you'll be amazed how different a handful of $300-400 CD players can sound
Ditto that. I was in the market for new speakers to replace my aging Mission 700s, when I paid more attention to what I thought was breakup on one side. Turned out it was actually a low level hiss that I traced down to my CD player that sounded like a distorting speaker. Replaced it with a garden-variety Denon (don't remember model #) and was blown away by just how different another CD player could sound.
That, and my amp (Rotel 971) were the most surprising things in my system: components that I expected to be jellybean replacements that ended up making a significant difference in the sound.
The PC components he placed inside that wooden case probably cost the same, but will be obsolete in a few years due to the speed at which we are updating technology these days. The radio however, was probably in use for well over 20+ years until a tube burned out and the previous owner could no longer get a replacement.
Don't confuse the two. Just because the PC won't run today's software, doesn't mean it ceased to function. For all the tasks it was doing before, it is still just fine and can continue to do them for 20+ years. The difference is that the external standards the radio was designed to deal with (frequencies, modulation method) didn't change while the ones for the PC (software, perhaps network connection) did.
There are computers decades old still chugging along just fine doing what they were originally designed for.
Knowing how to turn junk into things like nails and hammerheads and axe blades and so forth is fairly valuable knowledge in the midst of a terrible disaster, no?
No, because it's still easier to go to the next county/state and find a hardware store... and that is why I think the magazine will fail.
I just surfed over here from Nuts & Volts (interested parties can figure out the URL and hopefully avoid the/. effect without a link). N&V is a hardware hobbyist magazine that's beginner oriented. At the other end of the scale is Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar (of Byte mag fame). At one time or another I have subscribed to both and read many more. But they are just about the only hardware hobby magazines left. Why? The market is shrinking faster and faster. It is now so easy to get interesting things off the shelf cheaply that formerly were expensive or had to be custom built that there is little incentive for the average curious person to even become interested in building things.The barrier to entry has become so high that most won't bother when they can go write code instead.
Same reason Heathkit went out of business: the things they offered as kits became cheaper to buy complete and with warranty at the local Circuit City.
I like the concept of experimentation and building my own stuff -- that's why I have a basement full of electronics parts and tools, but I don't think this new magazine is going to last more than a year or so.
know that there's someone in the neighborhood who cares
This can't be emphasized enough! We moved from a quiet part of a medium-sized city to a suburb. One of the great things about that block in the city we lived on was that there were a lot of retired people who were quite friendly and neighborly and we looked out for each other. I'd help someone move a piano, they'd bring over home made raspberry jam or a bowl of raspberries fresh off the bush. When we went on vacation for a week, I felt much better knowing we had told the neighbors we'd be gone.
The only crime I was aware of in the 5 years I lived there was the shovel stolen from my backyard.
Our new neighborhood in the 'burbs probably has a statistically lower crime rate (crime rates are generally calculated over fairly large areas), but even though we chat with our two immediate neighbors, houses around here are so much farther apart that there isn't that same sense of community.
You know, I hadn't thought about this, but so was I.
I've often wondered about some of the silly comments made here in respect to women (like the one introducing the submission) and if there was something about the "geek mindset" I just didn't get. But I haven't had to think for a long while about the fact that I'm a man who was raised in a mostly female extended-family household. Women have commented in the past that they feel it's influenced my thought process, but somehow I just never made that connection to my feeling that so many Slashdotters have no clue how normal and capable most (yeah, I've dated at least one psycho:-) women are.
Last week I skipped 3 hours of a second rise on a bread I already spent 18 hours on
Curious: what kind of bread were you making? A sourdough or something that uses airborne yeast? I can't think of any other bread ('cept maybe croissants) that has 18 hours of preparation time!
OK. I don't get it. And yes, I am an engineer. A recipe is simply a guide to cooking something (and I don't see how they're designed to be used by one sex or the other) and these charts don't bring any improvement to the party.
If he really wanted to make recipes geek friendly, he could have emphasized that cooking is really just a pattern language: e.g., folding, stirring, beating are all different ways of combining ingredients, but with different results and for different reasons. Or shown that say, bread making and cake making generally follow a series of steps which are altered depending on the type of cake/bread you're making.
