entities come from? I've been racking my brain for a while now, and I cannot fathom how this is in any way ironic. It's definitely an annoyance, but there's no irony in that.
Why would they do that? The letter "C" in French is pronounced much like the word "say" in English. The only point of the cedilla is to soften what would otherwise be a "hard c," such as in façade and François. "C" by itself already has a soft sound.
Anymore, whenever someone nitpicks The Matrix trilogy, I just say, "Look: you're talking about a universe where the bad guys are fast enough to dodge bullets, but too slow to consistently block a punch. After you can explain that to my satisfaction, I'll address your concerns."
The old Scooby Doo cartoons were a rare case where rationality won in the end, and wasn't a big downer (at least, not to this kid). There was never an actual ghost; it was Old Man Grumby all along (and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids!).
In short, it depends on your level of knowledge about the props or plotpoints in the movie.
This is really good point that I recently learned myself. Last Christmas, I was visiting with relatives and Dear God happened to be on. Both my aunt and uncle work for the USPS, and they spent the entire time ripping into everything wrong with the movie. A lot of it was really obvious stuff (like how Greg Kinnear somehow sidesteps all the red tape involved in getting a government job), but most of it was minutiae that made me want to cry after an hour or so. On the way home, I kept thinking to myself, "Is that what I sound like? No wonder I'm alone."
...he could type "What is the meaning of life?" directly at the DOS prompt. Remember: all shells support natural-language parsing. It's enough to make one wonder why Infocom went out of business.
Why would an effective java programmer generate methods with 100's of lines of code that need summarizing? Such methods are known to be error-prone and hard to read and understand.
That's what I keep saying to my coworkers. Nevertheless, we have methods over a thousand lines long, and our largest class is hovering around 25kloc (and I assure you, there's little reason for most of that code to be in the same class).
If nothing else, code folding is an effective tool for when you're forced to maintain source code written by idiots.
Just before I graduated from college in 98 (a little Y2K nostalgia for ya), I interviewed with a lot of consulting firms who were in a hiring frenzy. It didn't take me long to sense the pattern and start asking them, "What's your strategy for keeping me off the bench once Y2K has come and gone?" None of the people I asked had a good answer. It was pretty obvious they had never once considered that businesses might need less outside help once The Mother of All Bugs was finally squashed.
I assume that's so, but it's a incredibly stupid mistake to make, especially considering these are the same people who insist on a sixteen digit account number.
What I do have difficulty grasping though is how a game can be made for the Xbox but NOT be made for Windows.
My guess would be because the XBox is a fixed set of hardware, with known capabilities. If I'm an XBox developer, I don't have to worry about making my game take advantage of Gee-Whiz Blip-Texture-Buffered Cell Shading (TM) that currently only exists on the Radeon 10K+1/2. If I choose to port my game from XBox to Windows, though, I'll be competing with games that do exploit these features, and I'll get a reputation of being "behind the curve."
I'm beginning to suspect that the author of this particular troll is a Windows user. Microsoft, WISE, InstallShield, etc., have cultivated in Windows users the notion that installation prohibits multitasking. Most every Windows installation program I've seen since the 3.1 days runs in either a maximized window or--in the case of a lot of games--fullscreen mode. Also, they pretty much all include a message on the first screen to the effect of, "Please shut down all other programs while Setup is running."
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. I didn't say he shouldn't want to make a profit. I said that he shouldn't want to write software that isn't profitable. I hate to break it to you, but most software is crap. If it takes you five years to turn out a new version of ls(1), you're not going to become a millionaire, even if it's closed-source. His post seemed (and it might be a misinterpretation on my part) to suggest that he should be able to make a profit on anything he writes, just because it took him time and money to do it.
Even the parent didn't suggest he was trying to sell the software. The idea is that you give the software away, and make money selling services. These services can include customization (which has little-to-no value outside a particular client) and integration with legacy systems (ditto), among others. If he needs to charge slightly more than the competition to recoup his costs, the ability to say, "I'm the author of this tool" should help convince a potential client he's worth it. If he has to charge significantly more, then there's a chance it's not a profitable piece of software, and he shouldn't bother writing it.
It's been my experience that the answer depends on such factors as time of day and local weather conditions (especially smog). Glancing out the window just now, it appears to be a pale gray.
Well, when I was thinking about services, it was for something a little more robust than "tech support." I imagined something more like adding new features, interfacing with legacy systems, etc. My job is developing software for corporate use, though, so maybe I'm slanted in my thinking.
gconf-editor:GNOME::regedit:Windows
I mercilessly mock anyone who claims that regedit is a reasonable tool for an end-user to use to customize Windows. I guess I'll have to start sharing the hate.
Or better still, feel free to fork it and rewrite it to work the way you'd like it to.
