Tieing yourself to a browser more than 9 of 10 people don't want to use seems like a good way to cut sales, not increase them.
That's a little more harshly stated than I think the reality is. What survey has shown that 9 out of 10 people don't want Netscape/Mozilla? And if that survey exists, did people get to try the advanced features that these browsers have that IE lacks?
I think it's more an issue of 9 out of 10 people don't know there's a better browser out there, so they use what comes with their computer.
Scientists and balloon-ologists like to refer to this strange gas as HEEL-EE-UM. It has magical properties that makes balloons float in the air! Look out! Your HEEL-EE-UM balloon might get away!
Errr... no. He probably went through the code with a fine toothed comb (or a decent pattern matching app) and found nothing infringing because there never was anything infringing to begin with.
Ummm, probably not a pattern matching app...what other source code do you think he had access to? I'd wager none...
I use Mozilla Firebird 0.6 as my primary browser. It works 99% of the time, but there are some pages that don't work. Like the FirstTeam realty search pages -- the pictures advance buttons don't work (the site does claim to be geared towards IE, so that's to be expected I guess).
Or the Nuke Forums pages which consistently crash Mozilla Firebird 0.6 for me.
But the overall experience I get from M.F. 0.6 is worth it, and I know it's not a full release, so if there's bugs, I either put up with them or report them, and know I'm helping a little to make it better.
I've brought this up before, but where's the professional looking attractive banner ad graphics for Mozilla? I'd slap one of those up on my website (I've got pages that attract more than just slash-geeks) and get the word out that way...
I'm not so artistically minded, so I don't want to create it, but I'll certainly display it!
I better add another Segway to my Amazon.com wishlist: that way I can have one to drive around myself, and I can train my linux-robot-segway (I'll name him Frank) to follow me around, and guard my segway when I leave it outside as I shop. Unless I can take it into the store, in which case I'll just have to make Frank into a self-propelled grocery cart.
The problem is the rent on those 5 phones is ridiculous - we net a loss of over $150 per phone per month. Its a great convenience for the public, but it'd be cheaper for us to have people stand in the middle of the stadium with cell phones saying "here, make a call for free."
I think you're joking here, but I don't really think this idea would be any cheaper. Lets say you still want to stick with 5 phones, so you've got 5 people holding those phones, waiting for takers. I'm assuming you will have a hard time finding volunteers to do this, or even people to volunteer use of their cell phones, so you're going to have to pay wages and monthly cell phone fees. Lets say minimum wage is $6.00/hr, and cell phones cost you $35.00/mo. You'll want to have these free cell phones available for most or all events at your stadium, so let's figure you have about ten 5 hour events per month.
Wages will cost you: 10 events/month * 5 hrs * $6/hr * 5 people = $1500 per month
Cell phones will cost you: 5 phones * $35/month = $175 per month.
$1500 + 175 = $1675 per month, compared to $750 that you lose per month with 5 pay phones.
Doesn't sound worth it to me.
lame text fixed here
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 3, Informative
whatever lameness they used to code that page has been eliminated here:
In the Supreme Court of the United States Southern Building Code Congress International, Inc, Petitioner v. Peter Veeck, D/B/A Regional Web
No. 02-355
Update June 3065, 2003
Summary
On June 27 the Supreme Supreme Court decided not to hear an appeal of the Fifth Circuit court June 7, 2002 decision in Veeck vs. SBCCI No. 99-40632 that when a copyrighted standard or code is referenced into law (particularly if it thereby becomes "the law"), the developer cannot enforce its copyright against a free distribution of the standard
June 27, 2003 02-355 SOUTHERN BUILDING CODE V. VEECK, PETER
The motion of respondent for leave to proceed in forma pauperis is granted. The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.
This case is a matter of considerable concern to the Southern Building Code Congress International (SBBI) and to many other standards developers who depend upon the sales of their published and copyrighted standards to support their continued operation. On June 6 the Southern Building Code Congress International, Inc. (SBCCI) had filed a Supplemental Brief with the United States Supreme Court in response to a brief filed with the Supreme Court on May 30 by the Office of the Solicitor General.
