If you deliver something that people are willing to spend money on, they will come. The fact that something else is free is NO EXCUSE.
Yeah, Netscape did great selling browsers after Microsoft started giving them away, right? If you have two products, one free and one $99, the free product will take a large market share away from the $99 product -- even if the $99 product is superior.
Tell me where you get money to finance upgrades and improvements in a product like Applixware when potential customers are being lured away in droves to StarOffice and other competing free products. When the Linux community stops competing against the vendors that support them, you will start seeing more commercial Linux products.
This is why Linux has so little mainstream commercial software available for it. When there are good commercial packages, the free-software movement quickly develops no-cost alternatives and, in effects, punishes those firms that chose to take a gamble on the Linux marketplace.
If someone is offering a quality Linux office suite for $99, don't screw them over by releasing a free alternative. If you use the free alternative, don't whine when the commercial package goes away.
If fewer people buy software, there will be fewer software companies and fewer jobs for software engineers. That will drive wages for software engineers down. If you make your living by writing software, think about that when you have to decide between free software and a commercial package.
Will we have to wonder if Mandrake Linus 7.2 is "newer" than Caldera OpenLinus 2.4? Will RedHat be considered the definitive Linus autobiography while superior versions by Corel, Slackware, and others sit on store shelves collecting dust?
Will there be a "standard edition" that just includes the basic dates, places, and facts while deluxe versions come with all of the stuff we really want?
Will we have tech support numbers to call when something in the autobiography does not work out the way that we hoped it would?
Will we be able to install additional information using RPM?
Apparently, you aren't. If you read the article, you would have realized that the link that you pointed to was not a self-contained bionic hand but was, instead, an externally, pneumatically-powered prosthesis.
That infamous Slashdotter reading comprehension problem rears its ugly head again. The article said that these were the first bionic hands small enough for use by children, not that they were the worlds first bionic hands. The first sentence of the article reads:
British scientists have created he world's first truly 'bionic' hand small enough to be used by a toddler.
Later in the article, it says that they are going to build larger ones for adults, but it does not claim that these will be the first bionic hands for adults.
They're impressive beasts, but one has to wonder why they've spent nearly a billion dollars on this.
They invested (not "spent") this money because they realize the value of R&D -- even if it does not immediately result in a retail product. In Japan, investors hold stock for decades while we glamorize "day trading." U.S. companies do not invest in the future because it will hurt their quarterly profits and, hence, their stock.
That is why we need a high short-term capital gains tax. Rewarding those who buy and sell based on quarterly reports is simply punishing CEOs and companies that invest in the future..
Too many of you stupid slashdotters take this stuff to heart. Obviously Intel's new core is going to overtake the K7. If not right now then in the very near future. You people should just calm down about it. AMD is doing a good job but Intel is a very big company. Nobody actually expected AMD to come out of this as market leaders, did they?
What makes you think that this is the last core that AMD is going to release? They have a 64 bit core in the works already. You say that "Intel is a very big company." So is IBM, and you see what a powerhouse IBM is in the PC industry now. It was people like you who said that Compaq was going to fade away because IBM was such a "big company."
Just look at the absurd blunders by Intel. They had the Pentium floating point bug and then tried to avoid replacing the chips. They put the serial number in the P3s, upsetting many consumers and privacy advocates. They released their 1.13ghz P3 and then had to recall it. They have been unable to deliver their high-clock-rate CPUs on time or in quantity. Their i820 chipset had a bug that required the replacement of thousands of motherboards from many different manufacturers. The 440BX chipset was the chipset of choice for the last couple of years because their i8xx chips sucked. Then they got in bed with the Rambus extortium, concentrating their efforts on a flawed, proprietary, overpriced technology.
So, don't be so quick to assume that AMD will not come out on top.
Since this discussion will be archived before I can do that, I'd just like to point out that I've heard a lot of people trash that book as hopelessly biased
The authors drew some conclusions about intelligence and race that upset many people. It was not the focus of the book and was just a side-note. I thought that they used very good science while many of their critics had a political agenda to prove. I have read the book and many of the criticisms.
My point about wealth is that it is an indication that someone is probably smart, not proof. It certainly isn't a 1.0 correlation and it's not linear (or Bill Gates would be teaching Stephen Hawking about theoretical physics). It also assumes similar opportunities. You can't compare the population of Uganda to the U.S. and declare, based on income, that we have a higher IQ.
So now there's a correlation between intelligence and personal wealth?
