It DID have a GUI, and in many cases it ran as well as Windows 95. There were loads of rough edges on the distros, but that was due less to Linux and more to no substantive commercial support or any of the "advanced" apps we've ended up with over the years. In a couple of years' time, you'd have KDE in it's infancy, which DID run on a 486 machine with 64Mb of RAM and you would see ApplixWare arrive for Linux. Was it what we have today? No. Was it easy to use? Not unless you were familiar with Unix machines and how they all worked. Was it faster and more capable than Windows 95? Yes. And, before you should comment that I'm biased, you should note that I am an accomplished Windows developer who was a Developer Beta Tester for the Chicago version of Windows which eventually became Windows 95 and that I've written numerous complex software systems for ActiveX frameworks (Like OCX components to drive 60 page per minute 600dpi scanners to their full speed with VB applications on a Pentium 166...) and wrote sophisticated cross-platform distributed systems that collected upwards of a $75k per day in parking revenues at DFW International Airport- code that compiled against *BSD, Solaris, Linux and Windows NT and ran better than anything before it.
Windows typically requires 2-4 times the resources over a comparable Linux installation to accomplish usable tasks. And, in the end, that's the key- usability. Sure, you can wedge Windows 95 onto a 386sx-25 laptop with only 4Mb of RAM and a 120Mb HD, but can you DO anything with it? Only with a LOT of patience as it swap-thrashes all to hell. Slackware, on the other hand...:-)
That's just a line in the sand they drew. I've set up loads of PII-350's and above that work WELL, so long as they have at least 128-256 Mb of RAM and at least 4 or more Gb of HD. I typically run Fedora Core 3/4 or Mandriva 2005/2006 on these boxes and they just simply work with little in the way of "slowness".
And, Windows can't do a firewall comfortably (or securely for that matter) with something like a 486 and 64Mb of ram and a floppy disc- Linux can...
Besides, if said officials are unaware of what causes pregancies then odds are they will not be reproducing, so hopefully the next generation will have fewer idiots in charge of their education.
That'd be wishful thinking, I fear. Just because you don't know what is causing the pregnancies, doesn't mean you won't be doing the act- you just don't connect the two things out of ignorance or abject stupidity. In this case, stupid people seem to be breeding like rabbits (as is evidenced by all the extremely stupid people about including Jack Thompson and apparently Frank Forcione and all the Canton, OH police department...)- they're just going to get worse as time progresses.
Say for example, the person in question that is told to leave has a Service Animal and is Handicapped and walks into a public place you run (And, this includes any business or governmental agency- technically, the USPS signs saying that only Seeing Eye Dogs are allowed in the building is in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act...).
1) Yes, you can make them leave, but you're in violation of the law if you're running anything other than something like a private club. If it's public, you're legally required to allow them in unless the animal or the person is actually disruptive to your operations or to the people present. And, better yet, if you call the cops, in most cases you will be the one receiving a ticket, etc. for a false call- if they did nothing else but bring the animal in, it's technically NOT trespass if you're a public business as the law is explicit; if you're handicapped and it's a service animal they HAVE to let you in unless the animal or yourself is in danger and you're not causing any issues otherwise (And this does NOT mean patrons being upset about a "pet" being in the place...)
2) The very act in question opens you up to a Civil Rights suit in a Federal Court which can amount to a lot of money on your part in court costs and damages if it's proven that they did nothing other than walk into your establishment.
Choose carefully what all you do- the law is NOT what most people actually think it is.
It's the intrim format for the PRINTING engine unless you print to RAW print queues- they use WMF or EMF (Same engine with extensions...) for spooling on Windows machines by default. Turning it off makes for a mess to say the least- it's not as easy as you'd think.
It's not that it's a GDI bug. It's a DESIGN MISFEATURE- the code does exactly what it's intended to do. The problem is that the feature is NOT secure, not a good idea on a system in the first place, and code and images shouldn't even be USING this thing.
F-Secure's hack, and yes, it's a hack, is an adequate fix until MS gets their damn hole that's been lurking since Windows 3.1 fixed.
