2.6GHz P4, 1GB of Corsair XMS3600, 140GB of RAID1+0, and a GF4 Ti4600.
Very, very smooth... So far the only people I know who've complained are running Athlons. A friend has virtually the identical setup, except he's using an Athlon (I don't remember which but the speed is comparable in everything else) and the demo runs like crap, maybe 8 FPS or so. Weird.
You're still ignoring the basic point. I was looking for an example of a company which developed a piece of software itself, then open sourced it, and managed to not sink into oblivion. I might be wrong -- it's why I asked for examples. I'm not aware of any. The successful or at least stable open source oriented software companies I'm aware of came along after the fact to build upon the product of someone else's open sourced labors.
You do make a good point about the difference between open source and free software, though. It's a common mistake and an easy trap to fall into. Understand that I'm not opposed to either idea -- I just don't think it is a sound business practice (strictly in terms of applying it to a product you have created yourself), and I'm not aware of any significant success stories.
Profit may not be everyone's measure of success, but in this world it's clearly a standard of success in business.
He's got it right, they had virtually no infrastructure to begin with -- at least not since the previous war 11 years ago. You can read as much in this article from a totally lib source if you don't believe it. Quoting from that article:
Currently, there is limited, expensive and state-controlled Internet use in Iraq, beamed via satellite since sanctions on the country have made it unable to install pipes and networks.
...and...
it could be explained by the fact that since the destruction of its infrastructure in 1991, Iraq is one of the most telecoms-poor country in the world.
And what's age of design got to do with anything? Take the the B52 bomber, that first flew in 1955, twenty years before Concorde, and is expected to remain in service for perhaps another thirty years.
You make a good argument, but it's actually even better than you realize. There are plans to turn B-52's into aerial "artillery" platforms by refitting them with nuclear engines, which will allow them to circle a battlefield continuously for periods ranging from several days up to a couple of weeks. If this plan goes through, the USAF stated they may extend the service life anywhere from 50 to 100 additional years.
Even if it doesn't happen, the fact that they're willing to contemplate 150 years of service is pretty impressive, and I imagine it makes for a pretty amazing ROI, too.
On the other hand, I've read that if you add up the regular maintenance and refits, a given B-52 is essentially a brand-new plane on something like a 7-10 year cycle (but that's true of most of the large, expensive military aircraft).
Obtuse? Bullshit. They make a profit on the razor, as well as the blades. It's different. That's a fact. It's only "obtuse" because it doesn't support your point like you had intended.
I definte noteworthy as profitable. Your examples of RedHat and SuSE are NOT examples. The discussion is about companies which develop a piece of software, then Open Source it. Neither RH nor SuSE did this, they're leeching off the product of someone else's work.
I appreciate that you're trying, but you haven't managed to refute the actual argument being presented. If you bust your ass and build an important piece of software, you are unlikely (I say guaranteed to not) recover your expenses and become successful by Open Sourcing the product of your labor. Again, as I said, this works fine and dandy for informal hobbyist style projects, but when it comes to business, you either play the services game and leech off somebody else's work, or you keep it closed in the hopes of making a real profit.
Last time I checked, a reloadable razor was often far more expensive than it cost to produce, usually has the razor attachment/release mechanism patented, and if you copied the design (the appearance) you'd find yourself in court pretty fast. They aren't giving away the razor by any stretch of the imagination. That example would be more like buying IBM's DB2 (a big-dollar razor) and then hiring IBM's consulting services (the blades) to help you implement it.
Besides, the comment I replied to took the very common position that it's somehow a good idea for a software company -- meaning a company that comes up with an idea and produces the software -- to give away the product of it's labor -- the software it wrote. Pursuing that context, I merely pointed out that there are no good examples of this leading any business to noteworthy success.
No, you don't maintain control over when and where your software gets distributed. That's the tradeoff you make to receive community effort and goodwill in return
And all you have to do is browse/. and sourceforge to get a pretty clear idea, respectively, of how little that "community and goodwill" is actually worth. Hint: It won't make up for giving away the product of your labor.
