I always thought that the Free Software philosophy didn't require users to be programmers. On the contrary, I believe Free Software is as much about turning the developers and users into co-owners of software as anything. That is to say, when the business model shifts from the software/content as widget-for-sale model to a relationship model (i.e. support, feature requests, customization, etc), the users end up benefitting from what is *not* a zero sum game. There are very few losers in this plan, except companies like Microsoft whose primary source of revenue is initial license fees (and even they are working hard to make sure that their income doesn't remain dependent on widget sales-- they aren't that stupid).
I think the real problem, so far, has been that most Free Software is not sufficiently user friendly so that a non-programmer can easily install, configure, and use the software. I'd say the last two years, though, have seen great strides in eliminating this complaint. There are a few outstanding areas where some technical know-how is probably more necessary on a Free Software system than on Windows, but that has mostly to do with hardware manufacturers who only produce Windows drivers and only grudgingly (or not at all) work with Linux/BSD types (usually their level of support involves releasing some specs, but not providing a lot of actual assistance-- how many device makers give out the source code to their own drivers to Free developers in an effort to get Free drivers into Linux?).
Am I strongly mistaken or is this a patent on the digital instantiation of a stencil? If so, there are thousands of years of prior work in the analog world, complete with methods for blending, irregular shapes, and layer transparency. I mean, besides screen-printing and cutouts, there's work that people like Walt Disney have done with multi-layer cameras, etc. If there's more to what this patent is about, I'd like to hear it. And please, don't say it's the math involved. Allowing companies to patent math equations is the most asinine thing ever, so if the patent office is doing *that* then it is probably time to write to the appropriate elected officials and request a change in patent office management.
As a publicly ownable company, they have an obligation to do whatever their shareholders tell them. Usually this is "make money", but it could be anything and is decided on by the democratically elected boards of the company. Members of the board are extremely responsive to the needs of larger blocks of shareholders. In fact, I've seen some pretty interesting wrangling over how board voting works and stuff like that, just because the board holds a lot of real power in a corporation.
A better interpretation of the profit motive would be that Apple has an obligation to pay its employees for their efforts. It can only do this if it continues to operate at least at the break-even point.
Frankly, this sort of patent messiness is just another X in my "con" column when it comes to Apple. And when their major "pro" at this point is "fanless computers", they just don't stack up well against a lot of other manufacturers.
While I've never seen damage to a shipment done by a shipper that even remotely resembled the damage in his pictures, I don't think I should have to "insure" something to recover the value of the goods when what his pictures showed is a clear case of neglect on the part of the shipper.
I don't use UPS for a host of completely separate customer service issues I've had with them, but one thing I've noted at their drop off point here in Minneapolis is that they don't accept sealed boxes. This is so they can check the packing material (and I assume other things as well).
The only way our poster really screwed up was to not save the boxes that his equipment came in, especially the G4 box. That would have been a much more secure shipment container than some left overs.
Re:This is turning into a VI or Emacs topic
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KDE 3.0 Screenshots
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· Score: 2
I never used Gnome except to check it out. I was a regular Enlightenment user until KDE2 and Konqueror came out. I then switched to KDE on all but one really slow machine that didn't really need the KDE functionality anyway (it's an old laptop, so if I'm home on the network I can run all my KDE apps just as fast by logging into the faster machine and having X serve them on the laptop-- try that on your consumer grade Windows machines!).
Except that any developer wants to can fork the project so that it does not include the easter eggs, thereby gaining all those users who are upset about such things. Whatever benefit that might have to such a developer I leave as an exercise for the reader.
Well, please tell your musician friends from this extremely heavy consumer of recorded music (I have been known to buy over 100 CDs a year) that they should *love* Napster and they should figure out ways to sell mp3s or oggs or some other fairly public/standard format files of their music online. Please suggest they investigate the approaches used by Mordam record distributors who sell individual digitized tracks from numerous artists for 50 to 80 cents on average.
Please also be sure to mention that I love to get my hot little hands on actual CDs and LPs and that I am a *lot* more likely to buy one (or the whole discography in some cases) when having a good idea what it sounds like. Sure, I've downloaded some stuff from Napster that I'm not likely to buy the album of, but it's stuff I wouldn't have been able to hear on the radio either (even if I did listen to the radio) and couldn't possibly have known much about without a prehear.
