I don't know about the rest of you, but this is really scary to me. Think about it. Of all the applications that you have, which one do you use the most? For me, its far and away my web browser. If a particular platform does not have a full featured browser (secure transactions, proxy, java, javascript, plugins, etc), its very unlikely that I would use it.
I see many people saying that "netscape was crap, I'm glad to see it go". Well, if netscape had never existed for Linux, I really don't think linux would be anywhere close to where it is today. An OS without a full featured web browser is a dead OS.
Mozilla is not up to the task yet, and won't be for quite some time. Netscape works, but is falling behind in support of new features (HTML 4, CSS2/3) fast. If Linux and other OSes don't have a modern browser, there is not much of a future for them.
Heck, if anything, I smell conspiracy. AOL buys Netscape. In the DOJ case, MS claims they haven't stifled competition (pointing at AOL/Netscape). MS gets off. AOL lets Netscape die. AOL and MS form a partnership. Result, MS is the only platform with a modern browser and AOL has the icon on the desktop. You heard it here first.
I personally don't like the idea of a domain name corresponding to its physical location. I don't want to need to change my domain name if I move. Thats the reason I bought it. Its a level of abstraction that separates the address from its location. Plus, having my own address makes it really easy for people to remember my email and web addresses.
This goes true for businesses. If a company does most of its business through the web, they want their customers/users to be able to find it easily. Using a search engine is actually a complicated step for a large percentage of the computer user population. The way most businesses look at it, if they don't have a nice domain name, they will lose customers due to them not being able to find the place.
The way DNS is currently used is exactly its orginal intent. Name services were developed to give those non-sense IP numbers some kind of human readable relevance. If we went with search engines to do all of our reference lookups, we don't need DNS. We could do just fine with plain ol' 192.168.113.17. If you think about it, what is DNS really? Its a lookup, a basic search engine.
As for using the.us top level domain. Sure, we could start doing that, as soon as they allow us to register those. It seems that the US government is trying to reserve those domains for its public schools.
I think the domain name thing should be a first-come first-serve system, as long as the person/entity that has the domain registered is actually using (as opposed to squatting). I would be pissed of some corp came a long and tried to strip my domain from me.
Everyone (5 people) that I have talked to that has purchased a MacMillian "Mandrake" distro has done so because it says "RedHat 6.0" on the box (which I believe RedHat is trying to prevent), and the price is much lower than the standard RedHat 6.0.
However from my experience, Mandrake is far from RedHat. It has major compatibility problems (the installer freezes on two of the three machines I needed to install it on). The machine that I did get it installed on is flakey. The PCMCIA services fail every 5-10 minutes requiring a restart. I've never had problems like this with RH. All of these machines were previously running RH 5.1 with no problems.
I'm not sure what Mandrake is trying to do, but I can see why they are not getting any respect.
The reason that many software products are bad has more to do with the actual software itself rather than its development process or the management involved with the product.
10-15 years ago computers had much less memory, much less disk space and therefore could not handle the complex programs that we have today. The software that we have today are UI driven, need to communicate with many other services and are expected to share data via some interface.
The software that we have today is several orders of magnitude more complex than software even 5 years ago. Most hardware drivers are really stable. Why? They are small, concise, and completely self-contained, which reduces their complexity. Large software procducts do not have this benefit of simplicity.
If you have ever been on a large software product, you know how complex it can be. Tracking down every single bug/dependancy is a time consuming task usually requiring a large team of quality assurance engineers. Fixing most bugs are easy. Fixing some others can result in complete re-writes of subsystems, or directly affect whole pieces of the software.
When it comes down to shipping a product, most companies want to ship bug-free software, but its impossible. There will always be bugs. So, a decision is made to not fix some bugs deemed "not harmful". Most of these bugs have work-arounds. Sometimes management makes bad decisions based on pressures from executive management to ship the product. But, when it comes down to it, the bugs are not in the system because of poor management, its due to the overly complex software.
Software is like atomic particles in a chaotic system. You can easily predict the outcome of one or two particles, but as you add a third particle the system becomes more difficult, adding a fourth, or fifth particle makes the system impossible to predict for all except the most powerful computers.
