OO is only better than MS because you don't have to pay for a bloated mess. The best office package I've used is Lotus Smart Suite. I'd be glad to pay a three digit sum for a cross-plattform version (Linux/OS X/Win) of that office package.
Seriously: You broke the WoW rules. No use whining on/. about it.
"Cmdrtaco" or anything simular is a name that does not comply with the WoW Naming rules in more than one way. That's a simple fact. l33tspeak and cool modern culture nicks that are clearly recognized as such, just as unspeakable consonants-only silables go against the spirit of Fantasy RPGs and thus are rightfully prohibited in WoW. I'm so glad WoW has such strict rules. There still are people who get a kick out of pointless or twisted namings and they barely get through with it, but at least they don't suck entirely. If I were a GM on WoW I had done the same and asked you to change your name.
Sorry, Commander, no Taco for you. Your imposing a fantasy character, so come up with a fantasy name. Or go somewhere else to play online.
It may sound crazy but the cheapest solution with relatively low power consumption and a high reduncancy I can think of would be some bizarely large PC (Quad Opteron w 16 GB RAM or something) and 30 to 50 external USB harddrives attached. Add in Linux and some virtual Software RAID thingy set up to make good use of the Horsepower and the only problem you have left might be IO speed. Ext3 is a slowpoke, but it's free, stable and safe - and probably fast enough. The biggest problem is finding USB adapters that can handle the load and enough sockets to plug them into. I don't know the USB specs, but from what I can tell USB 2 is far more powerfull than people usually expect. You'll need a little scripting to keep track of all those drives and their state, but it should work on the software side. Your power consumption would be extremely low for 'homebrew' and redundancy and inexpensiveness would be best. And you can get everything for that at your local PC shop. Exept the Quad Opteron Board maybe.
Let's see: Biiiiiig PC + 5 heavyweight USB 2 Cards => 9000$ 60 external 0,4 TB USB HDDs => 18000$ 12 USB Switches => 1000$ Backup HDDs, USB stuff and spare parts => 5000$
Sum: 33000$
That's extremely cheap. If it works with all those USB drives hooked to one Box this is your ticket. Crazy but feasable none the less.
This article has "shady marketing ploy" written all over it. A few days after Apple releases Aperture, we have Dvorak ranting about the current state of Photo Editing tools. I bet in his next column he's gonna write about Aperture and how cool it is. It IS cool, mind you, but this is a marketing ploy none the less. Fits the image Dvorak has in public too.
1st of all WotC aren't the creators of D&D. TSR was and was bought by WotC after they took down the entire RPG market with the invention of modern trading card games (TCG), read: Magic. Thus the wise saying: "Save gaming! Kill a Magic player today!"
2nd: The only likeness of RPG gaming and programming I can come up with is that both try to emulate/simulate certain aspects of the real world. You can have endless discussions on the pro's and con's about different RPG rulesets just as you can have endless debates about different Appserver Frameworks and PLs. Usually you can even have them with the same people. Probably even draw comparsions. D&D rules == Brainfuck, World of Darkness == PHP, GURPS == Perl, Torg == Ruby... or something like that. And you can blow huge amounts of time explaining a D&D player that the rules are crap just as you can blow the same amount of explaining an MS user why Windows sucks:-) . (Posters please cue Old-School Fidonet RPG rule debate / flamewar below)
The other thing they have in common is a meta attribute of both: Both are praticed by uncool people who are low on sex and like to stay indoors.:-)
-----
Slightly off topic trivia: A few weeks ago I went surfing for some RPG tidbits and found the old folks of Palladiumbooks. They are still around and publish stuff! I find it amazing that a company sticks purely to RPGs (even during the excessive TCG hype) and still is alive and kicking after more that two decades. And their RPG "Rifts" is the last large multi-genre RPG still around, surviving all others. Very interessting indeed. Check out their site, they have all the cool stuff still there.