OSS is great for hobbyist level projects (which can be very complete, very useful applications), but real world examples of significant, successful all-OSS software companies which sell an OSS product they created are few and far between (and I don't mean Yet Another Linux Distro Company) -- if they exist at all.
I was hoping NOBODY would say Director. Macromedia languages are awful. The guy who came up with Lingo should be permanently barred from using computers. The language is extremely arbitrary and bears little or no useful resemblance to any "real" language. Recent versions of Flash apparently support a reasonably standard JavaScript spinoff, so progress is being made (and we'll ignore how hideous JavaScript is as a language), but whatever you do, don't let your kids "learn" by using Macromedia products.
I believe there are two reasons so many people talk about Basic. The first one is, of course, that on older home computers it was always available. The second one, and I believe the more important one, is that it went a long way towards insulating you from being able to do anything really harmful, while allowing you to do things with immediate visible results.
Browsers, via HTML and locally-executed script code, go a long way towards satisfying both requirements. I would personally recommend letting them use IE so that they can use VBScript (which is a hell of a lot easier for a beginner to read and write than JavaScript), and perhaps encourage them to rewrite their VBS code in JS, which should nicely lay the groundwork for understanding programming generically, rather than specializing in one language, which is what cripples and confuses many self-taught beginners.
But whatever you do, avoid Macromedia languages like the plague...
Is someone listening to "Smack my bitch up" (Prodigy) really going to be productive in the office?
Yes. Weirdly, I happened to be listening to exactly that when I read your comment. Except for a short break to read/., I've been writing code for three hours, since 4AM. I should be done and on my way home by 2PM, around the time all the other people in the office are just starting to wake up again after lunch...
Let me get this straight... you think a Durango is an excessive purchase? I could see if you'd said maybe a Range Rover or a Hummer. I certainly have no problem with people buying those, either, but they do qualify as increasingly excessive for most buyers. On the other hand, a Durango is a pretty basic truck. I enjoyed mine for the several years I kept it, but you're smoking crack if you think it represents any form of luxury or excess, particularly for somebody with a good-paying IT job.
The "excessive consumerism" people are the mid-range IT workers who live in tiny, crappy apartments, but drive BMWs to work.
I agree with your basic description of excessive consumerism, but your example needs work...
People repeat it because it's humorous. It isn't things like this which have created our carefully scripted politicians, it's the ubiquitous TV cameras, the population's nearly non-existent attention span, and the combination of those which produce damning out-of-context sound bites.
I hope you get modded up. Wish I had some points for you. But between the European readers gleefully wringing their hands over the Fall of the American Empire, typical American/. readers who don't pause to think before they post (the computer IN FRONT OF YOU NOW can do all of that, or could with probably only a few hundred bucks in add-ons), and the usual gang of idiots and trolls, I fear your post will linger at the default +1 Karma bonus.
While EA may have valid reasons for wishing they had more control over XBOX on-line gaming (I'm sure one major issue they have is that XBOX developers don't even have the OPTION of using anything but XBOX Live) they have enough console experience to know that in the console world the console manufacturers always have the final word.
That means EA's position amounts to pointless pissing and moaning. This will cut them out of some potentially lucrative profits, which I'll get to momentarily. Granted EA could have milked consumers for even larger profits, but again, it's the console market, that's just how things work.
About those profits... Consider that Microsoft's long term goal is to have ten million XBOX Live subscriptions by 2007. (See FAQ.) While you may scoff now, their 2002 figures were on target, and they have already surpassed their 2003 target. Say that Microsoft is WAY off base and misses by 50%... that's still a very comfortable five million users -- probably HAPPY users, as I've yet to see any serious complaints about the quality of the XBOX Live service. Users, particularly console gamers, just don't care about that kind of thing. Plug-and-play is more important there than anywhere else. EA is cutting off their nose to spite their face.
You were screwed by a moderator. You're exactly right. I know six people (plus myself) who are waiting for Project Gotham 2 and Halo 2, either of which will be enough incentive for us to buy XBOX Live. EA games have really sucked lately (mainly because they're lowest-common-denominator PS2 ports), and they'll suck even more without XBOX Live support.
