Why doesn't the creator of GNUCash or someone else post precompiled binaries? Or at least mirror the dependencies so you don't have to hunt all over the web for them?
It makes no sense to just throw out source code and then expect people to use the product.
If he's looking for money, here's a nutty idea, he could sell a cd-rom ($5 to $10) with the precompiled working distribution with all needed dependencies with the source code as well to satisfy all the legal stuff.
It's cheap enough to burn, copy and distribute CDrs.
If that FTP server was meant to be accessible to the outside then putting it behind a firewall would have accomplished exactly nothing. The ports to it would be open anyway and he got in through the standard FTP port.
"because they forgot the word "alleged"."
If he admitted to the crime then "alledged" is no longer needed. He just needs to try to convince people he shouldn't be punished much.
I run guildFTPd on my server and havn't had any problems with it even with free anonymous FTP. I recently changed the anonymous FTP so it was write only (there's now a PHP file browser pointed at it for downloading) to prevent people from linking directly to ftp://www.icarusindie.com rather than http://www.icarusindie.com/ftp/ but even before it wasn't really an issue. Most people read and play by the rules.
Companies would rather you put that $20 (or whatever) they could charge you for a "classic" that's paid for itself over and over towards their new million dollar project that hasn't.
It doesn't seem so difficult to just post the old games on a company web-site and charge per download with a notice that the software has no warrenty. If you pay for it and it doesn't work, too bad. They just need to post the original min and recommended specs on the game info page and let you know that if you computer exceeds them then the game may not run properly if at all.
Unfortunatly, the theory sounds simple but when doing professional work it takes money to set up such a system and most people aren't going to accept "no warrenty." If Joe Blow pays $20 to download a game and it doesn't run he's going to demand money back or some form of technical support.
So there's really no simple way for companies to offer them. They'll have to do marketing and tech support and everything else that a new product needs so why bother? Mass market is looking in the shiney things department and isn't interested in old games to make it worth it.
Might as well focus efforts on the new stuff that needs to recoup costs.
On a related note; Alpha Video is selling really old movies on DVD for cheap. But movies don't need tech support.
It being monocrome wasn't a huge issue since GameBoy had been monocrome for years and was hugely popular.
The main technical problem was that they cramed the CPU and display all into one box. They claimed it was portable but because of that, it wasn't really. It was uncomfortable to play for long periods of time. You couldn't play it in a car. I later picked a second system up for $30 and ripped it apart to create the HMD VB.
Basically I just took out all the extra weight and put some straps on it so it was wearable.
The other problem was lack of games. Only a few were any good and those were too short.
LCDs are cheap enough now (~$200 to build a two LCD headset yourself) that they don't need to use mirrors which cause headaches and if they make a lightweight headset connected to at least a GameBoy Advance quality base (or even just use a standard connector that can be disconnected and plugged into the GameCube) they'll have a major product.
The main thing would be that it works with the GameCube in order to have a large library all ready to go. Then it has to be under $100 (unless it's a complete system). And it has to be light weight and comfortable and not retarded looking.
But who knows maybe they've got something completely different up their sleeves.
We pay for intangible goods all the time. Concerts, insurance, cable TV, internet access, theatre tickets, etc. This isn't a foreign concept. Just because I bought the car and the gas and the insurance to get me to the store doesn't mean I shouldn't have to pay for the products at the store.
And the majority of this thread is "I won't pay for on-line writtings so the subscription model doesn't work." Meanwhile sites are selling subscriptions for a variety of things. Most of the money I make from my site is from people who need drivers. They're looking for a specific file Windows told them they were missing, looked for it on Google and my site turns up as having it.
The "freeloaders" vs "paying customers" argument depends entirely on what you're selling. People selling fruit on the side of the road probably have far far more people driving by than buying but the amount that do buy, satifies their monetary needs. And that's all that matters.
People who try to sell things which are readily available for free obviously aren't going to do as well as those selling things which are more of a hassle to come by otherwise.
This isn't a black and white issue. There are numerous variables that determine the success of any busiess whether it's on-line or on a city street. You just have to know what those variables are to properly establish a successful company.