As an example, Sleater-Kinney is a band people I know have said they liked. And I'm familiar with the genre, but hadn't heard any specific S-K songs, after a couple of Napster downloads I proceeded to buy every CD of theirs I could find within a very short period of time. Another good example would be Negativland, while I owned a couple of their albums from back in the early 90's, once I found their U2 sendups on their web site for free, that renewed my interest and I picked up at least six or seven of their newer CDs.
Well, okay. I kept an open mind for at least a little while on this. I took your criticism to heart and tried clicking the link. What a waste of time that was-- it appears my internal BS filter is still working fine. After refusing four cookies from the linked site I get an article entitled "How Penny Per Page Might Work". This isn't a good title for a technical proposal. Thankfully, it's not a technical paper at all, it's just a bunch of hot air.
It's a solution in search of a problem. The author makes a weak attempt to convince us there is a problem with the economics of the web. Well, frankly, there is no problem. So far a bunch of overpaid pseudo-techies have shown amazing skill at draining venture capital into advertising and corporate perk buckets and applied almost no real business know-how to the problem at hand. This article falls clearly into the "imminent death of internet predicted" category.
Need I continue to criticize this proposed utopia and the numerous things the author failed to take into account? I mean, he didn't even consider that for traditional news sources the web is a godsend in terms of being able to track which pieces add value to the publication. Even if a local newspaper ends up entirely online (not likely) in the next couple of years, they have better information on their customers' reading habits than ever before in life! I would expect this to translate to huge savings in terms of how to report, what to syndicate, etc. And in time, those online versions of real world publications will probably go to subscription models, many already have. Many others have already gone to a pay-per-view model on archives.
This ain't rocket science, it's web design and basic business management. Yet you want me to read 8 pages of fluff about it before I'm allowed to have an opinion on the proposal? This proposal contains a few pie in the sky suggestions and a couple of sketchy illustrations-- but none of it is even necessary without a more demonstrative proof of the assertion that the web is broken and needs fixing!
This writer didn't even take into account that any business relying on page views for revenue is going to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to forecast page views in order to maintain budgets. How better to drain the resource pool at a company than to introduce such an incredibly random factor into the most important element of the revenue equation.
Shall I continue, or will you, the ever-savvy article reader and close-minded dismisser of the SLASHMOD, remain unswayed by my arguments against this proposed scheme? Would you care to find the rest of the posts I've made on this topic and counter my objections to the "penny-per-page" proposal?
What is this QUERTY keyboard? Is it better than the traditional QWERTY keyboard? I think it would be confusing to have the letters almost the same as a normal keyboard but not quite exactl.:)
Presumably you will be holding the stylus in your hand, so yes, you have something with a sufficiently narrow, yet blunt end to poke the keys with. Considering it's not a QWERTY layout, your traditional touch typing skills are wasted anyway. Too bad they didn't license the Fitaly layout, though. That's more efficient, I think than a straight ABCDEFG... layout.
So you've made the first truly insightful and positive post in this thread. Bravo. *grin*
The only way this will sell is if ISPs offer access level based web service. That is, $5/month on top of my ISP bill gets me 500 pages, $10/month 1000, etc. If I go over my level I get charged $.05 a page or something. Then, the ISP tracks hostnames and page views. By adding some code to a proxy they observe when images/frames/etc are part of a single real request and then they pay host owners according to the number of real hits that host got.
Serious problems. I am already paying for an access level. I pay about twice as much for cable modem as I would for a very high quality dialup connection, precisely because I like getting more information in less time. This whole thing would require massive regulatory oversight and investment on the part of ISPs and content providers (many of whom are not big fish). While this might be a good time to provide more jobs to the US economy, this is a drain on the existing internet businesses, which is likely to eat up significant portions of the supposed benefits of such a scheme.
I agree that this will drive up prices eventually, but not like the examples you give.
Canned soda prices are not considerably higher than they were several years ago. I pay $.60 at the machine here at work and from $.60 to $.70 at the convenience shops in the downtown metro here-- for Pepsi/Coke products. Pop bottles, OTOH, provide 66% more product (12 oz can vs. 20 oz bottle), so based on 50 cents for a can, I'd expect a price of 83 cents to be reasonable. Based on current market value of can of pop, $1 is not unreasonable. By purchasing in quantity at a grocer I can easily lower my cost per can to $.25.