All I can say is, I sure hope they spend some time improving the DX9 documentation. The MSDN Library *still* lists everything as "pre-release" and "subject to change" and it's a total nightmare to navigate, especially if you're looking for something simple like a method signature one one of the managed-code interfaces, for example.
DX9 has previously unannounced support for all the next-generation graphics features
I found the quote above to be very surprising -- I wonder what that's all about???
I don't understand why the piece about the extrasolar planet losing its gas envelope was combined with this other piece about Jupiter. Is it just because they're both "pretty far away"?
If I had been in more of a hurry, I would have completely missed the thing about the gas envelope, which I find very interesting and would have stopped to read, because I already knew about the dark spot on Jupiter and wouldn't have considered it worth my time.
Were the two stories combined by the article submitter, or was this more weirdness from the/. editors?
was repeatedly, over the course of months, told to take data
You don't mention who was telling you to do this. It would seem to be an important part of the picture. I don't mean you should give us names and addresses, of course -- but what was your relationship to the person or people urging you to do this, and why did they want you to take the data? Were they interested in the data, or did they want you to do something with it? Did somebody try to buy it from you?
The obvious answer, as others have already posted, is to go directly to the police. I don't know about Canada (many of us are assuming you're from Canada) but I believe (IANAL) in the US it's illegal to incite another person to commit a crime. In any case, it would be hard to imagine that they wouldn't be interested.
The fact that you haven't yet gone to the cops suggests there may be other mitigating circumstances of interest, which were not presented in the article.
At my company, the sysadmins put very heavy restrictions on the front-line workers. At one of our branch offices, they came to rely heavily on Excel macros, but due to extremely tiny user network storage quotas the macros were short on error handling and other functionality you'd normally get with software doing critical processing.
One user made the jump into the software development group. He was responsible for a lot of these now-critical macros. He had feared the macros would become important to daily processing, being used by people who didn't really understand them (and the afforementioned limitiations didn't help), so he chose some names that he hoped would indicate to the user that they probably shouldn't rely so heavily on those macros.
The best name was shitstorm, but another favorite of mine was trainwreckwaitingtohappen. In another macro, if the operation encountered an error, this was communicated by a clipart eagle swooping down across the spreadsheet, ripping off a clipart businessman's head, and shitting down his neck. (While the sysadmins restricted storage quotas, they did install the vast waste of space that is the MS Office clipart library.) The clipart one is something of an underground classic among the programmers around here.
Eventually he (wisely) quit and went to work somewhere else. To this day those same macros are busily doing whatever it is they do, rude and portentous filenames intact, and the users refuse to fund a project to decypher the macros and write a proper application. (Bad because the macros are starting to fail... trainwreckwaitingtohappen is particularly shaky these days...)
BTW, Hondas really can go very fast. Most of the "rice-boy" stuff in america is american car industry propaganda - you'll find, if you go to europe or asia, EVERYONE LAUGHS AT STUPID GAS-GUZZLING AMERICAN CARS, and prefers well-designed, efficient cars like hondas.
Make up your mind. Are you interested in efficiency, or in going fast?
I race stupid gas-guzzling American cars as a hobby (presently, a Camaro and a Viper GTS), and I can tell you the well-designed, efficient cars, after being modified to actually keep up with stupid gas-guzzling American cars, consume fuel at a generally equivalent rate. Otherwise that would be one factor (among many) in deciding whether we raced in the same classes. There are still differences, but the same economy-versus-performance decisions are available to everybody involved.
The situation on the street is different, but in that case the Hondas are most assuredly NOT very fast. I can introduce you to hosts of rice-boys who have lost many a street race who can attest to that. Furthermore, the gas guzzling image of American street cars is a largely outdated concept. If I drive somewhat gingerly, my street Viper (a 2001 RT/10, 11.5-second quarter mile, tops out around 185MPH) is capable of around 20 MPG in-town, and 24 or 25 highway. Not earth-shattering, but hardly gas-guzzling considering the car is closer to race-prepped than virtually every other car on the road, the aero is awful, and fuel economy was never a consideration.