The Indie segment of the industry doesn't make money from their CD's for the large part. They make it off of things like T-Shirt sales, concerts, etc. The only people making money off of sales of media is pretty much the major labels and their main affiliates (which parade as "Indie", but they're NOT...). Now, this doesn't excuse rampant ignoring of duplication/production rights- but to say that the Indies' are the ones who'll be hit worst is misdirecting the real issue which has NOTHING to do with Indies. Something that they just don't want you thinking about.
Well, I wouldn't go so far as saying that C# or Java is more "modern" than C++ (Which is kinda stupid...); but to say that C++ is "well engineered"...
C++ is well engineered in the same sense of PL/I was well engineered- and it's becoming as complex and convoluted. "Over engineered" would be a better description- and I'm a proponent of the language.
It's a misfeature of Windows itself. If you surf with ANY browser, you'll get zapped if you surf to a site set up to take advantage of this latest hole.
They had a "non-fragmented" market back a handful of years back. Dell tossed it to the curb, most likely due to pressure from Bill and Co. only months after doing it. Did you know that Michael Dell owns a good chunk of Red Hat? Did you know that Dell Ventures was one of the VC groups that helped take them public?
And don't go and tell me "fragmented"- what are the main distributions?
Red Hat SuSE Debian Slackware Mandriva
Now, realistically, the hardware involvement for support is largely the same for all of the above. That, my friend is all Dell cares about. What's the picture for Windows?
XP Professional XP Home Media Center 2003 Server Vista(Eventually...)
Each of the above setups realistically, with the exception of XP Home/Professional, have ever so slightly different hardware requirements and available driver profiles. Gee... Seems they have the same level of "fragmentation" and not all hardware can be realistically supported with each version- some drivers really only work with 2003 server or XP only, etc.
Any time someone trots out the "fragmentation" argument, I have to question ignorance or attribute it to trying to sell someone something, because it's mostly an empty argument. Which would it be in your case?
In fact, one of the "better" bang for buck AMD64 laptop offerings happens to be the HP/Compaq line of units. Reasonably reliable, maximized functionality, decent screen options, etc. All for 1000USD in most places. Not bad. Not my first choice in machines, though- what I wanted (But couldn't justify to my wife or myself...) was something in the class of Savrow's Katana KX9 or similar. Dual core, etc. I'd use the NVidia GPUs over an ATI one right at the moment. While the drivers work decently well, the ATI drivers work nicely with my Xpress200 setup on some games, others it bogs down BADLY. Under Windows, I see some of the same, but not as bad. In the case of NVidia's offerings, I do not see the same problems.
If I had any regrets with my Pavillion zv6000 so far over the past 3 months, it's been one of the GPU. Forced to turn on the UMA instead of just the integrated (which I'm suspecting is where part of the real slowdowns are coming from on this one...), slower on some stuff than it ought to be.
So many advocates of Java seem to miss this little detail- because they're tickled to not having to deal with the memory allocation, they think it's special and everyone should be using it. (Uh, BASIC had this... You'd think BASIC would have taken off more than it had if this was a useful thing for anything other than end-user application development...)
It amazes me how many people just don't "get it" with regards to this stuff- it's almost like they're not really teaching CS anymore. This is basic CS stuff and it seems to elude them.
It might be a death by a thousand cuts impact on performance, but unlike GC, it can be precisely and predictably controlled, GC can't. Therefore, if you're talking hard real-time tasks where late answers are failures, GC is a BAD idea as it soaks up CPU cycles because you're largely unable to do a task while memory's being GC'ed. Really, there is a place for all the different types of memory management, and trying to JAM one of them through that is utterly unsuitable for the task at hand is why we have the train wrecks we do in the IT industry.
For most applications, that might be the case, but it still injects bizarre loading behaviors in Real-Time apps, massively parallel apps, and high frequency data processing (i.e. the Stock Markets...) apps. I know, I develop code for the last category, and any Java apps we write (and we do write code IN Java as well as C++) avoid doing any code that does any dynamic allocations- otherwise we get little spikes (And, this is with modern JVMs...) that cause us to drop packet traffic like mad. JVMs don't do GC in a nice manner when you deal with data streams that swallow an OC-3 whole.
