I'm studying Japanese, and you're dead-on about haikus loosing most of their beauty in translation. Each Japanese syllable is a 'complete' sound, with a consonant and a vowel (with one exception, that being the 'n' nasal stop), haikus are, naturally, ideally matched with their parent language.
As I'm someone working on getting started with my own little one-man (well, plus a little help, here and there) software company, the question as to whether or not to allow my customers the ability to modify software is something I've been thinking about a lot.
On one hand, I think it's a great idea; I mean, I'm not worried about giving my customers access to the source code, because if someone else decides to infringe on my copyright, I can deal with things from a legal perspective, and businesses (my primary market) are loathe to avoid legal entanglements. Basically, I think I can count on my customers to, by and large, do the Right Thing and follow the legal requirements set down in the license -- namely, my small fee for service, support, and updates.
On the other hand, I am worried about having to support a customized installation. If I release version Foo, and a customer makes substantial changes to Foo for their site, and then wants support, I don't want to have to tell them that there's no way I can do anything for them, other than point them to the pile of documentation that I've provided. I'm considering adding an extra tier to my licensing model to cover this; a sort of VAR-type tier, where you can modify and redistribute the code, but whrere (a) I still get the basic license fee for working on the central codebase, and (b) it is explicitly understood that I can't provide any 'standard' support, although I will make programmer-consultant services available for a reasonable fee.
Anybody else have good suggestions for dealing with a business-geek who wants to give his customers access to code, but who doesn't want to end up in the quagmire of supporting a thousand hacked versions of his software?
I don't have a college degree, but I am a chemistry major, so I'll try and put this out in simple terms; if anybody with an actual BS/MS/PhD in Chem wants to correct my undergraduate mistakes, please do:
Glasses are compounds nominally formed when a metal is cooled too fast to form some sort of regular, rigid structure. When you look at solid metals, like steel, at a molecular level, they have a very regular, crystalline-like structure, which is what gives them their unique strength (this is also why diamonds are so tough; crystalline carbon). Problem is, these metallic crystals are very good at absorbing energy in certain wavelengths, and make a really bad conductor for light, although they do conduct electricity quite well (with a smaller amount of absorption).
If you can get a metal cooled quickly enough, it doesn't have time to form a lattice, and you get (nominally) glass, transparent to light. This is easily done with Silica, but cooling other metals fast enough is incredibly impractical. The 3M guys have found a way around this, and as such, have managed to produce a glass out of Alumina, which has a number of advantages over Silica-based glass; namely, it's stronger per unit weight, good refractive qualities, and better thermal response.
Yes and no. It depends on the size of the market for all those add-ons. If my product is, say, targeted at businesses with IT departments, and is easy to set up and support, than they will not likely purchase support from me. Likewise, if my product is a huge pain in the ass to use without the pay-for manual, I'm not likely to accrue customers. Only a product which demands expert support is going to work with your suggested business model, and this is a very limited niche.
Personally, I'm going to have a go at starting a company that produces useful applications which are small, lightweight, platform-agnostic, and easy to use and administrate. With these applications, I plan on supplying not only source code (non-GPL, but close), but a comprehensive manual as well. Support will also be available for those customers that want it.
What will I charge? Depends on the size of the business -- I plan on doing a tiered model, with the oddball bit that the first tier is completely free to individuals, nonprofits, educational institutions, and small businesses which make less than $100K a year, because I don't view these as my core market -- they wouldn't pay for the applications I plan on providing anyway, so giving it to them for free makes no difference to my bottom line.
Do I get an invite if I don't think murder is wrong?:D
I got into an interesting argument with a fellow anthropology major[1] about this -- She says that "'Murder is Wrong' is the only 'cultural absolute'", and I say that it's a useless definition, as the definition for 'murder' changes between cultures. You could abstract the statement out to say, 'Killing is wrong in some context in any given culture.', but the definition is still useless -- every single culture has prohibitions on something, and knowing that all cultures have some sort of prohibition against killing in certain contexts is worth Fsck-All, because the definition is so vague.
It's like saying that the corner grocery store is a walk lasting between ten minutes and two years away, maybe. Utterly useless to anyone wanting to get to the grocer.
