Yeah seriously. It's doublethink, the art of possessing two contrary ideas and beliving them both at once. In this case, people are lining up to buy nothing.
This phenomenon is peculiar to Apple. People know better than to buy crap from Sony, and it actually makes sense that place would be empty.
It does not make sense people would line up to buy nothing.
Meanwhile, at the Sony Style store, 5 blocks away, the glow of HDTVs illuminated the vapid faces of salespeople in tshirts as they stared across the racks over empty aisles. Aisles of laptops, PS3s, CDs and other items went unpurchased, and no one was there to see it.
Brand name computer stores are the outlet for those too weak to resist the urge to make impulse purchases in excess of a month's income. The fact Apple has been able to capitalize on this trend so well speaks to the fetishistic appeal of those shiny laptops and the absence of any real value in their products. Convinced the worth of something that is not even there, people are literally waiting in line to buy nothing.
This comes as no surprise. I recently worked with a large newspaper in New York to implement a content management system and found the group had real difficulties enforcing editorial standards.
Part of the problem was training, the staff was largely composed of former photo editors who were unfamiliar with producing photos for the web (we had multiple instances of 300 MB photos being deployed on the front page of the site). Culturally, newspaper people seem to be inclined towards repeatable processes and highly resistant to change in this area without a great deal of encouragement and hand holding.
Part of the problem also was the technology itself, believe it or not we made things too simple. In order to insert breaks in pages we added buttons to the user interface which were routinely ignored by the staff (even the editors) in favor of hand coding complex HTML structures. In order to create media insertion hooks, we created an extensive AJAX interface, which was disfavored over an existing photo catalog that had been in place before we got there.
Change is something that needs to be introduced gradually, and the process that works is the one that will win out in newspapers.
Good point. I just have this core belief that people take pride in their work (in this case the recommendations they make) and lawyers should be more on the side of getting deals done than making deals die. Hopefully, someone reads it, passes it along to someone else, and it generates some discussion.
Well, the guys who make the miniatures are not going to care either way, they are probably intimidated by management and legal to the point where they are not going to upset themselves over something they can do nothing about.
I will remind myself next time to check with you before writing a letter in protest of a decision by a legal department.
I am writing to express my severe dissatisfaction with regard to the decision made by Games Workshop as to the organization's IP policy related to video productions. More specifically, I am concerned to hear about the process that was used to determine the company's stance with regard to the fan-produced movie Damnatus and how several years of labor from hobbists / enthusiasts was wasted producing something while internal deliberations took place.
With all due respect for the valuable intellectual property of Games Workshop, the core audience you market your products to are hobbists who engage in similar types of creative activities and who would be rightfully outraged to think that an arbitrary legal process can wipe out several years of creative endeavor. It is simply wrong to let people invest years of their time and energy in an effort your company is fully aware of while clarifying legal issues on your end no matter how onerous the international process may be. At the very least, Games Workshop should consider selling the producers a license (non-transferable, at a severely discounted rate, and with provisions limiting the group's ability to make money off the materials) to enable them to publish the film as recompense for your legal department's incompetence in clarifying the issue.
Please regard this as more than a statement of disagreement. I can envision numerous scenarios under the terms of your IP policy which could be used as a form of protest here in the US and will be happy to organize such events and promote them should the creators of this film not be offered some means of sharing their work. Visiting emergency rooms en masse in your t-shirts chanting 'BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD'; public prayers at funerals to the Lord of Decay for disease and pestilence (with proper attribution offered at the top of our lungs); handing out graphic background text solicitations for Slanesshi Pleasure Parlors at junior high schools that fully credit Games Workshop; many things come to mind.
I stopped playing with your minatures in my teens and have better things to do than protest your decision. I hope you will find a better way to treat the people who enable your company to operate and find someone more responsive to handle inquiries into the use of Games Workshop material.
While it really pisses me off to think about paying $19mil for a toilet, the price is justified. It is a crap shoot bringing new commodal products to the market, about 90% of them are ejected from the market outright. The market serving the needs of the space community is flush with cash, and the value of this technology is often just flushed away when new ones enter the market. Having privacy concerns addressed for astronauts gives them time to think about their oratory skills, and I imagine we will have a number of master debaters on board at some time who will need to avail themselves of the discretion offered by the Russian crapper.