Don't get me wrong, GC's a nice thing to have- IF you can have it. For many problem sets, which actually comprise most of what goes for software engineering, GC's not a viable answer. For that matter, C++ is a tough call as well. C's better for many of those tasks as is something like Forth. If you think that a given tool is suitable for all tasks, you'd be mistaken. If you don't like dealing with something that doesn't do GC, then you probably ought to stay away from dealing with systems level programming, embedded systems, or HPC coding.
...the US' greatest asset, or more appropriately the rubbish that the bulk of the RIAA and MPAA members produce.
C'mon, now, if that stuff is all our greatest asset, then we're pretty much done for as a country and an economic power. And it's as disturbing that Congress views it that way too.
Garbage collection is a bad thing in many cases...
GC causes all kinds of load spikes that can bog down end user apps and blow server apps clean out of the water. GC makes things "easier" for the developer at the expense of overall performance. But, with at least C++, there are ways of accomplishing the same thing without needing a GC subsystem spooling up CPU cycles- smart pointers handle most of the same features that GC does in a safe and efficient manner. The code knows when a variable has dropped out of scope (it's compiled into the code itself...) and frees memory as opposed to a separate thread of execution periodically polling all the active objects to see which ones have dropped out of scope.
While wowing the developers is important, also providing them with a high performance, high reliability, and easy to use framework is important as well- moreso than wowing them. It does no good if it's "cool" to develop for a programming language, etc. if I'm spending 2-3 times the coding time for the other one or 2-3 times the debugging time, etc.
C#, for all of the claims of performance, is a a JIT based interpretive language. Ditto Java.
C#, for all of it's nicety, is little more than Java taken in MS' desired direction. If it weren't for Mono, C# wouldn't even be a subject of discussion as it'd been an MS only tool for use only on Windows (or whatever MS ends up calling thier stuff in the future...)
C, C++, and Objective-C are stable, robust languages that have been around for some time now. C# has not been around all that long, but since it's got all the "buzz" about it, people keep trying to deploy it everywhere.
Objective-C is actually a fairly clean OO language, moreso than C++. C++, while it's really good, has been muddied up with a bunch of conflicting design ideas that make for some...fun...with your coding if you're not paying attention to what you're doing.
All in all, I'd say that it's decent enough for doing Apple development- if you want to adapt Mono to that interface (Which, I believe, can be done...) knock yourself out.
He's just another utterly clueless pundit. To have them buy Opera is to admit that they didn't have what it takes to secure and extend the thing. MS flatly won't be inclined to do that if they can help it- this suggestion is in the same class as saying MS ought to do a Linux version of MS Office.
"As long as you can afford a digitial video camcorder, DVDs, and a burner, you can copy movies or TV or whatever. Who needs analog?"
Analog does NOT mean the process for recording it. It referrs to the process of viewing or listening a given work. In order to Camcorder it with a digital or analog camcorder, you NEED to have the "Analog" hole that they're trying to legislate away. If they implement effective means for enforcing the law (which I've grave doubts about them accomplishing it, but instituting draconian measures to attempt it all the same...) then your little camcorder remark is null and void.
I've never really seen 5-6 singles from an album in a long time. Pretty much since 45's went away, I've seen fewer and fewer singles. And even in it's heyday, the best I've ever seen was about four singles on the store shelves.
Which artists are you referring to, because even if I don't like the music, I'd love to see someone doing this (and putting 5-6 singles on a single disc doesn't count, that's just a mini-album).
This is the same damn song and dance they ran when Casette became available. Then the member labels figured out that this "Casette" thing actually meant better sales (I mean, 8-track in a car? C'mon!) for them and that they'd make more money because it actually cost less to make than a vinyl LP and was intrinsically easier to make. In this case, they need to re-evaulate the business model they're operating under and adapt or die. They have the potential to make as much money with newer business models adapted to the current tech situation, but NOOO... Well, that's fine; in the end, the ones that get this will survive, the ones that don't make the transition will go the way of the dodo, just like all the labels that aren't around from when they didn't make the casette or CD transitions.