People have been cooking for millenia: there's not a lot about it that's difficult. As I said above, recipes are guides: you're expected to be able to vary them depending on your individual circumstances -- you may have eggs much larger than those called out, have a late night whim for cake, but only have bread flour in the house and so on. That's the variability about cooking that makes it fun.
...you'll appreciate it later. Burning bridges in the sense you imply will make just you feel good temporarily at someone's expense. Life's too short to waste energy like that. Besides, weird things happen. Years down the line you might need something that person can offer, be it a recommendation, or an introduction to someone you want to meet and he just happens to work with them.
So go tell them you're leaving, show a list of tasks that won't be done before you quit and offer to document your work/train a replacement, etc. Odds are they won't care about any of this as they already know "short timer" mentality sets in when you're about to leave. More than likely you'll just have two weeks of showing up to work and getting paid to read magazines or look busy.
Because the fact is, ideas are not like property... unlike material property, intellectual property is not governed by economic principles of scarcity
Let me see if I understand: IP shouldn't have the same protections as physical property because it cannot be made scarce? OK? Did I understand what you meant?
I have a ranch which sits on top of easily extractable oil. I have a small, portable refinery that I built which produces gasoline/diesel etc from that oil for my own use. I have no intention of selling the oil on the open market (lets say I make my money selling those portable refineries) and the oil is sufficient for many lifetimes. So as far as I am concerned, there is an infinite supply of oil.
Are you then justified in coming onto my land to take oil for free as long as you don't reduce it below the amount I would use in my lifetime? After all it really won't make any difference to me, and if I didn't see you do it, I'd probably never notice.
you need to find a company that outsourced without losing jobs
Easy. My first employer. Of course, I can't point you at them because they went out of business, but for completely unrelated reasons.
Outsourcing, when done properly, is a money saver. The specific type of outsourcing I'm talking about was electronics assembly. We used to have someone whose job 8 hours/day, 5 days/week was assembling PC boards. As volumes grew, first we hired someone else, then engineers (like the newly hired me!) had to pitch in. Finally it was costing us too much (having an engineer do a minimum wage job, extra time spent managing the assemblers so they were busy enough, etc), so it was mostly outsourced to a company that specializes in that kind of work.
I went back to my preferred design engineer/customer support role. One of the assemblers spent most of her time doing kitting (putting together the parts kits to be sent to the contract manufacturer) and other inventory duties, and the other assembler's time was spent mostly doing quick-turnaround rush jobs or things we built only in small quantities or that were difficult to automate (e.g., making cables).
And yes, we saved money doing this. Hell, we were profitable enough that a bunch of morons paid top dollar for the company, only to run it into the ground a few years later. But that's another story.
This is a practical exercise in writing your spec in advance and handing it off to someone to implement. Which, oddly enough, is arguably applicable to software engineering
Actually, it's already being done for that reason. When I took a Systems Analysis class on the way to a degree in Software Engineering, our instructor told us that he usually did just that: after different teams presented their designs to the class (and had them verbally ripped to shreds with criticism), have the groups swap designs and then have to implement each other's designs. It was usually quite eye opening for those involved. Unfortunately for us, a bunch of new material had been added when I took the course, so we never had time to do that.
I think it's a great idea. Teaches you a lot about what happens in the real world when you have to implement someone else's design/watch as they mangle your design with their implementation.
I ask them to send me 1000 lines of C++ they're proud of
This may be a part of the problem. I have written thousands (more likely tens of thousands) of lines of C++ for a complex embedded system over the past few years. But even if my employer was OK with me emailing you a large chunk of code, I'd be hard pressed to be able to send you 1000 lines of it mainly because it is so integrated with changes that others on the project have done. It would more likely read like "I wrote the original module and these 100 lines are mine, but someone added these 10 to implement a new requirement when I was busy with something else, and later I wrote the following 20..."
BUT, since I was the sole low level developer on the project, I could probably send you thousands of lines of device driver code I wrote in C (not C++) that wasn't touched by anyone else.