I recently got up to speed with a real life commercial PHP App a client needs. Allways wanted to do that, and been mucking around with the one or other PHP threeliner throughout the years. PHP is just as people percieve it: Some strange sort of SSI PL that has become the reference for everything SSI. While Perl has a very funny syntax (on the brink of being silly) PHP has some strange sort of order to it. The "->" Object.method separator being only one of those strange things. But now I've learned from 1st hand experience why this awkward PHP thing is the most powerfull SSI solution and why people are using it for stuff any programmer in his right mind wouldn't dream of using PHP for: Documentation. Throw a beercan into a crowded shopping mall at saturday moring. The person yelling "Ouch!" has either a) written a PHP/MySQL app themselves, b) is related to somebody who did or c) knows somebody personally whos built a PHP/MySQL CMS or written a Book on the subject. Type your PHP question into Google and it will pop up the answer. Wanna do some webapp stuff? You can bet there is a PHP function for that, and that there are at least 5 Tutorials explaining how to use it. Plus a very well written official reference. The designers I work with have zilch knowledge of datamodelling (or objectmodelling for that matter) and the app we're building just now is a relational intergrety nightmare - yet all of them each know a few lines of PHP. The sheer number of ready made OSS/PD PHP solutions out there outweigh every amount of Java web applikations ever written. PHP is open, extremly well documented, fast, cheap, scalable and is based on tried and true technologies.
It boils down to a quite simple fact actually: PHP is nothing less than the web generations Basic.
You have to give them that: They're extremely thick when it comes to grasping what this is all about. They coudl've taken over the Linux/OSS market with a wave of a hand 3 years ago. But no, the had to bicker about anti-american OSS Licences and other BS - things people didn't give a sh*t about before that. They even could probably take it over now with carefull marketing and loads of cash. Buy Canonical, 150 Debian developers and Linus Torwalds, build a closed-source zero-hassle Direct X Kernel module and some other nifty things and lead the OSS bandwagon into a bright new future of unified services with commercial closed source MS Linux Extensions. Buy sourceforge, start a OSS Software of the Year Award, offer stripped top-notch IDEs for free, extended ones for cash. Buy trolltech and tell the world what Unix desktop everyone will use. They'd have the power and the cash to do it and pull through.
But no, they're sticking to their Windows crap. Zero remoting (exept with OSS VLC setups), ancient connectivity standards and the same type of hardware setup mess you get with everything else on the PC plattform.
MS inability to tap their power is the reason Apple has a real chance of taking over the entire Appliance market.
As far as I'm concerned, Nedit and Jedit have replaced Vi and Emacs as the top two rivaling editors. Both are among the best editors available today. Check them out : http://www.nedit.org/http://www.jedit.org./
Wrong. If you're building Amazon or a simular service (million visits/day) everything scales. I don't know the exact budget the Amazon portals had, but buying Guido von Rossum or Larry Wall and ten of their favorite programmers for life would've probalby been less than a month of amazons electricity bill.
If I were to rebuild Amazon I'd actually consider Python. If the VM doesn't cut it, I'd hire 20 programmers to optimize it. Which, btw, I don't think would be neccesary.
Another scenario is even more realistic. MySQL sucks for certain purposes. But if a certain OSS CMS I like only runs with it, but the project is big enough to imperatively require Postgres or Firebird, then the projects budget should allow to patch in support for that DB.
Dunno if there is such a licence. If there isn't, maybe you should just make one?
GPL OSS can make sense as a part of a business
on
Nessus Closes Source
·
· Score: 1
If you release a commercial product as GPL OSS - which I have done - you have to be ready to go with it hook sinker and all. Which the Nessus people obviously weren't. Going OSS with a working closed source product can but only have ONE SINGLE commercial benefit: As a marketing ploy. That's the simple truth.
If you have a finished piece of Software and you want it to soar by going GPL, you'll have to be ready to play the informal and emotional turnpike for all that's involved. That works well by tying the product to a single person who built it and maintains it (Kaspar Skarhoj -> Typo3, Linus Torwalds->Linux Kernel,...) and so forth.