You make developers sound like chattle. Nice. "IP", as far as a VC is concerned, refers strictly to things you can Patent or Copyright (and they REALLY like Patents over Copyrights for some bizarre reason- never mind that you need a lot of money in most cases to enforce the things...); expertise to carry a product or someone else's IP forward is called "expertise" on the balance sheet and doesn't carry as much value to the VC's unless you're THE player in that game.
Red Hat didn't have IP for the most part. They were one of the only real "expertise" plays in the game at the time- and they had what it took. LinuxCare didn't have as much as Red Hat and had internal management problems, so it died. VA Linux bought it because they premised everything on being a Linux hardware play and then when the big boys twigged onto doing Linux support for their bigger iron, VA hadn't gotten large margins on their stuff and had overspent themselves on other things- AND couldn't fill the flippin' orders they had in hand towards the end.
...I'd almost swear I was experiencing the Office Space experience right at the moment...but then, one could also say the same thing about living la vida Dilbert as well... Something about management wearing as suit and tie... Oh, there was a another movie talking to that one...something with Michael Fox in it...
However, one shouldn't count them 100% out; it all depends on whether they're interested in getting someone with experience on MacOS or Linux as a target platform as a contractor. The likelihood of them being just Windows developers is pretty high, even if they were founded by former Netscape developers.
Now, having said this, I'm not interested if they're not going to come to the table to discuss. There's enough projects that are really, really close to this in the first place that could be commercially supported in the same manner as they're doing. In a MMORPG (or MMOG in general...) the server plant's a critical piece and until P2P tech like JXTA is more robust for things like multiplayer stuff, it's going to be a massive expenditure to handle the server plant and network connectivity. Charge past a threshold of use or when they start collecting money (and help them do that).
Slashdot Mirror
...I will offer the following observation:
:-)
It DID have a GUI, and in many cases it ran as well as Windows 95. There were loads of rough edges on the distros,
but that was due less to Linux and more to no substantive commercial support or any of the "advanced"
apps we've ended up with over the years. In a couple of years' time, you'd have KDE in it's infancy, which DID run
on a 486 machine with 64Mb of RAM and you would see ApplixWare arrive for Linux. Was it what we have today? No.
Was it easy to use? Not unless you were familiar with Unix machines and how they all worked. Was it faster and more
capable than Windows 95? Yes. And, before you should comment that I'm biased, you should note that I am an accomplished Windows developer who was a Developer Beta Tester for the Chicago version of Windows which eventually became Windows 95 and that I've written numerous complex software systems for ActiveX frameworks (Like OCX components to drive 60 page per minute 600dpi scanners to their full speed with VB applications on a
Pentium 166...) and wrote sophisticated cross-platform distributed systems that collected upwards of a $75k per day in parking revenues at DFW International Airport- code that compiled against *BSD, Solaris, Linux and Windows NT and ran
better than anything before it.
Windows typically requires 2-4 times the resources over a comparable Linux installation to accomplish usable tasks. And, in the end, that's the key- usability. Sure, you can wedge Windows 95 onto a 386sx-25 laptop with only 4Mb of RAM and a 120Mb HD, but can you DO anything with it? Only with a LOT of patience as it swap-thrashes all to hell. Slackware, on the other hand...
That's just a line in the sand they drew. I've set up loads of PII-350's and above that work WELL, so long as they have at least 128-256 Mb of RAM and at least 4 or more Gb of HD. I typically run Fedora Core 3/4 or Mandriva 2005/2006 on these boxes and they just simply work with little in the way of "slowness".
And, Windows can't do a firewall comfortably (or securely for that matter) with something like a 486 and 64Mb of ram and a floppy disc- Linux can...