Now if I turn to stuff I've done on my own (home projects) in the last few years it would be mostly Java and assembly, with Python more recently taking the lead because I prefer to develop in those languages. And I daresay you'd get a better feel for what someone prefers to do if you look at their personal projects versus the professional ones: I like my job, but it's still just a job. When I interviewed for this job, one of the things I brought to make me stand out from other applicants was a small piece of hardware I designed at home and programmed in 6805 assembly. I was proud of that design because of the functionality I squeezed into a 504 byte code space, but it wouldn't meet the requirement you stated above.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to pretend the problem you see doesn't exist; rather I think that you're using a (perhaps necessarily) extremely narrow filter for applicants.
Besides, I live in the Midwest, so what do I care:-)
you should be able to upgrade to shock collars for all the developers pretty easily
That's nothing; we're trying to get our *users* to wear those. Augument those "Illegal entry"-type dialogs with a quick electric shock and you guarantee the user won't make the same mistake twice.
Now if I could figure out a way to make the shock collar go off when someone tries to report a bug, I'd be all set...
That said, you still need to sit up straight, put the monitor in the right place, and raise or lower the desk to the right height for you and your keyboard
That is just what I think whenever this kind of request comes up: What's your posture like? What kind of shape are you in?
The only people I've known who had trouble with most office chairs were either very overweight or were improperly positioned: sitting wrong, monitor/keyboard at wrong height, that kind of thing. Also it helps to get up every 1/2 hour or so and just walk to get a drink of water or something. Even if I just stay at the computer but stand up for a few minutes, I find it releases stress from my back.
That said, I just bought a Steelcase chair from a local office surplus store for $79 for computer use at home. Excellent chair, built like a tank and very comfortable and adjustable. Best of all, from what I can see on the web, the same chair usually retails for around $800!
It's a limited market. $100 for a textbook isn't unreasonable
Having just given my wife a blank check to buy textbooks (she estimated $350 for 3 classes) this morning, I'll say the same thing I said to her: that's ridiculous.
Yes, I can see for some graduate-level classes, or very new/unpopular fields that would be the case. But $120 for an introductory Ethics text (something very ironic about that!)? $90 for a Sociology text? No f'ing way! My most expensive undergraduate textbook was the $60 communications theory book. I remember that prof apologizing to students taking his Optical Fiber Communications elective about the $90 price of that text, but it was the only suitable one.
I don't want to work in shipping and billing, let alone marketing or management.
If you're one person working alone, the above is pretty simple, with the exception of marketing. In any event, I was trying to present an ideal situation: you have a product which is good except for its user interface and you have a trustworthy distributor who will periodically buy X copies for resale if you can improve the UI to something the average person can use easily.
To each his own I guess, but I still think most developers are somewhat motivated by money (well at least the ones I've known are) and would be inclined to improve what's essentially freeware if they could make a buck or two for their efforts.
You know what? I'm probably going to piss off a bunch of people with this (not something I'm entirely unfamiliar with:-), but it will probably only happen on a large scale when money's involved. Right now most OSS needs to be good enough to satisfy its creator, which is primarily an issue of functionality. The author knows how it works, so as long as there are no major bugs, he's generally satisfied with its operation, and there's not much incentive to improve the UI.
Now tell that same author that there's a possibility that he could charge $99.95 per copy if it were easier to use. Most people will wake up and work at it. Suddenly Jim the midnight programmer is talking to John over in Human Factors Engineering at his day job (or posting a request on RentACoder for cheap GUI design!) and asking him if he wants to make a few extra bucks by splitting profits on this cool app he's been distributing for free up till now if helps out with some design issues...
I wrote a bunch of freeware back in the days of BBSs and today at work I help out people in other departments by writing small tools for them when I have a free moment, so I understand the mentality behind free software and wanting to help the community. But I also realize that if you give someone a choice between giving his work away for free and paying him for it, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see which one has a higher probability of being more effective.
I think end-user usability is an area for companies like redhat, mandrake, suse, etc.
But if we leave it up to them, most programs will remain marginally usable. The vast majority of OSS doesn't end up on any distro: it's available from sourceforge or the author's site. And IMO that's where the most interesting software comes from. Who really needs another word processor or email program or browser anyway? Let the distros stick to providing solid, core functionality. The rest of us will write the niche apps that people and businesses need to get work done, and those need to be usable by non-geeks.
OSS has the opportunity to be like the cottage industries from the days when DOS and Windows were maturing on the way to ubiquity -- hundreds of tiny companies producing little applications that could be done by one or two developers and which met a real need -- and that's why I originally got excited about Linux. And it was real excitement -- not a trumped-up media frenzy around the latest WinXX release.