Nobody has interest in forking Typo3, because nobody can move as much as Kasper when it comes to T3. He know's what's going on. He's the emporer and the T3 people are his minions. He serves them and thus they are ready to follow him. If Kasper would start getting pissy with all people involved, they would be off on their own very fast. PHPNuke went that way. The creator didn't make the transition from mere programmer to community leader/maintainer. He was sad that no one paid him for what he'd done and started withdrawing from the unwritten deal. And so Nuke was forked something like 10 million times and eventually died the death of Über-forkage. It's not the top PHP CMS anymore.
Bottom line: GPLing stuff only makes sense as a business, if you are willing to move along in the evolution of the product. Nessus could do huge moves with a GPLd version. Even I know the name, allthough I'm not a security guy. That they withdraw all mixed up because competition is using their stuff only shows that they don't understand. From the GPL point of view, that others are using Nessus is an advantage, not a downside.
No, this is no big entry for Blender. Yes, Blender is far away from competing with Maya. It's probably even far away from competing with 3DSCrap - allthough not so very far I'd say. But there is one thing significant about Blender as an OSS Design Software:
While comparing Gimp to PS or Sketch to Illustrator is just plain silly, there is actually a point in comparing Blender to commercial 3D Software. Let's not forget: Blender was a commercial package itself back then. I even bought a licence for ca. 400$.
So, yes, over time it is not unlikely that Blender will be a solid alternative to Maya, Softimage, Houdini, Lightwave and the rest. Blender 2.4 is coming (probably at the blender conference next week) with a complete redo of IK. There are less than 10 open ends that need programming/redoing (renderer, joints, proper NLA, more/better modelling to name a few) but even though this is lots of work, it's an overseable amount of work. Each of these open ends can be done by a good programmer with a few months time. Blender *is* invading the 3D market. Especially in education. Softimage's 3Democracy campaign is one result of this.
If the Blender team could be the first to come clear with an XML based 3D format they could even call the shots and establish a new universal 3D standard.
Bottom line: Over time Blender could very well become a big player in the 3D world. Just not tomorrow.
The makers of 3DSCrap bought the makers of Maya. Wonderfull.
Why can't it be the other way around? Alias/Wavefront are real innovators in the field of 3D. Discreet/Autodesk products are more often just rehashed crummy re-releases of older versions. This really sucks. On the other hand, one can't really complain about the lack of competition in the 3D market.... But that could change fast.
I guess the 3D market is in for some serious consolidation.
How about a true Ringoworld movie, not some lame rippoff. That would actually be something really cool. I trust Peter Jackson to do a really good Hard Science Fiction flick. But Halo as a movie sounds like some really one-dimensional hollywood action crap even Jackson can't resque.
Ringworld on the other hand does have some real movie potential.
The USB drive isn't the safest way. An emergency kit of quarter-than-original sized copies of all documents, stamped and signed by an atourney/solicitor are the best to hold up against official double checking. When things get tough, no one's gonna take anything digital for granted. In 5 years from now you'll be able to fake anything you want with a PDA and a cheap off-the-shelf printer. Do good small fotocopies of the important stuff, fold them well and vacuumwrap them twice. After you've had them checked, verfied and stamped and signed by a solicitor that is. If you have business information that's imporrtant to you (and you only) and you want to squeeze it onto USB Chip, I recommmend some OSS filsesystem and way of encryption - they're the most likely to be readable a few decades from now. ext2, maybe fat16 or both as Filesystem. But then again, where to keep the crypto-key?... Consider some sort of obfuscation rather than encryption - you want to be able to extract data in any situation without having to memorize 4kb of gibberish.
You seem to get along well with your boss, which is a plus. First of all the concept of IP itself is flaky at best. Keep that in mind before pestering your boss and yourself to much in advance. If it's just another dynamic website that you can DL of the web by the millions don't raise to much fuss. You'll cause more trouble than it's worth.
I'd do the following:
If he actually pay'd your time well and you had no inclination to do the app on your own it's only fair to have him and you both own the copyright to the code seperately but thus with equal rights. Each with the right to build a 30 000 $ Application from it, relicence it as OSS or both.