There always has been. I suggest that you read The Bell Curve to see just how strong the correlation is. But, remember, it is just statistics. There are many people who are low-intelligence/high-net-worth and vice-versa.
As to Bill Gates, regardless of whether you like his company, products, or ethics, he is extremely intelligent. His programming ability is legendary and he has been a strong force in guiding the personal computer to where it is today -- despite the fact that his "vision" does not jive with yours and mine.
Maybe if you actually read something, you would recognize that errors and duplications occur in everything from the New York Times to, God forbid, web sites. Ever see a retraction in a newspaper?
If you think that the people who run Slashdot are 'idiots', I have two questions for you:
1. Why are you reading it (religiously, it appears)?
2. Why are they millionaires?
In closing, get a life. If you don't like Slashdot and the people who run it, don't read it. If you do read it, don't whine when you see a duplicate story. The rest of us would rather see the duplicate than see the duplicate plus you griping about it.
You act like Netpliance was our friend. They were not. They were anti-privacy and made no bones about the fact that they would sell your surfing habits to anyone interested. When asked about making the units available to hackers for a fair price, they greeted us with silence. After the hack was discovered, they tried numerous tricks, some illegal, to prevent hackers from getting the units.
Had Netpliance spent more money on engineering and less on marketing, they would not have sold a repackaged x86 laptop complete with a live IDE connector. According to one engineer who worked there, Netpliance thought of engineers as being a necessary evil -- at best.
Blaming Netpliance's failure on Slashdot is unfair. Slashdot is a news service for "nerds." When someone finds a way to take a $99 device and turn it into a full-blown computer for the cost of a hard drive, that is news. Are you suggesting that Slashdot should not have printed it? Or are you suggesting that we had a moral obligation not to hack iOpeners because it would hurt Netpliance's ill-conceived business plan? Regardless of your feelings on the matter, plugging a hard drive into an IDE connector is not theft of intellectual property.
You mentioned the music industry in an analogous manner. All that the MP3 trading is going to do is put pressure on record companies to reduce prices to a reasonable level. When CDs came out, they were about twice the price of an LP. "Manufacturing costs" was the excuse. That might have been true. Now that it costs under $1 to create a mass-market, fully packaged CD, why do they cost $19 at the mall?
Having been involved in the iOpener hacking community, I came to realize that Netpliance was a confused, unscrupulous company with no conceivable way of turning a profit. Netpliance had a cost of about $400 to manufacture each unit. (Everyone argued about this, but I got confirmation from within Netpliance.) They offered them for sale at prices ranging from $399 all the way down to $99. Not surprisingly, the bulk of their sales were at the $99 price point. They would have had to retain a customer for about two years (according to their own financial disclosures) before making a profit from that customer. Since they advertised to a computer-illiterate market, many of the purchasers decided early-on that the "Internet thing" was not for them and dropped the service. This meant that they lost money on each of those sales.
Netpliance's business ethics left much to be desired. After discovering that "hackers" were adding hard drives to the iOpener and not buying the service, they held up shipments to, as their own memo calls them, "suspect hacker customers." They sent letters to Circuit City customers threatening to charge them $499 if they did not subscribe to the service for at least three months. The modified the "Terms and Conditions of Sale" such that it claimed that they could cancel your service and charge you $499 for having done so. They made it a contractual breach to disassemble or modify the device. They gave themselves permission to "disable" your service or iOpener (using a bad BIOS download?). The ran a multi-page ad in the Washington Post that showed the $99 price but neglected to mention that there were shipping charges -- $35 worth to be exact! They offered toll-free numbers for those not local to any of their ISP access numbers. Then, after people had been using the appliance and had given out their e-mail, they retracted the toll-free access.
In closing, Netpliance has been a disreputable player in the technology community and one that should not be missed when they close their doors for good.
Rather than protecting children, this ruling sends the message that sexually molesting actual children is no worse than using a computer program to generate sexually explicit images that look like children. I'd rather have some guy get aroused by looking at computer generated images than to have him hanging out at elementary schools.
What next? Because murder is illegal, should we criminalize first-person shooters like Quake and Unreal because they contain computer-generated images of people being murdered? This ruling sets a dangerous precedent.
You really are a moron, aren't you? In 1973, Bob Kahn at DARPA (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) started a project to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds. The system of networks emerged from the research was known as the Internet.
If you claim I am wrong, cite your sources, troll boy.
