Look again, his site isn't the one with the nice Favicon, his site is the 2nd result, the one without it that actually has "Stategic Solutions For A Complex World!" on the front page. Even you, GoogleGuy, were fooled by the first result.
Following is what I'm seeing at the top of the results. Are you seeing the same?
iMatix Corporation Strategic Solutions for a Complex World. www.imatix.com/ - 5k - Cached - Similar pages
Xitami Portable free web server, distributed with source code according to a liberal license agreement. Online documentation on how to install, use, and configure. www.imatix.com/html/xitami/ - Similar pages [ More results from www.imatix.com ]
Welcome To Xitami.com ... Xitami.com is run by iMatix Corporation, the company that brought you Xitami. ... the iMatix GSL scripting language, built-in to the web server engine.... www.xitami.com/ - 6k - 21 Mar 2005 - Cached - Similar pages
When I do the search for "Strategic solutions for a complex world" his site comes up first. And the next 3 or 4 all link to his site with that phrase. I don't see the problem.
But then all the hijackers need to do is to grab the target page dynamically and feed it to GoogleBot directly when it comes calling (essentially a virtual redirect). The effect will be the same.
Re:The myth is dead! Long live the myth!
on
The Solar Death Ray
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think it was a reference to the Bill Nye story posted earlier.
I doubt it. Submissions usually sit in the queue for a day or two before being accepted (or rejected). Besides, since the submittors have no control over when their stories are posted, it'd be pretty stupid to try to reference an earlier story without an explicit link, wouldn't it?
I'm a non-motorist. I've never owned a car and I have no intention of getting one unless I absolutely have to (I do have a driving licence).
Amusing then that when picking you nickname you chose to use the name of a car model (though presumably you were thinking of the HHGG character that was named after that car).
How can you beat a show where somebody who loves what they do drives cars sideways around racing tracks and winding roads, and giggles about it the whole time!
No current open source solution adequate? Then help make one that is- either by improving an existing alternative, or starting your own.
That's fine, except most developers have no interest in writing a source control system. So given the choice of using a commercial SCS while working on the project they're interested in or working on a version control system, it's no suprise that many people choose the former and complain that there are no suitable open source solutions available.
However, having said this, it's still quite understandable for people to not want Linux development being tied to a closed-source product with nasty gotchas in it's free license. That's not whining in the least.
Larry's view is that it's whinning because they don't have to use BK and it not using it doesn't put them in a worse position than they were in before BK was adopted. He's kind of got a point there, though it's by no means black and white. Still the "whinning" could have been a lot worse. Just imagine if Linus had of adopted a commercial system (it's not like he's religous about using open-source tools).
The only thing resembling "whining" seems to be coming from Larry himself with this silly license. All it's going to do is make the acrimony WORSE, not better. Kind of childish, in my not so humble opinion.
You might have a point, except that license is a joke. It's under the BSD license.
Same amount of work? Really? How long did it take him to become a programmer? What about the time it took him to learn the Win32 API? He didn't get anything for that work until he turned it into software that users could take advantage of.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that most programmers do not get paid at anywhere near that rate. And I already stated that plenty of other highly skilled jobs do not get that rate either. How many drug researchers (for an example of something requiring even more training and potentially helping more people) get paid that sort of rate?
This feeling of being "ripped off" is silly and is hardly an excuse for dishonesty.
It's not an excuse, but it could be a reason for the degree of difference between the registration rates of the two versions. This is my point, and you have not addressed it at all, so I guess you agree. The stuff about the return this guy made is really a secondary issue: to me it seems greedy to be complaining about people's honesty when you're making that sort of money for that amount of work. You may consider that to be right and proper, that's fine.
Look. This guy wrote a cheap program to do a job many people needed done. You might think it was too easy a job to justify his charging $25.
But where were the cheaper alternatives? Surely if it was such an easy task for the typical person, there'd be other options.
Irrelevant. Here you're essentially arguing that he has a monopoly so therefore whatever he charges is fair. And I still maintain that $25 is not cheap for that sort of utility.