[1] Note that I'm considering a switch to biochem, mainly because I really hate all the fscking hippies in the Anthro department who can't understand that we aren't going back to teepees and granola.
The Unix Guys at work (e.g., me and my boss) recently sent out a memo to all corporate employees about logging in from public terminals. Because they are outside of company and/or individual control, it isn't possible to know what sort of software is running on them. Concordantly, it's quite possible that any given public terminal has a keylogger, packet-dumper, and any other type of spyware you would care to name.
Note that this memo wasn't just idle paranoia; we sent it out after having some IP address in Korea attempt to log in to our corporate webmail server, after one of our salesdroids checked her mail from a public terminal in the lobby of a business hotel. He had her username, password, and who knows what else in the way of corporate data, all from her using a public PC.
Me? I'll stick with bringing my laptop around, even if it looks funny, just like I stick to using GPG and public-key encryption on my emails.
There's an old story from Analog (a science-fiction magazine) titled 'Amateurs' which reminds me quite a bit of the guys at Scaled Composites, except in 'Amateurs', they didn't have a government prize to spur them on, just a drive to get into space, and a willingness to ignore and/or bend a few laws, such as re-using the ID of a salvaged Lear jet for their experimental SSTO vehicle[1], called 'Dervish Also', because the original, titled 'Dervish', blew up.
On the top of the hatch that led into the interior of the ship was stenciled the words: "Experimental Space Rocket -- Dangerous As Hell"
[1] Probably one of the funnier points in the story is during a radio exchange between the pilot of the Dervish Also and the ground, where the pilot requested clearance to take his "Learjet" to a flight level of 600. *grin*
...have Rick Berman shot, drawn, quartered, and then really hurt. That man has done nothing but ride the noble stallion, passed on by Roddenberry, that was once Star Trek to death, and after the horse died, Berman has been beating the fucker with a stick for a few years.
Microsoft administrators are often cheaper and come with less brainpower than their *nix counterparts. This makes it cheaper to retain MS trained staff. It is also (generally, thus far) cheaper to outsource Microsoft-based network management.
Because, of course, no corporation which can consider millions of dollars on licensing fees 'cheap' would be willing to spend a paltry few extra hundred thousand a year to get administrators with more brainpower and a genunie dedication to the technology which they use, versus having gotten into computers 'for the money' as most MS-only types do.
Enterprise development is also, thus far, cheaper on Microsoft platforms. These platforms have all the tools to develop large systems quickly and effectively. Few organisations are writing their enterprise systems in C anymore! In this respect Java is providing a lifeline to Linux. An equally important consideration is the available of enterprise platforms off the shelf, most of which support *nix (but not Linux) or Windows platforms.
Erm, last time I checked, there were more programming languages available for Linux than for Windows, although to be fair, Visual Basic and Visual C++ provide very easy-to-use IDEs, unless,of course, your interest is in writing business-critical applications; Visual Anything is much more suited to finding the right shade of beige for your buttons. Serious business tasks shouldn't even require a GUI; they should just get the job done, and be easy to fix if they break.
These are not the hallmarks of a Microsoft solution.
The real biggies in productivity are avoiding downtime, having the right applications for the job (i.e. productivity applications), and having the right skills to use the application. While workstation failures are irritating (and, frankly, Linux has at most a 10% lead in stability in that environment), network outages (not an OS consideration) and server failures are where the problems lie.
You are obviously talking out of your arse here, and have switched from the server to the desktop, where we all agree Windows is generally the better choice, especially for calendaring. However, software-related workstation failures are a problem, especially if they kill your ability to work for the day, or if they expose confidendial data to the outside world through security holes. When a single virus can kill your entire network *and* take out your nicely integrated Calendar/Email solution, it's time to find another vendor.
Finally, in terms of productivity applications and available skills and/or training, Linux can't touch Windows. They are literally hundreds or applications for every purpose out there that are smooth and polished and do what a business wants. More importantly, you'll easily find staff that are experienced with that package, and that's a huge cost saving.