As proven time and time again. I implemented a subscription service at IcarusIndie.com for high bandwidth areas of the site in January and have made a nice amount of money. I'm not getting rich off of it but it's enough to know it's a feasible idea. My site isn't large enough yet (and doesn't have a fast enough connection) to expect a large number of subscribers.
The problem is just like any other business, most people just slap up a site, throw some crap on it and expect people to pay. My site was entirely free for as long as my connection could take it. Which was 2 years. I then went through my log summaries, figured out what was taking up the most bandwidth and put it behind htaccess and now sell accounts to access those files.
Another thing is that you can't lock everything down. Otherwise people aren't going to be finding your site. I made sure to leave a bunch of good stuff freely available even though it takes quite a bit of bandwidth. The site is also diverse in it's content to attract people for quite a number of reasons.
The other thing is that most businesses fail. It's not surprising that there are a few big money makers and a lot of no money makers. Setting up a business anywhere takes talent and a product people will pay for. Most people don't have either.
You can't very well blame Microsoft for Netscape sucking.
And MS is in no way preventing anyone from installing Netscape.
It's pretty stupid to whine that MS should be the only OS available that shouldn't be allowed to include a browser and media player, etc. It's far from unreasonable to have those things included. If they started including Visual Studio, Office, and other major products then you might have a case.
but it's the computer controls that make it work. I think they'd frown on you ripping it open and wiring up a computer controlled switch.
Unless you've got 45 friends with godlike timing ability.
If you want to play Matrix, Fry's electronics has a super cheap 640x480 digital cam for $17. And you don't have to take it back or pay to have the pics developed. 640x480 is about standard TV resolution (US anyway) which is all you need for homebrew projects.
The interesting thing is that Matrix didn't invent that trick. They only modernized it with computers. One of the first motion pictures was of a running horse. The way they got the motion was by putting a series of still cameras along the track and as the horse ran along it hit the trip wires taking a picture. The pictures were then assembled into one fluid film.
I can't wait for Greek weddings to start having plate cam.
If you're going to be at Disneyland for 12 hours the cheapo camera's batteries aren't going to survive with having to power an LCD screen.
The other thing is that the idea of the disposable camera is to take spontanious shots. If you're serious enough about photography to need an LCD screen to make sure your shots come out, you should just just buy a digital camera. Most people aren't trying to get professional shots and a standard issue view finder is plenty accurate for casual picture taking.
Being digital, unless you really screw it up, the picture can be adjusted.
The complaint I have is the 26 shots. It being a digital camera they should have at least a hundred shots and then charge you based on how many you want to print. I'd rather not have to drag around a bunch of those cameras.
When up in Colorado I took well over 200 shots with a digital camera in about 8 hours. Quite a number of them came out really well. The real advantage of digital is that you can shoot all you want and you don't have to worry about running out of film and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
The easy way around that limitation is to have the artist draw the texture however he wants in any size and then have the coder stretch it into a best fit square. For instance if you have a 640x480 texture you can simply use Photoshop or whatever to set the image size to 512x512. For older cards you can have a second version shrunk to 256x256.
OpenGL and DirectX use 0.0-1.0 coordinates so it has no effect on the output (as far as the texture being mapped where it's supposed to be) as long as you don't crop the image.
They're going after the most popularly downloaded music which happens to be listened to by mostly young people. If old people music was being downloaded more often than young people music and they were still going after us youngins, then you might have a valid point.
So, do us youngins a favor and get your old folk together to start mass downloading your old people music to distract the RIAA from us.
I had stuff stored on 5.25 disks. Then 3.5 came out and I copied it onto those disks. 5.25 phased out and it didn't affect me. CD-R comes out and now those disks are on those.
You don't need to require a standard format that never goes away. You just have to make transitions. If you still have 5.25 floppies you can still find drives. But time is running out. If you don't care enough to make transitions then it's probably not important enough to worry about losing. Sometimes you just have to accept the fact that nothing lasts forever. And very little needs to.