As software becomes more and more complex, we will see less and less control over its quality. Yes, poor management and poor design philosophies exacerbates the problem, but the underlying problem is still the complexity of the software.
You think the weather is difficult to predict? Wait another 20 years and see where software is.
The issue that Suck.com talks about is valid. Before RH went public, people worked on Linux for the pure joy of contributing something for the greater good. But now, people are going to start thinking about why they should do anything that directly benefits the big corporations.
This is why Netscape/Mozilla is having such a hard time attracting outside help. Nobody wants to work on something that they get nothing for but somebody else gets rich off of. In the early times of Linux, nobody was making money, but now people are (big $$), and that's going directly against the idea if OSS.
Suck mentions the war between KDE and Gnome. Both parties are going after the "unified desktop", but their ultimate goals are trying to create a business out of it. (The interview with Migel from Gnome states that they have started a support business)
Hopefully, the different distibutions will keep people interested in developing the software instead of feeling like they are doing work for the big corp for free. If help from the opensource community dies off and RH, Caldara, etc. are the only ones left developing, Linux is dead.
The RH IPO brought out the greediness in a lot of people. I hope this rotten apple doesn't ruin the whole bunch.
I am strongly suggesting that everyone (US citizens here) write your state representatives in both your state governments and federal governments. If you don't know who your reps are, just go to Vote-Smart and enter your ZIP code.
If you do write your reps, try to mail the letter the old fashioned way, since it is most effective because they are required to file every letter they receive.
For those of you who need a starting block as to what to say, here is what I am sending. It fits on a single page. Obviously, you may modify it if you want (you will probably want to replace the stuff in the brackets []):
---------------------
August 11, 1999
[STATE REP] [STATE REP ADDRESS] [STATE REP CITY STATE ZIP]
[YOUR NAME] [YOUR ADDRESS] [YOUR CITY STATE ZIP]
Dear [STATE REP],
I am writing you due to my concern over the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) that has been approved by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL). This proposed law will most likely come to the floor of the [YOUR STATE] State Legislature in the near future. I strongly request that you VOTE AGAINST this proposed law.
The legalities contained in the UCITA aim to protect the large computer software corporations who are sponsoring the law, while severely limiting consumer rights. Also contained within the UCITA is a ban on reverse engineering. This is by far the most disturbing amendment of the UCITA. If reverse engineering were to become illegal, a large portion of computer software and computer software businesses would cease to exist. Reverse engineering is a central point of computer software. Reverse engineering allows a developer to create software that is compatible with existing software. If reverse engineering were banned, a large portion of existing software would become illegal, while the remaining "legal" software applications would suddenly have monopoly status. This would destroy small computer software businesses and severely harm consumers due to limited choices. The amendment for banning reverse engineering only benefits the large corporations by allowing them to further secure their monopolies.
As a professional computer software engineer, I am asking you to VOTE AGAINST the proposed UCITA law. It is not good for [YOUR STATE] and it is not good for The United States.
For more information about why the UCITA is an unbalanced law, please point your Web browser to the following addresses:
http://www.cptech.org/ucc/ (talks about Uniform Commercial Code Article B2 of the UCITA) http://www.acm.org/usacm/copyright/usacm-ucita.h tml (letter from the ACM President) http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl ?/features/990531ucita3.htm (general issues) http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/ reed/990531sr.htm (other issues) http://linuxticker.com/artikel/135.html (informal review)
In general, I believe unions do nothing but protect the lazy worker. I have many friends that have worked in union factories, union stores, and even union offices. None of them have ever seen any benefit from belonging to a union. If anything, the union just took their hard earned dollars, or "dues" as they like to call it.
Those same friends would tell me about various workers who would take naps during their shift, sit in the TV isle at the store and watch their favorite soap, and then complain when they couldn't take their 15 minute break. These people could not be fired because the union would protect them! Unions protect the lazy worker, not the honest hard working people. Thats one of the reasons why there are very few unions in the tech industry. Everybody that I know is an extremely hard worker. They enjoy their job, and have no need for "union protection".