No, these applications aren't smooth and polished; they're generalized. That's how shrinkwrap software works; you spend less on the software than you would for a custom-written application, but you must accept that said application will not be perfectly tailored to your needs. For some things, like word processing, this is fine, but for critical pieces of your business, this is not.
So yes, Linux is free and cheap and all that, and has tons of applications, and can do amazing stuff. But it doesn't do it out of the box, few people know the desktop environment or the applications, and it takes a less common skillset to configure, administer, maintain and develop in a Linux environment. All of which push up the long term TCO, and allow you to make a very valid cost comparison with Windows.
Yes, but only if you ignore Windows' shortcomings in these areas as well, including things like security, yearly hardware and software upgrade costs, etc. You also have to make the assumption that all of your employees have had their brains replaced with pieces of Silly-Putty, as anyone with more than ten functioning neurons,
The thing about Windows bugs is that many of them are remotly exploitable by unprivileged users; in order to exploit bugs like this, and in fact any root compromise that I know of, you need to first get a shell on the machine. Much harder than throwing up a web page or sending out a trojaned email.
I wish I had mod points, because you're only at +4. One of the biggest thing that pisses me off when I'm sparring or playing paintball with some of these dumb-ass kids (yes, even at 23, they're still kids), is that they have no idea how a realistic combat situation works.
Seriously. Take your average paintball geek, and tell them that they have a half-hopper to last them the entire game...let's say fifteen minutes worth. Likewise, take your average frat-boy toughguy, and see how well they do against an amateur, junior-grade boxer who is two weight classes below them. In either case, they will likely get pounded.
Kids who have grown up on movie combat seem to think that bullets rarely strike, and that you can take kicks to the head with no ill effects as long as you know Kung Fu, and it just doesn't work that way; getting shot hurts. A lot. Yes, I know by experience, and that's just because I was an idiot[1] at the time, not because someone wanted me dead. Getting punched hurts. A lot. One good solid right cross to the jaw, and it's lights out.
Okay. I'm done now.
[1] Richochet from a.22 I was plinking around with as a kid. Taught me a good lesson about setting up proper backing for a target, as well as a hell of a lot more respect for firearms. Especially because it narrowly missed both my left femoral artery and a nearby testicle.
of course, i'm talking out of my ass. i've never been a sysadmin, so feel free to correct anything that i've said that is totally wrong or anything (which i'm sure is plenty) that i've forgotten about what a sysadmin does.
This statement qualifies you as more intelligent than 90% of Slashdotters.
Look at my posting history for this topic; being a sysadmin is about more than just keeping stuff from breaking -- even if software never crashed, sysadmins would be needed, because system administration is all about the management of computer resources.
Yeah, but not every application requires a dual-Opteron server. Filservers need to be disk- and ram-heavy, but require little CPU, for example; the X-serves don't have a good cost-to-benefits ratio for the $1K rackmount range, and if you've got a small company with limited resoures, a $600 Dell will do just as well as a fileserver.
On top of that, there are a lot more third-party applications (for servers) designed to run on the x86 architecture; things like virus scanners, VMware and/or Crossover Wine for the odd Windows application, and such.
Apple support is good, but for the price of the hardware, you can get just-as-good support from Dell (on the hardware), and there's a huge Linux community who has been using Debian in production environments for some time. You just can't beat experience, and I've noted that I get better information from community-based support (sunmanagers) than I do from commercial support (Sun), simply because the community guys actually use the things they troubleshoot.
Again, not knocking the X-serve, but they are more expensive (come on, it's Apple) than comparable x86 boxen.
I wouldn't call that prostitution, unless you want to call marriage prostitution as well; after all, isn't the latter merely a trade of sex, affection, security, and property?
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In the white house, duh!
I'm studying Japanese, and you're dead-on about haikus loosing most of their beauty in translation. Each Japanese syllable is a 'complete' sound, with a consonant and a vowel (with one exception, that being the 'n' nasal stop), haikus are, naturally, ideally matched with their parent language.
Microsoft has ordered over ten million new mice and trackballs for their central offices.
As I'm someone working on getting started with my own little one-man (well, plus a little help, here and there) software company, the question as to whether or not to allow my customers the ability to modify software is something I've been thinking about a lot.
