A microwave only has one purpose. A computer has several. In fact, if there were microwave parts out there that would let you cook different foods better (a 'cordon bleu' style microwave, or a 'fast food only' microwave) people would probably go for those.
Most people don't build their own TV, but they do assemble their own entertainment systems (DVD, CD, speakers, etc).
Always wait on pricing! I got one of these back in January and paid over $200. I was at Circuit City on Friday and they had it for $8. $108 - $100 rebate. Ouch!
The 'blazer' browser isn't all that good imo because it locks up during use - the 'stop' button never works. Other than that, it's a decent unit.
Maybe they should strongarm PC makers into paying them $20 for each PC shipped, whether or not Mandrake is on that PC. That'd be a much better 'model' to have.
They can call it a 'club' or 'group' or whatever, but honestly, I can't see any other way for companies in their market to make money focusing just on a distribution. If they focused on training/consulting as well, that'd be a different story, and may be something they *should* do. But they're not doing it. They want to focus on making a distribution.
So how else do you make money from free software? You simply ask for it. In return, they give certain 'niceties' to people who pay. I don't think it's 'kindness' that motivates people - they want to support a product they like.
If there was a way to identify the content (aren't there some nifty headers some place with a specific ID for many commercial CDs?) one could fairly easily track which commercial music CDs are being copied and collect royalties on behalf of the artist.
IIRC, a CD costing $18 at a retail store ends up putting about $2 in the pocket of the artist. I'd happily give $2 directly to an artist for a copy of their disc. The other $16 is to cover overhead of distribution, marketing, etc. Well, the marketing is being done via WOM (or via ads which I'd already seen, causing interest in the music) and the distribution is being handled by the CD copier itself. I can do without the packaging, and the arist gets their $2 from the CD copying machine company.
If I'm copying a CD of my vacation pics, it's $5 to copy. If it's the latest Tom Petty or whatever, it's $7. Works for me.
I think the 'disabled' part meant that the sprinklers couldn't work after the impact, not that someone deliberately disabled the sprinkler system manually. That was just my reading of it. "Disabled" gives the impression that there was explicit intervention to turn something off. Frankly, I would have been surprised if the whole plumbing system could have withstood a blast like that to allow the sprinklers to work on upper floors.
Got a project from a client - well, half a project. We got the 'web' half, and the other team got the 'database' half. The database was SQL7, but that team said it had to be upgraded to SQL2000 - they'd handle the whole thing.
For some reason, the first 7 weeks we weren't allowed to know who the other team was. Turns out they were down the road from us. Well, we coded against the spec we were given. They didn't. They 'upgraded' the SQL7 to SQL2000 database.
Guess how? Using the 'upgrade' wizard which would have taken about 20 minutes? Nope - they apparently recreated everything by hand. About 50 tables, maybe 20-30 columns each. This apparently took them 8 weeks. Oh, yeah, this was the best part:
Every column in every table was VARCHAR(50). Didn't matter what it used to be.
*THEY* got paid. *WE* got stuck essentially recreating/upsizing the SQL7 -> 2000 database (absolutely no reason to, except that that's the only DB they now had) and had to do that in about 2 days while debugging the code we were working on.
yeah, I know the GPL insists the source must be available, and it should be, but Mandrakesoft shouldn't make it easy for people to take and not give back
It doesn't state that you have to make it freely available for everyone. Anyone that *you* distribute a binary to must be given reasonable access to the source code upon request. "Reasonable" can include a fee for transfer, media costs, etc.
Yeah it's neat they let people download ISOs, but that bandwidth isn't free to them. Why they wouldn't say $5/download or something is beyond me. Or simply have a one disc distro of binaries with a link to download sources if you want them.
Don't apologize for the GPL here - most people do more than it calls for (and many do much less, I'm sure).
Even if you sell it to someone else, you only have to make the code available to _those_who_buy_it_. You don't have to give it to the entire public just because you sell it to one person. What they do with it after they get it is up to them, though, and they may very well choose to give it away.
Good summary, but I think the point to keep in mind is that you end up having to envision a 'worst case scenario' which would indeed involve the first buyer merely redistributing everything for free.
I don't think the latest mozillas have crashed on me when browsing, but when I have the mail client up, it crashes about once per day. I have a mix of IE6 and Mozilla and Opera in day to day use, and Opera is far more "stable and fast" than either of the other two, but less 'compatible' (only slightly ime).
