You'll never make it playing the management game that way. If your boss wants your team to do project x in 3 months and you go back and tell him that your developers say it can be done in 10 months you might find yourself quickly replaced by a manager who can say "yes sir, we'll have it in 3 months."
I've been on many projects and the truth is almost all of them have been on time no matter how crazy the deadline was. A good team of developers will surprise you when pressure is applied.
If you look at the BugTrack data at about mid page you'll see these numbers.
MandrakeSoft Linux Mandrake 7.2 33
RedHat Linux 7.0 28
MandrakeSoft Linux Mandrake 7.1 27
Debian Linux 2.2 26
Sun Solaris 8.0 24
Sun Solaris 7.0 24
Microsoft Windows 2000 24
By looking at these numbers I can only assume they are counting the bugs on that CD. But do they count bugs if a service pack CD is included? For example, if I buy 2000 today versus a year ago, I get a different serice pack CD in the box.
With the Windows worms out there the majority of them seem to attack the same vulnerabilities over and over again. This makes sense I guess because unfortunatly when you apply a service pack to Windows, something as simple as replacing your NIC will send you back to your pre-patch levels. This is something which I think Microsoft needs to spend more time educating people about. How many people know they need to reapply service packs when they add new hardware?
When I think about it, I get more security notice emails from the Red Hat network than I get critical update notifications from Microsoft. But what does this mean to me? Does it mean that one os is better because it has less bugs or does it mean that one company is better because they are doing more to let me know about potential problems?
But I guess the big story here is BSD is far more secure than Linux or Windows or Solaris.
You could argue that competition will drive prices down, but that would be naive as well. The telecommunications market isn't open: it's a cabal, just like the recording industry, and other favorite/. demons.
You must be fairly young. Take a look at long distance phone companies. There used to be a monopoly and long distance calls were very expensive. Today there are hundreds of LD companies competing and prices have dropped considerably. The same rings true for cellular. Competition has driven prices down.
Agreed. The characters sucked in Episode I. In fact, and I hate to say this, the most interesting character was probably Jar Jar. If you want the other stuff, just go to CrewOfTwo to see some cool Star Wars effects in action.
Blender has the ability to act as a game engine. There are Blender 3D games that you can run inside Blender. This plug in allows you to play these games in your browser. I haven't seen the plug in used to view models (like Volo View lets you view AutoCAD drawings). I think the Blender plugin is intended to be more like Flash and allow people to create interesting interactive content. When the Blender site comes back:) check it out. It's pretty cool.
Blender is also based in Python so a user can write python scripts to export their Blender models into other formats, say Lightwave or Renderman for instance. For a free product its damned amazing.
Come on, that link is almost 4 years old. Go to the official site and download the latest version for free. It is not open source but lack of that does not make it non free. It is a good product. I have used the Linux and the Windows versions and it is capable of amazing things.
Alias|wavefront is supposed to be releasing a free (for non commercial use) version of Maya soon. I heard it will embed a watermark in your work. But still, having access and getting exposure to software that costs thousands of dollars is well worth it.
I don't belive an open source game engine is the solution. It might help the hobbiest develop an interesting game but it's not going to pay their mortgage.
Games need to be proprietary. Companies need to make money in order to stay alive in the game industry. If they can license their engine and make money off the competition that is one thing, but giving away your bread and butter is bad business in my opinion. You do that and the Linux community will be stuck with what we have.
Open Source is great, don't get me wrong. But you can't ask for games that are on the same level as the million dollar budget games on the Windows platform. Although it looks like some people are trying to accomplish just that. Check out WorldForge.org.
I played for roughly two years. Towards the end of my EQ career I took my play time and put it towards against my billable rate at work. Had I spent all that play time working on projects I'd be a few hundred thousand dollars richer.
I'd like to see a study on how MMORPG's effect people's lives. Several people who I met in EQ had their marriages go down the tubes because of the time they spent in game. When you add up the neglected jobs, wives, kids, pets, etc I am sure these games have a big impact. I'll admit I neglected a few things I shouldn't have because of it.