On one hand, I think it's a great idea; I mean, I'm not worried about giving my customers access to the source code, because if someone else decides to infringe on my copyright, I can deal with things from a legal perspective, and businesses (my primary market) are loathe to avoid legal entanglements. Basically, I think I can count on my customers to, by and large, do the Right Thing and follow the legal requirements set down in the license -- namely, my small fee for service, support, and updates.
On the other hand, I am worried about having to support a customized installation. If I release version Foo, and a customer makes substantial changes to Foo for their site, and then wants support, I don't want to have to tell them that there's no way I can do anything for them, other than point them to the pile of documentation that I've provided. I'm considering adding an extra tier to my licensing model to cover this; a sort of VAR-type tier, where you can modify and redistribute the code, but whrere (a) I still get the basic license fee for working on the central codebase, and (b) it is explicitly understood that I can't provide any 'standard' support, although I will make programmer-consultant services available for a reasonable fee.
Anybody else have good suggestions for dealing with a business-geek who wants to give his customers access to code, but who doesn't want to end up in the quagmire of supporting a thousand hacked versions of his software?
I don't have a college degree, but I am a chemistry major, so I'll try and put this out in simple terms; if anybody with an actual BS/MS/PhD in Chem wants to correct my undergraduate mistakes, please do:
:)
Glasses are compounds nominally formed when a metal is cooled too fast to form some sort of regular, rigid structure. When you look at solid metals, like steel, at a molecular level, they have a very regular, crystalline-like structure, which is what gives them their unique strength (this is also why diamonds are so tough; crystalline carbon). Problem is, these metallic crystals are very good at absorbing energy in certain wavelengths, and make a really bad conductor for light, although they do conduct electricity quite well (with a smaller amount of absorption).
If you can get a metal cooled quickly enough, it doesn't have time to form a lattice, and you get (nominally) glass, transparent to light. This is easily done with Silica, but cooling other metals fast enough is incredibly impractical. The 3M guys have found a way around this, and as such, have managed to produce a glass out of Alumina, which has a number of advantages over Silica-based glass; namely, it's stronger per unit weight, good refractive qualities, and better thermal response.
Hope that helped.
Yes and no. It depends on the size of the market for all those add-ons. If my product is, say, targeted at businesses with IT departments, and is easy to set up and support, than they will not likely purchase support from me. Likewise, if my product is a huge pain in the ass to use without the pay-for manual, I'm not likely to accrue customers. Only a product which demands expert support is going to work with your suggested business model, and this is a very limited niche.
Personally, I'm going to have a go at starting a company that produces useful applications which are small, lightweight, platform-agnostic, and easy to use and administrate. With these applications, I plan on supplying not only source code (non-GPL, but close), but a comprehensive manual as well. Support will also be available for those customers that want it.
What will I charge? Depends on the size of the business -- I plan on doing a tiered model, with the oddball bit that the first tier is completely free to individuals, nonprofits, educational institutions, and small businesses which make less than $100K a year, because I don't view these as my core market -- they wouldn't pay for the applications I plan on providing anyway, so giving it to them for free makes no difference to my bottom line.
I don't know, 'chew you up and excrete you out' seems to be the way most retirement plans are handled in the States these days...
Do I get an invite if I don't think murder is wrong? :D
I got into an interesting argument with a fellow anthropology major[1] about this -- She says that "'Murder is Wrong' is the only 'cultural absolute'", and I say that it's a useless definition, as the definition for 'murder' changes between cultures. You could abstract the statement out to say, 'Killing is wrong in some context in any given culture.', but the definition is still useless -- every single culture has prohibitions on something, and knowing that all cultures have some sort of prohibition against killing in certain contexts is worth Fsck-All, because the definition is so vague.
It's like saying that the corner grocery store is a walk lasting between ten minutes and two years away, maybe. Utterly useless to anyone wanting to get to the grocer.
[1] Note that I'm considering a switch to biochem, mainly because I really hate all the fscking hippies in the Anthro department who can't understand that we aren't going back to teepees and granola.
Don't punish the admins; punish the managers that give those admins a shoestring budget and no help.