Payphones are being used a *LOT* less than they were several years ago, owing to the prevalence of cell phones. The cost to install and maintain the phones has not gone down, so if the number of calls made is dropping then the fee per call must rise to maintain the revenue levels.
Because any site wishing to participate will likely have to pay some fees, this will raise the fixed costs of operating a for-profit website. Right now, there are numerous ways for me as a site owner to generate revenue that do not involve massive potential for fraud and privacy violations that any page-based scheme is likely to engender. But what this will do is make it likely that certain sites will do very well by simply figuring out manipulative formats. It is not a win for consumers. The subscription model or instance fee model work well for sites that need revenue.
Unless the pr0n sites are the ones clamoring for this, I'm guessing it would be a massive failure. Like it or not, adult sites on the net are often very successful businesses (not always tied to existing offline success stories either) and they have numerous existing business models that cover both micropayments, payment services, and subscriptions. Commercial sites need to look at existing models and where those models break down before we embark on some grand scheme such as this.
Kiddies? Stop being such a fucking prig, okay? Discussions are easier to have when you don't respond to obvious humor with name-calling and condescension.
There are very real technical objections to this plan from the sound of it. And frankly I'll bet you any system you set up I can build either clients or servers that subvert it. Will I lose my access? Maybe. Will I find a different way to obtain access. Probably. Look at how hard we've all been going after spammers, are they gone?
Unless they've got a whole new protocol that works nothing like HTTP(S) I can't even conceive of a way to account for page views as a fee determinant that isn't likely to lead to whole host of technical matters, fraud concerns, and probable privacy violations. Not to mention that most sites would require a complete overhaul because under any scheme you can concoct they are either generating way too many pages (splitting articles) or not enough (masking most of the activity in POSTed form fields).
As for the articles, I don't like to spend the time to read every freaking article that Slashdot posts. 50% of them are either too short to be informative or too involved to be useful in a reasonable amount of time. All I need in this case is to hear "penny a page" and I've pretty much got my opinion (based on stuff I already know)-- and it is very likely that some erstwhile Slashdotter is going to post a good summary or highly relevant insightful information as part of the discussion. So if there is information I need to know, I'm likely to get it right here at Slashdot.
Spell checking would have only caught one of the two spelling errors in the article posting. Maybe someday computers will be good with natural language, but not yet. Until such time, I suggest we all learn to communicate in Perl, which (for a computer language) is as close to a natural language as I've seen (often messy, too many ways to say the same thing, style differences can result in unintelligibility, etc etc).
My own opinion is that if you sign up for a project on a system like SourceForge, you should have something in a reasonable amount of time (a couple of weeks), even if it is just design docs. It's not really open source if all you've got out there is a vague description of your plans to develop something. But then, I think it would cost more to filter all that stuff out than it would to just leave it there, so who knows.... but if it impedes the value of the codebase by raising the noise level unacceptably, then it *is* time to consider some form of triage.
Or how about at least cleaning out the projects that never put any files out for release?
Re:Stop using the phrase Copy Protection...
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More Copy Protected CDs?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't like the idea of leaving the word "copy" in there. The public is already used to hearing that word in the context of "piracy" and "theft". Why don't we call it what it is, "fucking up the CD to prevent ethical reuse?".
RIAA, you can kiss my behind, I have started my boycott of your CDs. Total loss so far? $20. Since I have purchased, on average, 75-100 musical releases a year for the past several years, consider your potential annual "loss" to be anywhere from $1000-$2000. To the artists: this also means I won't be going to your shows, since I probably won't have heard your latest album enough to care.
You can sell KDE applications all day long without buying a Qt commercial license, as long as your applications use a GPL compatible license (i.e. comply with the terms of the GPL as set forth in the KDE and Qt packages) and you provide the source code to your application (or access to the source code) along with your binaries.
If TrollTech is saying otherwise then they are deliberately obscuring the legal details of the GPL (as I understand them and as they appear to explicated in the FAQ at fsf.org).
If, however, you'd like to sell Qt-based software that is proprietary in nature (i.e. you distribute only binaries under a non-Free license), then yes, you rightfully must purchase a Qt developers license. I'm sorry that you find $2000 a severe barrier to entry, but I think if you are serious about developing software that $2000 for a library license is not that large of an expense.