The amount of money he made should have little to do with how much work he did. Instead, it should correlate with how much service he did for others.
Firstly: why? A man who spends a few days building a road will receive several hundred dollars in compensation, and that's fair. This guy does the same amount of work and expects $50000+. Why is the difference so high? In both cases thousands of people will benefit from the work, so it's not the number of people who find the work useful. It's not the skilled nature of application development, most workers earn far less, regardless of the level of skill required. It's because the software vendor has the capability to perfectly replicate his product, and while automatic replication of work is the key to wealth, it's hardly a fair situation.
Secondly, my point is that the time he spent on that app is a more accurate estimate of its worth than the entirely arbitrary price he decided to charge for it. I haven't tried the app myself, but from description (it prints out windows helpfiles) and the time he spent on it indicate to my mind that it is overpriced. If people are given the choice between being honest and paying too much or being dishonest and paying nothing it is not a suprise that many of them choose to pay nothing. People are known for dishonesty when they feel they're being ripped off. However, if the choice had been between being honest and paying a fair price and being dishonest and paying nothing the percentage of people who decide to pay will be higher. Without further research at other price points this research is not conclusive.
Are you really defending those that would use this man's services and not even give him a "thank you"?
Not at all. What I'm saying is that I think if his pricing were more reasonable he would have found a smaller gap between the "honest" and "dishonest" users. As I said, people who feel the price is unreasonable are more inclined to be dishonest. Take a look at his "five fundamenetals for sucess": a product users need, quality, advertising, distribution of samples, and a reason to pay. Notice that he's completely forgotten pricing. Yet most business owners will tell you that price is probably the number one thing you have to get right to suceed.
In the article here, shareware author Colin Messit discovered that less than 20% of the people using his software would pay for it voluntarily.
He wrote his software in such a way that a user installing it would have a 50/50 chance of getting a crippled version or a non-crippled version at time of installation. When people registered, they sent their serial numbers which encoded whether or not they had the crippled version or the "honor system" version.
He discovered that the crippled version was registered (people sent money) 5 times as often as the "honor system" version.
Mr Messit says "it only took a couple of days to put together", yet he was charging US$25 for it. To me that seems like an excessive price for what seems to be a very small, specialized utility. I'd certainly think twice about paying $25 for something like that when for less than $100 I can get a game I know has taken thousands of man-hours to put together. Obviously if you have to have that functionality then you might be willing to pay $25 for it, but I expect a fair number of the people with the uncrippled version decided not to pay (and to keep using it) because he priced it too high.
My point is that this research only tells us that crippleware worked better in this particular case, a case where I think the registration fee was set way too high. Looking at just the uncrippled registrations, he made $3900 in about a year for his couple of days work. To me that seems pretty fair, and certainly not something I'd complain about. All registrations totaled $34000, and he claims it would have been $50000 if all versions had been crippled. That seems like an awfully good return for a couple of days work. Good on him for making that, but it seems a bit off to be complaining about his users honesty given just how much he made from that software.
In fact my company uses SVG technology to display all kinds of information in graph format, rendering server-side SVG to PNG for display by a web browser using Batik. When browser support is fixed we will be able to simply send the SVG itself and provide more interactivity with the graph (not graphic) by being able to click data points, for example.
I think you're talking about the wrong type of graph. This Ask Slashdot is asking about representations of sets of vertices connected (or not) by edges (e.g. a diagram of a comupter network), not about charts, plots, or function graphs.
Firefox, when you get right down to it, really is somewhat pointless. Not that it matters if people continue to like and use it, but I think a lot of people just use it because they've been told it's better than Mozilla, not because they actually decided that it was.
I agree, Firefox is now somewhat pointless. But when I switched, around 0.8, it was definitely faster and nicer to use than Mozilla. So for me, the question is "why should I switch back"?
Interesting. I grew up here in the US and everyone I know called them 'Legos'. I wonder if the country makes the difference?