My racing Viper (99 GTS) has a big-assed wing on it which provides roughly 100 to 150 lbs of downforce depending on my speed. We have measured this. This has a significant impact on handling (to the point that we have to play with the suspension to accomodate it). It creates downforce. That does increase turbulence, but turbulence is a side-effect of the downforce, which I define as compressing the air flowing over the top of the wing -- not the chaotic random motion suggested by the word "turbulence". However, you are correct in that it also reduces pressure-drag -- the Viper is famous for it's swirling suctioning vortex, which has been shown in the wind tunnel to extend as much as 12 feet behind the car (which is why GTSRs have giant rear diffusers). Hey, the body was designed for looks; it's still damned fast. However, the reduction in pressure-drag is also just a side-effect of the wing designed for downforce.
Regarding the underside of cars, I invite you to inspect the tray covering the bottom of a Ferrari 360. It is quite smooth, with a few cleverly arranged curves, and as a result it sticks to the road like it's been duct-taped there. It would be very easy for manufacturers to cover the bottom of their cars with aerodynamically useful undertrays. They don't do it because they don't have to. People wouldn't appreciate the value, so they can save money by leaving it off. (They can also reduce weight to meet increasingly psychotic fuel-economy regulations.)
While the Ferrari 360's undertray is a marvel of tedious and expensive engineering, it would be trivial to design an undertray that helped more than it hindered. It is disingenuous to the point of stupidity to suggest that modern cars don't have undertrays because a tangled mass of exposed equipment is somehow aeordynamically more desirable.
Slashdot Mirror
Very, very smooth... So far the only people I know who've complained are running Athlons. A friend has virtually the identical setup, except he's using an Athlon (I don't remember which but the speed is comparable in everything else) and the demo runs like crap, maybe 8 FPS or so. Weird.
You do make a good point about the difference between open source and free software, though. It's a common mistake and an easy trap to fall into. Understand that I'm not opposed to either idea -- I just don't think it is a sound business practice (strictly in terms of applying it to a product you have created yourself), and I'm not aware of any significant success stories.
Profit may not be everyone's measure of success, but in this world it's clearly a standard of success in business.
Article here...
Currently, there is limited, expensive and state-controlled Internet use in Iraq, beamed via satellite since sanctions on the country have made it unable to install pipes and networks.
it could be explained by the fact that since the destruction of its infrastructure in 1991, Iraq is one of the most telecoms-poor country in the world.
You make a good argument, but it's actually even better than you realize. There are plans to turn B-52's into aerial "artillery" platforms by refitting them with nuclear engines, which will allow them to circle a battlefield continuously for periods ranging from several days up to a couple of weeks. If this plan goes through, the USAF stated they may extend the service life anywhere from 50 to 100 additional years.
Even if it doesn't happen, the fact that they're willing to contemplate 150 years of service is pretty impressive, and I imagine it makes for a pretty amazing ROI, too.
On the other hand, I've read that if you add up the regular maintenance and refits, a given B-52 is essentially a brand-new plane on something like a 7-10 year cycle (but that's true of most of the large, expensive military aircraft).
I definte noteworthy as profitable. Your examples of RedHat and SuSE are NOT examples. The discussion is about companies which develop a piece of software, then Open Source it. Neither RH nor SuSE did this, they're leeching off the product of someone else's work.
I appreciate that you're trying, but you haven't managed to refute the actual argument being presented. If you bust your ass and build an important piece of software, you are unlikely (I say guaranteed to not) recover your expenses and become successful by Open Sourcing the product of your labor. Again, as I said, this works fine and dandy for informal hobbyist style projects, but when it comes to business, you either play the services game and leech off somebody else's work, or you keep it closed in the hopes of making a real profit.
Nobody ever got rich giving shit away, OSS included.
Besides, the comment I replied to took the very common position that it's somehow a good idea for a software company -- meaning a company that comes up with an idea and produces the software -- to give away the product of it's labor -- the software it wrote. Pursuing that context, I merely pointed out that there are no good examples of this leading any business to noteworthy success.