That's the easiest for good bosses/clients who do well at keeping you alive for the project you're doing for them: You pay me well for the result == you get simultanious copyright to all I did on the project. Not unique, but all the same.
If you're a freelancer and he doesn't want you to sell it to competition at all, you'll have to cut another type of deal. Mine usually is: I get paid for result, not time (which means more money, more freedom but more responebility), client owns code, me own code (as above) but the project goes GPL aswell, with both as authors. Usually we agree to both work on new opportunities for business. Agreeing on an all out release under OSS is a good way to avoid 'ownage' fights which can get irrational very fast and is a good way of keeping/re-establishing the peace between partners/clients. And a marketing tool aswell of course.
The features are neat and seem do good at dealing with the "E-Mail ist everything" Groupware approach. Which I don't like to much but that would just be me. Expect the client to do a little slowpocking and eat reasources - but that's a fair trade for a free Groupware that pushes some limits. I'd actually go by and build an entire Groupware like the Basecamp service in Flash/AS - but again that's just me.
Kudos to them or going through the fuss with JavaScript.
Now Imagine e-groupware, opengroupware, more-groupware, knowledgetree, zimbra and a few other getting together and building ONE GW suite. That would kick the ass out of MS Exchange, no?
Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.
- Bruce Schneier
How is 'Lost' a Sci-Fi Show?... nevermind. That list is just a Web-Columnist on a budget at work I guess. And Raumpatrouille isn't even mentioned. Raumpatrouille! Yeah! RÜCKSTURZ ZUR ERDE, baby! , Alphaorder, "Starlight Casino",... you know the drill. There's nothing like it. When this german TV show ran in the early sixties the street were empty. No, there's no doubt: 'Raumpatrouille' is the original. Everything else is just a rippoff.;-)
Curiously original ST is at position 1 and it's arguably strongly influenced by Raumpatrouille.
Signed Tamara Jagolowsk Galaktischer Sicherheitsdienst
Yeah! He's right on. See, with a constitution you get cool stuff like the following:
highest ratio of inmates worldwide
death penalty 24/7
every analphabetic insaniac can legaly get a gun within 10 minutes and enough ammo to kill everyone on the block without even raising suspicion
straight C presidents (they cheat in school, just like you, cool isn't it?)
zero social network (social network is for sissies that have NO CONSTITUTION!)
A gouverment that really leaves you alone - even when your washed away by a biblic flood
A cool PATRIOT act that lets the police do stuff to you that makes a London Tube Arrest look like a field trip to disney land. Makes for tough guys, builds character and teaches you some respect for the gouverment, you pansy-ass whimp!
DMCA for free - plus 20 years on the electric chair for violating it. (Your relatives might have to pay the electricity bill though)
built in eternal permission to turn up late for world wars
pop tarts (don't forget them!)
So, quit the whining and get youself a constitution you mince-pie eatin' sissy!
Buy Mac Mini. Unpack. Attach to wall outlet. Turn on. Finished.
The x86's ultimate Hardware Mess (How many Sockets have we now? Thirteen?) is one of the prime reasons I've started switching from x86/Debian to Apple a year ago. Good OS, Hardware consistency all the way through, safe, predictable and usable. Absolutely zero driver-crap Windows and Linux is plaqued with. No need to shell out aprox. 2000$ and add another 20 hrs. of private Linux Install Party just to get a decent, quiet mini system. If x86/Linux doesn't turn out to be prime choice in a few years from now it will be because Apple passed it just before the finishing line. And x86 hardware mess will be the reason for that.
Great. Just bought a 2nd GBA SP 8 weeks ago. With the small one coming up and this new one... guess I'll wait a while before shelling out money again. But I'm going o at look at it. Always thought the SP screen could be a little brighter.
Now there's a Browser that actually lets me notice my 1,2 Ghz / 512 MB. Everything else, including the native Safari I just was using a minute ago, is nothing but the ultimate slowpocke compared to this one. I'd had allready forgotten how fast it was. True Fullscreen, true and non-bullshit zooming, super-crisp rendering quality (including the textbox I'm just writing in) and some other niceys make this a very fine piece of software indeed. Guess these Opera folks just got themselves a new user.