I'd like to see a map with different regions marked based on what Legos are called, but I don't think it'd be a worthwhile acedemic project.
I think that outside the US (or possibly North America) everyone refers to it as either Lego or Lego bricks/blocks. Out of interest, in the US do you call a single piece a Lego?
I'm kind of disappointed that they didn't list Radio Shack Sucks. RSS was instrumental in organizing a class action against RadioShack, and in response RadioShack tried to lawyer them to death.
My response:
Looks like they pretty much suceeded.
You replied:
Um, I don't see it that way. I think they are still operating the site, with the URL RadioShackSucks.com.
HD-DVD multilayer disks can be made completely backwards compatible- HD on new layers for the home theater in the basement, conventional resolution on other layers for the car. Stores will only have to stock one disk. This will decide it.
Blu-ray also allows hybrid discs. So that HD-DVD advantage is gone. Not that it helped SACD much anyway. People don't seem much interested in hybrids.
In fact, some believe that The Empire Strikes Back (Ep V) could have been PG-13 had that rating existed.
According to the MPAA's ratings database, all three movies were rerated for the special editions, and again last year, presumably for the DVD versions. They remain PG.
Luke's hand get's lopped off. Granted, there's no blood, but it still probably freaked some little kids out when their hero got maimed. I do not know the MPAA's exact rating criteria, but were the film made today, I'd say the lopped-off hand part would get it a PG-13.
Is a 12 year old going to be bothered by it? I doubt it, so PG would be appropriate. I think the burnt corpses in Star Wars are worse.
I just searched the MPAA's ratings database and the three movies were rerated when the special editions came out, and again last year (I guess for the DVD changes). So none of them were bad enough for PG-13.
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But then all the hijackers need to do is to grab the target page dynamically and feed it to GoogleBot directly when it comes calling (essentially a virtual redirect). The effect will be the same.
I think it was a reference to the Bill Nye story posted earlier. I doubt it. Submissions usually sit in the queue for a day or two before being accepted (or rejected). Besides, since the submittors have no control over when their stories are posted, it'd be pretty stupid to try to reference an earlier story without an explicit link, wouldn't it?
Secondly, my point is that the time he spent on that app is a more accurate estimate of its worth than the entirely arbitrary price he decided to charge for it. I haven't tried the app myself, but from description (it prints out windows helpfiles) and the time he spent on it indicate to my mind that it is overpriced. If people are given the choice between being honest and paying too much or being dishonest and paying nothing it is not a suprise that many of them choose to pay nothing. People are known for dishonesty when they feel they're being ripped off. However, if the choice had been between being honest and paying a fair price and being dishonest and paying nothing the percentage of people who decide to pay will be higher. Without further research at other price points this research is not conclusive.
Not at all. What I'm saying is that I think if his pricing were more reasonable he would have found a smaller gap between the "honest" and "dishonest" users. As I said, people who feel the price is unreasonable are more inclined to be dishonest. Take a look at his "five fundamenetals for sucess": a product users need, quality, advertising, distribution of samples, and a reason to pay. Notice that he's completely forgotten pricing. Yet most business owners will tell you that price is probably the number one thing you have to get right to suceed.Minatures clarify just who is where during combat. Makes it a lot more realistic (no more characters teleporting from enemy to enemy).
My point is that this research only tells us that crippleware worked better in this particular case, a case where I think the registration fee was set way too high. Looking at just the uncrippled registrations, he made $3900 in about a year for his couple of days work. To me that seems pretty fair, and certainly not something I'd complain about. All registrations totaled $34000, and he claims it would have been $50000 if all versions had been crippled. That seems like an awfully good return for a couple of days work. Good on him for making that, but it seems a bit off to be complaining about his users honesty given just how much he made from that software.
Original post: My response: You replied:
I just searched the MPAA's ratings database and the three movies were rerated when the special editions came out, and again last year (I guess for the DVD changes). So none of them were bad enough for PG-13.