"Appplets"? Will they be sandboxed to only be able to send data to the phone number they came from?:0
Seriously, I just saw someone above mention 'stock quotes' and 'email'. Do we not already have enough devices to do this? Can no one come up with any other app besides 'stock quotes'?
Even at inflated dod prices, it costs them less to purchase Office than it does to write their own office suite.
Fair enough, but...
How much does the Air Force spend on MS Office? Could we say $1 million per year? For that million, they could dedicate 8-10 programmers to open office, helping to add in missing features and special things the Air Force would like to see, all the while being able to audit the security of it.
Most corps can't do that. The military/government *could*. Instead of constantly saying 'but it's cheaper to buy' run some numbers. What's it cheaper for in 1-3 years, not just next quarter.
If there were more dedicated people working on larger projects like openoffice, perhaps the quality and features would increase to the point where MS Office wouldn't be the defacto standard. And as for support - well, hey, you have people on staff who actually wrote the code. That helps for starters. And training? Again, take some of the money saved and invest it in training for people.
I don't want to sound like a raving anti-MS bigot. I'm far from it. But some long term benefits to computing as a whole could be achieved if organizations could look beyond the short term.
Re::Free2OneAndOneHalfGrand
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 2
Duh - I missed the first line and thought I was reading/. comments not the story. Swap the "what the hell are "YOU" doing" with "what the hell was HE/SHE doing".
My bad...
Re:Here's the article
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Even today with Windows 2000 and my development work, usually my day proceeds along "Work, work, crash. Reboot. Wait. Computer won't reboot. Shut down power. Work. Hang. Reboot. Boot into Linux for a few hours. Get some work done. Forced to reboot into Windows for some program. Crash."
Wow - what the hell are you doing on that computer? What kind of 'development' are you doing? I've had a system with W2k on it in use daily for a year with probably 20 reboots, mostly to swap to Linux for some reason. Less than 10 were due to hanging/crashing issues.
Honestly, what are you doing?
I've been in that boat, at a prior company, and I'm convinced it was because they gave me crappy hardware - especially network card. I would literally reboot twice between 9 and 10 am every day (NT4). NO ONE ELSE HAD THAT PROBLEM. But that's been my worst MS experience. Many other systems (95, 98, 2000, etc) have all worked pretty darn well. Not perfect, but Linux ain't perfect either.
Really, what are you doing? Have you tried to swap some hardware or troubleshoot this at all?
Re:Free2TwoGrand
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Does OS X cost $2000? I dunno, but I suspect not. Was his previous Linux box completely free of cost? Again, I suspect not.
I'm not pointing the finger at you necessarily, but the computer itself isn't free. People who routinely spend hundreds on speakers, sound cards, 3d whatzamajigger graphics boards, etc. bitch and moan about the cost of an OS. Yes, 'free' as in speech is good, and 'free' as in beer is good too, but don't bitch about the 'beer' one if you've got a system that costs more than a few hundred bucks, please.
"We're lucky Shakespeare didn't write on an old PC."
I can still access WordPerfect files from an old home computer from 1987. That computer still has a floppy drive which I can write files to. It still has the capability of connecting a null modem up to it for file transfer. Granted, that's not the easiest thing to do, but it's still accessible.
There HAVE to be some laserdisc readers someplace in the UK that can read this. The point they're probably making is 'be wary of putting too much faith in technology'. That's a good attitude to have, but simply putting a bit more thought into keeping the data available in multiple formats would help ensure no loss of access. Hell, this was a multimillion pound project - they couldn't burn any of this to conventional CDs too? Yes, you couldn't run out to Dixon's or BestBuy and get a CD burner for $100 like today, but I'd have thought a bit more technology was available to a multimillion pound project.
"Unfortunately, we don't know what we will do after that. We could store the data on desktop computers - but they are likely to become redundant in a few years. "
Yes, the desktops might, but the data won't. Put the data in normal, documented data formats, and put them on regular drives, CDs, ZIP disks, DVD, whatever. Don't put all your digital eggs in one basket, should be the lesson. OR, simply have a technology upgrade plan in place for data that is important enough to outlive the media on which it is contained. Data that was worth millions of pounds at one time should merit a stipend of a few thousand pounds a year to keep it accessible.