Linux on the desktop will happen: it's pretty much inevitable. And when it gets beyond the corporate-mandated desktops and early adopters and into the mainstream of "Windows alternative," those new users will need intuitive, easy to use mini-applications. The people already writing F/OSS software are in a perfect position to start providing that, but *not* if the only interface is CLI or a confusing collection of command buttons without any obvious workflow.
It's going to get easier to make money with Linux, whether anyone likes it or not. And with money will come hordes of barely-competent developers; the good ones will need to find a way to differentiate themselves: just adding features isn't going to cut it.
imagine, just imagine, that one day they realize how easy it is to get people to cough up money when threatened and start to file suits against anyone, regardless of guilt.
So you're saying that they're tyrants because they *could* at some point in the future sue people just because they feel like it?
People are unwilling to stand up against tyranny, which is exactly what this legal campaign is.
Tyranny? Are you out of your mind? Tyranny is jamming a spear up your ass and then planting the other end in the ground and leaving you to die (cf: Vlad the Impaler) Tyranny is torturing a confession out of you because "we know you're guilty, so just admit to it." Tyranny is taxation without representation and quartering soldiers in private homes against the owners' wishes.
Tyranny is not saying "we can prove you were complicit in violating our IP and we'll sue to recover damages."
For goodness sake, people die because of true tyranny and you're whining because you can't get free tunes! Look, I'm all in favor of slapping the RIAA down when they go after people who haven't done anything, but for the rest of them, well, you play with fire, you burn your fingers.
If you're so in favor of standing up to them why don't you go share a few million songs and send the RIAA anonymous emails about your activity. Then you can have your chance to stand up for the poor oppressed music listeners.
Whatever happened to making software for normal, individual users?
From what I can see, it's mostly free, or bundled with something else. A lot of useful stuff comes with a Windows PC -- word processor, email, browser and financial management -- and that's what most people use. This has removed a lot of incentive for small developers to address that market.
Besides games, what else do you need for personal use? I just bought a digital camera and it came with a CD chock full of applications I will never use cause I run Linux. You could buy separate picture management and editing software, but what they include will be fine for most users.
I can only think of two software products I have purchased in the last 8 years: Quickbooks for the small business I started in my spare bedroom and a Borland C++ toolsuite. All other software I have either came with Windows, or are tools given away for free by engineering companies to get you to use their products or high-functioning demos (assemblers, chip programmers, PC layout packages, etc). These days I don't even use Windows at home.
Ultimately it boils down to what you can make money at. I make a comfortable living as a software developer in the medical device industry and I have been thinking seriously about starting a business. However, I don't see any way to make even 20% less than I'm making now by developing consumer/hobby products, so my interests are best served by looking at industry and determining what needs I can meet.
I've also noticed that CompUSA and the like are setting themselves up as home entertainment vendors...
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto that. I was in the market for new speakers to replace my aging Mission 700s, when I paid more attention to what I thought was breakup on one side. Turned out it was actually a low level hiss that I traced down to my CD player that sounded like a distorting speaker. Replaced it with a garden-variety Denon (don't remember model #) and was blown away by just how different another CD player could sound.
That, and my amp (Rotel 971) were the most surprising things in my system: components that I expected to be jellybean replacements that ended up making a significant difference in the sound.
Don't confuse the two. Just because the PC won't run today's software, doesn't mean it ceased to function. For all the tasks it was doing before, it is still just fine and can continue to do them for 20+ years. The difference is that the external standards the radio was designed to deal with (frequencies, modulation method) didn't change while the ones for the PC (software, perhaps network connection) did.
There are computers decades old still chugging along just fine doing what they were originally designed for.
No, because it's still easier to go to the next county/state and find a hardware store
I just surfed over here from Nuts & Volts (interested parties can figure out the URL and hopefully avoid the
Same reason Heathkit went out of business: the things they offered as kits became cheaper to buy complete and with warranty at the local Circuit City.
I like the concept of experimentation and building my own stuff -- that's why I have a basement full of electronics parts and tools, but I don't think this new magazine is going to last more than a year or so.