I am a 33 year old political consultant who owns a successful technology firm and also enjoys a healthy income. I cook for myself and rarely eat out unless it is for a reason. I run 3 miles a day, engage in my community where there are serious needs (tutoring inner city youth, volunteering at food banks and shelters, teaching English as a second language) and have a variety of academic pursuits. I am active politically and regularly provide detailed technical expertise to lawmakers and lobbists (not that they ever listen to my opinions, but I do help them get their facts straight). My young daughter excels at everything from sports to academics, and, outside of the broadcast schedule of Red Sox games (which I watch on my laptop), I would not know when anything is going to be on TV.
No one is critizing anyone for enjoying a show as is tacitly implied in your response. To each their own, everyone is free to spend time how they choose. Social activism around a piece of entertainment is the subject here, and there are people who feel it is decadent and self-indulgent to spend thousands of dollars trying to sway the opinions of managers at a publicly held corporation over something as meaningless as a fictional broadcast series. Let's face it, if you want to change the world, other people are going to have their opinions and you are going to have to put up with that. There is nothing rude or ill mannered about people expressing their opinions, you live in a society where everyone has the right to say what they think.
On the other hand, as a professional consultant, I would seriously question the competence of anyone looking for good manners on Slashdot. No one cares what you do for a living, and the fact you are so defensive about your TV schedule is probably proof of my original point. Your old media credentials are meaningless and people like you are going to fade away as advertisers start to wise up to the fact they get better ROI off cable. I may start a campaign to persuade CBS that to keep that crap show off the air because of all the fringe elements it attracts, and I bet I could get more people involved and create more visibility for a fraction of what you people have spent on your nuts.
My Belkin unit is next to useless. Something is seriously wrong with it, I will be listening to a clear signal for about 5 minutes before it gets all goofy and I have to change the station. This means my hands are tied up while driving trying to get to a better frequency, and I often actually have to hold the device to get a good signal.
On the other hand, my friend drives a Prius which has a 1/8th inch jack for plugging external devices directly into the radio. He gets a crystal clear signal all the time from his hardwired iPod.
With all due respect, it's because it's entertainment. I mean, I am involved in a lot of political causes and fully realize that the drama of them is hardly any different from getting caught up in a TV show. That said, there's the potential for what I am doing to make a difference in someone's life in some small way. If I was spending the same time watching TV, I know the greatest potential there is for my butt to get fatter. On a basic level, that's what bothers people about this.
At a higher level, protesting the actions of a television network is really bothersome when compared to the actions of Americans in regards to actual real world events. When the government suspended habeus corpus for people accused of terrorism, where were the nuts? Who was sending stuff like this to Congress to tell them we did not appreciate what they were doing? When the DMCA passed, who was sending nuts to their politicians?
It's just surprising to see what is essentially online politicial activism directed towards a piece of entertainment. Bless you for standing up for something you believe in, now let's go get mobilized to get our boys home from Iraq, the price of gasoline down, living wages for all Americans, universal health care or whatever it is you care about besides TV.
Hey man, I know I have no clue what the realities of life are in Japan or the cultural differences that exist. It's just surprising the way people change when kids are involved, children are just such a polarizing force people will go to great lengths to be part of their lives.
There are cultural forces here too which, contrasted with those of your mother, may be interesting to talk about. My dad was a typical Irish American tough guy growing up, had no time for gadgets and used to blast me for spending so much time with computers. When I was 9, he smashed my Apple II with a baseball bat, drove me to the park, handed me the bat and told me not to come back until I was registered on a team. The only time he started using a computer was after he found out he could do his banking online, I had to buy it for him and he actually did not touch the keyboard himself for the first year he had it (I or my brother would have to log in for him). The guy had the worst relationship with technology I have seen in any human being, anything that lit up or went beep would deeply anger him and was inferior to his ideal of getting out and doing it yourself.