Slashdot Mirror
OO is only better than MS because you don't have to pay for a bloated mess. The best office package I've used is Lotus Smart Suite. I'd be glad to pay a three digit sum for a cross-plattform version (Linux/OS X/Win) of that office package.
Seriously: You broke the WoW rules. No use whining on /. about it.
"Cmdrtaco" or anything simular is a name that does not comply with the WoW Naming rules in more than one way. That's a simple fact. l33tspeak and cool modern culture nicks that are clearly recognized as such, just as unspeakable consonants-only silables go against the spirit of Fantasy RPGs and thus are rightfully prohibited in WoW. I'm so glad WoW has such strict rules. There still are people who get a kick out of pointless or twisted namings and they barely get through with it, but at least they don't suck entirely.
If I were a GM on WoW I had done the same and asked you to change your name.
Sorry, Commander, no Taco for you. Your imposing a fantasy character, so come up with a fantasy name. Or go somewhere else to play online.
It may sound crazy but the cheapest solution with relatively low power consumption and a high reduncancy I can think of would be some bizarely large PC (Quad Opteron w 16 GB RAM or something) and 30 to 50 external USB harddrives attached. Add in Linux and some virtual Software RAID thingy set up to make good use of the Horsepower and the only problem you have left might be IO speed. Ext3 is a slowpoke, but it's free, stable and safe - and probably fast enough.
The biggest problem is finding USB adapters that can handle the load and enough sockets to plug them into. I don't know the USB specs, but from what I can tell USB 2 is far more powerfull than people usually expect. You'll need a little scripting to keep track of all those drives and their state, but it should work on the software side.
Your power consumption would be extremely low for 'homebrew' and redundancy and inexpensiveness would be best. And you can get everything for that at your local PC shop. Exept the Quad Opteron Board maybe.
Let's see:
Biiiiiig PC + 5 heavyweight USB 2 Cards => 9000$
60 external 0,4 TB USB HDDs => 18000$
12 USB Switches => 1000$
Backup HDDs, USB stuff and spare parts => 5000$
Sum: 33000$
That's extremely cheap. If it works with all those
USB drives hooked to one Box this is your ticket.
Crazy but feasable none the less.
This article has "shady marketing ploy" written all over it. A few days after Apple releases Aperture, we have Dvorak ranting about the current state of Photo Editing tools. I bet in his next column he's gonna write about Aperture and how cool it is. It IS cool, mind you, but this is a marketing ploy none the less.
Fits the image Dvorak has in public too.
1st of all WotC aren't the creators of D&D. TSR was and was bought by WotC after they took down the entire RPG market with the invention of modern trading card games (TCG), read: Magic. Thus the wise saying: "Save gaming! Kill a Magic player today!"
... or something like that. :-) . (Posters please cue Old-School Fidonet RPG rule debate / flamewar below)
:-)
2nd:
The only likeness of RPG gaming and programming I can come up with is that both try to emulate/simulate certain aspects of the real world. You can have endless discussions on the pro's and con's about different RPG rulesets just as you can have endless debates about different Appserver Frameworks and PLs. Usually you can even have them with the same people. Probably even draw comparsions.
D&D rules == Brainfuck, World of Darkness == PHP, GURPS == Perl, Torg == Ruby
And you can blow huge amounts of time explaining a D&D player that the rules are crap just as you can blow the same amount of explaining an MS user why Windows sucks
The other thing they have in common is a meta attribute of both: Both are praticed by uncool people who are low on sex and like to stay indoors.
-----
Slightly off topic trivia: A few weeks ago I went surfing for some RPG tidbits and found the old folks of Palladiumbooks. They are still around and publish stuff! I find it amazing that a company sticks purely to RPGs (even during the excessive TCG hype) and still is alive and kicking after more that two decades. And their RPG "Rifts" is the last large multi-genre RPG still around, surviving all others. Very interessting indeed. Check out their site, they have all the cool stuff still there.
