There are a few forums I used to frequent, one for webmasters. It was mostly freelancers or one-man shops, from what I could tell, but the forum moderators were strict to the point of being stupid over 'pricing discussions'. "We can be sued for supporting price fixing" is the standard response.
One person asked what it was customary to charge for a certain type of service. I replied back that I've seen people charge anywhere from $50 to $1500. *THAT* was considered 'potential price fixing'. How a number with a variation of hundreds of percents could be 'fixed' is well beyond my comprehension.
You'd think then that magazines or websites which have pricing on them (like, for example, ecommerce sites) would be collaborating in price fixing, as they can see info from other companies, and those companies can see their info, and adjust things accordingly.
There's a difference between knowing what someone else charges and actively engaging numerous people to all sell at a particular price, but people don't seem to see the difference.
Not quite individual level, but we get many catalogs for previous occupants of our current office space. Dell, in particular, sends multiple catalogs here. What I found very interesting is that 2 Dell catalogs - indentical in products offered - often have different pricing based on the recipient. The even more interesting thing is that both recipients worked for the same company at the same time, but one was male and one was female, and they were being offered at different prices. The 'product code' was the same, but the 'catalog code' (or something like it) was different. I can not remember if the prices were higher for the male or the female - sorry...
Money spent on people usually stays in the local economy. Money spent on licensing usually leaves the local economy. Saving $10k on licensing but spending $10k in a learning curve for 2 employees is a financial wash, but has created more value for those people and for the local economy.
No OSS developer worth his salt uses patented or copyrighted code.
So, an OSS project isn't copyrighted? *EVERYTHING* is copyrighted. Copyright allows you to set the terms of *how* people can copy your 'OSS' code. You want to allow people who agree to the GPL to copy it? Fine. But it's still under copyright. You seem to not have any grasp of the term 'open source'.
I don't think there's a Windows version currently, but if they're distributing OO and Mozilla, giving people a copy of GnuCash as well wouldn't hurt. Maybe it's not 'internationalized'?
I think it was Dick Armey's proposal from a few years ago that income under $30k not be taxed, and everything over that be taxed at 10% (or maybe 15%?)
I really don't see how 'the rich' (great label there) would pay *less* than they do now. Not much to hide behind when it's basic math that a 10 year old should be able to do.
You made $200,000 last year? Pay $17,000 (10% of $170,000).
Why is that so hard or evil?
'The poor' wouldn't pay anything. Someone earning $50,000 would pay $2,000. What's wrong with that?
Also, what is seldom pointed out is that *activity* is taxed. Money sitting under my bed isn't taxed, but when I transfer it to someone else (purchase/gift) that activity is taxed. More money in people's pockets means they will engage in more activity, which is what is taxed.
They calmly sat back while people kept repeating the mantra that Java is slow (even though it isn't; JIT-ted code and better GUI techniques improve performance markedly), allowing it to lose mindshare to competing products.
*WHY* is it up to pointy-haired engineers to have to 'learn' how to 'optimize' their Java so that it performs reasonably well? Why can the language and the standard Sun libraries work *well* out-of-the-box. Java IS slow by default. Great. All I have to do now is learn 'better GUI techniques'. So, it's MY fault that Java is slow, not the people who (1) invented it and (2) put out libraries that don't perform well with 'normal' usage.
Sun is a hardware company and their incentive is to get you to use bigger/faster hardware to make the speed issue go away. Why this point isn't driven home every time people talk about Java being slow escapes me.
Now Microsoft has shipped.NET and the hype machine is in full force
No doubt there's hype, but even back in 1995, I could build a simple GUI app in VB which performed reasonably well for the hardware it was running on. Jump to 2003, and I *still* can't use basic Java tools to write a decent GUI app without having to have a fine-grained understanding of underlying threading models. And people were supposed to *flock* to this platform for everything?