Yet again you have shown the rest of the world how stupid you really are
Don't you find it ironic that you are using the Internet, which was invented by the United States, to call U.S. citizens "stupid"? When we created the Internet, the British could not even build a car with a reliable electrical system.
If you still think we are so stupid, please open your computer and remove all of the parts that were designed in the USA before replying to this message.
Reject e-mail with a 550 message that directs the sender to a web page that describes why you are blocking (their ISP signed contracts with spammers). The web page should have a link to e-mail addresses of executives at their ISP for purposes of sending complaints. It should also have phone numbers and addresses for complaints. If you have home phone numbers of the corporate executives, include those, too.
It's that kind of idiotic, geek machismo that makes Death Marches all too commonplace. What comes out of Death Marches is rarely "good software." More often, Death Marches result in failed, over-budget projects, burned out employees, and the loss of experienced software engineers to competitors with better work environments. Though rarely, a Death March sometimes results in a "finished" product. The product is almost invariably bug-ridden, unpolished, and lacking in functionality (since all but the core features have been bargained away in order to actually "complete" the project).
"Good software" results from a talented team of software engineers lead by experienced technical managers being given realistic requirements, schedules, and budgets.
The idea of a first-person shooter is to test your reflexes and pump your adrenalin, not to reward you for buying gadgets and writing macros. I don't want to play against a bunch of losers using crutches like the "Claw" and macros to make up for their inherent lack of skill -- or to give themselves an unfair advantage. Great. Now people can assign their hop-like-a-bunny-while-firing-all-weapons-in-succe ssion macro to the index finger button of the Claw. That should make game play fun for the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Netscape did great selling browsers after Microsoft started giving them away, right? If you have two products, one free and one $99, the free product will take a large market share away from the $99 product -- even if the $99 product is superior.
Tell me where you get money to finance upgrades and improvements in a product like Applixware when potential customers are being lured away in droves to StarOffice and other competing free products. When the Linux community stops competing against the vendors that support them, you will start seeing more commercial Linux products.
If someone is offering a quality Linux office suite for $99, don't screw them over by releasing a free alternative. If you use the free alternative, don't whine when the commercial package goes away.
If fewer people buy software, there will be fewer software companies and fewer jobs for software engineers. That will drive wages for software engineers down. If you make your living by writing software, think about that when you have to decide between free software and a commercial package.
Will there be a "standard edition" that just includes the basic dates, places, and facts while deluxe versions come with all of the stuff we really want?
Will we have tech support numbers to call when something in the autobiography does not work out the way that we hoped it would?
Will we be able to install additional information using RPM?
Apparently, you aren't. If you read the article, you would have realized that the link that you pointed to was not a self-contained bionic hand but was, instead, an externally, pneumatically-powered prosthesis.
British scientists have created he world's first truly 'bionic' hand small enough to be used by a toddler.
Later in the article, it says that they are going to build larger ones for adults, but it does not claim that these will be the first bionic hands for adults.
They invested (not "spent") this money because they realize the value of R&D -- even if it does not immediately result in a retail product. In Japan, investors hold stock for decades while we glamorize "day trading." U.S. companies do not invest in the future because it will hurt their quarterly profits and, hence, their stock.
That is why we need a high short-term capital gains tax. Rewarding those who buy and sell based on quarterly reports is simply punishing CEOs and companies that invest in the future..
What makes you think that this is the last core that AMD is going to release? They have a 64 bit core in the works already. You say that "Intel is a very big company." So is IBM, and you see what a powerhouse IBM is in the PC industry now. It was people like you who said that Compaq was going to fade away because IBM was such a "big company."
Just look at the absurd blunders by Intel. They had the Pentium floating point bug and then tried to avoid replacing the chips. They put the serial number in the P3s, upsetting many consumers and privacy advocates. They released their 1.13ghz P3 and then had to recall it. They have been unable to deliver their high-clock-rate CPUs on time or in quantity. Their i820 chipset had a bug that required the replacement of thousands of motherboards from many different manufacturers. The 440BX chipset was the chipset of choice for the last couple of years because their i8xx chips sucked. Then they got in bed with the Rambus extortium, concentrating their efforts on a flawed, proprietary, overpriced technology.
So, don't be so quick to assume that AMD will not come out on top.
-- Fred Maxwell --
The authors drew some conclusions about intelligence and race that upset many people. It was not the focus of the book and was just a side-note. I thought that they used very good science while many of their critics had a political agenda to prove. I have read the book and many of the criticisms.