I'm moving my VHS tapes to digital. Then they'll eventually burned to DVD and then whatever comes next during the transition period.
But that's about it. It's neat to know how a Model T was built although the information has little practicle value.
There may be some educational value to some of it. Lotus was written back when software had to stay relavivly simple due to memory constaints et al which would come in handly for someone just learning how to write such a program.
I'd hate to have to look through MS Word XP to figure out how it works and make my own version.
But for the most part the concepts have been well documented and we can stop worrying about specific implementations of those concepts going away. I don't need Lotus code to learn how to make a word processor. Plenty of tutorials and other sample source exists using more current coding styles.
There's also the problem of grave robbers and that whole burning of the great library thing.
The Egyptians could very well have written down the instructions for building them. There have been numerous opportunities for that information to be have been destroyed. Or they may have viewed their construction as too sacred and only passed down information on a need to know basis.
Our problem is that we charge for rocks and lack the motivation. We just assume we couldn't build such things as they did but never really bother to try.
"If they really believe they offer a valuable service,"
I was a telemarketer for all of two weeks. The training period before they could fire me. It paid for prom and I was probably the only one who would decide for people if they needed the product or not and had no problem telling them "no." I was selling *information* on lower interest rate credit cards for $369. I said "no" a lot.
I'm a programmer and I had a TI-85 which I could bring to work so I wrote a program that calculated how much they would currently have to pay to get out of debt and how much it would cost with a hypothetical low interest rate + $369. I did the script and then added "if you don't mind, could you tell me how much you're currently paying per month?" One kid had a few thousand in debt and was paying $20 a month. I told him how much he was going to end up paying (10's of thousands) and told him "you don't need to spend more money on this program, just pay 100 a month or so and you'll save thousands." He said "thanks!" and I hung up.
The company I worked for was LGSC which I decided stood for "Let's Go Screw Customers." Even the management found that funny and not surprisingly the office I worked at is no longer there.
What we were selling was actually just a list of banks that offered low interest rate credit cards. We weren't guarenteeing anything except an additional $369 of debt. I told quite a number of people to just talk to their bank. I wasn't about to screw people over who were deep in debt. And people who weren't in debt didn't need to spend $369.
And that is why I don't feel bad about having been a telemarketer.
The AipTek can run on a single 1.5v battery but it has the same problems as the Sipix: it can't process an image fast enough and ends up with horribly blurred and underdeveloped pictures.
It's trivial to take the camera apart and end up with a 1"x2" camera. A small wire is needed to hold the lens in place and then a 2 AAA holder can be wired up to it. The LCD status display isn't needed.
I bought a $37 Sipix Digital Cam which is pretty much identical to the Vivitar one used in the article.
It took one AAA battery but on a little sticker on the battery case it said it was rated for 3V. Which explains why it was crap. It was horribly under powered. Out of a several dozen pictures all of two came out. I took it back and got the AipTek Trio for $10 more and it works far better. Every picture I take comes out fine. It takes 2 AAA but that makes all the difference.
...because they arrest the youth of America. And judges because they put the youth of America in jail. And our peers too because they form the jury that convicts the youth of America.
www.recycledrussianbrides.com uses pop-under "technology" to have some Russian music I picked up at MP3.com playing in the background. It's full length and only plays once. It also contains an ad with a link to the artist's page. With the pop-under you can go anywhere on the site and it won't start and stop.
You can easily close the window if you don't like it. At a cookie is set to make sure it only loads once per browser session.
Embedding music in a page with actual content is just annoying. Every time you click on something it stops, and when you go back it starts again. And if you're not nice enough to display the controls there's little way to make it stop.
It's not necessarily a bad idea. With proper music and implementation it adds to the site. Most sites fail on both accounts though.
Slashdot Mirror
Why doesn't the creator of GNUCash or someone else post precompiled binaries? Or at least mirror the dependencies so you don't have to hunt all over the web for them?
It makes no sense to just throw out source code and then expect people to use the product.
If he's looking for money, here's a nutty idea, he could sell a cd-rom ($5 to $10) with the precompiled working distribution with all needed dependencies with the source code as well to satisfy all the legal stuff.