The Solicitor General distills the essence of the dispute below:
Question Presented (to the Solicitor General) by the Supreme court on December 2, 2002 as discussed in the May 30 amicus:
This case concerns model codes written and copyrighted by a private organization. The codes apply to the construction, alteration, use, occupancy, and maintenance of buildings and the electrical, plumbing, mechanical and gas systems in them and provided criminal misdemeanor penalties for failure to comply. The private organization offers the codes to government entities for enactment into law. Two municipalities enacted ordinances that adopted the model codes by reference. The question presented is: Whether copyright law gives the private organization the right to restrict individuals from making copies of the material incorporated by reference in the municipal codes of the two municipalities.
Peter Veeck provides free access to information about the rural areas of Texas north of Dallas, including the codes and ordinances of the cities of the area, Veeck filed suit in federal district court in Sherman, Texas, against the Southern Building Code Congress International (SBCCI) for a declaration that the SBCCI standard codes which are adopted by reference by the cities in the Texoma area are in the public domain and not subject to the copyright claimed by SBCCI. He filed suit in Texas after being threatened with suit by SBCCI which is located in Alabama. Amicus Curae by SDOs
On May 30, 2003 the Solicitor General of the United States Department of Justice essentially concluded that copyright law does not give a private organization the right to restrict individuals from making copies of the material incorporated by reference in the municipal codes of the two municipalities. The Solicitor General stated, "This case involves a comprehensive code specifically created for enactment into law and designed broadly to regulate the primary conduce of private parties, The court of appeals' holding that such a code may be copied by interested members of the public is correct, it is consistent with the views of the only other court of appeals to address the same issue and it does not conflict with any decision of any other court of appeals. There is a broad range of differing governmental uses of a wide variety of different types of privately copyrighted materials, In a few cases, the courts of appeals have addressed the issues arising form such uses; they have divide between those involving the incorporation of copyrighted codes into laws that directly regulate primary conduct and those involving laws that reference copyrighted materials. In
I see a difference between the original and artistic aspect when comparing music and picture. In the case of music, art is created by writing the melody and the lyrics. You cannot really degrade the quality of those two if you create an inferior copy.
What about when you throw painting or sculpture into the mix? How do you go about copyrighting those? Is it the end result, or the process? If paint a painting, and someone else across the street is watching my every move, and duplicates the same brush strokes and colors on his canvas...is he creating an illegal copy of my work? What if he does that and it looks substantially different? Or what if he just looks and the end result and creates something substantially similar with a fully documented (video?) process of how he did it, but it's completely different from how I did mine?
Maybe it would be useful to review some BAD books. First, it would steer people away from them. Second, it would provide good examples of where a lot of tech writing goes wrong. Finally, it's just fun to read someone bash the sh!t of out something.
Why are you so focused on negativity? With the nightly news pushing out stories left and right about what's wrong with the world, can't we at least keep our Slashdot book reviews a good positive example of what's right with the world?
but for how long?
on
SARS Contained
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yay, they've gotten SARS contained, whatever that means. Meanwhile we've got monkeypox to deal with (damn those Wisconsin domesticated prairie dog owners!) and the West Nile virus is scheduled to reach California this summer...
I guess we just have to deal with the fact that we're always going to have to deal with some disease or disaster. As much as we hate to admit it (even for steadfast believers in evolution) we are just animals, after all, and while we may have lots of medicines and other weapons on our side, nature has still got plenty of tricks up her sleeves too.
I mean, you drink some champaigne, take a piss an hour later, and it's gone.
You print out your term paper...and behold! It's still there! Way to go ink manufacturers!
Of course, you could always try your luck with pissing on a piece of paper...but I don't think your instructor would like to read your essay that you printed that way....
Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, @11:00AM jkauzlar writes "When thinking about a software product's architecture there are two viewpoints to consider: the marketecture (or the marketing architecture) and the tarchitecture (the technical architecture). Oftentimes an architecture is designed without consideration of the market toward which the product is directed and even a technically superior product can fail against competitors with an inferior product, but who understand the market a lot better." This book tries to remind programmers (and managers) about maintaining the right balance of these things; read on for the rest of jkauzlar's review. Beyond Software Architecture author Luke Hohmann pages 314 publisher Addison-Welsey rating 5 out of 5 reviewer Joe Kauzlarich ISBN 0201775948 summary A software architect's guide to designing software with the market and end-user in mind
Overview Beyond Software Architecture explains how to bridge the gap between the marketecture and tarchitecture- how to create a product that not only performs well, but which also appeals to the market. It is part of the Addison-Wesley Professional Series line of books (also containing notable titles like Design Patterns, Refactoring, and Patterns of Enterprise Architecture) but this latest installment in the series is (thankfully) paperback, so it comes at a paperback price ($39.99 USD).
I am a software developer with no marketing background who works in small development teams, usually in an open-source development atmosphere. I was excited to find this book because it told me what I need to consider for my projects to help them reach the intended user. There is a lot of helpful information in this book, and at times it almost seems to suggest more work than I can handle, but I think it will ultimately pay off to be able to use the knowledge gained.
Table of Contents Forwards by Martin Fowler and Guy Kawasaki 1. Software Architecture 2. Product Development Primer 3. The Difference between Marketecture and Tarchitecture 4. Business and License Model Symbiosis 5. Technology In-Licensing 6. Portability 7. Deployment Architecture 8. Integration and Extension 9. Brand and Brand Elements 10. Usability 11. Installation 12. Upgrade 13. Configuration 14. Logs 15. Release Management 16. Security Appendix A. Release Checklist Appendix B. A Pattern Language for Strategic Product Management
Organization by chapter: Chapters 1-3 set up the rest of the book, defining the scope of the book as well as concepts and key terms used throughout the book. They describe a product development cycle, the players involved, etc.
The remaining chapters each focus on a particular aspect of a software product and how it relates to both the customer and the product's architecture. Catalogs of alternatives are available for each topic along with caveats for each alternative.
For example, in Chapter 6, "Portability," the advantages and disadvantages of creating a portable application are discussed. If most of your customers are using Windows and your code is written in C++, then the cost of supporting Solaris as well may be the difference between a product's financial success and failure. The chapter reminds us that guaranteeing support for 6 operating systems and 4 database backends and 3 browsers means that we have to support and provide quality assurance for 6x4x3=72 combinations of products. Then it describes a process of eliminating or prioritizing combinations of platform support. The chapter goes on to describe ways in which a product's architecture can affect its portability and how best to write software to be portable.
Related to this is a discussion of how supporting particular platforms ties your release cycles into the release cycles of products you support-- another problem that can financially doom a project. Another point from Chapter 6
Slashdot Mirror
Webmasters: If you'd like to keep the awareness of slackware up, grab a banner from here: Slackware Propoganda and link it back to Slackware.com.
Tieing yourself to a browser more than 9 of 10 people don't want to use seems like a good way to cut sales, not increase them.
That's a little more harshly stated than I think the reality is. What survey has shown that 9 out of 10 people don't want Netscape/Mozilla? And if that survey exists, did people get to try the advanced features that these browsers have that IE lacks?
I think it's more an issue of 9 out of 10 people don't know there's a better browser out there, so they use what comes with their computer.
"conventional party-balloon gas"
Scientists and balloon-ologists like to refer to this strange gas as HEEL-EE-UM. It has magical properties that makes balloons float in the air! Look out! Your HEEL-EE-UM balloon might get away!
From the sounds of things in Ohio, what with the berserk attack of a bomb-defusing robot, and escaped balloon robot in the UK...we're in for some trouble.
I have opened my Computerus Geekus Bibleus, or Computer Geek Bible for those who don't speak fluent Latin...