However, if you are hoping to develop a shareware app in the hopes that your amateur development work catches on and brings you riches and fame, then maybe Qt is not for you. What I suggest is that if you really want to use Qt, start with a project that is small and that it won't bother you to GPL. Once that works out well, and you're established as a respected Qt developer you can probably get a client who will gladly help you purchase a commercial Qt license for proprietary development. Although, unless they are planning to resell your software, there is really no need. The GPL allows for in-house development using GPL libraries. You don't *have* to distribute your software, you know.
That is so true. Debian is a very hard distro to install. I mean, the base part is pretty easy unless you've got some major esoteric peripherals or hardware going, but on my somewhat dated x86 laptop I still had to download a custom X*Config to get X up and running. This same machine has never required that with either RH6.2 or RH7.1 or RH7.2. I had a lot of the same problems with Debian trying to get it to run on an iMac, the X configuration just wouldn't take. But with YellowDog it's always been instant success.
Now, I'm not the smartest bear on the block, but neither am I a complete moron. And frankly, I don't want to have to learn to configure the intricacies of X to just to get up and running. Even if I do go in there and get it to work, I'm very nervous I'm killing my monitor with some screwed up setting.
But what Debian lacks in the "ease of setting up X" department it more than makes up for in its total commitment to Free Software and in the ability to apt-get changes. They were way ahead on that one, if memory serves.
Um. In 1975 there really were no PCs to speak of (and when I say PC I use it to mean "personal computer" not "IBM PC compatible clone"). That might be part of the reason. And when machines like the Apple II and the Commodore 64 and that TI one and that Atari one started making their way into homes and schools and offices in the later 70's, there was *plenty* of non-MS software to be had.
As far as Microsoft being responsible for the standard platform, what a crock. For a long while the OS on a machine was hardly considered a key feature and no one much cared if they typed DIR or LOAD"$",8; LIST to see what files were on a disk. I suppose those with more hacker instinct leaned to the Apple, with it's modifiable DOS and more open architecture.
In fact, it was Apple with their first editions of Mac OS (and earlier prototypes) that really put the OS in the forefront on PCs. Prior to that the OS was a very small set of command line tools that really didn't do much other than provide a way to (maybe) write some BASIC, manage filesystems, and load/run applications. You found your applications you wanted to run and then you bought a computer that could run them, or you bought a computer suited to a certain type of applications. And yes, MS did write a lot of that early software, even for non-Intel platforms, but even without MS most everything would have happened. Sorry.
So if you're done with the ad hominem attacks, you can prove that you *were* born before 1975, because your little history lesson is sorely lacking.
Huh? You lost me. In this case who is "they", the greedy profiteers or the gay/lesbian community? Can we hope that Hilary will see the light after hanging around all those fighting *for* their rights and stop working to take ours away, or should I be worried that Elizabeth Birch will betray the gay community in favor of record company profits?
And here is Steve Albini's version of the same thing, I've never figured out which one thought it up first, though. Given that Steve produced an album for Courtney's husband once, they may have well thought it up over beers or heroin.
In fact, I'll take this one step further. I don't care how they act as members of the marketplace, up to and including lame exclusionary or exploitive contracts. I'm still free to choose to say no under such circumstances. But when they go messing with the laws of the land (i.e. COPA, SSSCA, DMCA, their warped interpretation of contract law in re "click-wrap" and nonsense like that) and having them changed to better prop up their profit models, that greatly disturbs me. Especially since it is eroding what I consider to be my *rights*, including my right *not* to give them money-- i.e. I buy a blank audio cassette, the RIAA profits. That's when they've gone too far.
What a crock. Last time I went to the store to buy toilet paper (and the rest of my groceries), I stood in line for 15 minutes at least. And then I had to pay for the stuff on top of that!
And how about an even more egregious example as long as we're using anecdotal evidence to back up the pseudoscience of economics: I called my local telephone company a few nights ago-- a small company called Qwest-- to have some services I was no longer going to be using turned off, I had to speak with four different service persons and spend 27 minutes on the call. God bless that good old fashioned capitalism. Obviously questioning it means I'd rather stand in line, unlike now where I stand in lots of lines.