My father loves my daughter. There is a deep relationship between the two where you can feel the joy they experience in each other's company. When I moved to Las Vegas, the most painful thing for either of them was being so far apart. Similar to your mother, he had a vcr that he had personally never used, until the day I started sending him tapes of my daughter playing soccer. When I told him about video conferencing, he asked me what it would take to get it going, and actually went out and bought the web cam himself. I was almost crying when he told me he did this, this was such a shock coming from someone with a such a violent disposition towards gadgets.
This is what I mean about kids being a polarizing force, they have the ability to fundamentally alter people's belief system and encourage behaviors which simply were not there before. I know the reality may be different in Japan but I like to think some things are universal. Maybe your mother is never going to use a computer, but I do wish you luck finding a way to help her build a relationship with your kids.
It's a TV show. Get over it. They cancelled Firefly, now Jericho is gone. As an alternative, these people should consider:
1) Going to the gym 2) Taking a loved one out to dinner 3) Taking up art 4) Relaxing with friends over the internet 5) Fixing some of those pesky things around the house 6) Getting a dog for companionship instead of a television 7) Volunteering for experiments on drugs to treat obsessive compulsive disorder 8) Going for a walk in the woods and experiencing nature 9) Getting a tan
There are so many other things to do in life that worry about a man soap opera.
You tell someone they get to see and talk to their grandkids, they learn how to use a computer. I had to do the same thing for my father once, he's the guy who would keep me tied up on the phone for 4 hours trying to learn how to make letters bold in Word.
I set up a web cam and AIM for him and showed him how to start and stop the thing a couple times. Then I let my daughter talk him through the process once or twice and it stuck. They talk all the time.
I get my technology news from anywhere but Slashdot. It's like standing on top of a pyramid, anywhere you step is slanted and treacherous. Late night UHF infomercials, Best Buy CSRs, Bazooka Joe bubble gum wrappers, even those blasted Microsoft white papers are more accurate and informative.
Damn, I hate Microsoft and wish they would go away and all, but 40 million is an impressive number for 4 months of sales. As long as they are not making it up, that is a respectable achievement regardless of how it compares with sales of other operating systems.
I was recently facing the same dilemma. I saw a market need for a module for a specific open source application and realized, between proposals, managing people, hiring developers, etc., the best thing I could do is augment my existing staff and bring on people to actually write the code.
Just to keep from getting flamed here, I do own a business and do not maintain projects per se. I do maintain modules for various projects, including Drupal, Scoop, Plone and Joomla. I release everything under the GPL license and look at this as an active way of supporting communities that my business is based on.
That said, running a project is hard work. Going commando on it, i.e. building the whole damn thing yourself and making it all work, is a life altering experience. It always looks so glamorous when you start, but quickly comes to be a part of what you do each day. If you have a day job, it will become your night job. If you are a student, this will become your teacher. Remember that as you try to get to an initial release.
When you do release something, one of two things will happen: a) no one will notice or b) everyone will talk only about what it can't do. Either way, no one will appreciate what you have been doing.
If you decide to continue updating it, you will be faced with tough choices. You will have to decide about what features need to be included in the project, prioritize requests that come in, and figure out a realistic schedule that allows you to get things out the door. People who do follow your project will be clamoring for things and you will have to put up with people who make threats to fork your project unless you add something completely stupid and useless. Deciding who to listen to is an art, and you will suck at it at first because each project is different and nothing you have ever done will prepare you to accept criticism without any expectation of reward.
If you decide to go on from there, someone will eventually submit a patch. You will probably have no clue what it is about at first, and it will take a lot of going back and forth to establish a rapport with that individual to figure out what it is supposed to do. You will probably wonder why you never thought of doing things that way and be impressed by the person who submitted it. If you ask them to work on the project with you, you will find out they are a male supermodel or billionaire with no real interest in programming and only submitted it because it was so obvious.
If you decide to go on after receiving community comments and patches from users, congratulations! Someone will likely come along with a competing project, since everyone knows they can do a better job, and you will lose half your user base. Your ranking on sourceforge and freshmeat will drop dramatically and traffic on your mailing lists will all but halt.
