You really do need a business type. Now that I have seen the demo I think that you actually have something that could be sold, but getting there is likely to be very tricky.
If you have made money creating social networking games, then you should have mentioned these games in the article. Not only would that have advertised your existing games, but it would give interested parties an idea of how much your software is worth.
Except the article was not much of an advertisement. It didn't even link to a website. Not that I blame the original poster for keeping this information close to his chest. After all, contact information, in this particular case, could be invaluable.
Apparently a random group of hackers has created a "framework" for making social games. They don't have any games that demonstrate the power of this framework, but it is an awesome framework nonetheless. After several man-years of work on this framework the hackers have decided that the best way to capitalize on their work is to sell their software to someone in the social gaming community that doesn't have a competing framework already. Since they don't know anyone in the social gaming community, much less someone in the social gaming community that is in need of an untested but still awesome game framework, they want to find a third party willing to sell their software on commission.
The article had dollar values as well. Netbook sales in 2009, according to the article, were worth $11.4 billion dollars, which is just over 10% of the total for portable PC sales. What's more, because of the low price of netbooks the unit sales numbers are even more impressive. Apparently 33 million netbooks were sold out of 169 million portable PCs. In short, approximately 20% of all portable PCs fit into the netbook category.
Perhaps even more interesting is that while unit sales for all portable PCs were up 5% net revenue was down 12%.
The article doesn't cover demographics (I would doubt that anyone has that information) but apart from that it actually covers most of your questions.
The idea that netbooks are dead, at this point at least, is simply ridiculous.
The doctor actually *dropped* my third child, luckily the nurse caught her after a short bounce off of the table. It still burns me up how much I had to pay that doctor to fumble my child.
In other words, you would like the freedom to choose the Free Software license of your choice, but you don't think that the folks writing GPLed software should have the same freedom.
Here's the thing. If you find yourself wanting to read the man pages, and you are confused by them. Go and purchase a copy of "Running Linux." Any edition will do. That's how most of us that *like* Linux learned to use it.
For most users, however, the man pages are just a waste of time. The have no desire to learn to use the various command line flags for "tar," nor do they want to understand the vagaries of cat.
For that matter, they don't want to learn how to create a partition for/home (which is the example used in the original article). The whole idea that the operating system should make this sort of activity accessible to newbies is simply ridiculous. By this standard Mac OSX is *more* difficult to use than Linux, and Windows is completely unusable.
Ubuntu's auto-partitioner gets this absolutely right (while still giving people that want a separate home partition the tools they need).
I suppose that if you believe that the defining characteristic of communism is their belief in centralized planning of the economy then no one is a communist. Even the folks in China don't believe in that particular red herring any more. The fact that the radical communists in the U.S. still believe in that claptrap demonstrates the lack of mental acuity in your average radical communist.
Van Jones is somewhat less dense than your average militant communist here in the U.S. He has, after 10 years in the trenches, realized that he was using the wrong means to his proposed end. Of course, the fact that the Communist leaders in China came to the same realization decades ago still means that Van Jones is pretty slow on the uptake.
I mean seriously, modern communism is all about encouraging certain kinds of private enterprise. You'd have to be living under a rock to have missed out on that fact.
That doesn't change Van Jones' proposed end. He still wants to redistribute wealth. He still wants to bring down existing enterprises. He simply wants to replace current industries with his friends the "eco-entrepreneurs." He's also still a communist by any sane definition. If Van Jones is not a communist then neither are the Chinese.
Either way, it shouldn't surprise anyone that he was a very controversial appointment.
Really, you call that a refutation? Basically, the guy admits to being a radical communist. He spent years in the radical communist community. He then admits that while he still shares the ideals of the radical communist that he believes that the private sector is the only organization capable of actually solving the problems he believes faces the country.
In short, his politics have not changed one iota. He just realized that he was wasting his time hanging out on the street corners with the other losers waving their damn signs.
This may surprise you, but quite a few of your fellow Americans have real problems with the idea that someone like this might be in a position of authority over them.
I am sure that Sun was an excellent company to work for. I am also sure that things are likely to change, quite drastically, thanks to the fact that Sun as a company has essentially failed and the remnants of that company are about to be eaten by Oracle. I have no idea how Oracle treats its employees, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was at least some degree of cultural mismatch between Oracle and Sun.