I recently got up to speed with a real life commercial PHP App a client needs. Allways wanted to do that, and been mucking around with the one or other PHP threeliner throughout the years.
PHP is just as people percieve it: Some strange sort of SSI PL that has become the reference for everything SSI. While Perl has a very funny syntax (on the brink of being silly) PHP has some strange sort of order to it. The "->" Object.method separator being only one of those strange things.
But now I've learned from 1st hand experience why this awkward PHP thing is the most powerfull SSI solution and why people are using it for stuff any programmer in his right mind wouldn't dream of using PHP for:
Documentation.
Throw a beercan into a crowded shopping mall at saturday moring. The person yelling "Ouch!" has either
a) written a PHP/MySQL app themselves, b) is related to somebody who did or c) knows somebody personally whos built a PHP/MySQL CMS or written a Book on the subject.
Type your PHP question into Google and it will pop up the answer.
Wanna do some webapp stuff? You can bet there is a PHP function for that, and that there are at least 5 Tutorials explaining how to use it. Plus a very well written official reference.
The designers I work with have zilch knowledge of datamodelling (or objectmodelling for that matter) and the app we're building just now is a relational intergrety nightmare - yet all of them each know a few lines of PHP.
The sheer number of ready made OSS/PD PHP solutions out there outweigh every amount of Java web applikations ever written. PHP is open, extremly well documented, fast, cheap, scalable and is based on tried and true technologies.
It boils down to a quite simple fact actually:
PHP is nothing less than the web generations Basic.
You have to give them that: They're extremely thick when it comes to grasping what this is all about.
They coudl've taken over the Linux/OSS market with a wave of a hand 3 years ago. But no, the had to bicker about anti-american OSS Licences and other BS - things people didn't give a sh*t about before that.
They even could probably take it over now with carefull marketing and loads of cash.
Buy Canonical, 150 Debian developers and Linus Torwalds, build a closed-source zero-hassle Direct X Kernel module and some other nifty things and lead the OSS bandwagon into a bright new future of unified services with commercial closed source MS Linux Extensions. Buy sourceforge, start a OSS Software of the Year Award, offer stripped top-notch IDEs for free, extended ones for cash. Buy trolltech and tell the world what Unix desktop everyone will use. They'd have the power and the cash to do it and pull through.
But no, they're sticking to their Windows crap. Zero remoting (exept with OSS VLC setups), ancient connectivity standards and the same type of hardware setup mess you get with everything else on the PC plattform.
MS inability to tap their power is the reason Apple has a real chance of taking over the entire Appliance market.
It's just like I said before allready.
If I had MS shares, I'd start selling them by now.
As far as I'm concerned, Nedit and Jedit have replaced Vi and Emacs as the top two rivaling editors. Both are among the best editors available today. Check them out : http://www.nedit.org/ http://www.jedit.org./
Wrong.
Now Slashdotters will not only have a "full Photoshop replacement" to rave about, but also the "viable open source alternative to Illustrator".
Wrong.
If you're building Amazon or a simular service (million visits/day) everything scales. I don't know the exact budget the Amazon portals had, but buying Guido von Rossum or Larry Wall and ten of their favorite programmers for life would've probalby been less than a month of amazons electricity bill.
If I were to rebuild Amazon I'd actually consider Python. If the VM doesn't cut it, I'd hire 20 programmers to optimize it. Which, btw, I don't think would be neccesary.
Another scenario is even more realistic. MySQL sucks for certain purposes. But if a certain OSS CMS I like only runs with it, but the project is big enough to imperatively require Postgres or Firebird, then the projects budget should allow to patch in support for that DB.
Dunno if there is such a licence.
If there isn't, maybe you should just make one?
If you release a commercial product as GPL OSS - which I have done - you have to be ready to go with it hook sinker and all. Which the Nessus people obviously weren't.
...) and so forth.
Going OSS with a working closed source product can but only have ONE SINGLE commercial benefit: As a marketing ploy. That's the simple truth.