I didn't say anything about PHP being 'good in the enterprise'. For web-based apps (in or outside of an 'enterprise'-level arena) I do think PHP is fine. Having done *large* commerce apps (7 figures/day) which needed to integrate with multiple data sources , PHP fit the bill quite nicely. Is it perfect for every application? No. Desktop apps? Possibly PHP-GTK will make headway in this area with the arrival of PHP5 (Q3 2003 I think) but it's not there yet.
bad interactions between code segments (trying to use DBM files and PostgreSQL at the same time)
We routinely use multiple datasources (DBM, MySQL, MSSQL, etc) simultaneously. It takes pretty much no effort at all to do such things - I'm not sure why that particular area caused you problems.
There's been a 'CLI' version for at least 3 years that I know of - just put #!/usr/bin/php at the top of a script.
(how about decent libraries with no GLOBALS?); I used to wish there were more, so we wrote our own, and supply them in LogiCreate, our PHP Application Server. It's a commercial product at the moment ($$$) so most people don't know of it, but the clients we have are far more productive than they used to be in PHP, and don't use GLOBALS.:)
This whole thread was started re: Java's problems. Your desktop app will most likey run into some problems when the next Java comes out because Sun is more interested in new features than stability and BC - that's the point of the internal memo (whether or not it's legit is a different matter).
Faster at what? We primarily develop web-based applications. *Most* benchmarking we've done shows that for the majority of the type of work we do, PHP is either slightly faster or much faster. We tend to go back and try Java stuff every 9-12 months to see the state of things. One of the developers here is fluent in Java, but we can't bother justifying the expense of ramping up to more expensive hardware, or having clients get more expensive hardware, to get the same performance that PHP gives automatically.
We do PHP training courses - and about 20% of the students are coming from a Java background. Their companies are sending them because they're looking for ways to cut development time and get more performance out of systems. PHP, in many cases, can provide that, and companies are (slowly) learning that.
This whole article was about an internal memo about Java's weaknesses. PHP certainly has some, but for many people, the issues with Java are worse than the issues surrounding PHP.
PHP can be written crap, and can be written well. We teach people how to avoid the crap aspect of PHP (intermingling of HTML/code, etc) and focus on the good bits (of which there are many).
PHP isn't always the best choice, but Java *certainly* isn't the best choice in a number of situations. This memo only goes to prove that Sun (or parts of it) aren't all that interested in making it the best it can be.
For developing GUI stuff, perhaps. For most other developing, a 'mid-level' machine is more than adequate. As I stated before, this particular machine runs *everything* else fine except for Java stuff, which is *dog slow*. That seems to point to Java being crap, not the hardware. When the rest of the development tools and end-user apps start to feel slow, we'll upgrade machines, but I'm not upgrading machines *just* to run the few Java apps out there worth running (and believe me, there aren't that many).
Clue: people were touting that Java was great for this sort of stuff 5 years ago.
Clue: at one point in time a 366mhz with 96 meg of RAM was a good machine for pretty much everything else in vogue *except* building GUI stuff with Java.
Clue: I'm running some Java apps on an 800mhz machine with 384meg. They're slow to start up, and slow to run. Slow under Linux with Sun JVM, slow under Windows with various JVMs. Slow with 1.3, and slow with 1.4. In comparison to *any* native programs (anything under Gnome, KDE or Windows) they're just slower. And it's often suprisingly slow when trying to run server-side stuff too.
Maybe I should just get a clue and just go get a 2ghz processor and a gig of RAM, right? It's so cheap, right? Then when Sun releases the next version of Java, I'll just upgrade my hardware again to take advantage of all the great enhancements (read: 'bug fixes' and 'new bugs'). Excellent idea!
It's rarely mentioned, but Sun is a HARDWARE company. What incentive do they have to make stuff optimized to run more efficiently on existing hardware? *NONE*
I've got some great deals on some good open source projects. I can get you Linux, WITH Apache, PHP and MySQL for only $399. Buy multiple copies and I'll get you a discount. Heck, if you call in the next 20 minutes, I'll throw in a copy of phpMyAdmin *WITH SOURCE CODE* *FREE*! Call 734-480-9961 - we're standing by...