In the article they state that "unions cannot afford to be shut out of the glamorous, powerful high-tech industry, which accounts for an ever-larger share of the work force." Notice that they use the phrase "cannot afford". That's all they want. The unions just want to tap the high-tech market to suck union dues out of you.
I really dislike unions and have absolutely no sympathy for the people on the street holding the "ON STRIKE" banners.
This subject irritates me so much that I wrote a little essay on my website a while ago. I'm not a writer, so don't expect it to be elegant. Check it out if you want.
With Etrade, you need to open an account (which it sounds like you already did). Their docs on IPOs are really vague. So, a few days ago, I emailed the support dept and asked how to get in. ETrade takes "indications of interest" where you need to fill out a form that asks some basic investment type questions (what is your short/long term goals?, etc.). Based on your answers you may or may not be admitted to the IPO. Etrade wants the IPO to match your investment goals.
The strange part about this is that they only accept indications of interest for 2 hours. This usually happens after the close of the market (4:30 EST), but they will never tell you what day and you need enough cash in your account to cover the purchase.
If you go to the IPO section and find an IPO that has a "Go Now!" link, it is open and you can fill out one of their "indication of interest" forms.
I had a feeling that the RH IPO would be available today. I've been trying to log on to Etrade all afternoon, but their system is screwed up again and I have not been able to access anything.
The argument from Microsoft that compition is "thriving" now is driving me insane. The trial is about what they *did*, not what they are currently doing. I can't believe that the DOJ lawyers are going along with this.
I think we need to remind the DOJ lawyers that M$ is in court because of what they *did*, not what is going on now.
If some whacko goes and beats someone with a tire iron, but that victim is able to fully heal and recover. Do you think the assailant would get off by saying "Hey, look! He's fine. There's no perminent damage. Therefore, I didn't do anything wrong."? That's exactly what M$ is doing.
A large cluster of machines that work together to render 3D animation. This is a cost effective way to get really fast rendering times on 3D animation.
Well, let me say that I am a slashdot reader and a developer on the Dreamweaver team here at Macromedia. We get a number of requests for Dreamweaver for Linux (it just became the #1 request last week).
Macromedia does NOT have any plans for a Linux version, but lets just say that I have a Linux box with Wine/Twine on my desk at work...
You can send feature requests ("Please make a Linux version") to:
Programmers should still get paid the same salary for the act of programming, but the net worth of the software should not be how high it is currently.
So if you are not selling the product, where does the money to pay the salaries come from? Remember, it is the company trying to make a profit, not necessarily the coder. The developer on Netscape is a good example on how the *coder* makes money by going to the ISP to customize navigator, but where is the company that developed it in the first place? They don't exist anymore. This is why most companies are not going open source. Sure, the individual engineer could still make money, but not the company.
There are some interesting issues with going open source. For a product that has stiff compition, going open source would allow their competitors to see how they designed their product and copy ideas more easily. Sure, going open source would gain them a huge user base because it is free, but what makes more money, 4.6*10^19 users * $0, or 20,000 * $100? If there is very little need for services on the software (the software is easy to use and performs a specific task with no customization), there is no way to make money.
Like I said, OSS works great for areas of software where there is huge amounts of customization (operating systems, custom software, etc), but for anything less, it most likely will fail miserably. I'm not putting down OSS (I like it), just pointing out the limitations.
Commercial propietary software is not all bad. A lot of it provides products to users that would never survive under OSS. 99% of computer users can't program, therefore it is impossible for them to help maintain their desired applications. Thats why most OSS projects today are tools made for coders by coders. Linux is a great example. Linus didn't want to pay for the commercial UNIX varients, so he set out to make his own. A tool for a coder, by a coder.
Thus you can give away your game, and sell the artwork, msuic, story, etc. like any other copyrighted material such as books, paintings, etc.
So, what's the difference between charging for the art or the entire package? Allocate your money however you want, you are still "selling" it. ("Call now and will give you this advanced digital watch FREE!... with only $45 shipping and handling"):-)
The economics of proprietary software are flawed. No other market sells a good that is as ridiculously over priced compared to it's creation costs as software
Wrong. Creating software is more than just printing manuals and burning CDs. Most software takes teams of coders and quality assurance engineers years to produce. During this time, they are all drawing salaries and benefits just like any other profession.