Slashdot Mirror
I always thought that the Free Software philosophy didn't require users to be programmers. On the contrary, I believe Free Software is as much about turning the developers and users into co-owners of software as anything. That is to say, when the business model shifts from the software/content as widget-for-sale model to a relationship model (i.e. support, feature requests, customization, etc), the users end up benefitting from what is *not* a zero sum game. There are very few losers in this plan, except companies like Microsoft whose primary source of revenue is initial license fees (and even they are working hard to make sure that their income doesn't remain dependent on widget sales-- they aren't that stupid).
I think the real problem, so far, has been that most Free Software is not sufficiently user friendly so that a non-programmer can easily install, configure, and use the software. I'd say the last two years, though, have seen great strides in eliminating this complaint. There are a few outstanding areas where some technical know-how is probably more necessary on a Free Software system than on Windows, but that has mostly to do with hardware manufacturers who only produce Windows drivers and only grudgingly (or not at all) work with Linux/BSD types (usually their level of support involves releasing some specs, but not providing a lot of actual assistance-- how many device makers give out the source code to their own drivers to Free developers in an effort to get Free drivers into Linux?).
Am I strongly mistaken or is this a patent on the digital instantiation of a stencil? If so, there are thousands of years of prior work in the analog world, complete with methods for blending, irregular shapes, and layer transparency. I mean, besides screen-printing and cutouts, there's work that people like Walt Disney have done with multi-layer cameras, etc. If there's more to what this patent is about, I'd like to hear it. And please, don't say it's the math involved. Allowing companies to patent math equations is the most asinine thing ever, so if the patent office is doing *that* then it is probably time to write to the appropriate elected officials and request a change in patent office management.
As a publicly ownable company, they have an obligation to do whatever their shareholders tell them. Usually this is "make money", but it could be anything and is decided on by the democratically elected boards of the company. Members of the board are extremely responsive to the needs of larger blocks of shareholders. In fact, I've seen some pretty interesting wrangling over how board voting works and stuff like that, just because the board holds a lot of real power in a corporation.
A better interpretation of the profit motive would be that Apple has an obligation to pay its employees for their efforts. It can only do this if it continues to operate at least at the break-even point.
Frankly, this sort of patent messiness is just another X in my "con" column when it comes to Apple. And when their major "pro" at this point is "fanless computers", they just don't stack up well against a lot of other manufacturers.
While I've never seen damage to a shipment done by a shipper that even remotely resembled the damage in his pictures, I don't think I should have to "insure" something to recover the value of the goods when what his pictures showed is a clear case of neglect on the part of the shipper.
I don't use UPS for a host of completely separate customer service issues I've had with them, but one thing I've noted at their drop off point here in Minneapolis is that they don't accept sealed boxes. This is so they can check the packing material (and I assume other things as well).
The only way our poster really screwed up was to not save the boxes that his equipment came in, especially the G4 box. That would have been a much more secure shipment container than some left overs.
I never used Gnome except to check it out. I was a regular Enlightenment user until KDE2 and Konqueror came out. I then switched to KDE on all but one really slow machine that didn't really need the KDE functionality anyway (it's an old laptop, so if I'm home on the network I can run all my KDE apps just as fast by logging into the faster machine and having X serve them on the laptop-- try that on your consumer grade Windows machines!).
Except that any developer wants to can fork the project so that it does not include the easter eggs, thereby gaining all those users who are upset about such things. Whatever benefit that might have to such a developer I leave as an exercise for the reader.
Well, please tell your musician friends from this extremely heavy consumer of recorded music (I have been known to buy over 100 CDs a year) that they should *love* Napster and they should figure out ways to sell mp3s or oggs or some other fairly public/standard format files of their music online. Please suggest they investigate the approaches used by Mordam record distributors who sell individual digitized tracks from numerous artists for 50 to 80 cents on average.
Please also be sure to mention that I love to get my hot little hands on actual CDs and LPs and that I am a *lot* more likely to buy one (or the whole discography in some cases) when having a good idea what it sounds like. Sure, I've downloaded some stuff from Napster that I'm not likely to buy the album of, but it's stuff I wouldn't have been able to hear on the radio either (even if I did listen to the radio) and couldn't possibly have known much about without a prehear.