I seem to remember a stink a while back about Red Hat not wanting to distribute Quake II for Linux. If they didn't want to distribute a game then its probably safe to assume they don't want to deal with the licensing and porting aspect of it either.
What kind of performance hit do you take when you run a graphics intensive game under X? I don't play games on my Linux box but I have noticed certain applications that crawl under Linux but perform very well in Windows or MacOS, even with lesser hardware. Flash and Blender just to name a few. I would think some of these Loki games, Soldier of Fortune for example would be painful to play. (I'm downloading a demo now just to see for myself)
Yeah, I'm putting that one right up there with "should I let my wife mow the lawn" and "should I accept free drinks from the bartender."
These wannabe kernel compilers might even learn something in the process too. Like what happens when I replace a good kernel with something that I thought was a kernel.
If they just want to prevent online distribution then I can understand their motive. People are going to want to be able to record a TV show and then watch it later. There are people who work during prime time and can't watch TV. Surely the networks would prefer these people be able to tape and watch their programming and advertising rather than not view it at all. Unless the networks deliver programming that is viewable on demand they will benefit from the VCR and TiVo. Stopping unauthorized distribution is a different issue though. I think they are entitled to try to come up with something that will protect their rights. And I don't think you'll see much support of file swapping when it comes to actors as you did with some musicians. Actors in television do it for the money and syndication is where many of them make the big money. All those markets and all those royalty checks add up. You start throwing enough Seinfeld episodes out on the net and all of a sudden Babu might really have to return to Pakistan.
Not only that but we should all agree to buy the CD's from one obscure artist. All the sales will earn the artist gold records and maybe even a Grammy. Then we all return at once and watch the artist lose their awards due to a bad copy protection scheme. It will be the biggest scandal since Milli Vanilli.
I think I will choose neither. Rather than having a boxy looking phone that has a PDA built into it or a boxy PDA with a phone built into it I think I would rather keep my Visor and have it talk to my nice stylish looking phone (with the features I want in a phone) with something like Bluetooth. In other words I'd like to choose my PDA and my phone separatly. Right now I like the Visor, tomorrow I might like the next Linux PDA. The way the cell phone industry is in the US with providers locking you into a contract for a year and giving you the choice between a Nokia, Nokia, or perhaps even a Nokia it makes sense for me to just wait for the day when a phone and a PDA and a dash mounted GPS can all talk to each other rather than trying to combine them all into one unit. At least my Visor has managed to stay out of the junk drawer unlike my Avigo and my first generation CE device.
You will never seen a Microsoft or AOL exec talking about how cool the their companies or products are
I guess Katz has never seen how Steve Balmer reacts to upcoming Microsoft releases. He makes Jobs look like a mute, an armless and legless mute without sweat glands even.
Regardless of copyright, would they not be in violation of copyright for producing a device that bypasses a circumvention method?
Perhaps but consider this, their device copies audio CD's. The published standard does not allow for copy protection methods on audio CD's. If the RIAA pursued this they would probably in turn get hit with violating Philips patents by selling something, a copy protected CD, for what it is not. I think that would make an interesting case for sure.
When a company asks for resumes in Word format they are doing that to ensure they receive a document they can read. If you have Windows 95 or better you can save a document in Word format using Wordpad. If you are a Linux, er GNU/Linux user you can save a document in a Word format using several common word processors. Its not really that hard. You can even save plain text to.doc and these folks who insist on using Word will be able to read it.
As far as RMS goes, he sees all commercial software as a threat to himself and to humanity. While I often use Linux and other free software at home I still like and use commercial software. Sometimes it is a lot easier being the buttress of the Microsoft monopoly than it is trying to figure out how to get your new word processor installed that requires libXYZ.3.2.1.3 without breaking your MP3 player that still relies on libXYZ.3.2.1.1.