While I believe that some innovative ideas have not been able to get enough traction in the current PC climate, you can't *prove it*.
"Show me a company that isn't around because of MS". You *can't* do it. FWIW, I had spoken to a few VCs a few years back about some ideas. In every case during the conversation someone brought up 'what will MS do in this arena?'. Is that the only reason we didn't get funded? By no means, but it WAS a factor their thinking. If the fear of MS coming in to your market was a factor in investing, it's a pretty sure thing that *some* ideas which may have had a good impact couldn't get off the ground because of MS perceived dominance or potential threat.
No, what I meant was that you'd show up, but others wouldn't be there, and you'd have to reschedule. The lost time in sorting out the miscommunication would be the killer, in the long run.
I get told off from pro-Windows people that 'IIS is free!' whenever price comes up. Presumably you'd be able to take whatever resource packs/service packs/option packs with IIS on them (remember, it doesn't come with the operating system, it's an 'option') and just install them on another platform, if the binaries would run.
I'd suggested something similar some time ago to friends/colleagues. A virus that spread itself silently, and which changed Outlook appointments quietly. Changing something from 1pm to 3pm, for example, or emailing other participants that a meeting has been cancelled (within 1 hour, or 30 minutes, or something).
The costs would be impossible to calculate, but the damage would be huge in terms of lost productivity.
For a time, perhaps they would. But just as in the old days if my CD broke or my tape melted in the back seat of a car, it's not the record company's fault.
But really, make a backup! We're talking about downloading an ogg or mp3 anyway.
I've seen all of you saying 'it doesn't matter', but it does.
From a purely technical standpoint, it might not matter. From a 'how things look to the outside world', it matters a lot. If a company as large as Apple was to have a change of heart, it would be as detrmental to the *idea* of open source to the same extent that Apple support open source has been a positive factor. You can't have it both ways.
PCAnywhere is INSTALL CD - click click click. And it's preinstalled on many machines by an IS department.
The whole 'invite by email' thing in the KDE system right now is nice, but *mostly* useless as the only people that would be able to 'click' on the link would have to have KDE (3.1?) installed already.
Embedding a method for the java applet to be distributed from the host machine would ensure that nearly anyone who got the email invite would be able to click and view the shared desktop, without having to know where to go download VNC, learn how to install it, maybe configure it, etc. The VNC apps are not user-friendly.
Technically cool? Yes.
Easy for end-users who *just want to see the desktop someone is trying to share with them*? Nope.
Well, not from VNC in particular, but at least in the rc6, the other person really needs to have KDE to use it. *OR* they need to know how to set up VNC on their end and configure it properly. What would have been much nicer is to have the Java applet built in on the KDE side, such that it'd let someone connect on a port (80? 8080? whatever) to get the Java viewer applet, then use that applet VNC viewer to connect to your desktop. Right now it's still very limited in its usefulness to techies. Being able to *easily* demonstrate to a non KDE user how useful the sharing is would have been nicer than simply saying 'it's really cool'.
I bet they do. I bet there's shops you frequent that have piped in music. By shopping there you are supporting those record companies who have their music piped in.
Being the big Beatles fan that I am, I have to wonder how they were able to get such good sounds (which often still sound fresh nearly 40 years later) without all that top of the line equipment. I'm not suggesting that they had crap 2nd hand stuff, but certainly much of the equipment at Abbey Road wasn't state of the art even for the times - that became a point of contention in the late 60s (using 4 track when others had 8 track, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
There are a few forums I used to frequent, one for webmasters. It was mostly freelancers or one-man shops, from what I could tell, but the forum moderators were strict to the point of being stupid over 'pricing discussions'. "We can be sued for supporting price fixing" is the standard response.