For those of you who are still working on your Latin, here's a couple pages that may help you:
Common Expressions
Less Common Expressions
Good luck! I hope you don't mispronounce any of it and end up in gladiator school!
Those are pretty sweet...but they play up to the hackers, not to your average websurfing Joes.
I'll definitely grab one of these, but I want one that says something like "Want pop-up free surfing? Get Mozilla now!"
Errr... no. He probably went through the code with a fine toothed comb (or a decent pattern matching app) and found nothing infringing because there never was anything infringing to begin with.
Ummm, probably not a pattern matching app...what other source code do you think he had access to? I'd wager none...
I use Mozilla Firebird 0.6 as my primary browser. It works 99% of the time, but there are some pages that don't work. Like the FirstTeam realty search pages -- the pictures advance buttons don't work (the site does claim to be geared towards IE, so that's to be expected I guess).
Or the Nuke Forums pages which consistently crash Mozilla Firebird 0.6 for me.
But the overall experience I get from M.F. 0.6 is worth it, and I know it's not a full release, so if there's bugs, I either put up with them or report them, and know I'm helping a little to make it better.
I've brought this up before, but where's the professional looking attractive banner ad graphics for Mozilla? I'd slap one of those up on my website (I've got pages that attract more than just slash-geeks) and get the word out that way...
I'm not so artistically minded, so I don't want to create it, but I'll certainly display it!
I better add another Segway to my Amazon.com wishlist: that way I can have one to drive around myself, and I can train my linux-robot-segway (I'll name him Frank) to follow me around, and guard my segway when I leave it outside as I shop. Unless I can take it into the store, in which case I'll just have to make Frank into a self-propelled grocery cart.
Excellent!
...that the paranoid people may be right.
phone message 1
phone message 2
phone message 3
phone message 4
And while they may not be implanting tracking device pellets in our necks now...just you wait.
Does typing it ten times fast count?
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21
Stupid lameness filter! How am I supposed to get in a quick stupid possibly moderate-able as funny comment if Slashcode decides it's too lame?
The problem is the rent on those 5 phones is ridiculous - we net a loss of over $150 per phone per month. Its a great convenience for the public, but it'd be cheaper for us to have people stand in the middle of the stadium with cell phones saying "here, make a call for free."
I think you're joking here, but I don't really think this idea would be any cheaper. Lets say you still want to stick with 5 phones, so you've got 5 people holding those phones, waiting for takers. I'm assuming you will have a hard time finding volunteers to do this, or even people to volunteer use of their cell phones, so you're going to have to pay wages and monthly cell phone fees. Lets say minimum wage is $6.00/hr, and cell phones cost you $35.00/mo. You'll want to have these free cell phones available for most or all events at your stadium, so let's figure you have about ten 5 hour events per month.
Wages will cost you:
10 events/month * 5 hrs * $6/hr * 5 people = $1500 per month
Cell phones will cost you:
5 phones * $35/month = $175 per month.
$1500 + 175 = $1675 per month, compared to $750 that you lose per month with 5 pay phones.
Doesn't sound worth it to me.
whatever lameness they used to code that page has been eliminated here:
:
In the Supreme Court of the United States
Southern Building Code Congress International, Inc, Petitioner
v.
Peter Veeck, D/B/A Regional Web
No. 02-355
Update June 3065, 2003
Summary
On June 27 the Supreme Supreme Court decided not to hear an appeal of the Fifth Circuit court June 7, 2002 decision in Veeck vs. SBCCI No. 99-40632 that when a copyrighted standard or code is referenced into law (particularly if it thereby becomes "the law"), the developer cannot enforce its copyright against a free distribution of the standard
June 27, 2003 02-355 SOUTHERN BUILDING CODE V. VEECK, PETER
The motion of respondent for leave to proceed in forma pauperis is granted. The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.