As the answers get easier to find, it becomes increasingly more important to employ/be the person who knows what question to ask!
This can't be emphasized enough! We moved from a quiet part of a medium-sized city to a suburb. One of the great things about that block in the city we lived on was that there were a lot of retired people who were quite friendly and neighborly and we looked out for each other. I'd help someone move a piano, they'd bring over home made raspberry jam or a bowl of raspberries fresh off the bush. When we went on vacation for a week, I felt much better knowing we had told the neighbors we'd be gone.
The only crime I was aware of in the 5 years I lived there was the shovel stolen from my backyard.
Our new neighborhood in the 'burbs probably has a statistically lower crime rate (crime rates are generally calculated over fairly large areas), but even though we chat with our two immediate neighbors, houses around here are so much farther apart that there isn't that same sense of community.
You know, I hadn't thought about this, but so was I.
I've often wondered about some of the silly comments made here in respect to women (like the one introducing the submission) and if there was something about the "geek mindset" I just didn't get. But I haven't had to think for a long while about the fact that I'm a man who was raised in a mostly female extended-family household. Women have commented in the past that they feel it's influenced my thought process, but somehow I just never made that connection to my feeling that so many Slashdotters have no clue how normal and capable most (yeah, I've dated at least one psycho
Thanks for the food for thought.
Curious: what kind of bread were you making? A sourdough or something that uses airborne yeast? I can't think of any other bread ('cept maybe croissants) that has 18 hours of preparation time!
OK. I don't get it. And yes, I am an engineer. A recipe is simply a guide to cooking something (and I don't see how they're designed to be used by one sex or the other) and these charts don't bring any improvement to the party.
If he really wanted to make recipes geek friendly, he could have emphasized that cooking is really just a pattern language: e.g., folding, stirring, beating are all different ways of combining ingredients, but with different results and for different reasons. Or shown that say, bread making and cake making generally follow a series of steps which are altered depending on the type of cake/bread you're making.
People have been cooking for millenia: there's not a lot about it that's difficult. As I said above, recipes are guides: you're expected to be able to vary them depending on your individual circumstances -- you may have eggs much larger than those called out, have a late night whim for cake, but only have bread flour in the house and so on. That's the variability about cooking that makes it fun.
...you'll appreciate it later. Burning bridges in the sense you imply will make just you feel good temporarily at someone's expense. Life's too short to waste energy like that. Besides, weird things happen. Years down the line you might need something that person can offer, be it a recommendation, or an introduction to someone you want to meet and he just happens to work with them.
So go tell them you're leaving, show a list of tasks that won't be done before you quit and offer to document your work/train a replacement, etc. Odds are they won't care about any of this as they already know "short timer" mentality sets in when you're about to leave. More than likely you'll just have two weeks of showing up to work and getting paid to read magazines or look busy.
Let me see if I understand: IP shouldn't have the same protections as physical property because it cannot be made scarce? OK? Did I understand what you meant?
I have a ranch which sits on top of easily extractable oil. I have a small, portable refinery that I built which produces gasoline/diesel etc from that oil for my own use. I have no intention of selling the oil on the open market (lets say I make my money selling those portable refineries) and the oil is sufficient for many lifetimes. So as far as I am concerned, there is an infinite supply of oil.
Are you then justified in coming onto my land to take oil for free as long as you don't reduce it below the amount I would use in my lifetime? After all it really won't make any difference to me, and if I didn't see you do it, I'd probably never notice.
And yes, I really would like an answer.
Easy. My first employer. Of course, I can't point you at them because they went out of business, but for completely unrelated reasons.
Outsourcing, when done properly, is a money saver. The specific type of outsourcing I'm talking about was electronics assembly. We used to have someone whose job 8 hours/day, 5 days/week was assembling PC boards. As volumes grew, first we hired someone else, then engineers (like the newly hired me!) had to pitch in. Finally it was costing us too much (having an engineer do a minimum wage job, extra time spent managing the assemblers so they were busy enough, etc), so it was mostly outsourced to a company that specializes in that kind of work.
I went back to my preferred design engineer/customer support role. One of the assemblers spent most of her time doing kitting (putting together the parts kits to be sent to the contract manufacturer) and other inventory duties, and the other assembler's time was spent mostly doing quick-turnaround rush jobs or things we built only in small quantities or that were difficult to automate (e.g., making cables).