When Masahiro Mori sees international petroleum supertankers groan into Japan's Chiba, it must strike him, like many other energy visionaries, as an absurd image: a hazardous product being hauled thousands of miles across a potentially superior and cleaner fuel, hydrogen.
So he proposes using an "orbital death ray"? Someone please send this guy a copy of Star Wars.
True, you can pay less for VMWare but you still need a copy of Windows and a license to run it. This project isn't about running Windows apps on Linux (we already have that). This project is about an alternative to Windows that your mom can use.
Still, for a few bucks more you can buy Windows. The $100 Lindows price tag isn't going to help it any when the real thing is just a few dollars more.
I know at least six people who have dumped broadband in the last year because of the economy. It was just too expensive for them to justify the need for it. For many it is just a novelty. If my job didn't allow me to use a VPN and work from home occasionally I'd probably be on dialup and save about $30 a month.
High speed pop-up ads, 50 times faster than dialup. Sign me up!
I was going to build an Athlon box for DV editing, now with the new iMac I think I just saved myself some time. It has all the features I will need without the hassle. The only thing I wish it had were a wireless keyboard and mouse. That would be extra sweet.
Please please please do NOT do this to the local indie music retailer
Agreed, besides they might quit selling to you after a while. If I do the buy and return it's going to be from the big guys who also have an online/mail order presence. That way, even if they give me crap about returning them I can at least tell Amex that the CD's were defective and mail them back and get a refund one way or another.
Code generally goes through peer reviews and quality assurance before it is accepted into the main stream. Say waht you want about MS, but I'm sure they do these things (they can afford it!)
Mod this redundant if you will but given the QUANTITY of hotfixes I've had to apply to IE and Outlook alone this year it is hard for me to believe there is any kind of code review at all. Unless someone who is intentionally planting a back door has a function defined as void SecretAlQaedaBackdoor() how is review catch it? They're having a hard enough time catching common exploitable things such as buffer overflows.
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You'll never make it playing the management game that way. If your boss wants your team to do project x in 3 months and you go back and tell him that your developers say it can be done in 10 months you might find yourself quickly replaced by a manager who can say "yes sir, we'll have it in 3 months."
I've been on many projects and the truth is almost all of them have been on time no matter how crazy the deadline was. A good team of developers will surprise you when pressure is applied.
If you look at the BugTrack data at about mid page you'll see these numbers.
MandrakeSoft Linux Mandrake 7.2 33
RedHat Linux 7.0 28
MandrakeSoft Linux Mandrake 7.1 27
Debian Linux 2.2 26
Sun Solaris 8.0 24
Sun Solaris 7.0 24
Microsoft Windows 2000 24
By looking at these numbers I can only assume they are counting the bugs on that CD. But do they count bugs if a service pack CD is included? For example, if I buy 2000 today versus a year ago, I get a different serice pack CD in the box.
With the Windows worms out there the majority of them seem to attack the same vulnerabilities over and over again. This makes sense I guess because unfortunatly when you apply a service pack to Windows, something as simple as replacing your NIC will send you back to your pre-patch levels. This is something which I think Microsoft needs to spend more time educating people about. How many people know they need to reapply service packs when they add new hardware?
When I think about it, I get more security notice emails from the Red Hat network than I get critical update notifications from Microsoft. But what does this mean to me? Does it mean that one os is better because it has less bugs or does it mean that one company is better because they are doing more to let me know about potential problems?
But I guess the big story here is BSD is far more secure than Linux or Windows or Solaris.
You could argue that competition will drive prices down, but that would be naive as well. The telecommunications market isn't open: it's a cabal, just like the recording industry, and other favorite /. demons.
You must be fairly young. Take a look at long distance phone companies. There used to be a monopoly and long distance calls were very expensive. Today there are hundreds of LD companies competing and prices have dropped considerably. The same rings true for cellular. Competition has driven prices down.
Agreed. The characters sucked in Episode I. In fact, and I hate to say this, the most interesting character was probably Jar Jar. If you want the other stuff, just go to CrewOfTwo to see some cool Star Wars effects in action.