One person asked what it was customary to charge for a certain type of service. I replied back that I've seen people charge anywhere from $50 to $1500. *THAT* was considered 'potential price fixing'. How a number with a variation of hundreds of percents could be 'fixed' is well beyond my comprehension.
You'd think then that magazines or websites which have pricing on them (like, for example, ecommerce sites) would be collaborating in price fixing, as they can see info from other companies, and those companies can see their info, and adjust things accordingly.
There's a difference between knowing what someone else charges and actively engaging numerous people to all sell at a particular price, but people don't seem to see the difference.
Not quite individual level, but we get many catalogs for previous occupants of our current office space. Dell, in particular, sends multiple catalogs here. What I found very interesting is that 2 Dell catalogs - indentical in products offered - often have different pricing based on the recipient. The even more interesting thing is that both recipients worked for the same company at the same time, but one was male and one was female, and they were being offered at different prices. The 'product code' was the same, but the 'catalog code' (or something like it) was different. I can not remember if the prices were higher for the male or the female - sorry...
Yes, and...
Money spent on people usually stays in the local economy. Money spent on licensing usually leaves the local economy. Saving $10k on licensing but spending $10k in a learning curve for 2 employees is a financial wash, but has created more value for those people and for the local economy.
No OSS developer worth his salt uses patented or copyrighted code.
So, an OSS project isn't copyrighted? *EVERYTHING* is copyrighted. Copyright allows you to set the terms of *how* people can copy your 'OSS' code. You want to allow people who agree to the GPL to copy it? Fine. But it's still under copyright. You seem to not have any grasp of the term 'open source'.
I don't think there's a Windows version currently, but if they're distributing OO and Mozilla, giving people a copy of GnuCash as well wouldn't hurt. Maybe it's not 'internationalized'?
I think it was Dick Armey's proposal from a few years ago that income under $30k not be taxed, and everything over that be taxed at 10% (or maybe 15%?)
I really don't see how 'the rich' (great label there) would pay *less* than they do now. Not much to hide behind when it's basic math that a 10 year old should be able to do.
You made $200,000 last year? Pay $17,000 (10% of $170,000).
Why is that so hard or evil?
'The poor' wouldn't pay anything. Someone earning $50,000 would pay $2,000. What's wrong with that?
Also, what is seldom pointed out is that *activity* is taxed. Money sitting under my bed isn't taxed, but when I transfer it to someone else (purchase/gift) that activity is taxed. More money in people's pockets means they will engage in more activity, which is what is taxed.
They calmly sat back while people kept repeating the mantra that Java is slow (even though it isn't; JIT-ted code and better GUI techniques improve performance markedly), allowing it to lose mindshare to competing products.
.NET and the hype machine is in full force
*WHY* is it up to pointy-haired engineers to have to 'learn' how to 'optimize' their Java so that it performs reasonably well? Why can the language and the standard Sun libraries work *well* out-of-the-box. Java IS slow by default. Great. All I have to do now is learn 'better GUI techniques'. So, it's MY fault that Java is slow, not the people who (1) invented it and (2) put out libraries that don't perform well with 'normal' usage.
Sun is a hardware company and their incentive is to get you to use bigger/faster hardware to make the speed issue go away. Why this point isn't driven home every time people talk about Java being slow escapes me.
Now Microsoft has shipped
No doubt there's hype, but even back in 1995, I could build a simple GUI app in VB which performed reasonably well for the hardware it was running on. Jump to 2003, and I *still* can't use basic Java tools to write a decent GUI app without having to have a fine-grained understanding of underlying threading models. And people were supposed to *flock* to this platform for everything?
If you've not got a date/spouse, you can still send yourself some mad-libs-esque erotic stories for the hell of it from pillowmail.com
And I wasn't using 'selecting an article out of MySQL' as the benchmark, either.