It's cheap enough to burn, copy and distribute CDrs.
Ben
If that FTP server was meant to be accessible to the outside then putting it behind a firewall would have accomplished exactly nothing. The ports to it would be open anyway and he got in through the standard FTP port.
"because they forgot the word "alleged"."
If he admitted to the crime then "alledged" is no longer needed. He just needs to try to convince people he shouldn't be punished much.
Ben
I run guildFTPd on my server and havn't had any problems with it even with free anonymous FTP. I recently changed the anonymous FTP so it was write only (there's now a PHP file browser pointed at it for downloading) to prevent people from linking directly to ftp://www.icarusindie.com rather than http://www.icarusindie.com/ftp/ but even before it wasn't really an issue. Most people read and play by the rules.
Ben
Companies would rather you put that $20 (or whatever) they could charge you for a "classic" that's paid for itself over and over towards their new million dollar project that hasn't.
It doesn't seem so difficult to just post the old games on a company web-site and charge per download with a notice that the software has no warrenty. If you pay for it and it doesn't work, too bad. They just need to post the original min and recommended specs on the game info page and let you know that if you computer exceeds them then the game may not run properly if at all.
Unfortunatly, the theory sounds simple but when doing professional work it takes money to set up such a system and most people aren't going to accept "no warrenty." If Joe Blow pays $20 to download a game and it doesn't run he's going to demand money back or some form of technical support.
So there's really no simple way for companies to offer them. They'll have to do marketing and tech support and everything else that a new product needs so why bother? Mass market is looking in the shiney things department and isn't interested in old games to make it worth it.
Might as well focus efforts on the new stuff that needs to recoup costs.
On a related note; Alpha Video is selling really old movies on DVD for cheap. But movies don't need tech support.
Ben
So are you for or against allowing such "great" games to continue to exist?
Won't someone think of the children?
Ben
It being monocrome wasn't a huge issue since GameBoy had been monocrome for years and was hugely popular.
The main technical problem was that they cramed the CPU and display all into one box. They claimed it was portable but because of that, it wasn't really. It was uncomfortable to play for long periods of time. You couldn't play it in a car. I later picked a second system up for $30 and ripped it apart to create the HMD VB.
HMD VB
Basically I just took out all the extra weight and put some straps on it so it was wearable.
The other problem was lack of games. Only a few were any good and those were too short.
LCDs are cheap enough now (~$200 to build a two LCD headset yourself) that they don't need to use mirrors which cause headaches and if they make a lightweight headset connected to at least a GameBoy Advance quality base (or even just use a standard connector that can be disconnected and plugged into the GameCube) they'll have a major product.
The main thing would be that it works with the GameCube in order to have a large library all ready to go. Then it has to be under $100 (unless it's a complete system). And it has to be light weight and comfortable and not retarded looking.
But who knows maybe they've got something completely different up their sleeves.
Ben
South Park episode.
Ben
We pay for intangible goods all the time. Concerts, insurance, cable TV, internet access, theatre tickets, etc. This isn't a foreign concept. Just because I bought the car and the gas and the insurance to get me to the store doesn't mean I shouldn't have to pay for the products at the store.
And the majority of this thread is "I won't pay for on-line writtings so the subscription model doesn't work." Meanwhile sites are selling subscriptions for a variety of things. Most of the money I make from my site is from people who need drivers. They're looking for a specific file Windows told them they were missing, looked for it on Google and my site turns up as having it.
The "freeloaders" vs "paying customers" argument depends entirely on what you're selling. People selling fruit on the side of the road probably have far far more people driving by than buying but the amount that do buy, satifies their monetary needs. And that's all that matters.
People who try to sell things which are readily available for free obviously aren't going to do as well as those selling things which are more of a hassle to come by otherwise.
This isn't a black and white issue. There are numerous variables that determine the success of any busiess whether it's on-line or on a city street. You just have to know what those variables are to properly establish a successful company.