That'd be wishful thinking, I fear. Just because you don't know what is causing the pregnancies, doesn't mean you won't be doing the act- you just don't connect the two things out of ignorance or abject stupidity. In this case, stupid people seem to be breeding like rabbits (as is evidenced by all the extremely stupid people about including Jack Thompson and apparently Frank Forcione and all the Canton, OH police department...)- they're just going to get worse as time progresses.
There's actually modifiers to that, even.
Say for example, the person in question that is told to leave has a Service Animal and is Handicapped
and walks into a public place you run (And, this includes any business or governmental agency-
technically, the USPS signs saying that only Seeing Eye Dogs are allowed in the building is in
violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act...).
1) Yes, you can make them leave, but you're in violation of the law if you're running anything other
than something like a private club. If it's public, you're legally required to allow them in
unless the animal or the person is actually disruptive to your operations or to the people present.
And, better yet, if you call the cops, in most cases you will be the one receiving a ticket, etc.
for a false call- if they did nothing else but bring the animal in, it's technically NOT trespass
if you're a public business as the law is explicit; if you're handicapped and it's a service animal
they HAVE to let you in unless the animal or yourself is in danger and you're not causing any issues
otherwise (And this does NOT mean patrons being upset about a "pet" being in the place...)
2) The very act in question opens you up to a Civil Rights suit in a Federal Court which can amount to a
lot of money on your part in court costs and damages if it's proven that they did nothing other than walk
into your establishment.
Choose carefully what all you do- the law is NOT what most people actually think it is.
It's the intrim format for the PRINTING engine unless you print to RAW print queues- they use WMF or EMF (Same engine with extensions...) for spooling on Windows machines by default. Turning it off makes for a mess to say the least- it's not as easy as you'd think.
It's not that it's a GDI bug. It's a DESIGN MISFEATURE- the code does exactly what it's intended to do. The problem is that the feature is NOT secure, not a good idea on a system in the first place, and code and images shouldn't even be USING this thing.
F-Secure's hack, and yes, it's a hack, is an adequate fix until MS gets their damn hole that's been lurking since Windows 3.1 fixed.
That's garbage.
The Indie segment of the industry doesn't make money from their CD's for the large part. They make it off of things like T-Shirt sales, concerts, etc. The only people making money off of sales of media is pretty much the major labels and their main affiliates (which parade as "Indie", but they're NOT...). Now, this doesn't excuse rampant ignoring of duplication/production rights- but to say that the Indies' are the ones who'll be hit worst is misdirecting the real issue which has NOTHING to do with Indies. Something that they just don't want you thinking about.
Well, I wouldn't go so far as saying that C# or Java is more "modern" than C++ (Which is kinda stupid...); but to say that C++ is "well engineered"...
C++ is well engineered in the same sense of PL/I was well engineered- and it's becoming as complex and convoluted.
"Over engineered" would be a better description- and I'm a proponent of the language.
It's a misfeature of Windows itself. If you surf with ANY browser, you'll get zapped if you surf to a site set up to take advantage of this latest hole.
They had a "non-fragmented" market back a handful of years back. Dell tossed it to the curb, most likely due to pressure from Bill and Co. only months after doing it. Did you know that Michael Dell owns a good chunk of Red Hat? Did you know that Dell Ventures was one of the VC groups that helped take them public?
And don't go and tell me "fragmented"- what are the main distributions?
Red Hat
SuSE
Debian
Slackware
Mandriva
Now, realistically, the hardware involvement for support is largely the same for all of the above . That, my friend is all Dell cares about. What's the picture for Windows?
XP Professional
XP Home
Media Center
2003 Server
Vista(Eventually...)
Each of the above setups realistically, with the exception of XP Home/Professional, have ever so slightly different hardware requirements and available driver profiles. Gee... Seems they have the same level of "fragmentation" and not all hardware can be realistically supported with each version- some drivers really only work with 2003 server or XP only, etc.
Any time someone trots out the "fragmentation" argument, I have to question ignorance or attribute it to trying to sell someone something, because it's mostly an empty argument. Which would it be in your case?