(i don't know about you, but the thought of relying on windows to stay up more than half a day is not good)
Funny, my W2k box pretty much stays up non-stop. The uptime is pretty much identical to any Linux machines running in the office.
I'm surprised there arn't as many homemade projects around
I'm not surprised at all. Could be the reason there aren't that many home-brewed products is that one you get outside of 'software only' hacking most of the opensource crowd just can't get involved.
You want to put an 'old' CPU in there? To run video recording, email, net, dvd, cd, mp3 and other stuff? How 'old' a machine would actually run all that at a usable performance? If you're one of those "I run everything in the world on my P90 and Lunix 1.1 kernel and 8 meg of RAM on a 400 meg drive and it FLIES compared to Windows" peopel good luck to you. Those of us in the real world will simply pay $100 for a DirecTivo machine:) and get a dedicated device which is well-engineered, simple, intuitive, easy to use and solid and stable.
Tivo.com has links to some stores, including http://www.americansatellite.com/products/list.asp ?affl=NT99120101&id=106&CAT=13306&mfg=philips from their 'specials' page.
I got 2 phillips DSR6000s from them. One was $99.99, then I waited a couple weeks, and the price went up to $109.99. Still a good price, considering the walmart down the street had them in stock for $399.99. "No, we don't match prices from the internet!" they cheerily replied when I asked about buying one at a reduced cost. No wonder they had an inch of dust on them - they'll NEVER shift them at that price.
You say "what's the deal with the thing?" The deal is it's a great replacement reciever if you have DirecTV already. It's really INEXPENSIVE actually, compared to retail standalone Tivo devices.
I'm nowhere near a socialist, but you've definitely got something there with the ego/greed thing. Not *EVERYONE* is like that - I know some people who've GPL'd projects and they were not motivated by ego/greed - at least not to the point where it was a negative anyway.:)
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A microwave only has one purpose. A computer has several. In fact, if there were microwave parts out there that would let you cook different foods better (a 'cordon bleu' style microwave, or a 'fast food only' microwave) people would probably go for those.
Most people don't build their own TV, but they do assemble their own entertainment systems (DVD, CD, speakers, etc).
thanks
Always wait on pricing! I got one of these back in January and paid over $200. I was at Circuit City on Friday and they had it for $8. $108 - $100 rebate. Ouch!
The 'blazer' browser isn't all that good imo because it locks up during use - the 'stop' button never works. Other than that, it's a decent unit.
Maybe they should strongarm PC makers into paying them $20 for each PC shipped, whether or not Mandrake is on that PC. That'd be a much better 'model' to have.
They can call it a 'club' or 'group' or whatever, but honestly, I can't see any other way for companies in their market to make money focusing just on a distribution. If they focused on training/consulting as well, that'd be a different story, and may be something they *should* do. But they're not doing it. They want to focus on making a distribution.
So how else do you make money from free software? You simply ask for it. In return, they give certain 'niceties' to people who pay. I don't think it's 'kindness' that motivates people - they want to support a product they like.
If there was a way to identify the content (aren't there some nifty headers some place with a specific ID for many commercial CDs?) one could fairly easily track which commercial music CDs are being copied and collect royalties on behalf of the artist.
IIRC, a CD costing $18 at a retail store ends up putting about $2 in the pocket of the artist. I'd happily give $2 directly to an artist for a copy of their disc. The other $16 is to cover overhead of distribution, marketing, etc. Well, the marketing is being done via WOM (or via ads which I'd already seen, causing interest in the music) and the distribution is being handled by the CD copier itself. I can do without the packaging, and the arist gets their $2 from the CD copying machine company.
If I'm copying a CD of my vacation pics, it's $5 to copy. If it's the latest Tom Petty or whatever, it's $7. Works for me.
I think the 'disabled' part meant that the sprinklers couldn't work after the impact, not that someone deliberately disabled the sprinkler system manually. That was just my reading of it. "Disabled" gives the impression that there was explicit intervention to turn something off. Frankly, I would have been surprised if the whole plumbing system could have withstood a blast like that to allow the sprinklers to work on upper floors.
When assembling a bunch of laptops for a remote sales force, I got a shipment of equipment in, including about 50 surge protectors.
They were all marked 'Windows 95 compatible'. This was mid 1996. DAMN I wish I'd kept one!