Blender has the ability to act as a game engine. There are Blender 3D games that you can run inside Blender. This plug in allows you to play these games in your browser. I haven't seen the plug in used to view models (like Volo View lets you view AutoCAD drawings). I think the Blender plugin is intended to be more like Flash and allow people to create interesting interactive content. When the Blender site comes back :) check it out. It's pretty cool.
Blender is also based in Python so a user can write python scripts to export their Blender models into other formats, say Lightwave or Renderman for instance. For a free product its damned amazing.
Come on, that link is almost 4 years old. Go to the official site and download the latest version for free. It is not open source but lack of that does not make it non free. It is a good product. I have used the Linux and the Windows versions and it is capable of amazing things.
Alias|wavefront is supposed to be releasing a free (for non commercial use) version of Maya soon. I heard it will embed a watermark in your work. But still, having access and getting exposure to software that costs thousands of dollars is well worth it.
I don't belive an open source game engine is the solution. It might help the hobbiest develop an interesting game but it's not going to pay their mortgage.
Games need to be proprietary. Companies need to make money in order to stay alive in the game industry. If they can license their engine and make money off the competition that is one thing, but giving away your bread and butter is bad business in my opinion. You do that and the Linux community will be stuck with what we have.
Open Source is great, don't get me wrong. But you can't ask for games that are on the same level as the million dollar budget games on the Windows platform. Although it looks like some people are trying to accomplish just that. Check out WorldForge.org.
I played for roughly two years. Towards the end of my EQ career I took my play time and put it towards against my billable rate at work. Had I spent all that play time working on projects I'd be a few hundred thousand dollars richer.
I'd like to see a study on how MMORPG's effect people's lives. Several people who I met in EQ had their marriages go down the tubes because of the time they spent in game. When you add up the neglected jobs, wives, kids, pets, etc I am sure these games have a big impact. I'll admit I neglected a few things I shouldn't have because of it.
I seem to remember a stink a while back about Red Hat not wanting to distribute Quake II for Linux. If they didn't want to distribute a game then its probably safe to assume they don't want to deal with the licensing and porting aspect of it either.
What kind of performance hit do you take when you run a graphics intensive game under X? I don't play games on my Linux box but I have noticed certain applications that crawl under Linux but perform very well in Windows or MacOS, even with lesser hardware. Flash and Blender just to name a few. I would think some of these Loki games, Soldier of Fortune for example would be painful to play. (I'm downloading a demo now just to see for myself)
Yeah, I'm putting that one right up there with "should I let my wife mow the lawn" and "should I accept free drinks from the bartender."
These wannabe kernel compilers might even learn something in the process too. Like what happens when I replace a good kernel with something that I thought was a kernel.
If they just want to prevent online distribution then I can understand their motive. People are going to want to be able to record a TV show and then watch it later. There are people who work during prime time and can't watch TV. Surely the networks would prefer these people be able to tape and watch their programming and advertising rather than not view it at all. Unless the networks deliver programming that is viewable on demand they will benefit from the VCR and TiVo. Stopping unauthorized distribution is a different issue though. I think they are entitled to try to come up with something that will protect their rights. And I don't think you'll see much support of file swapping when it comes to actors as you did with some musicians. Actors in television do it for the money and syndication is where many of them make the big money. All those markets and all those royalty checks add up. You start throwing enough Seinfeld episodes out on the net and all of a sudden Babu might really have to return to Pakistan.
Not only that but we should all agree to buy the CD's from one obscure artist. All the sales will earn the artist gold records and maybe even a Grammy. Then we all return at once and watch the artist lose their awards due to a bad copy protection scheme. It will be the biggest scandal since Milli Vanilli.