As an example, Sleater-Kinney is a band people I know have said they liked. And I'm familiar with the genre, but hadn't heard any specific S-K songs, after a couple of Napster downloads I proceeded to buy every CD of theirs I could find within a very short period of time. Another good example would be Negativland, while I owned a couple of their albums from back in the early 90's, once I found their U2 sendups on their web site for free, that renewed my interest and I picked up at least six or seven of their newer CDs.
Well, okay. I kept an open mind for at least a little while on this. I took your criticism to heart and tried clicking the link. What a waste of time that was-- it appears my internal BS filter is still working fine. After refusing four cookies from the linked site I get an article entitled "How Penny Per Page Might Work". This isn't a good title for a technical proposal. Thankfully, it's not a technical paper at all, it's just a bunch of hot air.
It's a solution in search of a problem. The author makes a weak attempt to convince us there is a problem with the economics of the web. Well, frankly, there is no problem. So far a bunch of overpaid pseudo-techies have shown amazing skill at draining venture capital into advertising and corporate perk buckets and applied almost no real business know-how to the problem at hand. This article falls clearly into the "imminent death of internet predicted" category.
Need I continue to criticize this proposed utopia and the numerous things the author failed to take into account? I mean, he didn't even consider that for traditional news sources the web is a godsend in terms of being able to track which pieces add value to the publication. Even if a local newspaper ends up entirely online (not likely) in the next couple of years, they have better information on their customers' reading habits than ever before in life! I would expect this to translate to huge savings in terms of how to report, what to syndicate, etc. And in time, those online versions of real world publications will probably go to subscription models, many already have. Many others have already gone to a pay-per-view model on archives.
This ain't rocket science, it's web design and basic business management. Yet you want me to read 8 pages of fluff about it before I'm allowed to have an opinion on the proposal? This proposal contains a few pie in the sky suggestions and a couple of sketchy illustrations-- but none of it is even necessary without a more demonstrative proof of the assertion that the web is broken and needs fixing!
This writer didn't even take into account that any business relying on page views for revenue is going to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to forecast page views in order to maintain budgets. How better to drain the resource pool at a company than to introduce such an incredibly random factor into the most important element of the revenue equation.
Shall I continue, or will you, the ever-savvy article reader and close-minded dismisser of the SLASHMOD, remain unswayed by my arguments against this proposed scheme? Would you care to find the rest of the posts I've made on this topic and counter my objections to the "penny-per-page" proposal?
What is this QUERTY keyboard? Is it better than the traditional QWERTY keyboard? I think it would be confusing to have the letters almost the same as a normal keyboard but not quite exactl. :)
Presumably you will be holding the stylus in your hand, so yes, you have something with a sufficiently narrow, yet blunt end to poke the keys with. Considering it's not a QWERTY layout, your traditional touch typing skills are wasted anyway. Too bad they didn't license the Fitaly layout, though. That's more efficient, I think than a straight ABCDEFG... layout.
So you've made the first truly insightful and positive post in this thread. Bravo. *grin*
The only way this will sell is if ISPs offer access level based web service. That is, $5/month on top of my ISP bill gets me 500 pages, $10/month 1000, etc. If I go over my level I get charged $.05 a page or something. Then, the ISP tracks hostnames and page views. By adding some code to a proxy they observe when images/frames/etc are part of a single real request and then they pay host owners according to the number of real hits that host got.
Serious problems. I am already paying for an access level. I pay about twice as much for cable modem as I would for a very high quality dialup connection, precisely because I like getting more information in less time. This whole thing would require massive regulatory oversight and investment on the part of ISPs and content providers (many of whom are not big fish). While this might be a good time to provide more jobs to the US economy, this is a drain on the existing internet businesses, which is likely to eat up significant portions of the supposed benefits of such a scheme.
I agree that this will drive up prices eventually, but not like the examples you give.
Canned soda prices are not considerably higher than they were several years ago. I pay $.60 at the machine here at work and from $.60 to $.70 at the convenience shops in the downtown metro here-- for Pepsi/Coke products. Pop bottles, OTOH, provide 66% more product (12 oz can vs. 20 oz bottle), so based on 50 cents for a can, I'd expect a price of 83 cents to be reasonable. Based on current market value of can of pop, $1 is not unreasonable. By purchasing in quantity at a grocer I can easily lower my cost per can to $.25.