If you have a finished piece of Software and you want it to soar by going GPL, you'll have to be ready to play the informal and emotional turnpike for all that's involved. That works well by tying the product to a single person who built it and maintains it (Kaspar Skarhoj -> Typo3, Linus Torwalds->Linux Kernel,
Nobody has interest in forking Typo3, because nobody can move as much as Kasper when it comes to T3. He know's what's going on. He's the emporer and the T3 people are his minions. He serves them and thus they are ready to follow him. If Kasper would start getting pissy with all people involved, they would be off on their own very fast. PHPNuke went that way. The creator didn't make the transition from mere programmer to community leader/maintainer. He was sad that no one paid him for what he'd done and started withdrawing from the unwritten deal. And so Nuke was forked something like 10 million times and eventually died the death of Über-forkage. It's not the top PHP CMS anymore.
Bottom line:
GPLing stuff only makes sense as a business, if you are willing to move along in the evolution of the product. Nessus could do huge moves with a GPLd version. Even I know the name, allthough I'm not a security guy. That they withdraw all mixed up because competition is using their stuff only shows that they don't understand. From the GPL point of view, that others are using Nessus is an advantage, not a downside.
No, this is no big entry for Blender. Yes, Blender is far away from competing with Maya. It's probably even far away from competing with 3DSCrap - allthough not so very far I'd say.
But there is one thing significant about Blender as an OSS Design Software:
While comparing Gimp to PS or Sketch to Illustrator is just plain silly, there is actually a point in comparing Blender to commercial 3D Software.
Let's not forget: Blender was a commercial package itself back then. I even bought a licence for ca. 400$.
So, yes, over time it is not unlikely that Blender will be a solid alternative to Maya, Softimage, Houdini, Lightwave and the rest. Blender 2.4 is coming (probably at the blender conference next week) with a complete redo of IK. There are less than 10 open ends that need programming/redoing (renderer, joints, proper NLA, more/better modelling to name a few) but even though this is lots of work, it's an overseable amount of work. Each of these open ends can be done by a good programmer with a few months time.
Blender *is* invading the 3D market. Especially in education. Softimage's 3Democracy campaign is one result of this.
If the Blender team could be the first to come clear with an XML based 3D format they could even call the shots and establish a new universal 3D standard.
Bottom line:
Over time Blender could very well become a big player in the 3D world. Just not tomorrow.
The makers of 3DSCrap bought the makers of Maya. Wonderfull.
... But that could change fast.
Why can't it be the other way around? Alias/Wavefront are real innovators in the field of 3D. Discreet/Autodesk products are more often just rehashed crummy re-releases of older versions. This really sucks.
On the other hand, one can't really complain about the lack of competition in the 3D market.
I guess the 3D market is in for some serious consolidation.
Anyway, I'm sticking with Lightwave and Blender.
How about a true Ringoworld movie, not some lame rippoff.
That would actually be something really cool.
I trust Peter Jackson to do a really good Hard Science Fiction flick. But Halo as a movie sounds like some really one-dimensional hollywood action crap even Jackson can't resque.
Ringworld on the other hand does have some real movie potential.
The USB drive isn't the safest way. ... Consider some sort of obfuscation rather than encryption - you want to be able to extract data in any situation without having to memorize 4kb of gibberish.
An emergency kit of quarter-than-original sized copies of all documents, stamped and signed by an atourney/solicitor are the best to hold up against official double checking. When things get tough, no one's gonna take anything digital for granted. In 5 years from now you'll be able to fake anything you want with a PDA and a cheap off-the-shelf printer.
Do good small fotocopies of the important stuff, fold them well and vacuumwrap them twice. After you've had them checked, verfied and stamped and signed by a solicitor that is.
If you have business information that's imporrtant to you (and you only) and you want to squeeze it onto USB Chip, I recommmend some OSS filsesystem and way of encryption - they're the most likely to be readable a few decades from now. ext2, maybe fat16 or both as Filesystem. But then again, where to keep the crypto-key?
You seem to get along well with your boss, which is a plus.