Ben
As proven time and time again. I implemented a subscription service at IcarusIndie.com for high bandwidth areas of the site in January and have made a nice amount of money. I'm not getting rich off of it but it's enough to know it's a feasible idea. My site isn't large enough yet (and doesn't have a fast enough connection) to expect a large number of subscribers.
The problem is just like any other business, most people just slap up a site, throw some crap on it and expect people to pay. My site was entirely free for as long as my connection could take it. Which was 2 years. I then went through my log summaries, figured out what was taking up the most bandwidth and put it behind htaccess and now sell accounts to access those files.
Another thing is that you can't lock everything down. Otherwise people aren't going to be finding your site. I made sure to leave a bunch of good stuff freely available even though it takes quite a bit of bandwidth. The site is also diverse in it's content to attract people for quite a number of reasons.
The other thing is that most businesses fail. It's not surprising that there are a few big money makers and a lot of no money makers. Setting up a business anywhere takes talent and a product people will pay for. Most people don't have either.
Ben
You can't very well blame Microsoft for Netscape sucking.
And MS is in no way preventing anyone from installing Netscape.
It's pretty stupid to whine that MS should be the only OS available that shouldn't be allowed to include a browser and media player, etc. It's far from unreasonable to have those things included. If they started including Visual Studio, Office, and other major products then you might have a case.
Ben
but it's the computer controls that make it work. I think they'd frown on you ripping it open and wiring up a computer controlled switch.
Unless you've got 45 friends with godlike timing ability.
If you want to play Matrix, Fry's electronics has a super cheap 640x480 digital cam for $17. And you don't have to take it back or pay to have the pics developed. 640x480 is about standard TV resolution (US anyway) which is all you need for homebrew projects.
The interesting thing is that Matrix didn't invent that trick. They only modernized it with computers. One of the first motion pictures was of a running horse. The way they got the motion was by putting a series of still cameras along the track and as the horse ran along it hit the trip wires taking a picture. The pictures were then assembled into one fluid film.
I can't wait for Greek weddings to start having plate cam.
Ben
If you're going to be at Disneyland for 12 hours the cheapo camera's batteries aren't going to survive with having to power an LCD screen.
The other thing is that the idea of the disposable camera is to take spontanious shots. If you're serious enough about photography to need an LCD screen to make sure your shots come out, you should just just buy a digital camera. Most people aren't trying to get professional shots and a standard issue view finder is plenty accurate for casual picture taking.
Being digital, unless you really screw it up, the picture can be adjusted.
The complaint I have is the 26 shots. It being a digital camera they should have at least a hundred shots and then charge you based on how many you want to print. I'd rather not have to drag around a bunch of those cameras.
When up in Colorado I took well over 200 shots with a digital camera in about 8 hours. Quite a number of them came out really well. The real advantage of digital is that you can shoot all you want and you don't have to worry about running out of film and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Ben
The easy way around that limitation is to have the artist draw the texture however he wants in any size and then have the coder stretch it into a best fit square. For instance if you have a 640x480 texture you can simply use Photoshop or whatever to set the image size to 512x512. For older cards you can have a second version shrunk to 256x256.
OpenGL and DirectX use 0.0-1.0 coordinates so it has no effect on the output (as far as the texture being mapped where it's supposed to be) as long as you don't crop the image.
Ben
They're going after the most popularly downloaded music which happens to be listened to by mostly young people. If old people music was being downloaded more often than young people music and they were still going after us youngins, then you might have a valid point.
So, do us youngins a favor and get your old folk together to start mass downloading your old people music to distract the RIAA from us.
Thanks,
Ben
I had stuff stored on 5.25 disks. Then 3.5 came out and I copied it onto those disks. 5.25 phased out and it didn't affect me. CD-R comes out and now those disks are on those.
You don't need to require a standard format that never goes away. You just have to make transitions. If you still have 5.25 floppies you can still find drives. But time is running out. If you don't care enough to make transitions then it's probably not important enough to worry about losing. Sometimes you just have to accept the fact that nothing lasts forever. And very little needs to.