Lets say you have a team of 10 coders and 10 QA, each earning an average of $50,000/year. Assume the total cost to the company is 1.6 times their salary to account for benefits. If it takes one year write the software, it costs the company $1.6 million ($80,000*20 employess) before they can even sell it! And this is only counting the salaries of the coders and QA. This does not account for salaries of management and sales and marketing, or even paying the electricity bills. If you throw all that in you are probably getting close $3 million.
Now assume they can sell the application for $100 profit per copy. At a production cost of $3 million, they would have to sell 30,000 copies (which is a lot tougher than you think) just to break even, let alone make a profit.
Most software companies won't even try to make a piece of software unless they feel they can get five times the return on investment. This isn't because they're greedy, but rather a for saftey reasons. If they project the market wrong, or overestimate demand, they can lose their shirt really quickly.
Despite the recent hype of open source software, the OSS model does not work in all areas of software. OSS works well in the operating system and software standards arena, but fails in the niche markets and small applications and games.
Don't get mad at the "evil" software houses that charge for their software. Trust me, most of them are making about the same amount of profit as any other type of business. Its only the big ones with dominant market shares that rake it in because they sell millions of copies. And the only reason they sell millions of copies is because it is a standard necessity for people. And when something becomes a standard, this is when OSS takes over (Linux, GIMP, KOffice, etc).
My grandfather once had a friend that was a typewriter salesman during the 1920's. By this time, the QWERTY standard had pretty much been established, but he was curious about the seemingly odd layout of the keys.
The answer that he was given was that the reason for the layout was both technical and marketing. The technical part was that it allowed the machine to work better (the jamming that the article talks about).
The marketing part is when it becomes interesting. When the QWERTY layout was designed, their main objective was to prevent the mechanism from jamming. The first version was not quite the layout we have today, but close. However, they noticed that the new layout made it difficult for the sales people to use, because the keys were in a fairly illogical order. If the sales people couldn't use it, there would be no chance that a potential customer would buy it. So, they decided to re-order a few keys.
I'm not sure what keys were moved, but the result was that it allowed the salesmen to easily type the word "typewriter" for demonstration purposes. This is why the word "typewriter" can be constructed using only the keys in the top row.
For all those of you out there that think Christian Gross's comment "And now the fun begins" is obsurd and open source software is going to conquer the world. Wake up, graduate from college (or get out of your academic/government job) and get a job in the realm of commercial application software, where people *outside* your company (none of this back end IT stuff that never sees the light of day) use your product.
Until you do, you lack the necessary knowledge and experience to make accurate judgements. I have been both in academic and commercial software. I have contributed to open source projects. I have seen both sides. Open source is needed to maintain standards and provide the basics, but it will never be cutting edge. It will always be the commercial software that blazes the path.
If you have ever worked on a commercial product you will know that customers only care about ONE thing, "Can I do my work with it?" They don't care what the code looks like. They don't care if the underlying architecture is genius. They only care about its usefulness.
This is just like how you don't care what the internal design of your microwave oven is. All you care about is whether or not it will heat your lunch noodles.
Given a choice between a free product that is well coded but lacks more powerful features, and commercial product that has sloppy code but has the tools that they need, most business will choose to pay for the commercial product. Why? They don't care about the code. They care about what it can do for them, and sometimes the cost of the commercial product is worth the features that they get.
And the money, well that drives compition and innovation.
Sorry, but this is going a little overboard. I know the internet is a revolution, and open source is changing/will change some (but not all) of how software is made. However, this article sounds more like the ramblings of a religious zealot rather than a cohesive statement or argument by a philosopher. (Blah, blah, blah, YEAH! Just like free software! blah, blah blah...)
I thought this article was going to talk about specific examples of similarities between historical revolutions and the ones happening now. He gave none. Just lots of genneralizations.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about the rest of you, but this is really scary to me. Think about it. Of all the applications that you have, which one do you use the most? For me, its far and away my web browser. If a particular platform does not have a full featured browser (secure transactions, proxy, java, javascript, plugins, etc), its very unlikely that I would use it.