If you decide to go on after the ice thaws, you will find that people think about what you do as old school or hardcore. Congratulations, you are now several years older and this thing has been the center of your life for a long time. Your close relations probably have developed negative attitudes towards the time you spend on the computer and you are going to spend time thinking about ways to get your life back on track.
If you decide to go on after your mid life crisis and the child custody hearings after your wife leaves, you will find people calling for you to set up a foundation. Congratulations, you now get to deal with more lawyers! They are always a fun bunch and you are going to enjoy getting to know all your long time supporters as you beg them for donations to afford the spine breaking legal fees.
If you get your papers in order and set up a means to support the project long term, you will find that you have officially made it in the world of open source. Congratulations, you get to deal with the outcomes! If the project was worthwhile, it will have been adopted by organizations worldwide and you will have made no money off of it. You may be lucky enough to get a job somewhere being paid to support the thing, but those are rare cases. If it was not useful, you will find yourself writing a note to your users telling them how fun it has been and how other commitments are taking you away for a while.
I have been a Vonage customer for over 3 years and am immesely satisfied with the service. If Verizon were to prevail in court, I would never forgive them and cease using their services permanently. I don't even pretend to understand what the patents are that they are trying to enforce but shutting down an entire company through litigation smacks of anti-competitive behavior.
Tommy Iomi is the original, mate. All the wild crazy stuff Randy came up with was based on tracks laid down for that train a long, long time before.
The question is who was Ozzy's best guitarist, and he made his best music with Sabbath. There are not too many people who want to argue with that. IANAGL (I am not a guitar legend), but, I do believe the heavier, grungier stuff was definitely the best. There is something to be said for simplicity, and the simple genius of Iron Man exceeds the high flying solos of Crazy Train any day.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's a wild rumor about a 3G iPhone.
I am at 51st and Lex and was just over there. The store employees have not heard anything about it. The people are still lined up tho.
M
Yeah seriously. It's doublethink, the art of possessing two contrary ideas and beliving them both at once. In this case, people are lining up to buy nothing.
This phenomenon is peculiar to Apple. People know better than to buy crap from Sony, and it actually makes sense that place would be empty.
It does not make sense people would line up to buy nothing.
M
Computer store. I did not say gadget store.
M
Meanwhile, at the Sony Style store, 5 blocks away, the glow of HDTVs illuminated the vapid faces of salespeople in tshirts as they stared across the racks over empty aisles. Aisles of laptops, PS3s, CDs and other items went unpurchased, and no one was there to see it.
Brand name computer stores are the outlet for those too weak to resist the urge to make impulse purchases in excess of a month's income. The fact Apple has been able to capitalize on this trend so well speaks to the fetishistic appeal of those shiny laptops and the absence of any real value in their products. Convinced the worth of something that is not even there, people are literally waiting in line to buy nothing.
Truly, they are the dead.
M
This comes as no surprise. I recently worked with a large newspaper in New York to implement a content management system and found the group had real difficulties enforcing editorial standards.
Part of the problem was training, the staff was largely composed of former photo editors who were unfamiliar with producing photos for the web (we had multiple instances of 300 MB photos being deployed on the front page of the site). Culturally, newspaper people seem to be inclined towards repeatable processes and highly resistant to change in this area without a great deal of encouragement and hand holding.
Part of the problem also was the technology itself, believe it or not we made things too simple. In order to insert breaks in pages we added buttons to the user interface which were routinely ignored by the staff (even the editors) in favor of hand coding complex HTML structures. In order to create media insertion hooks, we created an extensive AJAX interface, which was disfavored over an existing photo catalog that had been in place before we got there.
Change is something that needs to be introduced gradually, and the process that works is the one that will win out in newspapers.
M
Somewhere in the distance, the Warhammer Online team weeps gentle tears.
M
Will the new ones come with a flux capacitor standard?
M
Good point. I just have this core belief that people take pride in their work (in this case the recommendations they make) and lawyers should be more on the side of getting deals done than making deals die. Hopefully, someone reads it, passes it along to someone else, and it generates some discussion.
Thanks for the advice.
M
Well, the guys who make the miniatures are not going to care either way, they are probably intimidated by management and legal to the point where they are not going to upset themselves over something they can do nothing about.
