In Montreal, a kid who crossing the street to grab a bus was run over by a cop who was speeding through the intersection. It was bad enough that the kid had the walk signal in his favour, but the worst part was that this happened about a block away from an institute for the blind, and the cop didn't have his sirens on.
If you're going to get on a GPL project that you want to make commercial, better pay attention to this spat so you can figure out what NOT to do...
Don't just get one domain name. Get them all. There's obviously some silly politics going on here between these two, but if Nusphere was able to come along and steal mySQL.org, then guess what, so was ANYBODY. What do you think is cheaper? Register.org,.net and.com for a few years or spending one hour with an IP lawyer? Never mind that it never takes just one hour with any lawyer...
Keep all sales and marketing in house. This way you're in charge of the folks who claim to be in charge of sales and marketing. It'd seem self-evident, but it looks like NuSphere feel they have some rights to messing around with mySQL AB simply because they spend time promoting it. This could be easily averted if Monty and Davis were actually employing their promoters.
If you ever have a public spat, never speak on behalf of your side of things. Get a lawyer to do it. Right now it looks like childish bickering. Not only does getting a lawyer actually ensure that the wrong things aren't said, but having a lawyer speak on your behalf actually distances you a little more from PR fallout. Witness the whole Adobe/KIllustrator thing. Even on Slashdot, Adobe's not really any worse off despite the trademark-rights bullying that was going on, because everybody here is content believing that it was the lawyers doing it, not the parent company.
Deal with licensing issues EARLY. I'm willing to bet that most of us out there had no idea that there was a possible GPL violation going on with NuSphere's statically linked library code. Meanwhile, the way they talk, it seems that mySQL AB was aware about this for some time. What were they doing? Waiting for a public fiasco such as this to happen before bringing it up amidst the mud slinging? It makes mySQL AB look just as bad for having let it got this far.
One of the suggestions, to make a prima donna feel replaceable, makes me nervous. I think management's got to play a little more of a careful game than just bringing in new people to keep the current difficult ones in check. What it often does is send that same message to ALL the employees.
At one office I worked with, I finally reached my threshold in terms of being handed additional tasks over and above my job requirements, and the way I ended up would probably tag me as a prima donna if my former manager looked at this article and shared it with the hr department -- I became somewhat aloof to the common good, and became a little harder to contact, but trust me, it was a defense mechanism because the harder I worked for her approval, the more I was congratulated and "rewarded" by being given additional tasks.
To make matters worse, they already had the steady influx of additional talent that kept people in other departments paranoid about losing their jobs. It was an office of around 50 people, with 25 core people in the "replaceable" category, with close to a dozen additionals brought in each year. I'd thought that perhaps I might be immune to this because I'd already proven myself to be valuable to the office, but in the end, my complaints about getting too much work weren't really dealt with. They just hired a couple more people, and when I couldn't take it any more and quit, they just brought in someone else. A year later, now, the lower-level staff is finally getting close to getting a union together, but the revolving door policy that was put in place to deal with those who didn't fit in well had already taken its toll on many people who no longer work there.
I guess the point is, if an employee is getting difficult, don't feel that a diagnosis of the problem the EMPLOYEE has is necessarily the first step. It might just have something to do with the environment. Yeah, you don't want one person terrorizing the office because of a lack of common good, but the complete opposite end of the scale can be just as bad, also on office morale.
We've seen GNOME make the move into CORBA with ORBit, and more recently express interest in matching.NET with Mono, in what is assumed to be finding open source answers for some sophisticated proprietary distributed technologies. Does KDE have anything like this planned for the future? Like KORBA or.KNET or something? Or is that sort of stuff beyond the scope of KDE's goals and commitments?
It seems like Ximian is trying to make sure they can match MS technology for technology. You've got orbit, bonobo, and now mono. KDE's got kParts to match bonobo, but other than that, it looks like they're not getting involved in this stuff. Why is that? Is Ximian over-extending itself? Or is KDE going to end up playing catch-up to everyone else's technologies?
Okay, I read the article and it said that if the guy likes onions on his hamburgers, then it gets logged. But over 700KB per customer? That's longer than a novel! This is either one of two things:
1: The worst database normalization job ever, or
2: An offensive amount of specific material being kept on each customer.
Okay, no onions on your burger? That's a boolean false. Okay, okay, they've probably got more information on betting patterns, but are you going to tell me they've got more than half a meg of this sort of thing? Per customer? Does that make sense?!