I imagine that headhunters are having a much easier time poaching from Sun right now than they have in the past. There is a great deal of uncertainty at Sun, and many of Sun's most talented employees are very likely to take advantage of other offers. The longer the merger drags on, the more the level of uncertainty will rise, and the more quality employees Sun will lose.
Because, while OpenSolaris is pretty cool, support for OpenSolaris could easily disappear tomorrow. Yes, OpenSolaris might still exist, but future development on OpenSolaris is basically 100% dependent on Sun. If Oracle decides that it does not want to fund OpenSolaris development any more (or it simply decides to reduce funding for development) then OpenSolaris will be in serious trouble.
Imagine you are a top engineer working for sun. I know it's a stretch, but try and hang with me here. Now imagine that you knew Sun was going to cut 3,000 jobs. You probably would, at the very least, spruce up your resume. You also might start actively looking for a new job. At the very least you'll probably actually answer the phone when the headhunter that has been bothering you calls again.
The problem with top engineers is that they generally have the skills and contacts that it takes to move fairly easily to a new job, but "fairly easily" still takes a bit of doing, and the more time you have beforehand, the better. So when things begin to get dicey at a company the best employees are often the very first to jump ship. After all, why go through the uncertainty of a round of layoffs if you don't have to?
In fact, right now only the very worst of Sun's employees are not actively looking for a new job. Only the folks that know that there is no way that they'll land a comparable job somewhere else are dedicating their resources to hanging onto what is clearly a sinking ship. Everyone else is moving towards the lifeboats.
In other words, for $100 you get a fancy pedometer that magically uploads information to a website that may or may not exist 2 years from now. You'll also need either Windows or Mac OS X.
Yes, you must use the website. We do not provide any way to dump data to your PC, but the website will have an extensive XML and JSON API. You will be able to access most of your data through the API. (emphasis added)
That may sound like a good deal to you, but it isn't what I want. The idea of a wireless pedometer is actually somewhat cool, but I already have fitness tracking software. I don't want to use their lame website, and I don't want to have to rely on them staying in business.
Yes, there have been non-Intel versions of Windows before, and they sold exceptionally poorly. The old Alpha version of NT at least had the advantage of having a high profit margin. If you were running Windows NT on a Dec Alpha chances were very good that you were also going to be running SQL Server and paying enough in license fees that it was worth Microsoft's time.
Or apparently not, as the Alpha port has gone away, and even the Intel-friendly Itanium support is a generation behind.
Arm9 is basically an entirely different beast. Instead of a high end offering it is an extremely low end offering. Arm9 will be debuting in the netbook arena--a market where pressure from Linux has already driven Microsoft to continue support for Windows XP, and at a drastically reduced price to boot.
Microsoft is going to stay as far away from Arm9 as possible. The last thing that Microsoft wants to do is to actively encourage people to move towards netbooks. Even if Microsoft did want people to move towards netbooks it wouldn't want to spend time and energy on a non-x86 architecture unless it was absolutely clear that Intel was getting creamed. After all, getting Windows to run on Arm9 is only part of the battle. The tricky bit would be getting the quadzillions of other Windows applications to run on Arm9.
Windows without its assortment of Windows applications is not likely to compete well against Linux.
Microsoft is simply going to ignore Arm and hope it goes away, which, without Windows support, is likely to happen. For now Intel's Atom processor is likely to be good enough, and Microsoft would just as soon the entire netbook category went away anyhow.
I agree that learning doesn't have to happen in a classroom. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that in many cases classrooms prevent learning.
However, from my own experience the folks that accomplish the most are the folks that can consistently force themselves to do things that are hard and/or boring. I don't think that you can teach people to be inquisitive, but I do think that you can teach people to have discipline.
If you want to express unpopular (or even illegal) opinions without fear of retribution then I would suggest doing so in PRIVATE. They Internet is not private, and in most cases it isn't anonymous either.
Sure, there are places on the Internet that are close enough to being truly anonymous that you are probably safe. On the other hand, most of these places are obscure enough that they are basically private as well. Feel free to spew your crap there, as the rest of us aren't likely to ever encounter your vitriol.
I probably agree with you about the farm subsidies, but you can't really blame the farm subsidies for the food choices of individual Americans. The most popular foods are not the least expensive (by a long shot). Americans tend to prefer foods that are heavily processed (for taste) and easy to prepare.
If you are knowingly distributing copyrighted material without permission, and for commercial gain to boot, you have just entered into the criminal intent zone. What's more, as I mentioned in my original post, all of the big players in the copyright scene would agree with me.