The Unix Guys at work (e.g., me and my boss) recently sent out a memo to all corporate employees about logging in from public terminals. Because they are outside of company and/or individual control, it isn't possible to know what sort of software is running on them. Concordantly, it's quite possible that any given public terminal has a keylogger, packet-dumper, and any other type of spyware you would care to name.
Note that this memo wasn't just idle paranoia; we sent it out after having some IP address in Korea attempt to log in to our corporate webmail server, after one of our salesdroids checked her mail from a public terminal in the lobby of a business hotel. He had her username, password, and who knows what else in the way of corporate data, all from her using a public PC.
Me? I'll stick with bringing my laptop around, even if it looks funny, just like I stick to using GPG and public-key encryption on my emails.
The full quote it:
"Any landing which you can walk away from is a good landing.
Any landing after which you can use the plane again is a great landing."
Or, if you work for American Airlines:
"Any landing after which our customers, or their surviving kin, don't sue us is a good landing."
There's an old story from Analog (a science-fiction magazine) titled 'Amateurs' which reminds me quite a bit of the guys at Scaled Composites, except in 'Amateurs', they didn't have a government prize to spur them on, just a drive to get into space, and a willingness to ignore and/or bend a few laws, such as re-using the ID of a salvaged Lear jet for their experimental SSTO vehicle[1], called 'Dervish Also', because the original, titled 'Dervish', blew up.
On the top of the hatch that led into the interior of the ship was stenciled the words: "Experimental Space Rocket -- Dangerous As Hell"
[1] Probably one of the funnier points in the story is during a radio exchange between the pilot of the Dervish Also and the ground, where the pilot requested clearance to take his "Learjet" to a flight level of 600. *grin*
...have Rick Berman shot, drawn, quartered, and then really hurt. That man has done nothing but ride the noble stallion, passed on by Roddenberry, that was once Star Trek to death, and after the horse died, Berman has been beating the fucker with a stick for a few years.
Microsoft administrators are often cheaper and come with less brainpower than their *nix counterparts. This makes it cheaper to retain MS trained staff. It is also (generally, thus far) cheaper to outsource Microsoft-based network management.
Because, of course, no corporation which can consider millions of dollars on licensing fees 'cheap' would be willing to spend a paltry few extra hundred thousand a year to get administrators with more brainpower and a genunie dedication to the technology which they use, versus having gotten into computers 'for the money' as most MS-only types do.
Enterprise development is also, thus far, cheaper on Microsoft platforms. These platforms have all the tools to develop large systems quickly and effectively. Few organisations are writing their enterprise systems in C anymore! In this respect Java is providing a lifeline to Linux. An equally important consideration is the available of enterprise platforms off the shelf, most of which support *nix (but not Linux) or Windows platforms.
Erm, last time I checked, there were more programming languages available for Linux than for Windows, although to be fair, Visual Basic and Visual C++ provide very easy-to-use IDEs, unless,of course, your interest is in writing business-critical applications; Visual Anything is much more suited to finding the right shade of beige for your buttons. Serious business tasks shouldn't even require a GUI; they should just get the job done, and be easy to fix if they break.
These are not the hallmarks of a Microsoft solution.
The real biggies in productivity are avoiding downtime, having the right applications for the job (i.e. productivity applications), and having the right skills to use the application. While workstation failures are irritating (and, frankly, Linux has at most a 10% lead in stability in that environment), network outages (not an OS consideration) and server failures are where the problems lie.
You are obviously talking out of your arse here, and have switched from the server to the desktop, where we all agree Windows is generally the better choice, especially for calendaring. However, software-related workstation failures are a problem, especially if they kill your ability to work for the day, or if they expose confidendial data to the outside world through security holes. When a single virus can kill your entire network *and* take out your nicely integrated Calendar/Email solution, it's time to find another vendor.
Finally, in terms of productivity applications and available skills and/or training, Linux can't touch Windows. They are literally hundreds or applications for every purpose out there that are smooth and polished and do what a business wants. More importantly, you'll easily find staff that are experienced with that package, and that's a huge cost saving.