And all you have to do is browse /. and sourceforge to get a pretty clear idea, respectively, of how little that "community and goodwill" is actually worth. Hint: It won't make up for giving away the product of your labor.
OSS is great for hobbyist level projects (which can be very complete, very useful applications), but real world examples of significant, successful all-OSS software companies which sell an OSS product they created are few and far between (and I don't mean Yet Another Linux Distro Company) -- if they exist at all.
Web services are only a small part of .NET...
I believe there are two reasons so many people talk about Basic. The first one is, of course, that on older home computers it was always available. The second one, and I believe the more important one, is that it went a long way towards insulating you from being able to do anything really harmful, while allowing you to do things with immediate visible results.
Browsers, via HTML and locally-executed script code, go a long way towards satisfying both requirements. I would personally recommend letting them use IE so that they can use VBScript (which is a hell of a lot easier for a beginner to read and write than JavaScript), and perhaps encourage them to rewrite their VBS code in JS, which should nicely lay the groundwork for understanding programming generically, rather than specializing in one language, which is what cripples and confuses many self-taught beginners.
But whatever you do, avoid Macromedia languages like the plague...
You, sir, are a dumbass.
Or SOAP on PERL::Lite.
Cuts both ways.
It's also a very heavy burden for you to assign to a video game. Get a grip.
Yes. Weirdly, I happened to be listening to exactly that when I read your comment. Except for a short break to read /., I've been writing code for three hours, since 4AM. I should be done and on my way home by 2PM, around the time all the other people in the office are just starting to wake up again after lunch...
That's one of the funniest things I've ever read.
Let me get this straight... you think a Durango is an excessive purchase? I could see if you'd said maybe a Range Rover or a Hummer. I certainly have no problem with people buying those, either, but they do qualify as increasingly excessive for most buyers. On the other hand, a Durango is a pretty basic truck. I enjoyed mine for the several years I kept it, but you're smoking crack if you think it represents any form of luxury or excess, particularly for somebody with a good-paying IT job.
The "excessive consumerism" people are the mid-range IT workers who live in tiny, crappy apartments, but drive BMWs to work.
I agree with your basic description of excessive consumerism, but your example needs work...
People repeat it because it's humorous. It isn't things like this which have created our carefully scripted politicians, it's the ubiquitous TV cameras, the population's nearly non-existent attention span, and the combination of those which produce damning out-of-context sound bites.
Another medicore day on slashdot...
Good point, though. :)
That means EA's position amounts to pointless pissing and moaning. This will cut them out of some potentially lucrative profits, which I'll get to momentarily. Granted EA could have milked consumers for even larger profits, but again, it's the console market, that's just how things work.
About those profits... Consider that Microsoft's long term goal is to have ten million XBOX Live subscriptions by 2007. (See FAQ.) While you may scoff now, their 2002 figures were on target, and they have already surpassed their 2003 target. Say that Microsoft is WAY off base and misses by 50%... that's still a very comfortable five million users -- probably HAPPY users, as I've yet to see any serious complaints about the quality of the XBOX Live service. Users, particularly console gamers, just don't care about that kind of thing. Plug-and-play is more important there than anywhere else. EA is cutting off their nose to spite their face.
As for Eidos, well... who cares?
You were screwed by a moderator. You're exactly right. I know six people (plus myself) who are waiting for Project Gotham 2 and Halo 2, either of which will be enough incentive for us to buy XBOX Live. EA games have really sucked lately (mainly because they're lowest-common-denominator PS2 ports), and they'll suck even more without XBOX Live support.
DX9 has previously unannounced support for all the next-generation graphics features
I found the quote above to be very surprising -- I wonder what that's all about???
If I had been in more of a hurry, I would have completely missed the thing about the gas envelope, which I find very interesting and would have stopped to read, because I already knew about the dark spot on Jupiter and wouldn't have considered it worth my time.
Were the two stories combined by the article submitter, or was this more weirdness from the /. editors?
You don't mention who was telling you to do this. It would seem to be an important part of the picture. I don't mean you should give us names and addresses, of course -- but what was your relationship to the person or people urging you to do this, and why did they want you to take the data? Were they interested in the data, or did they want you to do something with it? Did somebody try to buy it from you?