I see many people saying that "netscape was crap, I'm glad to see it go". Well, if netscape had never existed for Linux, I really don't think linux would be anywhere close to where it is today. An OS without a full featured web browser is a dead OS.
Mozilla is not up to the task yet, and won't be for quite some time. Netscape works, but is falling behind in support of new features (HTML 4, CSS2/3) fast. If Linux and other OSes don't have a modern browser, there is not much of a future for them.
Heck, if anything, I smell conspiracy. AOL buys Netscape. In the DOJ case, MS claims they haven't stifled competition (pointing at AOL/Netscape). MS gets off. AOL lets Netscape die. AOL and MS form a partnership. Result, MS is the only platform with a modern browser and AOL has the icon on the desktop. You heard it here first.
- Darrick
I personally don't like the idea of a domain name corresponding to its physical location. I don't want to need to change my domain name if I move. Thats the reason I bought it. Its a level of abstraction that separates the address from its location. Plus, having my own address makes it really easy for people to remember my email and web addresses.
.us top level domain. Sure, we could start doing that, as soon as they allow us to register those. It seems that the US government is trying to reserve those domains for its public schools.
This goes true for businesses. If a company does most of its business through the web, they want their customers/users to be able to find it easily. Using a search engine is actually a complicated step for a large percentage of the computer user population. The way most businesses look at it, if they don't have a nice domain name, they will lose customers due to them not being able to find the place.
The way DNS is currently used is exactly its orginal intent. Name services were developed to give those non-sense IP numbers some kind of human readable relevance. If we went with search engines to do all of our reference lookups, we don't need DNS. We could do just fine with plain ol' 192.168.113.17. If you think about it, what is DNS really? Its a lookup, a basic search engine.
As for using the
I think the domain name thing should be a first-come first-serve system, as long as the person/entity that has the domain registered is actually using (as opposed to squatting). I would be pissed of some corp came a long and tried to strip my domain from me.
Everyone (5 people) that I have talked to that has purchased a MacMillian "Mandrake" distro has done so because it says "RedHat 6.0" on the box (which I believe RedHat is trying to prevent), and the price is much lower than the standard RedHat 6.0.
However from my experience, Mandrake is far from RedHat. It has major compatibility problems (the installer freezes on two of the three machines I needed to install it on). The machine that I did get it installed on is flakey. The PCMCIA services fail every 5-10 minutes requiring a restart. I've never had problems like this with RH. All of these machines were previously running RH 5.1 with no problems.
I'm not sure what Mandrake is trying to do, but I can see why they are not getting any respect.
The reason that many software products are bad has more to do with the actual software itself rather than its development process or the management involved with the product.
10-15 years ago computers had much less memory, much less disk space and therefore could not handle the complex programs that we have today. The software that we have today are UI driven, need to communicate with many other services and are expected to share data via some interface.
The software that we have today is several orders of magnitude more complex than software even 5 years ago. Most hardware drivers are really stable. Why? They are small, concise, and completely self-contained, which reduces their complexity. Large software procducts do not have this benefit of simplicity.
If you have ever been on a large software product, you know how complex it can be. Tracking down every single bug/dependancy is a time consuming task usually requiring a large team of quality assurance engineers. Fixing most bugs are easy. Fixing some others can result in complete re-writes of subsystems, or directly affect whole pieces of the software.
When it comes down to shipping a product, most companies want to ship bug-free software, but its impossible. There will always be bugs. So, a decision is made to not fix some bugs deemed "not harmful". Most of these bugs have work-arounds. Sometimes management makes bad decisions based on pressures from executive management to ship the product. But, when it comes down to it, the bugs are not in the system because of poor management, its due to the overly complex software.
Software is like atomic particles in a chaotic system. You can easily predict the outcome of one or two particles, but as you add a third particle the system becomes more difficult, adding a fourth, or fifth particle makes the system impossible to predict for all except the most powerful computers.
As software becomes more and more complex, we will see less and less control over its quality. Yes, poor management and poor design philosophies exacerbates the problem, but the underlying problem is still the complexity of the software.