No, these applications aren't smooth and polished; they're generalized. That's how shrinkwrap software works; you spend less on the software than you would for a custom-written application, but you must accept that said application will not be perfectly tailored to your needs. For some things, like word processing, this is fine, but for critical pieces of your business, this is not.
So yes, Linux is free and cheap and all that, and has tons of applications, and can do amazing stuff. But it doesn't do it out of the box, few people know the desktop environment or the applications, and it takes a less common skillset to configure, administer, maintain and develop in a Linux environment. All of which push up the long term TCO, and allow you to make a very valid cost comparison with Windows.
Yes, but only if you ignore Windows' shortcomings in these areas as well, including things like security, yearly hardware and software upgrade costs, etc. You also have to make the assumption that all of your employees have had their brains replaced with pieces of Silly-Putty, as anyone with more than ten functioning neurons,
Ah. Thanks!
That too; 'gesellschaft' is both 'business' and 'corporation', so it could apply to either a corporate entity, or just a limited-liability company.
GmbH is the German equivalent of, 'Inc'. or 'Ltd.'
It's short for 'Gesellschaft mit Beschränkter Haftung' (Corporation with Limited Liability).
Das ist alle für heute. Viel Spass.
What ever happened to the hydrogen economy? ;)
The Hindenburg.
The thing about Windows bugs is that many of them are remotly exploitable by unprivileged users; in order to exploit bugs like this, and in fact any root compromise that I know of, you need to first get a shell on the machine. Much harder than throwing up a web page or sending out a trojaned email.
Do you turn them on by saying, "I solemnly swear I am up to no good." -- ?
I wish I had mod points, because you're only at +4. One of the biggest thing that pisses me off when I'm sparring or playing paintball with some of these dumb-ass kids (yes, even at 23, they're still kids), is that they have no idea how a realistic combat situation works.
.22 I was plinking around with as a kid. Taught me a good lesson about setting up proper backing for a target, as well as a hell of a lot more respect for firearms. Especially because it narrowly missed both my left femoral artery and a nearby testicle.
Seriously. Take your average paintball geek, and tell them that they have a half-hopper to last them the entire game...let's say fifteen minutes worth. Likewise, take your average frat-boy toughguy, and see how well they do against an amateur, junior-grade boxer who is two weight classes below them. In either case, they will likely get pounded.
Kids who have grown up on movie combat seem to think that bullets rarely strike, and that you can take kicks to the head with no ill effects as long as you know Kung Fu, and it just doesn't work that way; getting shot hurts. A lot. Yes, I know by experience, and that's just because I was an idiot[1] at the time, not because someone wanted me dead. Getting punched hurts. A lot. One good solid right cross to the jaw, and it's lights out.
Okay. I'm done now.
[1] Richochet from a
Speak for yourself! *grin*
of course, i'm talking out of my ass. i've never been a sysadmin, so feel free to correct anything that i've said that is totally wrong or anything (which i'm sure is plenty) that i've forgotten about what a sysadmin does.
This statement qualifies you as more intelligent than 90% of Slashdotters.
Look at my posting history for this topic; being a sysadmin is about more than just keeping stuff from breaking -- even if software never crashed, sysadmins would be needed, because system administration is all about the management of computer resources.
Yeah, but not every application requires a dual-Opteron server. Filservers need to be disk- and ram-heavy, but require little CPU, for example; the X-serves don't have a good cost-to-benefits ratio for the $1K rackmount range, and if you've got a small company with limited resoures, a $600 Dell will do just as well as a fileserver.
On top of that, there are a lot more third-party applications (for servers) designed to run on the x86 architecture; things like virus scanners, VMware and/or Crossover Wine for the odd Windows application, and such.
Apple support is good, but for the price of the hardware, you can get just-as-good support from Dell (on the hardware), and there's a huge Linux community who has been using Debian in production environments for some time. You just can't beat experience, and I've noted that I get better information from community-based support (sunmanagers) than I do from commercial support (Sun), simply because the community guys actually use the things they troubleshoot.
Again, not knocking the X-serve, but they are more expensive (come on, it's Apple) than comparable x86 boxen.
I wouldn't call that prostitution, unless you want to call marriage prostitution as well; after all, isn't the latter merely a trade of sex, affection, security, and property?