I didn't say anything about PHP being 'good in the enterprise'. For web-based apps (in or outside of an 'enterprise'-level arena) I do think PHP is fine. Having done *large* commerce apps (7 figures/day) which needed to integrate with multiple data sources , PHP fit the bill quite nicely. Is it perfect for every application? No. Desktop apps? Possibly PHP-GTK will make headway in this area with the arrival of PHP5 (Q3 2003 I think) but it's not there yet.
:)
bad interactions between code segments (trying to use DBM files and PostgreSQL at the same time)
We routinely use multiple datasources (DBM, MySQL, MSSQL, etc) simultaneously. It takes pretty much no effort at all to do such things - I'm not sure why that particular area caused you problems.
There's been a 'CLI' version for at least 3 years that I know of - just put #!/usr/bin/php at the top of a script.
(how about decent libraries with no GLOBALS?);
I used to wish there were more, so we wrote our own, and supply them in LogiCreate, our PHP Application Server. It's a commercial product at the moment ($$$) so most people don't know of it, but the clients we have are far more productive than they used to be in PHP, and don't use GLOBALS.
This whole thread was started re: Java's problems. Your desktop app will most likey run into some problems when the next Java comes out because Sun is more interested in new features than stability and BC - that's the point of the internal memo (whether or not it's legit is a different matter).
Faster at what? We primarily develop web-based applications. *Most* benchmarking we've done shows that for the majority of the type of work we do, PHP is either slightly faster or much faster. We tend to go back and try Java stuff every 9-12 months to see the state of things. One of the developers here is fluent in Java, but we can't bother justifying the expense of ramping up to more expensive hardware, or having clients get more expensive hardware, to get the same performance that PHP gives automatically.
We do PHP training courses - and about 20% of the students are coming from a Java background. Their companies are sending them because they're looking for ways to cut development time and get more performance out of systems. PHP, in many cases, can provide that, and companies are (slowly) learning that.
This whole article was about an internal memo about Java's weaknesses. PHP certainly has some, but for many people, the issues with Java are worse than the issues surrounding PHP.
PHP can be written crap, and can be written well. We teach people how to avoid the crap aspect of PHP (intermingling of HTML/code, etc) and focus on the good bits (of which there are many).
PHP isn't always the best choice, but Java *certainly* isn't the best choice in a number of situations. This memo only goes to prove that Sun (or parts of it) aren't all that interested in making it the best it can be.
For developing GUI stuff, perhaps. For most other developing, a 'mid-level' machine is more than adequate. As I stated before, this particular machine runs *everything* else fine except for Java stuff, which is *dog slow*. That seems to point to Java being crap, not the hardware. When the rest of the development tools and end-user apps start to feel slow, we'll upgrade machines, but I'm not upgrading machines *just* to run the few Java apps out there worth running (and believe me, there aren't that many).
Clue: people were touting that Java was great for this sort of stuff 5 years ago.
Clue: at one point in time a 366mhz with 96 meg of RAM was a good machine for pretty much everything else in vogue *except* building GUI stuff with Java.
Clue: I'm running some Java apps on an 800mhz machine with 384meg. They're slow to start up, and slow to run. Slow under Linux with Sun JVM, slow under Windows with various JVMs. Slow with 1.3, and slow with 1.4. In comparison to *any* native programs (anything under Gnome, KDE or Windows) they're just slower. And it's often suprisingly slow when trying to run server-side stuff too.
Maybe I should just get a clue and just go get a 2ghz processor and a gig of RAM, right? It's so cheap, right? Then when Sun releases the next version of Java, I'll just upgrade my hardware again to take advantage of all the great enhancements (read: 'bug fixes' and 'new bugs'). Excellent idea!