Okay, I'm going to guess that Linus isn't going to make the jump from 2.4 to 3.0, but will instead go to 2.6 and then 2.8, and then 3.0. Now, assuming that it's about 18 minor increments between versions, at the rate of around 1 per month, that'll mean 18 months + 18 months + 12 months, for a grand total of 48 months. So, that'll be June, 2005!
By that point, Linux will be powering all our flying cars, I bet!
No, seriously. I'd have loved to see how VB and VC++ would hold up in this sort of thing, on similar hardware. Given that I'm trying to teach myself how to come up with non-MS solutions to everyday problems, it'd be nice to be able to pitch something to somebody knowing how well it compares to MS-based solutions.
Beyond the scope of the benchmarking experiment, I'm sure, but he included tcl, for christ's sake...
I think the best idea is to ignore.NET, seriously. Microsoft is trying to make.NET some sort of de facto standard, whereas the only things Microsoft really has as a de facto standard in the business arena are (1) the best internet browser, (2) a niche built on its proprietary file formats. Everywhere else it has legitimate competition, and the only way they can break that competition is to come up with an "entirely new" industry paradigm to work with. (A potential (3) could present itself if the whole.NET implementation ends up being faster than whatever's offered by the JVM, which is a distinct possibility.)
If, instead of concentrating on reverse-engineering, time got spent on trying to make the JVM a little quicker, Mozilla a reliable speed demon and to incorporate translation of MS file formats, no programming model that MS would try to push would make a difference. The more interesting battle is in trying to break MS's hold on existing areas where it is dominant. Spending time working on a.NET replacement only enables it.
CSS = C-Styled Scripting or Cascading Style Sheets or Content Scrambling System
ASP = Application Service Provider or Active Server Pages
LSB = Least Significant Bit or Linux Standards Base
ORB = Object Request Broker or Operation Request Block
PGP = Pretty Good Privacy, PPP = Point to Point Protocol, P2P = Peer to Peer, PHP = PHP Hypertext Processor, PAP = Push Access Protocol or Password Authentication Protocol
DOS = Denial of Service or Disk Operating System, DSO = Data Source Object or Dynamic Shared Object .net = common url suffix, but.NET = java clone
Here's an article comparing X-based programming to SDL-based programming.
You can use OpenGL techniques in SDL, so here's some OpenGL stuff for you...
This NeHe page comes complete with a version of the infamous Gears ported to SDL.
Finally, if you really want to start getting the best out of it, you'd better get on hardware acceleration. Either switch to one of the latest commercial distributions (RH 7.1 and Mandrake 8.0 do 3d out of the box), or use the source, luke.
Craig Mundie was dropping this word like crazy during that round table discussion they just had, and now Bill Gates is using it in his interviews. Just when you thought their language use couldn't get any more annoying ("innovation" anyone?), here you are with the scary word "viral" getting attached to the GPL and the warm-fuzzies-inducing "ecosystem" getting attached to (in part) the world that Microsoft is a part of, and the GPL is not.
I suppose the major argument is that free code begets proprietary extensions to the code which begets profits which begets university endowments and R&D which begets more free code, and the GPL's elimination of the corporate middleman is somehow disrupting the ecosystem. How inconsiderate -- not to mention environmentally unfriendly and terribly Politically Incorrect -- of us.
Oh well, maybe when we're through with that and then with nuking the gay whales, we'll have enough left to put the crybabies at MS out of their misery. Until then, realize that you can undo pretty much all the damage these FUD attempts cause in a good face-to-face discussion. Just don't miss your chance at throwing a little good advocacy out there when you get the chance.
(And don't forget to remind people which company originally made popular the marriage of "virus" and "computer" in the first place).
I don't want to but my job requirements and MS give me no choice!
I hear ya buddy. I mean, bosses SUCK. The other day, you know what my boss does to make me earn my paycheck? You want to know? Get this: He makes me follow my job description.
Can you imagine THE NERVE?!
Start a march or grab a special color of ribbon or something. I'm with you. Fight the power.
This is all redundant, I'm sure, but... According to that second article, they go from 1.75 million users to about 7,000?
I'm amazed. Basically, the free nature of the service accounts for about 1,743,000 extra users. There isn't a single person in marketing who can't figure out a way to turn that demographic into a source of revenue?
You've got news websites out there giving away their content for free all the time and they're still alive -- and they don't have nearly the amount of dedicated traffic that Napster had in its heydey. What is it that is handcuffing Napster now?
They could advertise albums and shows, offer live show ticket sales and take a cut, set up some form of voluntary payment system which will lead to value-added service (customized server-side database options, notifications, rebates on ticket purchases or album purchases, better cient software), generate a good server-side file-sharing engine and license it (a la google), have high-quality custom-made CDs that'll get shipped to your home within the week, and those five are just off the top of my head.