You think the weather is difficult to predict? Wait another 20 years and see where software is.
The issue that Suck.com talks about is valid. Before RH went public, people worked on Linux for the pure joy of contributing something for the greater good. But now, people are going to start thinking about why they should do anything that directly benefits the big corporations.
This is why Netscape/Mozilla is having such a hard time attracting outside help. Nobody wants to work on something that they get nothing for but somebody else gets rich off of. In the early times of Linux, nobody was making money, but now people are (big $$), and that's going directly against the idea if OSS.
Suck mentions the war between KDE and Gnome. Both parties are going after the "unified desktop", but their ultimate goals are trying to create a business out of it. (The interview with Migel from Gnome states that they have started a support business)
Hopefully, the different distibutions will keep people interested in developing the software instead of feeling like they are doing work for the big corp for free. If help from the opensource community dies off and RH, Caldara, etc. are the only ones left developing, Linux is dead.
The RH IPO brought out the greediness in a lot of people. I hope this rotten apple doesn't ruin the whole bunch.
I am strongly suggesting that everyone (US citizens here) write your state representatives in both your state governments and federal governments. If you don't know who your reps are, just go to Vote-Smart and enter your ZIP code.
h tml (letter from the ACM President) l ?/features/990531ucita3.htm (general issues) / reed/990531sr.htm (other issues)
If you do write your reps, try to mail the letter the old fashioned way, since it is most effective because they are required to file every letter they receive.
For those of you who need a starting block as to what to say, here is what I am sending. It fits on a single page. Obviously, you may modify it if you want (you will probably want to replace the stuff in the brackets []):
---------------------
August 11, 1999
[STATE REP]
[STATE REP ADDRESS]
[STATE REP CITY STATE ZIP]
[YOUR NAME]
[YOUR ADDRESS]
[YOUR CITY STATE ZIP]
Dear [STATE REP],
I am writing you due to my concern over the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) that has been approved by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL). This proposed law will most likely come to the floor of the [YOUR STATE] State Legislature in the near future. I strongly request that you VOTE AGAINST this proposed law.
The legalities contained in the UCITA aim to protect the large computer software corporations who are sponsoring the law, while severely limiting consumer rights. Also contained within the UCITA is a ban on reverse engineering. This is by far the most disturbing amendment of the UCITA. If reverse engineering were to become illegal, a large portion of computer software and computer software businesses would cease to exist. Reverse engineering is a central point of computer software. Reverse engineering allows a developer to create software that is compatible with existing software. If reverse engineering were banned, a large portion of existing software would become illegal, while the remaining "legal" software applications would suddenly have monopoly status. This would destroy small computer software businesses and severely harm consumers due to limited choices. The amendment for banning reverse engineering only benefits the large corporations by allowing them to further secure their monopolies.
As a professional computer software engineer, I am asking you to VOTE AGAINST the proposed UCITA law. It is not good for [YOUR STATE] and it is not good for The United States.
For more information about why the UCITA is an unbalanced law, please point your Web browser to the following addresses:
http://www.cptech.org/ucc/ (talks about Uniform Commercial Code Article B2 of the UCITA)
http://www.acm.org/usacm/copyright/usacm-ucita.
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.p
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?
http://linuxticker.com/artikel/135.html (informal review)
Thank you,
[YOUR NAME]
Go listen to "Geeks in Space 4". They actually mention the beer that they will have. Its good micro brew. Not Dudweiser or Spiller.
In general, I believe unions do nothing but protect the lazy worker. I have many friends that have worked in union factories, union stores, and even union offices. None of them have ever seen any benefit from belonging to a union. If anything, the union just took their hard earned dollars, or "dues" as they like to call it.
Those same friends would tell me about various workers who would take naps during their shift, sit in the TV isle at the store and watch their favorite soap, and then complain when they couldn't take their 15 minute break. These people could not be fired because the union would protect them! Unions protect the lazy worker, not the honest hard working people. Thats one of the reasons why there are very few unions in the tech industry. Everybody that I know is an extremely hard worker. They enjoy their job, and have no need for "union protection".