I will remind myself next time to check with you before writing a letter in protest of a decision by a legal department.
M
Oh, customer support is going to handle it in a better fashion?
M
Dear Legal Department -
I am writing to express my severe dissatisfaction with regard to the decision made by Games Workshop as to the organization's IP policy related to video productions. More specifically, I am concerned to hear about the process that was used to determine the company's stance with regard to the fan-produced movie Damnatus and how several years of labor from hobbists / enthusiasts was wasted producing something while internal deliberations took place.
With all due respect for the valuable intellectual property of Games Workshop, the core audience you market your products to are hobbists who engage in similar types of creative activities and who would be rightfully outraged to think that an arbitrary legal process can wipe out several years of creative endeavor. It is simply wrong to let people invest years of their time and energy in an effort your company is fully aware of while clarifying legal issues on your end no matter how onerous the international process may be. At the very least, Games Workshop should consider selling the producers a license (non-transferable, at a severely discounted rate, and with provisions limiting the group's ability to make money off the materials) to enable them to publish the film as recompense for your legal department's incompetence in clarifying the issue.
Please regard this as more than a statement of disagreement. I can envision numerous scenarios under the terms of your IP policy which could be used as a form of protest here in the US and will be happy to organize such events and promote them should the creators of this film not be offered some means of sharing their work. Visiting emergency rooms en masse in your t-shirts chanting 'BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD'; public prayers at funerals to the Lord of Decay for disease and pestilence (with proper attribution offered at the top of our lungs); handing out graphic background text solicitations for Slanesshi Pleasure Parlors at junior high schools that fully credit Games Workshop; many things come to mind.
I stopped playing with your minatures in my teens and have better things to do than protest your decision. I hope you will find a better way to treat the people who enable your company to operate and find someone more responsive to handle inquiries into the use of Games Workshop material.
Regards,
A Really Paranoid IP Freak
While it really pisses me off to think about paying $19mil for a toilet, the price is justified. It is a crap shoot bringing new commodal products to the market, about 90% of them are ejected from the market outright. The market serving the needs of the space community is flush with cash, and the value of this technology is often just flushed away when new ones enter the market. Having privacy concerns addressed for astronauts gives them time to think about their oratory skills, and I imagine we will have a number of master debaters on board at some time who will need to avail themselves of the discretion offered by the Russian crapper.
M
Glad to see the
reviewer is paying
attention the ample
margins throughout the
book. It helps me
make a purchasing
decision, I really
only ever buy books
with good margins.
M
Great, thanks for your life story.
I am a 33 year old political consultant who owns a successful technology firm and also enjoys a healthy income. I cook for myself and rarely eat out unless it is for a reason. I run 3 miles a day, engage in my community where there are serious needs (tutoring inner city youth, volunteering at food banks and shelters, teaching English as a second language) and have a variety of academic pursuits. I am active politically and regularly provide detailed technical expertise to lawmakers and lobbists (not that they ever listen to my opinions, but I do help them get their facts straight). My young daughter excels at everything from sports to academics, and, outside of the broadcast schedule of Red Sox games (which I watch on my laptop), I would not know when anything is going to be on TV.
No one is critizing anyone for enjoying a show as is tacitly implied in your response. To each their own, everyone is free to spend time how they choose. Social activism around a piece of entertainment is the subject here, and there are people who feel it is decadent and self-indulgent to spend thousands of dollars trying to sway the opinions of managers at a publicly held corporation over something as meaningless as a fictional broadcast series. Let's face it, if you want to change the world, other people are going to have their opinions and you are going to have to put up with that. There is nothing rude or ill mannered about people expressing their opinions, you live in a society where everyone has the right to say what they think.
On the other hand, as a professional consultant, I would seriously question the competence of anyone looking for good manners on Slashdot. No one cares what you do for a living, and the fact you are so defensive about your TV schedule is probably proof of my original point. Your old media credentials are meaningless and people like you are going to fade away as advertisers start to wise up to the fact they get better ROI off cable. I may start a campaign to persuade CBS that to keep that crap show off the air because of all the fringe elements it attracts, and I bet I could get more people involved and create more visibility for a fraction of what you people have spent on your nuts.