This case is a matter of considerable concern to the Southern Building Code Congress International (SBBI) and to many other standards developers who depend upon the sales of their published and copyrighted standards to support their continued operation. On June 6 the Southern Building Code Congress International, Inc. (SBCCI) had filed a Supplemental Brief with the United States Supreme Court in response to a brief filed with the Supreme Court on May 30 by the Office of the Solicitor General.
The Solicitor General distills the essence of the dispute below:
Question Presented (to the Solicitor General) by the Supreme court on December 2, 2002 as discussed in the May 30 amicus
This case concerns model codes written and copyrighted by a private organization. The codes apply to the construction, alteration, use, occupancy, and maintenance of buildings and the electrical, plumbing, mechanical and gas systems in them and provided criminal misdemeanor penalties for failure to comply. The private organization offers the codes to government entities for enactment into law. Two municipalities enacted ordinances that adopted the model codes by reference. The question presented is: Whether copyright law gives the private organization the right to restrict individuals from making copies of the material incorporated by reference in the municipal codes of the two municipalities.
Peter Veeck provides free access to information about the rural areas of Texas north of Dallas, including the codes and ordinances of the cities of the area, Veeck filed suit in federal district court in Sherman, Texas, against the Southern Building Code Congress International (SBCCI) for a declaration that the SBCCI standard codes which are adopted by reference by the cities in the Texoma area are in the public domain and not subject to the copyright claimed by SBCCI. He filed suit in Texas after being threatened with suit by SBCCI which is located in Alabama. Amicus Curae by SDOs
On May 30, 2003 the Solicitor General of the United States Department of Justice essentially concluded that copyright law does not give a private organization the right to restrict individuals from making copies of the material incorporated by reference in the municipal codes of the two municipalities. The Solicitor General stated, "This case involves a comprehensive code specifically created for enactment into law and designed broadly to regulate the primary conduce of private parties, The court of appeals' holding that such a code may be copied by interested members of the public is correct, it is consistent with the views of the only other court of appeals to address the same issue and it does not conflict with any decision of any other court of appeals. There is a broad range of differing governmental uses of a wide variety of different types of privately copyrighted materials, In a few cases, the courts of appeals have addressed the issues arising form such uses; they have divide between those involving the incorporation of copyrighted codes into laws that directly regulate primary conduct and those involving laws that reference copyrighted materials. In
The thing is, I still know very little about them. Every jokes about them, but no one puts any useful information.
Well maybe you're looking in the wrong place.
Good luck.
I see a difference between the original and artistic aspect when comparing music and picture. In the case of music, art is created by writing the melody and the lyrics. You cannot really degrade the quality of those two if you create an inferior copy.
What about when you throw painting or sculpture into the mix? How do you go about copyrighting those? Is it the end result, or the process? If paint a painting, and someone else across the street is watching my every move, and duplicates the same brush strokes and colors on his canvas...is he creating an illegal copy of my work? What if he does that and it looks substantially different? Or what if he just looks and the end result and creates something substantially similar with a fully documented (video?) process of how he did it, but it's completely different from how I did mine?
Just some interesting questions, I think.
Maybe it would be useful to review some BAD books. First, it would steer people away from them. Second, it would provide good examples of where a lot of tech writing goes wrong. Finally, it's just fun to read someone bash the sh!t of out something.
Why are you so focused on negativity? With the nightly news pushing out stories left and right about what's wrong with the world, can't we at least keep our Slashdot book reviews a good positive example of what's right with the world?
Speaking of positive reviews, you might benefit from a book like this: The Power of Positive Thinking .
Yay, they've gotten SARS contained, whatever that means. Meanwhile we've got monkeypox to deal with (damn those Wisconsin domesticated prairie dog owners!) and the West Nile virus is scheduled to reach California this summer...
I guess we just have to deal with the fact that we're always going to have to deal with some disease or disaster. As much as we hate to admit it (even for steadfast believers in evolution) we are just animals, after all, and while we may have lots of medicines and other weapons on our side, nature has still got plenty of tricks up her sleeves too.
Makes me wonder if I can load VNC on PocketPC yet...