Similar issue:
Got a project from a client - well, half a project. We got the 'web' half, and the other team got the 'database' half. The database was SQL7, but that team said it had to be upgraded to SQL2000 - they'd handle the whole thing.
For some reason, the first 7 weeks we weren't allowed to know who the other team was. Turns out they were down the road from us. Well, we coded against the spec we were given. They didn't. They 'upgraded' the SQL7 to SQL2000 database.
Guess how? Using the 'upgrade' wizard which would have taken about 20 minutes? Nope - they apparently recreated everything by hand. About 50 tables, maybe 20-30 columns each. This apparently took them 8 weeks. Oh, yeah, this was the best part:
Every column in every table was VARCHAR(50). Didn't matter what it used to be.
*THEY* got paid. *WE* got stuck essentially recreating/upsizing the SQL7 -> 2000 database (absolutely no reason to, except that that's the only DB they now had) and had to do that in about 2 days while debugging the code we were working on.
VARCHAR(50). For everything.
Then only charge when downloading from Mandrake's servers.
yeah, I know the GPL insists the source must be available, and it should be, but Mandrakesoft shouldn't make it easy for people to take and not give back
It doesn't state that you have to make it freely available for everyone. Anyone that *you* distribute a binary to must be given reasonable access to the source code upon request. "Reasonable" can include a fee for transfer, media costs, etc.
Yeah it's neat they let people download ISOs, but that bandwidth isn't free to them. Why they wouldn't say $5/download or something is beyond me. Or simply have a one disc distro of binaries with a link to download sources if you want them.
Don't apologize for the GPL here - most people do more than it calls for (and many do much less, I'm sure).
In turn, however, we have asked him to reconsider his policy of making unannounced tests on servers.
But if sending a mail to a server could cause it to crash, how else could you contact someone to get permission to test? Phone calling?
DAMN - I'd mod you up if I had any points! :0
*I'm free!*
"Start me up"
They had plenty of commercials for a short time.
But true, no one can compete with something prebundled which locks out competitors.
Even if you sell it to someone else, you only have to make the code available to _those_who_buy_it_. You don't have to give it to the entire public just because you sell it to one person. What they do with it after they get it is up to them, though, and they may very well choose to give it away.
Good summary, but I think the point to keep in mind is that you end up having to envision a 'worst case scenario' which would indeed involve the first buyer merely redistributing everything for free.
I don't think the latest mozillas have crashed on me when browsing, but when I have the mail client up, it crashes about once per day. I have a mix of IE6 and Mozilla and Opera in day to day use, and Opera is far more "stable and fast" than either of the other two, but less 'compatible' (only slightly ime).
"Appplets"? Will they be sandboxed to only be able to send data to the phone number they came from? :0
Seriously, I just saw someone above mention 'stock quotes' and 'email'. Do we not already have enough devices to do this? Can no one come up with any other app besides 'stock quotes'?
Even at inflated dod prices, it costs them less to purchase Office than it does to write their own office suite.
...
Fair enough, but
How much does the Air Force spend on MS Office? Could we say $1 million per year? For that million, they could dedicate 8-10 programmers to open office, helping to add in missing features and special things the Air Force would like to see, all the while being able to audit the security of it.
Most corps can't do that. The military/government *could*. Instead of constantly saying 'but it's cheaper to buy' run some numbers. What's it cheaper for in 1-3 years, not just next quarter.
If there were more dedicated people working on larger projects like openoffice, perhaps the quality and features would increase to the point where MS Office wouldn't be the defacto standard. And as for support - well, hey, you have people on staff who actually wrote the code. That helps for starters. And training? Again, take some of the money saved and invest it in training for people.
I don't want to sound like a raving anti-MS bigot. I'm far from it. But some long term benefits to computing as a whole could be achieved if organizations could look beyond the short term.
Fair enough. :)
Duh - I missed the first line and thought I was reading /. comments not the story. Swap the "what the hell are "YOU" doing" with "what the hell was HE/SHE doing".
My bad...
Even today with Windows 2000 and my development work, usually my day proceeds along "Work, work, crash. Reboot. Wait. Computer won't reboot. Shut down power. Work. Hang. Reboot. Boot into Linux for a few hours. Get some work done. Forced to reboot into Windows for some program. Crash."