M
My Belkin unit is next to useless. Something is seriously wrong with it, I will be listening to a clear signal for about 5 minutes before it gets all goofy and I have to change the station. This means my hands are tied up while driving trying to get to a better frequency, and I often actually have to hold the device to get a good signal.
On the other hand, my friend drives a Prius which has a 1/8th inch jack for plugging external devices directly into the radio. He gets a crystal clear signal all the time from his hardwired iPod.
M
With all due respect, it's because it's entertainment. I mean, I am involved in a lot of political causes and fully realize that the drama of them is hardly any different from getting caught up in a TV show. That said, there's the potential for what I am doing to make a difference in someone's life in some small way. If I was spending the same time watching TV, I know the greatest potential there is for my butt to get fatter. On a basic level, that's what bothers people about this.
At a higher level, protesting the actions of a television network is really bothersome when compared to the actions of Americans in regards to actual real world events. When the government suspended habeus corpus for people accused of terrorism, where were the nuts? Who was sending stuff like this to Congress to tell them we did not appreciate what they were doing? When the DMCA passed, who was sending nuts to their politicians?
It's just surprising to see what is essentially online politicial activism directed towards a piece of entertainment. Bless you for standing up for something you believe in, now let's go get mobilized to get our boys home from Iraq, the price of gasoline down, living wages for all Americans, universal health care or whatever it is you care about besides TV.
M
Hey man, I know I have no clue what the realities of life are in Japan or the cultural differences that exist. It's just surprising the way people change when kids are involved, children are just such a polarizing force people will go to great lengths to be part of their lives.
There are cultural forces here too which, contrasted with those of your mother, may be interesting to talk about. My dad was a typical Irish American tough guy growing up, had no time for gadgets and used to blast me for spending so much time with computers. When I was 9, he smashed my Apple II with a baseball bat, drove me to the park, handed me the bat and told me not to come back until I was registered on a team. The only time he started using a computer was after he found out he could do his banking online, I had to buy it for him and he actually did not touch the keyboard himself for the first year he had it (I or my brother would have to log in for him). The guy had the worst relationship with technology I have seen in any human being, anything that lit up or went beep would deeply anger him and was inferior to his ideal of getting out and doing it yourself.
My father loves my daughter. There is a deep relationship between the two where you can feel the joy they experience in each other's company. When I moved to Las Vegas, the most painful thing for either of them was being so far apart. Similar to your mother, he had a vcr that he had personally never used, until the day I started sending him tapes of my daughter playing soccer. When I told him about video conferencing, he asked me what it would take to get it going, and actually went out and bought the web cam himself. I was almost crying when he told me he did this, this was such a shock coming from someone with a such a violent disposition towards gadgets.
This is what I mean about kids being a polarizing force, they have the ability to fundamentally alter people's belief system and encourage behaviors which simply were not there before. I know the reality may be different in Japan but I like to think some things are universal. Maybe your mother is never going to use a computer, but I do wish you luck finding a way to help her build a relationship with your kids.
M
It's a TV show. Get over it. They cancelled Firefly, now Jericho is gone. As an alternative, these people should consider:
1) Going to the gym
2) Taking a loved one out to dinner
3) Taking up art
4) Relaxing with friends over the internet
5) Fixing some of those pesky things around the house
6) Getting a dog for companionship instead of a television
7) Volunteering for experiments on drugs to treat obsessive compulsive disorder
8) Going for a walk in the woods and experiencing nature
9) Getting a tan
There are so many other things to do in life that worry about a man soap opera.
M
You tell someone they get to see and talk to their grandkids, they learn how to use a computer. I had to do the same thing for my father once, he's the guy who would keep me tied up on the phone for 4 hours trying to learn how to make letters bold in Word.
I set up a web cam and AIM for him and showed him how to start and stop the thing a couple times. Then I let my daughter talk him through the process once or twice and it stuck. They talk all the time.
M
I get my technology news from anywhere but Slashdot. It's like standing on top of a pyramid, anywhere you step is slanted and treacherous. Late night UHF infomercials, Best Buy CSRs, Bazooka Joe bubble gum wrappers, even those blasted Microsoft white papers are more accurate and informative.