In the article they state that "unions cannot afford to be shut out of the glamorous, powerful high-tech industry, which accounts for an ever-larger share of the work force." Notice that they use the phrase "cannot afford". That's all they want. The unions just want to tap the high-tech market to suck union dues out of you.
I really dislike unions and have absolutely no sympathy for the people on the street holding the "ON STRIKE" banners.
This subject irritates me so much that I wrote a little essay on my website a while ago. I'm not a writer, so don't expect it to be elegant. Check it out if you want.
With Etrade, you need to open an account (which it sounds like you already did). Their docs on IPOs are really vague. So, a few days ago, I emailed the support dept and asked how to get in. ETrade takes "indications of interest" where you need to fill out a form that asks some basic investment type questions (what is your short/long term goals?, etc.). Based on your answers you may or may not be admitted to the IPO. Etrade wants the IPO to match your investment goals.
The strange part about this is that they only accept indications of interest for 2 hours. This usually happens after the close of the market (4:30 EST), but they will never tell you what day and you need enough cash in your account to cover the purchase.
If you go to the IPO section and find an IPO that has a "Go Now!" link, it is open and you can fill out one of their "indication of interest" forms.
I had a feeling that the RH IPO would be available today. I've been trying to log on to Etrade all afternoon, but their system is screwed up again and I have not been able to access anything.
The argument from Microsoft that compition is "thriving" now is driving me insane. The trial is about what they *did*, not what they are currently doing. I can't believe that the DOJ lawyers are going along with this.
I think we need to remind the DOJ lawyers that M$ is in court because of what they *did*, not what is going on now.
If some whacko goes and beats someone with a tire iron, but that victim is able to fully heal and recover. Do you think the assailant would get off by saying "Hey, look! He's fine. There's no perminent damage. Therefore, I didn't do anything wrong."? That's exactly what M$ is doing.
A large cluster of machines that work together to render 3D animation. This is a cost effective way to get really fast rendering times on 3D animation.
Well, let me say that I am a slashdot reader and a developer on the Dreamweaver team here at Macromedia. We get a number of requests for Dreamweaver for Linux (it just became the #1 request last week).
Macromedia does NOT have any plans for a Linux version, but lets just say that I have a Linux box with Wine/Twine on my desk at work...
You can send feature requests ("Please make a Linux version") to:
wish-dreamweaver@macromedia.com
I don't know for sure what the educational license says, but I could ask. Contact me if you want to know: dbrown@macromedia.com
Programmers should still get paid the same salary for the act of programming, but the net worth of the software should not be how high it is currently.
So if you are not selling the product, where does the money to pay the salaries come from? Remember, it is the company trying to make a profit, not necessarily the coder. The developer on Netscape is a good example on how the *coder* makes money by going to the ISP to customize navigator, but where is the company that developed it in the first place? They don't exist anymore. This is why most companies are not going open source. Sure, the individual engineer could still make money, but not the company.
- Darrick
There are some interesting issues with going open source. For a product that has stiff compition, going open source would allow their competitors to see how they designed their product and copy ideas more easily. Sure, going open source would gain them a huge user base because it is free, but what makes more money, 4.6*10^19 users * $0, or 20,000 * $100? If there is very little need for services on the software (the software is easy to use and performs a specific task with no customization), there is no way to make money.
... with only $45 shipping and handling") :-)
Like I said, OSS works great for areas of software where there is huge amounts of customization (operating systems, custom software, etc), but for anything less, it most likely will fail miserably. I'm not putting down OSS (I like it), just pointing out the limitations.
Commercial propietary software is not all bad. A lot of it provides products to users that would never survive under OSS. 99% of computer users can't program, therefore it is impossible for them to help maintain their desired applications. Thats why most OSS projects today are tools made for coders by coders. Linux is a great example. Linus didn't want to pay for the commercial UNIX varients, so he set out to make his own. A tool for a coder, by a coder.
Thus you can give away your game, and sell the artwork, msuic, story, etc. like any other copyrighted material such as books, paintings, etc.
So, what's the difference between charging for the art or the entire package? Allocate your money however you want, you are still "selling" it. ("Call now and will give you this advanced digital watch FREE!