Payphones are being used a *LOT* less than they were several years ago, owing to the prevalence of cell phones. The cost to install and maintain the phones has not gone down, so if the number of calls made is dropping then the fee per call must rise to maintain the revenue levels.
Because any site wishing to participate will likely have to pay some fees, this will raise the fixed costs of operating a for-profit website. Right now, there are numerous ways for me as a site owner to generate revenue that do not involve massive potential for fraud and privacy violations that any page-based scheme is likely to engender. But what this will do is make it likely that certain sites will do very well by simply figuring out manipulative formats. It is not a win for consumers. The subscription model or instance fee model work well for sites that need revenue.
Unless the pr0n sites are the ones clamoring for this, I'm guessing it would be a massive failure. Like it or not, adult sites on the net are often very successful businesses (not always tied to existing offline success stories either) and they have numerous existing business models that cover both micropayments, payment services, and subscriptions. Commercial sites need to look at existing models and where those models break down before we embark on some grand scheme such as this.
Kiddies? Stop being such a fucking prig, okay? Discussions are easier to have when you don't respond to obvious humor with name-calling and condescension.
There are very real technical objections to this plan from the sound of it. And frankly I'll bet you any system you set up I can build either clients or servers that subvert it. Will I lose my access? Maybe. Will I find a different way to obtain access. Probably. Look at how hard we've all been going after spammers, are they gone?
Unless they've got a whole new protocol that works nothing like HTTP(S) I can't even conceive of a way to account for page views as a fee determinant that isn't likely to lead to whole host of technical matters, fraud concerns, and probable privacy violations. Not to mention that most sites would require a complete overhaul because under any scheme you can concoct they are either generating way too many pages (splitting articles) or not enough (masking most of the activity in POSTed form fields).
As for the articles, I don't like to spend the time to read every freaking article that Slashdot posts. 50% of them are either too short to be informative or too involved to be useful in a reasonable amount of time. All I need in this case is to hear "penny a page" and I've pretty much got my opinion (based on stuff I already know)-- and it is very likely that some erstwhile Slashdotter is going to post a good summary or highly relevant insightful information as part of the discussion. So if there is information I need to know, I'm likely to get it right here at Slashdot.
Spell checking would have only caught one of the two spelling errors in the article posting. Maybe someday computers will be good with natural language, but not yet. Until such time, I suggest we all learn to communicate in Perl, which (for a computer language) is as close to a natural language as I've seen (often messy, too many ways to say the same thing, style differences can result in unintelligibility, etc etc).
My own opinion is that if you sign up for a project on a system like SourceForge, you should have something in a reasonable amount of time (a couple of weeks), even if it is just design docs. It's not really open source if all you've got out there is a vague description of your plans to develop something. But then, I think it would cost more to filter all that stuff out than it would to just leave it there, so who knows.... but if it impedes the value of the codebase by raising the noise level unacceptably, then it *is* time to consider some form of triage.
Or how about at least cleaning out the projects that never put any files out for release?
I don't like the idea of leaving the word "copy" in there. The public is already used to hearing that word in the context of "piracy" and "theft". Why don't we call it what it is, "fucking up the CD to prevent ethical reuse?".
RIAA, you can kiss my behind, I have started my boycott of your CDs. Total loss so far? $20. Since I have purchased, on average, 75-100 musical releases a year for the past several years, consider your potential annual "loss" to be anywhere from $1000-$2000. To the artists: this also means I won't be going to your shows, since I probably won't have heard your latest album enough to care.
What a crock!
You can sell KDE applications all day long without buying a Qt commercial license, as long as your applications use a GPL compatible license (i.e. comply with the terms of the GPL as set forth in the KDE and Qt packages) and you provide the source code to your application (or access to the source code) along with your binaries.
If TrollTech is saying otherwise then they are deliberately obscuring the legal details of the GPL (as I understand them and as they appear to explicated in the FAQ at fsf.org).
If, however, you'd like to sell Qt-based software that is proprietary in nature (i.e. you distribute only binaries under a non-Free license), then yes, you rightfully must purchase a Qt developers license. I'm sorry that you find $2000 a severe barrier to entry, but I think if you are serious about developing software that $2000 for a library license is not that large of an expense.