First of all the concept of IP itself is flaky at best. Keep that in mind before pestering your boss and yourself to much in advance.
If it's just another dynamic website that you can DL of the web by the millions don't raise to much fuss. You'll cause more trouble than it's worth.
I'd do the following:
If he actually pay'd your time well and you had no inclination to do the app on your own it's only fair to have him and you both own the copyright to the code seperately but thus with equal rights.
Each with the right to build a 30 000 $ Application from it, relicence it as OSS or both.
That's the easiest for good bosses/clients who do well at keeping you alive for the project you're doing for them: You pay me well for the result == you get simultanious copyright to all I did on the project. Not unique, but all the same.
If you're a freelancer and he doesn't want you to sell it to competition at all, you'll have to cut another type of deal.
Mine usually is: I get paid for result, not time (which means more money, more freedom but more responebility), client owns code, me own code (as above) but the project goes GPL aswell, with both as authors. Usually we agree to both work on new opportunities for business.
Agreeing on an all out release under OSS is a good way to avoid 'ownage' fights which can get irrational very fast and is a good way of keeping/re-establishing the peace between partners/clients. And a marketing tool aswell of course.
The features are neat and seem do good at dealing with the "E-Mail ist everything" Groupware approach. Which I don't like to much but that would just be me.
Expect the client to do a little slowpocking and eat reasources - but that's a fair trade for a free Groupware that pushes some limits.
I'd actually go by and build an entire Groupware like the Basecamp service in Flash/AS - but again that's just me.
Kudos to them or going through the fuss with JavaScript.
Now Imagine e-groupware, opengroupware, more-groupware, knowledgetree, zimbra and a few other getting together and building ONE GW suite. That would kick the ass out of MS Exchange, no?
Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.
The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take
this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.
- Bruce Schneier
How is 'Lost' a Sci-Fi Show? ... nevermind. That list is just a Web-Columnist on a budget at work I guess. ... you know the drill. There's nothing like it. When this german TV show ran in the early sixties the street were empty. ;-)
And Raumpatrouille isn't even mentioned.
Raumpatrouille! Yeah!
RÜCKSTURZ ZUR ERDE, baby! , Alphaorder, "Starlight Casino",
No, there's no doubt: 'Raumpatrouille' is the original. Everything else is just a rippoff.
Curiously original ST is at position 1 and it's arguably strongly influenced by Raumpatrouille.
Signed
Tamara Jagolowsk
Galaktischer Sicherheitsdienst
See, with a constitution you get cool stuff like the following:
Makes for tough guys, builds character and teaches you some respect for the gouverment, you pansy-ass whimp!
So, quit the whining and get youself a constitution you mince-pie eatin' sissy!
Buy Mac Mini. Unpack. Attach to wall outlet. Turn on.
Finished.
The x86's ultimate Hardware Mess (How many Sockets have we now? Thirteen?) is one of the prime reasons I've started switching from x86/Debian to Apple a year ago. Good OS, Hardware consistency all the way through, safe, predictable and usable. Absolutely zero driver-crap Windows and Linux is plaqued with. No need to shell out aprox. 2000$ and add another 20 hrs. of private Linux Install Party just to get a decent, quiet mini system.
If x86/Linux doesn't turn out to be prime choice in a few years from now it will be because Apple passed it just before the finishing line. And x86 hardware mess will be the reason for that.
Great. Just bought a 2nd GBA SP 8 weeks ago. With the small one coming up and this new one ... guess I'll wait a while before shelling out money again. But I'm going o at look at it. Always thought the SP screen could be a little brighter.
Now there's a Browser that actually lets me notice my 1,2 Ghz / 512 MB. Everything else, including the native Safari I just was using a minute ago, is nothing but the ultimate slowpocke compared to this one.
I'd had allready forgotten how fast it was.
True Fullscreen, true and non-bullshit zooming, super-crisp rendering quality (including the textbox I'm just writing in) and some other niceys make this a very fine piece of software indeed. Guess these Opera folks just got themselves a new user.
... often. That's why Apache is such an exploit ridden viri host. Oh, wait, ...