In "the real world," people don't just assume they deserve to recoup their expenses for no other reason than that they spent X years and Y dollars doing something. If you absolutely must turn a profit on something you did, you should make arrangements to get reimbursed before the fist line of code is ever written.
Unless your product is trivial (in which case, you don't deserve to support yourself on it), it will take time for your competitors to understand what the Hell your code does, and how best to complement it. In the meantime, the services you provide give you new ideas for adding yet more complexity. Not all consultants are created equal.
The topic is programming languages. Neither Slashdot, UTF-8, nor HTML serve as programming languages.
Even setting that aside, though, I still fail to see anything ironic. I don't speak Japanese, and I can't read or write Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana. Does that alone imply some kind of irony since I'm posting here? If so, how? Is it more ironic or less so that I have some knowledge of Devanagari, but absolutely none of Cyrillic?
Finally, HTML entities are for non-English alphabets, not languages. I have no difficulty, for example, posting what little French I know (je n'ai pas étudié le français depuis douze ans), and that is most definitely a non-English language.
...because Slashdot is where HTML entities come from? I've been racking my brain for a while now, and I cannot fathom how this is in any way ironic. It's definitely an annoyance, but there's no irony in that.
Why would they do that? The letter "C" in French is pronounced much like the word "say" in English. The only point of the cedilla is to soften what would otherwise be a "hard c," such as in façade and François. "C" by itself already has a soft sound.
Facetious is my all-time favorite Greek philosopher. It's a shame so few people understand his work; he's truly under-appreciated.
Anymore, whenever someone nitpicks The Matrix trilogy, I just say, "Look: you're talking about a universe where the bad guys are fast enough to dodge bullets, but too slow to consistently block a punch. After you can explain that to my satisfaction, I'll address your concerns."
Not to start a fight or anything, but is there any evidence that one can be "programmed" by a radio via the subconscious?
Scooby Doo (the cartoon, not the movies).
The old Scooby Doo cartoons were a rare case where rationality won in the end, and wasn't a big downer (at least, not to this kid). There was never an actual ghost; it was Old Man Grumby all along (and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids!).
This is really good point that I recently learned myself. Last Christmas, I was visiting with relatives and Dear God happened to be on. Both my aunt and uncle work for the USPS, and they spent the entire time ripping into everything wrong with the movie. A lot of it was really obvious stuff (like how Greg Kinnear somehow sidesteps all the red tape involved in getting a government job), but most of it was minutiae that made me want to cry after an hour or so. On the way home, I kept thinking to myself, "Is that what I sound like? No wonder I'm alone."
...he could type "What is the meaning of life?" directly at the DOS prompt. Remember: all shells support natural-language parsing. It's enough to make one wonder why Infocom went out of business.
Whoa! Where do I go to get this feature?
Everything old is new again.
There used to be something called Two Kernel Monte which would do what you're describing, but it looks dead in the water.
That's what I keep saying to my coworkers. Nevertheless, we have methods over a thousand lines long, and our largest class is hovering around 25kloc (and I assure you, there's little reason for most of that code to be in the same class).
If nothing else, code folding is an effective tool for when you're forced to maintain source code written by idiots.
Regarding the Y2K part of your hypothesis:
Just before I graduated from college in 98 (a little Y2K nostalgia for ya), I interviewed with a lot of consulting firms who were in a hiring frenzy. It didn't take me long to sense the pattern and start asking them, "What's your strategy for keeping me off the bench once Y2K has come and gone?" None of the people I asked had a good answer. It was pretty obvious they had never once considered that businesses might need less outside help once The Mother of All Bugs was finally squashed.
I assume that's so, but it's a incredibly stupid mistake to make, especially considering these are the same people who insist on a sixteen digit account number.
One of my credit cards (which I have since cancelled) demanded that the 4-digit PIN not start with zero or one.
I'm sure a thousand people will reply, but here: THX 1138.
No, I'm pretty sure it's Darl who will be playing the role of Ben Dover.
My guess would be because the XBox is a fixed set of hardware, with known capabilities. If I'm an XBox developer, I don't have to worry about making my game take advantage of Gee-Whiz Blip-Texture-Buffered Cell Shading (TM) that currently only exists on the Radeon 10K+1/2. If I choose to port my game from XBox to Windows, though, I'll be competing with games that do exploit these features, and I'll get a reputation of being "behind the curve."
I'm pretty sure that's not the regular expression you want. It'd be something more like:
http://.*\.doubleclick\.net/.*
I'm beginning to suspect that the author of this particular troll is a Windows user. Microsoft, WISE, InstallShield, etc., have cultivated in Windows users the notion that installation prohibits multitasking. Most every Windows installation program I've seen since the 3.1 days runs in either a maximized window or--in the case of a lot of games--fullscreen mode. Also, they pretty much all include a message on the first screen to the effect of, "Please shut down all other programs while Setup is running."