The obvious answer, as others have already posted, is to go directly to the police. I don't know about Canada (many of us are assuming you're from Canada) but I believe (IANAL) in the US it's illegal to incite another person to commit a crime. In any case, it would be hard to imagine that they wouldn't be interested.
The fact that you haven't yet gone to the cops suggests there may be other mitigating circumstances of interest, which were not presented in the article.
Details, please?
One user made the jump into the software development group. He was responsible for a lot of these now-critical macros. He had feared the macros would become important to daily processing, being used by people who didn't really understand them (and the afforementioned limitiations didn't help), so he chose some names that he hoped would indicate to the user that they probably shouldn't rely so heavily on those macros.
The best name was shitstorm, but another favorite of mine was trainwreckwaitingtohappen. In another macro, if the operation encountered an error, this was communicated by a clipart eagle swooping down across the spreadsheet, ripping off a clipart businessman's head, and shitting down his neck. (While the sysadmins restricted storage quotas, they did install the vast waste of space that is the MS Office clipart library.) The clipart one is something of an underground classic among the programmers around here.
Eventually he (wisely) quit and went to work somewhere else. To this day those same macros are busily doing whatever it is they do, rude and portentous filenames intact, and the users refuse to fund a project to decypher the macros and write a proper application. (Bad because the macros are starting to fail... trainwreckwaitingtohappen is particularly shaky these days...)
Oh well, he tried to warn them...
Make up your mind. Are you interested in efficiency, or in going fast?
I race stupid gas-guzzling American cars as a hobby (presently, a Camaro and a Viper GTS), and I can tell you the well-designed, efficient cars, after being modified to actually keep up with stupid gas-guzzling American cars, consume fuel at a generally equivalent rate. Otherwise that would be one factor (among many) in deciding whether we raced in the same classes. There are still differences, but the same economy-versus-performance decisions are available to everybody involved.
The situation on the street is different, but in that case the Hondas are most assuredly NOT very fast. I can introduce you to hosts of rice-boys who have lost many a street race who can attest to that. Furthermore, the gas guzzling image of American street cars is a largely outdated concept. If I drive somewhat gingerly, my street Viper (a 2001 RT/10, 11.5-second quarter mile, tops out around 185MPH) is capable of around 20 MPG in-town, and 24 or 25 highway. Not earth-shattering, but hardly gas-guzzling considering the car is closer to race-prepped than virtually every other car on the road, the aero is awful, and fuel economy was never a consideration.
My racing Viper (99 GTS) has a big-assed wing on it which provides roughly 100 to 150 lbs of downforce depending on my speed. We have measured this. This has a significant impact on handling (to the point that we have to play with the suspension to accomodate it). It creates downforce. That does increase turbulence, but turbulence is a side-effect of the downforce, which I define as compressing the air flowing over the top of the wing -- not the chaotic random motion suggested by the word "turbulence". However, you are correct in that it also reduces pressure-drag -- the Viper is famous for it's swirling suctioning vortex, which has been shown in the wind tunnel to extend as much as 12 feet behind the car (which is why GTSRs have giant rear diffusers). Hey, the body was designed for looks; it's still damned fast. However, the reduction in pressure-drag is also just a side-effect of the wing designed for downforce.
Regarding the underside of cars, I invite you to inspect the tray covering the bottom of a Ferrari 360. It is quite smooth, with a few cleverly arranged curves, and as a result it sticks to the road like it's been duct-taped there. It would be very easy for manufacturers to cover the bottom of their cars with aerodynamically useful undertrays. They don't do it because they don't have to. People wouldn't appreciate the value, so they can save money by leaving it off. (They can also reduce weight to meet increasingly psychotic fuel-economy regulations.)
While the Ferrari 360's undertray is a marvel of tedious and expensive engineering, it would be trivial to design an undertray that helped more than it hindered. It is disingenuous to the point of stupidity to suggest that modern cars don't have undertrays because a tangled mass of exposed equipment is somehow aeordynamically more desirable.