I think I will choose neither. Rather than having a boxy looking phone that has a PDA built into it or a boxy PDA with a phone built into it I think I would rather keep my Visor and have it talk to my nice stylish looking phone (with the features I want in a phone) with something like Bluetooth. In other words I'd like to choose my PDA and my phone separatly. Right now I like the Visor, tomorrow I might like the next Linux PDA. The way the cell phone industry is in the US with providers locking you into a contract for a year and giving you the choice between a Nokia, Nokia, or perhaps even a Nokia it makes sense for me to just wait for the day when a phone and a PDA and a dash mounted GPS can all talk to each other rather than trying to combine them all into one unit. At least my Visor has managed to stay out of the junk drawer unlike my Avigo and my first generation CE device.
You will never seen a Microsoft or AOL exec talking about how cool the their companies or products are
I guess Katz has never seen how Steve Balmer reacts to upcoming Microsoft releases. He makes Jobs look like a mute, an armless and legless mute without sweat glands even.
You know what? In real life when I look down I can't see my feet. I have not seen my feet in many years.
Regardless of copyright, would they not be in violation of copyright for producing a device that bypasses a circumvention method?
Perhaps but consider this, their device copies audio CD's. The published standard does not allow for copy protection methods on audio CD's. If the RIAA pursued this they would probably in turn get hit with violating Philips patents by selling something, a copy protected CD, for what it is not. I think that would make an interesting case for sure.
When a company asks for resumes in Word format they are doing that to ensure they receive a document they can read. If you have Windows 95 or better you can save a document in Word format using Wordpad. If you are a Linux, er GNU/Linux user you can save a document in a Word format using several common word processors. Its not really that hard. You can even save plain text to .doc and these folks who insist on using Word will be able to read it.
As far as RMS goes, he sees all commercial software as a threat to himself and to humanity. While I often use Linux and other free software at home I still like and use commercial software. Sometimes it is a lot easier being the buttress of the Microsoft monopoly than it is trying to figure out how to get your new word processor installed that requires libXYZ.3.2.1.3 without breaking your MP3 player that still relies on libXYZ.3.2.1.1.
When Masahiro Mori sees international petroleum supertankers groan into Japan's Chiba, it must strike him, like many other energy visionaries, as an absurd image: a hazardous product being hauled thousands of miles across a potentially superior and cleaner fuel, hydrogen.
So he proposes using an "orbital death ray"? Someone please send this guy a copy of Star Wars.
True, you can pay less for VMWare but you still need a copy of Windows and a license to run it. This project isn't about running Windows apps on Linux (we already have that). This project is about an alternative to Windows that your mom can use.
Still, for a few bucks more you can buy Windows. The $100 Lindows price tag isn't going to help it any when the real thing is just a few dollars more.
I know at least six people who have dumped broadband in the last year because of the economy. It was just too expensive for them to justify the need for it. For many it is just a novelty. If my job didn't allow me to use a VPN and work from home occasionally I'd probably be on dialup and save about $30 a month.
High speed pop-up ads, 50 times faster than dialup. Sign me up!
I wonder if it is the same crystals found in Wint-O-Green Lifesavers? They emit light when you bite them.
I was going to build an Athlon box for DV editing, now with the new iMac I think I just saved myself some time. It has all the features I will need without the hassle. The only thing I wish it had were a wireless keyboard and mouse. That would be extra sweet.
Please please please do NOT do this to the local indie music retailer
Agreed, besides they might quit selling to you after a while. If I do the buy and return it's going to be from the big guys who also have an online/mail order presence. That way, even if they give me crap about returning them I can at least tell Amex that the CD's were defective and mail them back and get a refund one way or another.
Code generally goes through peer reviews and quality assurance before it is accepted into the main stream. Say waht you want about MS, but I'm sure they do these things (they can afford it!)
Mod this redundant if you will but given the QUANTITY of hotfixes I've had to apply to IE and Outlook alone this year it is hard for me to believe there is any kind of code review at all. Unless someone who is intentionally planting a back door has a function defined as void SecretAlQaedaBackdoor() how is review catch it? They're having a hard enough time catching common exploitable things such as buffer overflows.