(Oh yeah, and consider some kind of middleman elimination to get rid of the recording studios -- any system that charges $20 a CD, gives only a fraction of that in royalties to the artist and basically costs less than a buck to make, DEFINITELY needs to trim the fat, and is upping base costs everywhere. I think Napster would find it easier to offer a free service if they didn't have to help pay for mansions in Beverly Hills for people who don't even make the music.)
Subscription-based services fail when what you're trying to charge has already been offered for free. So many sites tried doing this before and then reinstated the free services when the community dropped off -- I remember when Starwave got bought by ESPN and tried to make you have to sign up and pay just to see things like basketball stats... you can bet that didn't last long. Turn Napster into THE primary industry marketing machine, and you've got a chance. Otherwise, the underground will keep swapping and the music companies will just keep missing the boat, not to mention the point.
Okay, avoiding all the usual James Joyce "if-a-guy-coughs-on-a-block-of-wood-and-it-turns-i nto-a-cow-is-it-art?" type stuff...
I think the reasons people resist the whole computer artwork as fine art comes from the fact that you need to understand certain scientific principles in order to bring the artwork into existence, whereas, to be a decent writer you only need to drink alot. Architecture probably gets a bad rep because of this too (the science part, not the drinking part).
What constitutes a fine art is an expression of something that can be taken as a metaphor for something else. The canvas is irrelevent, and the tools are irrelvent. If someone says that you can't use hard science to create art, either (a) show them the various films out there that rely on computer animation to render entire characters in their film, or (b) show them a photographer who has to measure lighting levels for a scene to work, or (c) show them any number of sketches by Leonardo Da Vinci. In pretty much the same way that a novelist can use a word processor to generate a novel (which is universally looked upon as fine art), a computer graphics artist can use Bryce or 3d Studio Max (or, heck, even C) to create a work of fine art. In both cases, the canvas starts out empty, and the artist has to fill it. It's not going to fill itself.
Also, it's important to note that for something to be considered art, it needs to be open to interpretation. As such, drawing a penguin on the screen doesn't really constitute anything artistic (not going into abstract art or photorealism or andy warhol here). If that penguin is meant to represent something that it currently is not (ie: it is not JUST a drawing of a penguin), then you've got a potential work of art, especially if it speaks to the basic human condition.
Also, there's a certain nebulous quality to art that makes it seem less permanent than, say, Michelangelo's David. Like, change one view matrix here and substitute a bitmap there and VOILA! Totally new picture. It's hard to rally behind an artistic genre that has mutability as a built-in feature. To be honest, 3d graphics have gotten to the point that it's relatively easy to make something that's on the surface far more impressive than something an artist in another genre would have to slave over to achieve. Consider how easy it would be for a painter to add extra mountains to a landscape, whereas a computer artist might only have to change their for loop, or copy and paste something.
Also, because computers seldom ARE used for art, people tend to dismiss the notion that they CAN be used for art. In much the same way that "Armageddon" drags down an entire genre into the sub-artistic, games such as "Tomb Raider" make you forget about gems like "Myst", which could probably be considered a work of art in its own right (remember, just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't art;).
We'd like to submit a complaint against the gaim product for using an acronym that is confusingly similar to my product, Greater Australia's Instant Internet Mailer. We understand that in your country I can register this as a trademark several years after I've put it out, so We'll deal with that end of things later. However, for the moment, we at GAIIM would like to say we will not stand for this sort of piracy and theft.
Because we know you were not ripping off AOL's service because you were (in fact) ripping off ours, We believe we have first rights to this issue, and would like to sue the gaim project for the grand total of two (2) dollars. We feel that it is important that the gaim project admit that it is guilty of trying to rip off OUR product and not AOL's (whether or not this can have any residual benefit in, oh, say, a defense case against AOL, is entirely besides the point).
Slashdot Mirror
In Montreal, a kid who crossing the street to grab a bus was run over by a cop who was speeding through the intersection. It was bad enough that the kid had the walk signal in his favour, but the worst part was that this happened about a block away from an institute for the blind, and the cop didn't have his sirens on.
At one office I worked with, I finally reached my threshold in terms of being handed additional tasks over and above my job requirements, and the way I ended up would probably tag me as a prima donna if my former manager looked at this article and shared it with the hr department -- I became somewhat aloof to the common good, and became a little harder to contact, but trust me, it was a defense mechanism because the harder I worked for her approval, the more I was congratulated and "rewarded" by being given additional tasks.