In fact, one of the "better" bang for buck AMD64 laptop offerings happens to be the HP/Compaq line of units. Reasonably reliable, maximized functionality, decent screen options, etc. All for 1000USD in most places. Not bad. Not my first choice in machines, though- what I wanted (But couldn't justify to my wife or myself...) was something in the class of Savrow's Katana KX9 or similar. Dual core, etc. I'd use the NVidia GPUs over an ATI one right at the moment. While the drivers work decently well, the ATI drivers work nicely with my Xpress200 setup on some games, others it bogs down BADLY. Under Windows, I see some of the same, but not as bad. In the case of NVidia's offerings, I do not see the same problems.
If I had any regrets with my Pavillion zv6000 so far over the past 3 months, it's been one of the GPU. Forced to turn on the UMA instead of just the integrated (which I'm suspecting is where part of the real slowdowns are coming from on this one...), slower on some stuff than it ought to be.
So many advocates of Java seem to miss this little detail- because they're tickled to not having to deal with the memory allocation, they think it's special and everyone should be using it. (Uh, BASIC had this... You'd think BASIC would have taken off more than it had if this was a useful thing for anything other than end-user application development...)
It amazes me how many people just don't "get it" with regards to this stuff- it's almost like they're not really teaching CS anymore. This is basic CS stuff and it seems to elude them.
It might be a death by a thousand cuts impact on performance, but unlike GC, it can be precisely and predictably controlled, GC can't. Therefore, if you're talking hard real-time tasks where late answers are failures, GC is a BAD idea as it soaks up CPU cycles because you're largely unable to do a task while memory's being GC'ed. Really, there is a place for all the different types of memory management, and trying to JAM one of them through that is utterly unsuitable for the task at hand is why we have the train wrecks we do in the IT industry.
For most applications, that might be the case, but it still injects bizarre loading behaviors in Real-Time apps, massively parallel apps, and high frequency data processing (i.e. the Stock Markets...) apps. I know, I develop code for the last category, and any Java apps we write (and we do write code IN Java as well as C++) avoid doing any code that does any dynamic allocations- otherwise we get little spikes (And, this is with modern JVMs...) that cause us to drop packet traffic like mad. JVMs don't do GC in a nice manner when you deal with data streams that swallow an OC-3 whole.
Don't get me wrong, GC's a nice thing to have- IF you can have it. For many problem sets, which actually comprise most of what goes for software engineering, GC's not a viable answer. For that matter, C++ is a tough call as well. C's better for many of those tasks as is something like Forth. If you think that a given tool is suitable for all tasks, you'd be mistaken. If you don't like dealing with something that doesn't do GC, then you probably ought to stay away from dealing with systems level programming, embedded systems, or HPC coding.
...the US' greatest asset, or more appropriately the rubbish that the bulk of the RIAA and MPAA members produce.
C'mon, now, if that stuff is all our greatest asset, then we're pretty much done for as a country and an economic power. And it's as disturbing that Congress views it that way too.
It's still interpreted, it's just interpreted all at once before execution (Hm... Sounds like Perl, Ruby, Python and a few others...). Try again.
Garbage collection is a bad thing in many cases...
GC causes all kinds of load spikes that can bog down end user apps and blow server apps clean out of the water. GC makes things "easier" for the developer at the expense of overall performance. But, with at least C++, there are ways of accomplishing the same thing without needing a GC subsystem spooling up CPU cycles- smart pointers handle most of the same features that GC does in a safe and efficient manner. The code knows when a variable has dropped out of scope (it's compiled into the code itself...) and frees memory as opposed to a separate thread of execution periodically polling all the active objects to see which ones have dropped out of scope.
While wowing the developers is important, also providing them with a high performance, high reliability, and easy to use framework is important as well- moreso than wowing them. It does no good if it's "cool" to develop for a programming language, etc. if I'm spending 2-3 times the coding time for the other one or 2-3 times the debugging time, etc.
C#, for all of the claims of performance, is a a JIT based interpretive language. Ditto Java.