It's rarely mentioned, but Sun is a HARDWARE company. What incentive do they have to make stuff optimized to run more efficiently on existing hardware? *NONE*
I couldn't care less about the price,
I've got some great deals on some good open source projects. I can get you Linux, WITH Apache, PHP and MySQL for only $399. Buy multiple copies and I'll get you a discount. Heck, if you call in the next 20 minutes, I'll throw in a copy of phpMyAdmin *WITH SOURCE CODE* *FREE*! Call 734-480-9961 - we're standing by...
While I believe that some innovative ideas have not been able to get enough traction in the current PC climate, you can't *prove it*.
"Show me a company that isn't around because of MS". You *can't* do it. FWIW, I had spoken to a few VCs a few years back about some ideas. In every case during the conversation someone brought up 'what will MS do in this arena?'. Is that the only reason we didn't get funded? By no means, but it WAS a factor their thinking. If the fear of MS coming in to your market was a factor in investing, it's a pretty sure thing that *some* ideas which may have had a good impact couldn't get off the ground because of MS perceived dominance or potential threat.
Heh - good call. :)
No, what I meant was that you'd show up, but others wouldn't be there, and you'd have to reschedule. The lost time in sorting out the miscommunication would be the killer, in the long run.
I get told off from pro-Windows people that 'IIS is free!' whenever price comes up. Presumably you'd be able to take whatever resource packs/service packs/option packs with IIS on them (remember, it doesn't come with the operating system, it's an 'option') and just install them on another platform, if the binaries would run.
I'd suggested something similar some time ago to friends/colleagues. A virus that spread itself silently, and which changed Outlook appointments quietly. Changing something from 1pm to 3pm, for example, or emailing other participants that a meeting has been cancelled (within 1 hour, or 30 minutes, or something).
The costs would be impossible to calculate, but the damage would be huge in terms of lost productivity.
For a time, perhaps they would. But just as in the old days if my CD broke or my tape melted in the back seat of a car, it's not the record company's fault.
But really, make a backup! We're talking about downloading an ogg or mp3 anyway.
I've seen all of you saying 'it doesn't matter', but it does.
From a purely technical standpoint, it might not matter. From a 'how things look to the outside world', it matters a lot. If a company as large as Apple was to have a change of heart, it would be as detrmental to the *idea* of open source to the same extent that Apple support open source has been a positive factor. You can't have it both ways.
PCAnywhere is INSTALL CD - click click click. And it's preinstalled on many machines by an IS department.
The whole 'invite by email' thing in the KDE system right now is nice, but *mostly* useless as the only people that would be able to 'click' on the link would have to have KDE (3.1?) installed already.
Embedding a method for the java applet to be distributed from the host machine would ensure that nearly anyone who got the email invite would be able to click and view the shared desktop, without having to know where to go download VNC, learn how to install it, maybe configure it, etc. The VNC apps are not user-friendly.
Technically cool? Yes.
Easy for end-users who *just want to see the desktop someone is trying to share with them*? Nope.
Well, not from VNC in particular, but at least in the rc6, the other person really needs to have KDE to use it. *OR* they need to know how to set up VNC on their end and configure it properly. What would have been much nicer is to have the Java applet built in on the KDE side, such that it'd let someone connect on a port (80? 8080? whatever) to get the Java viewer applet, then use that applet VNC viewer to connect to your desktop. Right now it's still very limited in its usefulness to techies. Being able to *easily* demonstrate to a non KDE user how useful the sharing is would have been nicer than simply saying 'it's really cool'.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0672323826/ qid=1023402602/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/002-9605789-10808 10
Record companies get nothing from me.
I bet they do. I bet there's shops you frequent that have piped in music. By shopping there you are supporting those record companies who have their music piped in.
Being the big Beatles fan that I am, I have to wonder how they were able to get such good sounds (which often still sound fresh nearly 40 years later) without all that top of the line equipment. I'm not suggesting that they had crap 2nd hand stuff, but certainly much of the equipment at Abbey Road wasn't state of the art even for the times - that became a point of contention in the late 60s (using 4 track when others had 8 track, etc).