And yes, we saved money doing this. Hell, we were profitable enough that a bunch of morons paid top dollar for the company, only to run it into the ground a few years later.
But that's another story.
Actually, it's already being done for that reason. When I took a Systems Analysis class on the way to a degree in Software Engineering, our instructor told us that he usually did just that: after different teams presented their designs to the class (and had them verbally ripped to shreds with criticism), have the groups swap designs and then have to implement each other's designs. It was usually quite eye opening for those involved. Unfortunately for us, a bunch of new material had been added when I took the course, so we never had time to do that.
I think it's a great idea. Teaches you a lot about what happens in the real world when you have to implement someone else's design/watch as they mangle your design with their implementation.
This may be a part of the problem. I have written thousands (more likely tens of thousands) of lines of C++ for a complex embedded system over the past few years. But even if my employer was OK with me emailing you a large chunk of code, I'd be hard pressed to be able to send you 1000 lines of it mainly because it is so integrated with changes that others on the project have done. It would more likely read like "I wrote the original module and these 100 lines are mine, but someone added these 10 to implement a new requirement when I was busy with something else, and later I wrote the following 20..."
BUT, since I was the sole low level developer on the project, I could probably send you thousands of lines of device driver code I wrote in C (not C++) that wasn't touched by anyone else.
Now if I turn to stuff I've done on my own (home projects) in the last few years it would be mostly Java and assembly, with Python more recently taking the lead because I prefer to develop in those languages. And I daresay you'd get a better feel for what someone prefers to do if you look at their personal projects versus the professional ones: I like my job, but it's still just a job.
When I interviewed for this job, one of the things I brought to make me stand out from other applicants was a small piece of hardware I designed at home and programmed in 6805 assembly. I was proud of that design because of the functionality I squeezed into a 504 byte code space, but it wouldn't meet the requirement you stated above.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to pretend the problem you see doesn't exist; rather I think that you're using a (perhaps necessarily) extremely narrow filter for applicants.
Besides, I live in the Midwest, so what do I care
That's nothing; we're trying to get our *users* to wear those. Augument those "Illegal entry"-type dialogs with a quick electric shock and you guarantee the user won't make the same mistake twice.
Now if I could figure out a way to make the shock collar go off when someone tries to report a bug, I'd be all set...
That is just what I think whenever this kind of request comes up: What's your posture like? What kind of shape are you in?
The only people I've known who had trouble with most office chairs were either very overweight or were improperly positioned: sitting wrong, monitor/keyboard at wrong height, that kind of thing.
Also it helps to get up every 1/2 hour or so and just walk to get a drink of water or something. Even if I just stay at the computer but stand up for a few minutes, I find it releases stress from my back.
That said, I just bought a Steelcase chair from a local office surplus store for $79 for computer use at home. Excellent chair, built like a tank and very comfortable and adjustable. Best of all, from what I can see on the web, the same chair usually retails for around $800!
Having just given my wife a blank check to buy textbooks (she estimated $350 for 3 classes) this morning, I'll say the same thing I said to her: that's ridiculous.
Yes, I can see for some graduate-level classes, or very new/unpopular fields that would be the case. But $120 for an introductory Ethics text (something very ironic about that!)? $90 for a Sociology text? No f'ing way!
My most expensive undergraduate textbook was the $60 communications theory book. I remember that prof apologizing to students taking his Optical Fiber Communications elective about the $90 price of that text, but it was the only suitable one.
If you're one person working alone, the above is pretty simple, with the exception of marketing. In any event, I was trying to present an ideal situation: you have a product which is good except for its user interface and you have a trustworthy distributor who will periodically buy X copies for resale if you can improve the UI to something the average person can use easily.
To each his own I guess, but I still think most developers are somewhat motivated by money (well at least the ones I've known are) and would be inclined to improve what's essentially freeware if they could make a buck or two for their efforts.
You know what? I'm probably going to piss off a bunch of people with this (not something I'm entirely unfamiliar with :-), but it will probably only happen on a large scale when money's involved. Right now most OSS needs to be good enough to satisfy its creator, which is primarily an issue of functionality. The author knows how it works, so as long as there are no major bugs, he's generally satisfied with its operation, and there's not much incentive to improve the UI.