The only reason that this isn't more clear is that only a fool plays around with other people's copyrighted materials, so we don't have a lot of precedents. No one in their right mind tries to walk a fine line with Microsoft's copyrighted material (to give an example). Heck, you can get in serious trouble for merely *using* Microsoft's software improperly, without any attempts to distribute at all.
The idea that linking implies derivation stems from the days when static linking was the norm. It is hard to argue that your application isn't a derivative work if it actually includes a copy of someone else's library in the binary. Dynamic linking, especially for programs that are designed to use more than one compatible library are a slightly murkier case, but only slightly so. That's why the GNU software that clones other software libraries (like glibc) tend to be under the LGPL. After all, in those cases the FSF wants to encourage people to use their library instead of the library they are cloning. The few GPLed libraries tended to be things like readline, which were unique to GNU.
The reason that most lawyers are very careful about not crossing the line when it comes to copyright is twofold. First, most of the companies and people with skin in the copyright game are heavily invested in strong copyrights. That's why you'll never see Microsoft challenge the GPL in court, for example. Microsoft actually favors a far more restrictive interpretation of copyright, and the last thing that it wants is to see copyright weakened, even if it would mean getting access to piles of GPL software for use in their proprietary products.
The second reason that lawyers tend to be very careful about copyright is that the U.S. has ridiculously draconian copyright laws. You are free to disregard the GPL when creating your application, but if the judge disagrees with your interpretation you could end up in serious legal trouble. Not only would your profits be forfeit, but the owner of the GPLed code you used could press criminal charges. Unless you feel like following in the footsteps of Jammie Thomas it is simply far safer to take the FSF at its word when it comes to interpretting the GPL.
In fact, you should probably follow the advice of whoever wrote the software you are planning to interoperate with. For example, the folks at MySQL forward an alternate interpretation of the GPL that says that software that talks to their server needs to be GPLed unless you have a commercial license. Personally, I think that's a land grab, but I wouldn't consider testing it myself.
Slashdot Mirror
You really do need a business type. Now that I have seen the demo I think that you actually have something that could be sold, but getting there is likely to be very tricky.
I am sorry to have been so disparaging.
If you have made money creating social networking games, then you should have mentioned these games in the article. Not only would that have advertised your existing games, but it would give interested parties an idea of how much your software is worth.
Except the article was not much of an advertisement. It didn't even link to a website. Not that I blame the original poster for keeping this information close to his chest. After all, contact information, in this particular case, could be invaluable.
Apparently a random group of hackers has created a "framework" for making social games. They don't have any games that demonstrate the power of this framework, but it is an awesome framework nonetheless. After several man-years of work on this framework the hackers have decided that the best way to capitalize on their work is to sell their software to someone in the social gaming community that doesn't have a competing framework already. Since they don't know anyone in the social gaming community, much less someone in the social gaming community that is in need of an untested but still awesome game framework, they want to find a third party willing to sell their software on commission.
Yeah, I would want my name on that advertisement.
The article had dollar values as well. Netbook sales in 2009, according to the article, were worth $11.4 billion dollars, which is just over 10% of the total for portable PC sales. What's more, because of the low price of netbooks the unit sales numbers are even more impressive. Apparently 33 million netbooks were sold out of 169 million portable PCs. In short, approximately 20% of all portable PCs fit into the netbook category.
Perhaps even more interesting is that while unit sales for all portable PCs were up 5% net revenue was down 12%.
The article doesn't cover demographics (I would doubt that anyone has that information) but apart from that it actually covers most of your questions.
The idea that netbooks are dead, at this point at least, is simply ridiculous.
Even if you are not an emacs user org-mode is awesome.
The doctor actually *dropped* my third child, luckily the nurse caught her after a short bounce off of the table. It still burns me up how much I had to pay that doctor to fumble my child.
[citation needed]
In other words, you would like the freedom to choose the Free Software license of your choice, but you don't think that the folks writing GPLed software should have the same freedom.
Here's the thing. If you find yourself wanting to read the man pages, and you are confused by them. Go and purchase a copy of "Running Linux." Any edition will do. That's how most of us that *like* Linux learned to use it.
For most users, however, the man pages are just a waste of time. The have no desire to learn to use the various command line flags for "tar," nor do they want to understand the vagaries of cat.