My point about wealth is that it is an indication that someone is probably smart, not proof. It certainly isn't a 1.0 correlation and it's not linear (or Bill Gates would be teaching Stephen Hawking about theoretical physics). It also assumes similar opportunities. You can't compare the population of Uganda to the U.S. and declare, based on income, that we have a higher IQ.
Fred Maxwell
There always has been. I suggest that you read The Bell Curve to see just how strong the correlation is. But, remember, it is just statistics. There are many people who are low-intelligence/high-net-worth and vice-versa.
As to Bill Gates, regardless of whether you like his company, products, or ethics, he is extremely intelligent. His programming ability is legendary and he has been a strong force in guiding the personal computer to where it is today -- despite the fact that his "vision" does not jive with yours and mine.
Fred Maxwell
Maybe if you actually read something, you would recognize that errors and duplications occur in everything from the New York Times to, God forbid, web sites. Ever see a retraction in a newspaper?
If you think that the people who run Slashdot are 'idiots', I have two questions for you:
1. Why are you reading it (religiously, it appears)?
2. Why are they millionaires?
In closing, get a life. If you don't like Slashdot and the people who run it, don't read it. If you do read it, don't whine when you see a duplicate story. The rest of us would rather see the duplicate than see the duplicate plus you griping about it.
Had Netpliance spent more money on engineering and less on marketing, they would not have sold a repackaged x86 laptop complete with a live IDE connector. According to one engineer who worked there, Netpliance thought of engineers as being a necessary evil -- at best.
Blaming Netpliance's failure on Slashdot is unfair. Slashdot is a news service for "nerds." When someone finds a way to take a $99 device and turn it into a full-blown computer for the cost of a hard drive, that is news. Are you suggesting that Slashdot should not have printed it? Or are you suggesting that we had a moral obligation not to hack iOpeners because it would hurt Netpliance's ill-conceived business plan? Regardless of your feelings on the matter, plugging a hard drive into an IDE connector is not theft of intellectual property.
You mentioned the music industry in an analogous manner. All that the MP3 trading is going to do is put pressure on record companies to reduce prices to a reasonable level. When CDs came out, they were about twice the price of an LP. "Manufacturing costs" was the excuse. That might have been true. Now that it costs under $1 to create a mass-market, fully packaged CD, why do they cost $19 at the mall?
Fred Maxwell
Netpliance's business ethics left much to be desired. After discovering that "hackers" were adding hard drives to the iOpener and not buying the service, they held up shipments to, as their own memo calls them, "suspect hacker customers." They sent letters to Circuit City customers threatening to charge them $499 if they did not subscribe to the service for at least three months. The modified the "Terms and Conditions of Sale" such that it claimed that they could cancel your service and charge you $499 for having done so. They made it a contractual breach to disassemble or modify the device. They gave themselves permission to "disable" your service or iOpener (using a bad BIOS download?). The ran a multi-page ad in the Washington Post that showed the $99 price but neglected to mention that there were shipping charges -- $35 worth to be exact! They offered toll-free numbers for those not local to any of their ISP access numbers. Then, after people had been using the appliance and had given out their e-mail, they retracted the toll-free access.
In closing, Netpliance has been a disreputable player in the technology community and one that should not be missed when they close their doors for good.
Fred Maxwell
What next? Because murder is illegal, should we criminalize first-person shooters like Quake and Unreal because they contain computer-generated images of people being murdered? This ruling sets a dangerous precedent.
You really are a moron, aren't you? In 1973, Bob Kahn at DARPA (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) started a project to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds. The system of networks emerged from the research was known as the Internet.
If you claim I am wrong, cite your sources, troll boy.
Don't you find it ironic that you are using the Internet, which was invented by the United States, to call U.S. citizens "stupid"? When we created the Internet, the British could not even build a car with a reliable electrical system.
If you still think we are so stupid, please open your computer and remove all of the parts that were designed in the USA before replying to this message.
Reject e-mail with a 550 message that directs the sender to a web page that describes why you are blocking (their ISP signed contracts with spammers). The web page should have a link to e-mail addresses of executives at their ISP for purposes of sending complaints. It should also have phone numbers and addresses for complaints. If you have home phone numbers of the corporate executives, include those, too.
"Good software" results from a talented team of software engineers lead by experienced technical managers being given realistic requirements, schedules, and budgets.
Fred Maxwell