Wow - what the hell are you doing on that computer? What kind of 'development' are you doing? I've had a system with W2k on it in use daily for a year with probably 20 reboots, mostly to swap to Linux for some reason. Less than 10 were due to hanging/crashing issues.
Honestly, what are you doing?
I've been in that boat, at a prior company, and I'm convinced it was because they gave me crappy hardware - especially network card. I would literally reboot twice between 9 and 10 am every day (NT4). NO ONE ELSE HAD THAT PROBLEM. But that's been my worst MS experience. Many other systems (95, 98, 2000, etc) have all worked pretty darn well. Not perfect, but Linux ain't perfect either.
Really, what are you doing? Have you tried to swap some hardware or troubleshoot this at all?
Does OS X cost $2000? I dunno, but I suspect not. Was his previous Linux box completely free of cost? Again, I suspect not.
I'm not pointing the finger at you necessarily, but the computer itself isn't free. People who routinely spend hundreds on speakers, sound cards, 3d whatzamajigger graphics boards, etc. bitch and moan about the cost of an OS. Yes, 'free' as in speech is good, and 'free' as in beer is good too, but don't bitch about the 'beer' one if you've got a system that costs more than a few hundred bucks, please.
"We're lucky Shakespeare didn't write on an old PC."
I can still access WordPerfect files from an old home computer from 1987. That computer still has a floppy drive which I can write files to. It still has the capability of connecting a null modem up to it for file transfer. Granted, that's not the easiest thing to do, but it's still accessible.
There HAVE to be some laserdisc readers someplace in the UK that can read this. The point they're probably making is 'be wary of putting too much faith in technology'. That's a good attitude to have, but simply putting a bit more thought into keeping the data available in multiple formats would help ensure no loss of access. Hell, this was a multimillion pound project - they couldn't burn any of this to conventional CDs too? Yes, you couldn't run out to Dixon's or BestBuy and get a CD burner for $100 like today, but I'd have thought a bit more technology was available to a multimillion pound project.
"Unfortunately, we don't know what we will do after that. We could store the data on desktop computers - but they are likely to become redundant in a few years. "
Yes, the desktops might, but the data won't. Put the data in normal, documented data formats, and put them on regular drives, CDs, ZIP disks, DVD, whatever. Don't put all your digital eggs in one basket, should be the lesson. OR, simply have a technology upgrade plan in place for data that is important enough to outlive the media on which it is contained. Data that was worth millions of pounds at one time should merit a stipend of a few thousand pounds a year to keep it accessible.
(i don't know about you, but the thought of relying on windows to stay up more than half a day is not good)
:) and get a dedicated device which is well-engineered, simple, intuitive, easy to use and solid and stable.
Funny, my W2k box pretty much stays up non-stop. The uptime is pretty much identical to any Linux machines running in the office.
I'm surprised there arn't as many homemade projects around
I'm not surprised at all. Could be the reason there aren't that many home-brewed products is that one you get outside of 'software only' hacking most of the opensource crowd just can't get involved.
You want to put an 'old' CPU in there? To run video recording, email, net, dvd, cd, mp3 and other stuff? How 'old' a machine would actually run all that at a usable performance? If you're one of those "I run everything in the world on my P90 and Lunix 1.1 kernel and 8 meg of RAM on a 400 meg drive and it FLIES compared to Windows" peopel good luck to you. Those of us in the real world will simply pay $100 for a DirecTivo machine
Tivo.com has links to some stores, including http://www.americansatellite.com/products/list.asp ?affl=NT99120101&id=106&CAT=13306&mfg=philips from their 'specials' page.
I got 2 phillips DSR6000s from them. One was $99.99, then I waited a couple weeks, and the price went up to $109.99. Still a good price, considering the walmart down the street had them in stock for $399.99. "No, we don't match prices from the internet!" they cheerily replied when I asked about buying one at a reduced cost. No wonder they had an inch of dust on them - they'll NEVER shift them at that price.
You say "what's the deal with the thing?" The deal is it's a great replacement reciever if you have DirecTV already. It's really INEXPENSIVE actually, compared to retail standalone Tivo devices.
I'm nowhere near a socialist, but you've definitely got something there with the ego/greed thing. Not *EVERYONE* is like that - I know some people who've GPL'd projects and they were not motivated by ego/greed - at least not to the point where it was a negative anyway. :)