For that matter, they don't want to learn how to create a partition for /home (which is the example used in the original article). The whole idea that the operating system should make this sort of activity accessible to newbies is simply ridiculous. By this standard Mac OSX is *more* difficult to use than Linux, and Windows is completely unusable.
Ubuntu's auto-partitioner gets this absolutely right (while still giving people that want a separate home partition the tools they need).
I suppose that if you believe that the defining characteristic of communism is their belief in centralized planning of the economy then no one is a communist. Even the folks in China don't believe in that particular red herring any more. The fact that the radical communists in the U.S. still believe in that claptrap demonstrates the lack of mental acuity in your average radical communist.
Van Jones is somewhat less dense than your average militant communist here in the U.S. He has, after 10 years in the trenches, realized that he was using the wrong means to his proposed end. Of course, the fact that the Communist leaders in China came to the same realization decades ago still means that Van Jones is pretty slow on the uptake.
I mean seriously, modern communism is all about encouraging certain kinds of private enterprise. You'd have to be living under a rock to have missed out on that fact.
That doesn't change Van Jones' proposed end. He still wants to redistribute wealth. He still wants to bring down existing enterprises. He simply wants to replace current industries with his friends the "eco-entrepreneurs." He's also still a communist by any sane definition. If Van Jones is not a communist then neither are the Chinese.
Either way, it shouldn't surprise anyone that he was a very controversial appointment.
Really, you call that a refutation? Basically, the guy admits to being a radical communist. He spent years in the radical communist community. He then admits that while he still shares the ideals of the radical communist that he believes that the private sector is the only organization capable of actually solving the problems he believes faces the country.
In short, his politics have not changed one iota. He just realized that he was wasting his time hanging out on the street corners with the other losers waving their damn signs.
This may surprise you, but quite a few of your fellow Americans have real problems with the idea that someone like this might be in a position of authority over them.
I am sure that Sun was an excellent company to work for. I am also sure that things are likely to change, quite drastically, thanks to the fact that Sun as a company has essentially failed and the remnants of that company are about to be eaten by Oracle. I have no idea how Oracle treats its employees, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was at least some degree of cultural mismatch between Oracle and Sun.
I imagine that headhunters are having a much easier time poaching from Sun right now than they have in the past. There is a great deal of uncertainty at Sun, and many of Sun's most talented employees are very likely to take advantage of other offers. The longer the merger drags on, the more the level of uncertainty will rise, and the more quality employees Sun will lose.
Because, while OpenSolaris is pretty cool, support for OpenSolaris could easily disappear tomorrow. Yes, OpenSolaris might still exist, but future development on OpenSolaris is basically 100% dependent on Sun. If Oracle decides that it does not want to fund OpenSolaris development any more (or it simply decides to reduce funding for development) then OpenSolaris will be in serious trouble.
Imagine you are a top engineer working for sun. I know it's a stretch, but try and hang with me here. Now imagine that you knew Sun was going to cut 3,000 jobs. You probably would, at the very least, spruce up your resume. You also might start actively looking for a new job. At the very least you'll probably actually answer the phone when the headhunter that has been bothering you calls again.
The problem with top engineers is that they generally have the skills and contacts that it takes to move fairly easily to a new job, but "fairly easily" still takes a bit of doing, and the more time you have beforehand, the better. So when things begin to get dicey at a company the best employees are often the very first to jump ship. After all, why go through the uncertainty of a round of layoffs if you don't have to?
In fact, right now only the very worst of Sun's employees are not actively looking for a new job. Only the folks that know that there is no way that they'll land a comparable job somewhere else are dedicating their resources to hanging onto what is clearly a sinking ship. Everyone else is moving towards the lifeboats.
In other words, for $100 you get a fancy pedometer that magically uploads information to a website that may or may not exist 2 years from now. You'll also need either Windows or Mac OS X.
Here's what the fitbit.com FAQ says about the API
That may sound like a good deal to you, but it isn't what I want. The idea of a wireless pedometer is actually somewhat cool, but I already have fitness tracking software. I don't want to use their lame website, and I don't want to have to rely on them staying in business.
I also don't want to pay $100 for a pedometer.
Yes, there have been non-Intel versions of Windows before, and they sold exceptionally poorly. The old Alpha version of NT at least had the advantage of having a high profit margin. If you were running Windows NT on a Dec Alpha chances were very good that you were also going to be running SQL Server and paying enough in license fees that it was worth Microsoft's time.