To make matters worse, they already had the steady influx of additional talent that kept people in other departments paranoid about losing their jobs. It was an office of around 50 people, with 25 core people in the "replaceable" category, with close to a dozen additionals brought in each year. I'd thought that perhaps I might be immune to this because I'd already proven myself to be valuable to the office, but in the end, my complaints about getting too much work weren't really dealt with. They just hired a couple more people, and when I couldn't take it any more and quit, they just brought in someone else. A year later, now, the lower-level staff is finally getting close to getting a union together, but the revolving door policy that was put in place to deal with those who didn't fit in well had already taken its toll on many people who no longer work there.
I guess the point is, if an employee is getting difficult, don't feel that a diagnosis of the problem the EMPLOYEE has is necessarily the first step. It might just have something to do with the environment. Yeah, you don't want one person terrorizing the office because of a lack of common good, but the complete opposite end of the scale can be just as bad, also on office morale.
Kind of hard to get enjoyment out of a having a faction of nuts rampaging through a colony of bolts.
We've seen GNOME make the move into CORBA with ORBit, and more recently express interest in matching .NET with Mono, in what is assumed to be finding open source answers for some sophisticated proprietary distributed technologies. Does KDE have anything like this planned for the future? Like KORBA or .KNET or something? Or is that sort of stuff beyond the scope of KDE's goals and commitments?
I tell you, I can only suspend disbelief so far. "Whatsh that junior? You'll have to shpeak up. Thish hearing aid ish no good."
It seems like Ximian is trying to make sure they can match MS technology for technology. You've got orbit, bonobo, and now mono. KDE's got kParts to match bonobo, but other than that, it looks like they're not getting involved in this stuff. Why is that? Is Ximian over-extending itself? Or is KDE going to end up playing catch-up to everyone else's technologies?
1: The worst database normalization job ever, or
2: An offensive amount of specific material being kept on each customer.
Okay, no onions on your burger? That's a boolean false. Okay, okay, they've probably got more information on betting patterns, but are you going to tell me they've got more than half a meg of this sort of thing? Per customer? Does that make sense?!
That's all the optical feedback I need.
By that point, Linux will be powering all our flying cars, I bet!
Beyond the scope of the benchmarking experiment, I'm sure, but he included tcl, for christ's sake...
If, instead of concentrating on reverse-engineering, time got spent on trying to make the JVM a little quicker, Mozilla a reliable speed demon and to incorporate translation of MS file formats, no programming model that MS would try to push would make a difference. The more interesting battle is in trying to break MS's hold on existing areas where it is dominant. Spending time working on a .NET replacement only enables it.
Er... nothing really. I just enjoy saying "Voigt-Kempf!!!". PKD fans'll know what I'm talking about.
Any chance they'll have an LSB-compliant install? Like, nothing except for the barebones and such?
ASP = Application Service Provider or Active Server Pages
LSB = Least Significant Bit or Linux Standards Base
ORB = Object Request Broker or Operation Request Block
PGP = Pretty Good Privacy, PPP = Point to Point Protocol, P2P = Peer to Peer, PHP = PHP Hypertext Processor, PAP = Push Access Protocol or Password Authentication Protocol
DOS = Denial of Service or Disk Operating System, DSO = Data Source Object or Dynamic Shared Object
So many things to keep track of...
Here's the SDL doc project.
Here's an article comparing X-based programming to SDL-based programming.
You can use OpenGL techniques in SDL, so here's some OpenGL stuff for you...
This NeHe page comes complete with a version of the infamous Gears ported to SDL.
Finally, if you really want to start getting the best out of it, you'd better get on hardware acceleration. Either switch to one of the latest commercial distributions (RH 7.1 and Mandrake 8.0 do 3d out of the box), or use the source, luke.
I suppose the major argument is that free code begets proprietary extensions to the code which begets profits which begets university endowments and R&D which begets more free code, and the GPL's elimination of the corporate middleman is somehow disrupting the ecosystem. How inconsiderate -- not to mention environmentally unfriendly and terribly Politically Incorrect -- of us.
Oh well, maybe when we're through with that and then with nuking the gay whales, we'll have enough left to put the crybabies at MS out of their misery. Until then, realize that you can undo pretty much all the damage these FUD attempts cause in a good face-to-face discussion. Just don't miss your chance at throwing a little good advocacy out there when you get the chance.
(And don't forget to remind people which company originally made popular the marriage of "virus" and "computer" in the first place).
Okay, it's too damned early in the morning to be getting repetitive and surreal in your opinions. What the hell is with "Postfix (and Postfix)"?