I'm moving my VHS tapes to digital. Then they'll eventually burned to DVD and then whatever comes next during the transition period.
Ben
But that's about it. It's neat to know how a Model T was built although the information has little practicle value.
There may be some educational value to some of it. Lotus was written back when software had to stay relavivly simple due to memory constaints et al which would come in handly for someone just learning how to write such a program.
I'd hate to have to look through MS Word XP to figure out how it works and make my own version.
But for the most part the concepts have been well documented and we can stop worrying about specific implementations of those concepts going away. I don't need Lotus code to learn how to make a word processor. Plenty of tutorials and other sample source exists using more current coding styles.
Ben
There's also the problem of grave robbers and that whole burning of the great library thing.
The Egyptians could very well have written down the instructions for building them. There have been numerous opportunities for that information to be have been destroyed. Or they may have viewed their construction as too sacred and only passed down information on a need to know basis.
Our problem is that we charge for rocks and lack the motivation. We just assume we couldn't build such things as they did but never really bother to try.
Ben
They would use the terms the people they were talking to were familiar with.
Maybe I call it soccer but for the sake of simplicity I'll call it football when speaking with others who call it football.
Ben
But does it run Windows?
Ben
"If they really believe they offer a valuable service,"
I was a telemarketer for all of two weeks. The training period before they could fire me. It paid for prom and I was probably the only one who would decide for people if they needed the product or not and had no problem telling them "no." I was selling *information* on lower interest rate credit cards for $369. I said "no" a lot.
I'm a programmer and I had a TI-85 which I could bring to work so I wrote a program that calculated how much they would currently have to pay to get out of debt and how much it would cost with a hypothetical low interest rate + $369. I did the script and then added "if you don't mind, could you tell me how much you're currently paying per month?" One kid had a few thousand in debt and was paying $20 a month. I told him how much he was going to end up paying (10's of thousands) and told him "you don't need to spend more money on this program, just pay 100 a month or so and you'll save thousands." He said "thanks!" and I hung up.
The company I worked for was LGSC which I decided stood for "Let's Go Screw Customers." Even the management found that funny and not surprisingly the office I worked at is no longer there.
What we were selling was actually just a list of banks that offered low interest rate credit cards. We weren't guarenteeing anything except an additional $369 of debt. I told quite a number of people to just talk to their bank. I wasn't about to screw people over who were deep in debt. And people who weren't in debt didn't need to spend $369.
And that is why I don't feel bad about having been a telemarketer.
Ben
How about a mascot that doesn't look like it has down syndrome?
Ben
The AipTek can run on a single 1.5v battery but it has the same problems as the Sipix: it can't process an image fast enough and ends up with horribly blurred and underdeveloped pictures.
It's trivial to take the camera apart and end up with a 1"x2" camera. A small wire is needed to hold the lens in place and then a 2 AAA holder can be wired up to it. The LCD status display isn't needed.
Ben
I bought a $37 Sipix Digital Cam which is pretty much identical to the Vivitar one used in the article.
It took one AAA battery but on a little sticker on the battery case it said it was rated for 3V. Which explains why it was crap. It was horribly under powered. Out of a several dozen pictures all of two came out. I took it back and got the AipTek Trio for $10 more and it works far better. Every picture I take comes out fine. It takes 2 AAA but that makes all the difference.
Ben
...because they arrest the youth of America. And judges because they put the youth of America in jail. And our peers too because they form the jury that convicts the youth of America.
How dare we punish kids who do illegal things.
Ben
www.recycledrussianbrides.com uses pop-under "technology" to have some Russian music I picked up at MP3.com playing in the background. It's full length and only plays once. It also contains an ad with a link to the artist's page. With the pop-under you can go anywhere on the site and it won't start and stop.
You can easily close the window if you don't like it. At a cookie is set to make sure it only loads once per browser session.
Embedding music in a page with actual content is just annoying. Every time you click on something it stops, and when you go back it starts again. And if you're not nice enough to display the controls there's little way to make it stop.
It's not necessarily a bad idea. With proper music and implementation it adds to the site. Most sites fail on both accounts though.
Ben