C#, for all of it's nicety, is little more than Java taken in MS' desired direction. If it weren't for Mono, C# wouldn't even be a subject of discussion as it'd been an MS only tool for use only on Windows (or whatever MS ends up calling thier stuff in the future...)
C, C++, and Objective-C are stable, robust languages that have been around for some time now. C# has not been around all that long, but since it's got all the "buzz" about it, people keep trying to deploy it everywhere.
Objective-C is actually a fairly clean OO language, moreso than C++. C++, while it's really good, has been muddied up with a bunch of conflicting design ideas that make for some...fun...with your coding if you're not paying attention to what you're doing.
All in all, I'd say that it's decent enough for doing Apple development- if you want to adapt Mono to that interface (Which, I believe, can be done...) knock yourself out.
He's just another utterly clueless pundit. To have them buy Opera is to admit that they didn't have what it takes to secure and extend the thing. MS flatly won't be inclined to do that if they can help it- this suggestion is in the same class as saying MS ought to do a Linux version of MS Office.
Analog does NOT mean the process for recording it. It referrs to the process of viewing or listening a given work. In order to Camcorder it with a digital or analog camcorder, you NEED to have the "Analog" hole that they're trying to legislate away. If they implement effective means for enforcing the law (which I've grave doubts about them accomplishing it, but instituting draconian measures to attempt it all the same...) then your little camcorder remark is null and void.
I've never really seen 5-6 singles from an album in a long time. Pretty much since 45's went away, I've seen fewer and fewer singles. And even in it's heyday, the best I've ever seen was about four singles on the store shelves.
Which artists are you referring to, because even if I don't like the music, I'd love to see someone doing this (and putting 5-6 singles on a single disc doesn't count, that's just a mini-album).
This is the same damn song and dance they ran when Casette became available. Then the member labels
figured out that this "Casette" thing actually meant better sales (I mean, 8-track in a car? C'mon!)
for them and that they'd make more money because it actually cost less to make than a vinyl LP and
was intrinsically easier to make. In this case, they need to re-evaulate the business model they're
operating under and adapt or die. They have the potential to make as much money with newer business
models adapted to the current tech situation, but NOOO... Well, that's fine; in the end, the ones that
get this will survive, the ones that don't make the transition will go the way of the dodo, just like
all the labels that aren't around from when they didn't make the casette or CD transitions.
You make developers sound like chattle. Nice. "IP", as far as a VC is concerned, refers strictly to things you can Patent or Copyright (and they REALLY like Patents over Copyrights for some bizarre reason- never mind that you need a lot of money in most cases to enforce the things...); expertise to carry a product or someone else's IP forward is called "expertise" on the balance sheet and doesn't carry as much value to the VC's unless you're THE player in that game.
Red Hat didn't have IP for the most part. They were one of the only real "expertise" plays in the game at the time- and they had what it took. LinuxCare didn't have as much as Red Hat and had internal management problems, so it died. VA Linux bought it because they premised everything on being a Linux hardware play and then when the big boys twigged onto doing Linux support for their bigger iron, VA hadn't gotten large margins on their stuff and had overspent themselves on other things- AND couldn't fill the flippin' orders they had in hand towards the end.
...I'd almost swear I was experiencing the Office Space experience right at the moment...but then, one could also say the same thing about living la vida Dilbert as well... Something about management wearing as suit and tie... Oh, there was a another movie talking to that one...something with Michael Fox in it...
However, one shouldn't count them 100% out; it all depends on whether they're interested in getting someone with experience on MacOS or Linux as a target platform as a contractor. The likelihood of them being just Windows developers is pretty high, even if they were founded by former Netscape developers.
Now, having said this, I'm not interested if they're not going to come to the table to discuss. There's enough projects that are really, really close to this in the first place that could be commercially supported in the same manner as they're doing. In a MMORPG (or MMOG in general...) the server plant's a critical piece and until P2P tech like JXTA is more robust for things like multiplayer stuff, it's going to be a massive expenditure to handle the server plant and network connectivity. Charge past a threshold of use or when they start collecting money (and help them do that).