Exceptin' that maybe twas tha Loch Niss monstarrr that caused those seismic tremarrrs, what? We nevar claimed she was a quiet lass, now, did we?
I hear ya buddy. I mean, bosses SUCK. The other day, you know what my boss does to make me earn my paycheck? You want to know? Get this: He makes me follow my job description.
Can you imagine THE NERVE?!
Start a march or grab a special color of ribbon or something. I'm with you. Fight the power.
I'm amazed. Basically, the free nature of the service accounts for about 1,743,000 extra users. There isn't a single person in marketing who can't figure out a way to turn that demographic into a source of revenue?
You've got news websites out there giving away their content for free all the time and they're still alive -- and they don't have nearly the amount of dedicated traffic that Napster had in its heydey. What is it that is handcuffing Napster now?
They could advertise albums and shows, offer live show ticket sales and take a cut, set up some form of voluntary payment system which will lead to value-added service (customized server-side database options, notifications, rebates on ticket purchases or album purchases, better cient software), generate a good server-side file-sharing engine and license it (a la google), have high-quality custom-made CDs that'll get shipped to your home within the week, and those five are just off the top of my head.
(Oh yeah, and consider some kind of middleman elimination to get rid of the recording studios -- any system that charges $20 a CD, gives only a fraction of that in royalties to the artist and basically costs less than a buck to make, DEFINITELY needs to trim the fat, and is upping base costs everywhere. I think Napster would find it easier to offer a free service if they didn't have to help pay for mansions in Beverly Hills for people who don't even make the music.)
Subscription-based services fail when what you're trying to charge has already been offered for free. So many sites tried doing this before and then reinstated the free services when the community dropped off -- I remember when Starwave got bought by ESPN and tried to make you have to sign up and pay just to see things like basketball stats... you can bet that didn't last long. Turn Napster into THE primary industry marketing machine, and you've got a chance. Otherwise, the underground will keep swapping and the music companies will just keep missing the boat, not to mention the point.
Definitely better than their original idea -- bringing in Theo De Raadt to lead their PR department.
I think the reasons people resist the whole computer artwork as fine art comes from the fact that you need to understand certain scientific principles in order to bring the artwork into existence, whereas, to be a decent writer you only need to drink alot. Architecture probably gets a bad rep because of this too (the science part, not the drinking part).
What constitutes a fine art is an expression of something that can be taken as a metaphor for something else. The canvas is irrelevent, and the tools are irrelvent. If someone says that you can't use hard science to create art, either (a) show them the various films out there that rely on computer animation to render entire characters in their film, or (b) show them a photographer who has to measure lighting levels for a scene to work, or (c) show them any number of sketches by Leonardo Da Vinci. In pretty much the same way that a novelist can use a word processor to generate a novel (which is universally looked upon as fine art), a computer graphics artist can use Bryce or 3d Studio Max (or, heck, even C) to create a work of fine art. In both cases, the canvas starts out empty, and the artist has to fill it. It's not going to fill itself.
Also, it's important to note that for something to be considered art, it needs to be open to interpretation. As such, drawing a penguin on the screen doesn't really constitute anything artistic (not going into abstract art or photorealism or andy warhol here). If that penguin is meant to represent something that it currently is not (ie: it is not JUST a drawing of a penguin), then you've got a potential work of art, especially if it speaks to the basic human condition.
Also, there's a certain nebulous quality to art that makes it seem less permanent than, say, Michelangelo's David. Like, change one view matrix here and substitute a bitmap there and VOILA! Totally new picture. It's hard to rally behind an artistic genre that has mutability as a built-in feature. To be honest, 3d graphics have gotten to the point that it's relatively easy to make something that's on the surface far more impressive than something an artist in another genre would have to slave over to achieve. Consider how easy it would be for a painter to add extra mountains to a landscape, whereas a computer artist might only have to change their for loop, or copy and paste something.
Also, because computers seldom ARE used for art, people tend to dismiss the notion that they CAN be used for art. In much the same way that "Armageddon" drags down an entire genre into the sub-artistic, games such as "Tomb Raider" make you forget about gems like "Myst", which could probably be considered a work of art in its own right (remember, just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't art ;).
With apologies for the bad grammar and confusing interchanges of "I" and "We".
Because we know you were not ripping off AOL's service because you were (in fact) ripping off ours, We believe we have first rights to this issue, and would like to sue the gaim project for the grand total of two (2) dollars. We feel that it is important that the gaim project admit that it is guilty of trying to rip off OUR product and not AOL's (whether or not this can have any residual benefit in, oh, say, a defense case against AOL, is entirely besides the point).
nudge nudge NUDGE nudge NUDGE