M
Damn, I hate Microsoft and wish they would go away and all, but 40 million is an impressive number for 4 months of sales. As long as they are not making it up, that is a respectable achievement regardless of how it compares with sales of other operating systems.
M
I was recently facing the same dilemma. I saw a market need for a module for a specific open source application and realized, between proposals, managing people, hiring developers, etc., the best thing I could do is augment my existing staff and bring on people to actually write the code.
Just to keep from getting flamed here, I do own a business and do not maintain projects per se. I do maintain modules for various projects, including Drupal, Scoop, Plone and Joomla. I release everything under the GPL license and look at this as an active way of supporting communities that my business is based on.
That said, running a project is hard work. Going commando on it, i.e. building the whole damn thing yourself and making it all work, is a life altering experience. It always looks so glamorous when you start, but quickly comes to be a part of what you do each day. If you have a day job, it will become your night job. If you are a student, this will become your teacher. Remember that as you try to get to an initial release.
When you do release something, one of two things will happen: a) no one will notice or b) everyone will talk only about what it can't do. Either way, no one will appreciate what you have been doing.
If you decide to continue updating it, you will be faced with tough choices. You will have to decide about what features need to be included in the project, prioritize requests that come in, and figure out a realistic schedule that allows you to get things out the door. People who do follow your project will be clamoring for things and you will have to put up with people who make threats to fork your project unless you add something completely stupid and useless. Deciding who to listen to is an art, and you will suck at it at first because each project is different and nothing you have ever done will prepare you to accept criticism without any expectation of reward.
If you decide to go on from there, someone will eventually submit a patch. You will probably have no clue what it is about at first, and it will take a lot of going back and forth to establish a rapport with that individual to figure out what it is supposed to do. You will probably wonder why you never thought of doing things that way and be impressed by the person who submitted it. If you ask them to work on the project with you, you will find out they are a male supermodel or billionaire with no real interest in programming and only submitted it because it was so obvious.
If you decide to go on after receiving community comments and patches from users, congratulations! Someone will likely come along with a competing project, since everyone knows they can do a better job, and you will lose half your user base. Your ranking on sourceforge and freshmeat will drop dramatically and traffic on your mailing lists will all but halt.
If you decide to go on after the ice thaws, you will find that people think about what you do as old school or hardcore. Congratulations, you are now several years older and this thing has been the center of your life for a long time. Your close relations probably have developed negative attitudes towards the time you spend on the computer and you are going to spend time thinking about ways to get your life back on track.
If you decide to go on after your mid life crisis and the child custody hearings after your wife leaves, you will find people calling for you to set up a foundation. Congratulations, you now get to deal with more lawyers! They are always a fun bunch and you are going to enjoy getting to know all your long time supporters as you beg them for donations to afford the spine breaking legal fees.
If you get your papers in order and set up a means to support the project long term, you will find that you have officially made it in the world of open source. Congratulations, you get to deal with the outcomes! If the project was worthwhile, it will have been adopted by organizations worldwide and you will have made no money off of it. You may be lucky enough to get a job somewhere being paid to support the thing, but those are rare cases. If it was not useful, you will find yourself writing a note to your users telling them how fun it has been and how other commitments are taking you away for a while.
M
Titles have already been leaked.
Star Wars 7: Return of the Ragnar
Star Wars 8: The Gammorean Strikes Back
M
I have been a Vonage customer for over 3 years and am immesely satisfied with the service. If Verizon were to prevail in court, I would never forgive them and cease using their services permanently. I don't even pretend to understand what the patents are that they are trying to enforce but shutting down an entire company through litigation smacks of anti-competitive behavior.
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Tommy Iomi is the original, mate. All the wild crazy stuff Randy came up with was based on tracks laid down for that train a long, long time before.
The question is who was Ozzy's best guitarist, and he made his best music with Sabbath. There are not too many people who want to argue with that. IANAGL (I am not a guitar legend), but, I do believe the heavier, grungier stuff was definitely the best. There is something to be said for simplicity, and the simple genius of Iron Man exceeds the high flying solos of Crazy Train any day.
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