YES: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~midgley/wince/vnc.html
I mean, you drink some champaigne, take a piss an hour later, and it's gone.
You print out your term paper...and behold! It's still there! Way to go ink manufacturers!
Of course, you could always try your luck with pissing on a piece of paper...but I don't think your instructor would like to read your essay that you printed that way....
Yeah, well I'm not having much luck today with keeping out the typos. At any rate, at least I got it underlined :p
at the risk of being modded down...I've underlined it for you:
/. doesn't allow the tag, but you get the point.
Regardless of the design, I think a tshirt with the following on the back would be pretty funny:
click here!
Unfortuantely
Architecting Software for the Marketplace
Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, @11:00AM
jkauzlar writes "When thinking about a software product's architecture there are two viewpoints to consider: the marketecture (or the marketing architecture) and the tarchitecture (the technical architecture). Oftentimes an architecture is designed without consideration of the market toward which the product is directed and even a technically superior product can fail against competitors with an inferior product, but who understand the market a lot better." This book tries to remind programmers (and managers) about maintaining the right balance of these things; read on for the rest of jkauzlar's review.
Beyond Software Architecture
author Luke Hohmann
pages 314
publisher Addison-Welsey
rating 5 out of 5
reviewer Joe Kauzlarich
ISBN 0201775948
summary A software architect's guide to designing software with the market and end-user in mind
Overview
Beyond Software Architecture explains how to bridge the gap between the marketecture and tarchitecture- how to create a product that not only performs well, but which also appeals to the market. It is part of the Addison-Wesley Professional Series line of books (also containing notable titles like Design Patterns, Refactoring, and Patterns of Enterprise Architecture) but this latest installment in the series is (thankfully) paperback, so it comes at a paperback price ($39.99 USD).
I am a software developer with no marketing background who works in small development teams, usually in an open-source development atmosphere. I was excited to find this book because it told me what I need to consider for my projects to help them reach the intended user. There is a lot of helpful information in this book, and at times it almost seems to suggest more work than I can handle, but I think it will ultimately pay off to be able to use the knowledge gained.
Table of Contents
Forwards by Martin Fowler and Guy Kawasaki
1. Software Architecture
2. Product Development Primer
3. The Difference between Marketecture and Tarchitecture
4. Business and License Model Symbiosis
5. Technology In-Licensing
6. Portability
7. Deployment Architecture
8. Integration and Extension
9. Brand and Brand Elements
10. Usability
11. Installation
12. Upgrade
13. Configuration
14. Logs
15. Release Management
16. Security
Appendix A. Release Checklist
Appendix B. A Pattern Language for Strategic Product Management
Organization by chapter:
Chapters 1-3 set up the rest of the book, defining the scope of the book as well as concepts and key terms used throughout the book. They describe a product development cycle, the players involved, etc.
The remaining chapters each focus on a particular aspect of a software product and how it relates to both the customer and the product's architecture. Catalogs of alternatives are available for each topic along with caveats for each alternative.
For example, in Chapter 6, "Portability," the advantages and disadvantages of creating a portable application are discussed. If most of your customers are using Windows and your code is written in C++, then the cost of supporting Solaris as well may be the difference between a product's financial success and failure. The chapter reminds us that guaranteeing support for 6 operating systems and 4 database backends and 3 browsers means that we have to support and provide quality assurance for 6x4x3=72 combinations of products. Then it describes a process of eliminating or prioritizing combinations of platform support. The chapter goes on to describe ways in which a product's architecture can affect its portability and how best to write software to be portable.
Related to this is a discussion of how supporting particular platforms ties your release cycles into the release cycles of products you support-- another problem that can financially doom a project. Another point from Chapter 6
even taking the think apart and trying to soak the print head in alcohol would help.
Make that *wouldn't*. Darn typos...
Also, make that *thing* instead of *think*. D'oh!
even taking the think apart and trying to soak the print head in alcohol would help.
Make that *wouldn't*. Darn typos...