Now tell that same author that there's a possibility that he could charge $99.95 per copy if it were easier to use. Most people will wake up and work at it. Suddenly Jim the midnight programmer is talking to John over in Human Factors Engineering at his day job (or posting a request on RentACoder for cheap GUI design!) and asking him if he wants to make a few extra bucks by splitting profits on this cool app he's been distributing for free up till now if helps out with some design issues...
I wrote a bunch of freeware back in the days of BBSs and today at work I help out people in other departments by writing small tools for them when I have a free moment, so I understand the mentality behind free software and wanting to help the community. But I also realize that if you give someone a choice between giving his work away for free and paying him for it, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see which one has a higher probability of being more effective.
But if we leave it up to them, most programs will remain marginally usable. The vast majority of OSS doesn't end up on any distro: it's available from sourceforge or the author's site. And IMO that's where the most interesting software comes from. Who really needs another word processor or email program or browser anyway? Let the distros stick to providing solid, core functionality. The rest of us will write the niche apps that people and businesses need to get work done, and those need to be usable by non-geeks.
OSS has the opportunity to be like the cottage industries from the days when DOS and Windows were maturing on the way to ubiquity -- hundreds of tiny companies producing little applications that could be done by one or two developers and which met a real need -- and that's why I originally got excited about Linux. And it was real excitement -- not a trumped-up media frenzy around the latest WinXX release.
Linux on the desktop will happen: it's pretty much inevitable. And when it gets beyond the corporate-mandated desktops and early adopters and into the mainstream of "Windows alternative," those new users will need intuitive, easy to use mini-applications. The people already writing F/OSS software are in a perfect position to start providing that, but *not* if the only interface is CLI or a confusing collection of command buttons without any obvious workflow.
It's going to get easier to make money with Linux, whether anyone likes it or not. And with money will come hordes of barely-competent developers; the good ones will need to find a way to differentiate themselves: just adding features isn't going to cut it.
For which there are known avenues for protest and legal remedies. The only answer to tyrants is force; that is not the case here.
So you're saying that they're tyrants because they *could* at some point in the future sue people just because they feel like it?
With the exception of the CF card, you've just described some of the word processors of the early 80's.
Why not just record the prof's lecture and then transcribe what sections she needs to back in the dorm?
Tyranny? Are you out of your mind?
Tyranny is jamming a spear up your ass and then planting the other end in the ground and leaving you to die (cf: Vlad the Impaler)
Tyranny is torturing a confession out of you because "we know you're guilty, so just admit to it."
Tyranny is taxation without representation and quartering soldiers in private homes against the owners' wishes.
Tyranny is not saying "we can prove you were complicit in violating our IP and we'll sue to recover damages."
For goodness sake, people die because of true tyranny and you're whining because you can't get free tunes!
Look, I'm all in favor of slapping the RIAA down when they go after people who haven't done anything, but for the rest of them, well, you play with fire, you burn your fingers.
If you're so in favor of standing up to them why don't you go share a few million songs and send the RIAA anonymous emails about your activity. Then you can have your chance to stand up for the poor oppressed music listeners.
From what I can see, it's mostly free, or bundled with something else.
A lot of useful stuff comes with a Windows PC -- word processor, email, browser and financial management -- and that's what most people use. This has removed a lot of incentive for small developers to address that market.
Besides games, what else do you need for personal use? I just bought a digital camera and it came with a CD chock full of applications I will never use cause I run Linux. You could buy separate picture management and editing software, but what they include will be fine for most users.
I can only think of two software products I have purchased in the last 8 years: Quickbooks for the small business I started in my spare bedroom and a Borland C++ toolsuite. All other software I have either came with Windows, or are tools given away for free by engineering companies to get you to use their products or high-functioning demos (assemblers, chip programmers, PC layout packages, etc). These days I don't even use Windows at home.
Ultimately it boils down to what you can make money at. I make a comfortable living as a software developer in the medical device industry and I have been thinking seriously about starting a business. However, I don't see any way to make even 20% less than I'm making now by developing consumer/hobby products, so my interests are best served by looking at industry and determining what needs I can meet.
I've also noticed that CompUSA and the like are setting themselves up as home entertainment vendors...