- Darrick
The economics of proprietary software are flawed. No other market sells a good that is as ridiculously over priced compared to it's creation costs as software
Wrong. Creating software is more than just printing manuals and burning CDs. Most software takes teams of coders and quality assurance engineers years to produce. During this time, they are all drawing salaries and benefits just like any other profession.
Lets say you have a team of 10 coders and 10 QA, each earning an average of $50,000/year. Assume the total cost to the company is 1.6 times their salary to account for benefits. If it takes one year write the software, it costs the company $1.6 million ($80,000*20 employess) before they can even sell it! And this is only counting the salaries of the coders and QA. This does not account for salaries of management and sales and marketing, or even paying the electricity bills. If you throw all that in you are probably getting close $3 million.
Now assume they can sell the application for $100 profit per copy. At a production cost of $3 million, they would have to sell 30,000 copies (which is a lot tougher than you think) just to break even, let alone make a profit.
Most software companies won't even try to make a piece of software unless they feel they can get five times the return on investment. This isn't because they're greedy, but rather a for saftey reasons. If they project the market wrong, or overestimate demand, they can lose their shirt really quickly.
Despite the recent hype of open source software, the OSS model does not work in all areas of software. OSS works well in the operating system and software standards arena, but fails in the niche markets and small applications and games.
Don't get mad at the "evil" software houses that charge for their software. Trust me, most of them are making about the same amount of profit as any other type of business. Its only the big ones with dominant market shares that rake it in because they sell millions of copies. And the only reason they sell millions of copies is because it is a standard necessity for people. And when something becomes a standard, this is when OSS takes over (Linux, GIMP, KOffice, etc).
- Darrick
My grandfather once had a friend that was a typewriter salesman during the 1920's. By this time, the QWERTY standard had pretty much been established, but he was curious about the seemingly odd layout of the keys.
The answer that he was given was that the reason for the layout was both technical and marketing. The technical part was that it allowed the machine to work better (the jamming that the article talks about).
The marketing part is when it becomes interesting. When the QWERTY layout was designed, their main objective was to prevent the mechanism from jamming. The first version was not quite the layout we have today, but close. However, they noticed that the new layout made it difficult for the sales people to use, because the keys were in a fairly illogical order. If the sales people couldn't use it, there would be no chance that a potential customer would buy it. So, they decided to re-order a few keys.
I'm not sure what keys were moved, but the result was that it allowed the salesmen to easily type the word "typewriter" for demonstration purposes. This is why the word "typewriter" can be constructed using only the keys in the top row.
For all those of you out there that think Christian Gross's comment "And now the fun begins" is obsurd and open source software is going to conquer the world. Wake up, graduate from college (or get out of your academic/government job) and get a job in the realm of commercial application software, where people *outside* your company (none of this back end IT stuff that never sees the light of day) use your product.
Until you do, you lack the necessary knowledge and experience to make accurate judgements. I have been both in academic and commercial software. I have contributed to open source projects. I have seen both sides. Open source is needed to maintain standards and provide the basics, but it will never be cutting edge. It will always be the commercial software that blazes the path.
If you have ever worked on a commercial product you will know that customers only care about ONE thing, "Can I do my work with it?" They don't care what the code looks like. They don't care if the underlying architecture is genius. They only care about its usefulness.
This is just like how you don't care what the internal design of your microwave oven is. All you care about is whether or not it will heat your lunch noodles.
Given a choice between a free product that is well coded but lacks more powerful features, and commercial product that has sloppy code but has the tools that they need, most business will choose to pay for the commercial product. Why? They don't care about the code. They care about what it can do for them, and sometimes the cost of the commercial product is worth the features that they get.
And the money, well that drives compition and innovation.
- Darrick Brown
Sorry, but this is going a little overboard. I know the internet is a revolution, and open source is changing/will change some (but not all) of how software is made. However, this article sounds more like the ramblings of a religious zealot rather than a cohesive statement or argument by a philosopher. (Blah, blah, blah, YEAH! Just like free software! blah, blah blah...)
I thought this article was going to talk about specific examples of similarities between historical revolutions and the ones happening now. He gave none. Just lots of genneralizations.
I'm not impressed.