Or apparently not, as the Alpha port has gone away, and even the Intel-friendly Itanium support is a generation behind.
Arm9 is basically an entirely different beast. Instead of a high end offering it is an extremely low end offering. Arm9 will be debuting in the netbook arena--a market where pressure from Linux has already driven Microsoft to continue support for Windows XP, and at a drastically reduced price to boot.
Microsoft is going to stay as far away from Arm9 as possible. The last thing that Microsoft wants to do is to actively encourage people to move towards netbooks. Even if Microsoft did want people to move towards netbooks it wouldn't want to spend time and energy on a non-x86 architecture unless it was absolutely clear that Intel was getting creamed. After all, getting Windows to run on Arm9 is only part of the battle. The tricky bit would be getting the quadzillions of other Windows applications to run on Arm9.
Windows without its assortment of Windows applications is not likely to compete well against Linux.
Microsoft is simply going to ignore Arm and hope it goes away, which, without Windows support, is likely to happen. For now Intel's Atom processor is likely to be good enough, and Microsoft would just as soon the entire netbook category went away anyhow.
Someone needs to mod this informative.
I like Pampered Chef parties. They serve food!
I agree that learning doesn't have to happen in a classroom. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that in many cases classrooms prevent learning.
However, from my own experience the folks that accomplish the most are the folks that can consistently force themselves to do things that are hard and/or boring. I don't think that you can teach people to be inquisitive, but I do think that you can teach people to have discipline.
If you want to express unpopular (or even illegal) opinions without fear of retribution then I would suggest doing so in PRIVATE. They Internet is not private, and in most cases it isn't anonymous either.
Sure, there are places on the Internet that are close enough to being truly anonymous that you are probably safe. On the other hand, most of these places are obscure enough that they are basically private as well. Feel free to spew your crap there, as the rest of us aren't likely to ever encounter your vitriol.
It's hard to get less expensive than oatmeal.
I probably agree with you about the farm subsidies, but you can't really blame the farm subsidies for the food choices of individual Americans. The most popular foods are not the least expensive (by a long shot). Americans tend to prefer foods that are heavily processed (for taste) and easy to prepare.
Thanks for the conversation.
Yes, we basically agree.
Thanks for clarifying that. That's what I meant to say, but I was not sufficiently clear.
If you are knowingly distributing copyrighted material without permission, and for commercial gain to boot, you have just entered into the criminal intent zone. What's more, as I mentioned in my original post, all of the big players in the copyright scene would agree with me.
The only reason that this isn't more clear is that only a fool plays around with other people's copyrighted materials, so we don't have a lot of precedents. No one in their right mind tries to walk a fine line with Microsoft's copyrighted material (to give an example). Heck, you can get in serious trouble for merely *using* Microsoft's software improperly, without any attempts to distribute at all.
The idea that linking implies derivation stems from the days when static linking was the norm. It is hard to argue that your application isn't a derivative work if it actually includes a copy of someone else's library in the binary. Dynamic linking, especially for programs that are designed to use more than one compatible library are a slightly murkier case, but only slightly so. That's why the GNU software that clones other software libraries (like glibc) tend to be under the LGPL. After all, in those cases the FSF wants to encourage people to use their library instead of the library they are cloning. The few GPLed libraries tended to be things like readline, which were unique to GNU.
The reason that most lawyers are very careful about not crossing the line when it comes to copyright is twofold. First, most of the companies and people with skin in the copyright game are heavily invested in strong copyrights. That's why you'll never see Microsoft challenge the GPL in court, for example. Microsoft actually favors a far more restrictive interpretation of copyright, and the last thing that it wants is to see copyright weakened, even if it would mean getting access to piles of GPL software for use in their proprietary products.
The second reason that lawyers tend to be very careful about copyright is that the U.S. has ridiculously draconian copyright laws. You are free to disregard the GPL when creating your application, but if the judge disagrees with your interpretation you could end up in serious legal trouble. Not only would your profits be forfeit, but the owner of the GPLed code you used could press criminal charges. Unless you feel like following in the footsteps of Jammie Thomas it is simply far safer to take the FSF at its word when it comes to interpretting the GPL.
In fact, you should probably follow the advice of whoever wrote the software you are planning to interoperate with. For example, the folks at MySQL forward an alternate interpretation of the GPL that says that software that talks to their server needs to be GPLed unless you have a commercial license. Personally, I think that's a land grab, but I wouldn't consider testing it myself.