However, if you are hoping to develop a shareware app in the hopes that your amateur development work catches on and brings you riches and fame, then maybe Qt is not for you. What I suggest is that if you really want to use Qt, start with a project that is small and that it won't bother you to GPL. Once that works out well, and you're established as a respected Qt developer you can probably get a client who will gladly help you purchase a commercial Qt license for proprietary development. Although, unless they are planning to resell your software, there is really no need. The GPL allows for in-house development using GPL libraries. You don't *have* to distribute your software, you know.
That is so true. Debian is a very hard distro to install. I mean, the base part is pretty easy unless you've got some major esoteric peripherals or hardware going, but on my somewhat dated x86 laptop I still had to download a custom X*Config to get X up and running. This same machine has never required that with either RH6.2 or RH7.1 or RH7.2. I had a lot of the same problems with Debian trying to get it to run on an iMac, the X configuration just wouldn't take. But with YellowDog it's always been instant success.
Now, I'm not the smartest bear on the block, but neither am I a complete moron. And frankly, I don't want to have to learn to configure the intricacies of X to just to get up and running. Even if I do go in there and get it to work, I'm very nervous I'm killing my monitor with some screwed up setting.
But what Debian lacks in the "ease of setting up X" department it more than makes up for in its total commitment to Free Software and in the ability to apt-get changes. They were way ahead on that one, if memory serves.
Um. In 1975 there really were no PCs to speak of (and when I say PC I use it to mean "personal computer" not "IBM PC compatible clone"). That might be part of the reason. And when machines like the Apple II and the Commodore 64 and that TI one and that Atari one started making their way into homes and schools and offices in the later 70's, there was *plenty* of non-MS software to be had.
As far as Microsoft being responsible for the standard platform, what a crock. For a long while the OS on a machine was hardly considered a key feature and no one much cared if they typed DIR or LOAD"$",8; LIST to see what files were on a disk. I suppose those with more hacker instinct leaned to the Apple, with it's modifiable DOS and more open architecture.
In fact, it was Apple with their first editions of Mac OS (and earlier prototypes) that really put the OS in the forefront on PCs. Prior to that the OS was a very small set of command line tools that really didn't do much other than provide a way to (maybe) write some BASIC, manage filesystems, and load/run applications. You found your applications you wanted to run and then you bought a computer that could run them, or you bought a computer suited to a certain type of applications. And yes, MS did write a lot of that early software, even for non-Intel platforms, but even without MS most everything would have happened. Sorry.
So if you're done with the ad hominem attacks, you can prove that you *were* born before 1975, because your little history lesson is sorely lacking.
Huh? You lost me. In this case who is "they", the greedy profiteers or the gay/lesbian community? Can we hope that Hilary will see the light after hanging around all those fighting *for* their rights and stop working to take ours away, or should I be worried that Elizabeth Birch will betray the gay community in favor of record company profits?
And here is Steve Albini's version of the same thing, I've never figured out which one thought it up first, though. Given that Steve produced an album for Courtney's husband once, they may have well thought it up over beers or heroin.
In fact, I'll take this one step further. I don't care how they act as members of the marketplace, up to and including lame exclusionary or exploitive contracts. I'm still free to choose to say no under such circumstances. But when they go messing with the laws of the land (i.e. COPA, SSSCA, DMCA, their warped interpretation of contract law in re "click-wrap" and nonsense like that) and having them changed to better prop up their profit models, that greatly disturbs me. Especially since it is eroding what I consider to be my *rights*, including my right *not* to give them money-- i.e. I buy a blank audio cassette, the RIAA profits. That's when they've gone too far.
Here's an interview with her in The Advocate. I think it's totally bizarre that her partner is the executive director of the Human Rights Campaign.
You would rather stand in line for toilet paper?
What a crock. Last time I went to the store to buy toilet paper (and the rest of my groceries), I stood in line for 15 minutes at least. And then I had to pay for the stuff on top of that!
And how about an even more egregious example as long as we're using anecdotal evidence to back up the pseudoscience of economics: I called my local telephone company a few nights ago-- a small company called Qwest-- to have some services I was no longer going to be using turned off, I had to speak with four different service persons and spend 27 minutes on the call. God bless that good old fashioned capitalism. Obviously questioning it means I'd rather stand in line, unlike now where I stand in lots of lines.