There is no market. Take a look at used software for sale on ebay. Thousands of used titles with no takers. The bottom has fallen out of software business long ago. Next to go was the music business, and then the movie business. Its not even worthwhile to duplicate them and list them.
I've sold four bits of software on eBay, and bought one. I bought Cubase SE for OS X, and sold MS Office 2k/MS Works 2k, iLife 04, OS X Panther and Cubase VST 5 (Windows). The Office 2k was an upgrade licence and the bundled Works qualified, so I'm counting that as one bit of software and so a single sale.
There is a market, but I doubt it's that high for games. I'd suggest that the average gamer is more amenable and less fussy about warzed stuff than the average business sale or creative is. Even creative is marginal, given the number of pirated Photoshop installs I've seen in my life.
Probably too late for this to be read by many now, but sticking a top-level hierarchy as your organisation name is just pure nomenclenture. I agree that many others have done it, but I level this charge at them as well.
Should be comp.mozilla, not top-level Mozilla. There's also a comp.infosystems.www hierarchy, which would seem a better place.
Think of the typical Windows Start menu, and what a mess it is because companies keep sticking their name in it rather than the name of the product or anything tied to the product's purpose. Usenet has gone the same way unfortunately.
Safari seem to be an earlier build, my version doesn't seem to have any tabs. The build reports as 2.05, has anyone else noted this about the Intel build, I couldn't find anything on the Web.
Tabs aren't enabled in Safari by default, you need to go into preferences and switch them on. No, I have no idea why they don't just switch them on and have done with it.
This cropped up on macrumors.com last night, and I took the opportunity to grab the music tracks and a few lectures. I listened to "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" this morning - can thoroughly recommend it. I chose it purely based on the title, it turns out to be a lecture on the physiological nature of stress and was very interesting.
The music? Well...I liked it, but sorry Stanford - it's mostly very derivative and most bands seem to be directly pretending to be another cmmercial one. What happened to colleges doing new forms of music and experimental stuff?
The minds from Disney and Pixar have given us some of the best animated work in years. The Toy Story movies, Monsters Inc., and recently, the Incredibles.
Those would be 'the minds from Pixar'. Disney merely distributed.
Disney has a system for writing good storys, and Pixar's people have a system for making them look really frickin cool.
Disney has written one good story in the last ten or fifteen years - Lilo and Stitch. The Lion King is good, but there's rather strong evidence it was just lifted from Kimba The White Lion. Even Lilo and Stitch wasn't the company's main focus at the time, I believe that was meant to be The Emporer's New Groove or something equally horrific.
Despite the above, I still think this is good news. However I see it as a potential improvement in Disney, not as anything great for Pixar per se.
Several months ago there was an article on slashdot claiming that the algorithm for google news had a built in bias to favor politically conservative/right wing news sources?
Didn't see the article you're referring to, but I doubt the allegation is true. On the UK site, I sent a note pointing out that at one time it disproportiately picked up The Scotsman and The Guardian. Don't know what the Scotsman is considered, but The Guardian is a soft-left newspaper here.
I didn't think it was political bias even then, just thought the algorithm needed a kick to get a greater spread of sources. I suspect the same algorithm would have been used for both the US and UK sites, and so I imagine in the US by chance the appearance of bias fell to the right, rather than to the left as it did in the UK.
I met the guy who developed Stoned, down in New Zealand. Good times, good times.
On meeting the guy, did you chuck him in the nearest river? Because that would have been the only meeting that loon would have been a good time for me. The stoned virus very nearly wiped out my A-Level computing project (UK exams taken at 18) and nearly got me banned from the lab as well. Had I not had an ST with some fairly nice sector copying programs, I would have lost everything with a week to go, and so my University chance would have been blown. And yeah backups, but I was still learning and you've got to remember that this virus stuff was still relatively new at the time (1989).
Cretins who write these things aren't being cool, they're just sociopathic idiots and should be treated as such.
or you could have saved your company a tonne of labour costs and have them buy you a new $10 keyboard.
This is a damned good point in fact, and one that did cross my mind at the time. It's actually my keyboard though - I always take my own keyboard and mouse to every job I go to (MS keyboard, Logitech 3-button mouse) as they normally provide the default Dell stuff which is pretty awful.
Or even to disassemble in fact. Gah. Mind you, dissamble sounds enough like a word that I think I'm going to try and bluff it out. Well, apart from posting my correction in front of an audience of thousands that is...
I cleaned my (work) keyboard a couple of weeks ago. I got a baby-wipe tissue and ran it over the keys. It was still incredibly dirty.
Step two. Get another tissue, scrub away at those keys for all I'm worth, including the gaps between them. Result? Keycaps more or less fine, keyboard as a whole still filthy - I could see stuff at the bottom of the keys.
Step three - the whole hog. To the astonishment of everyone around me at work, I got a screwdriver, unscrewed the keyboard and dissassembled it. More baby-wipes, more scrubbing away. Got tweezers to pull out bits from round the base of the keys. A shcok and awe campaign against the dirt lurking there, no less.
Result? Even with all that, it's still not sparkling clean. IDrastically better of course, but not perfect by any means. Looking at the state it's in at the moment, I'm guessing it will be time for the same exercise again in about a week or two's time.
The keyboard I use here is an MS 'Internet' keyboard by the way - nice enough. I'm going to have to go through the same sort of thing at home soon with an Apple Bluetooth keyboard, and I suspect that's going to be a pain to dissamble.
From the bottom of the article:
"Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly magazine Annals of Improbable Research (www.improbable.com) and organiser of the Ig Nobel Prize"
(emphasis added by me)
ie, to all the people complaining: this is supposed to be flaming obvious.
Admittedly as applied to the original poster's situation that may be so, however as a general point in using the GPL with your development, eg. linking to libraries etc., it is still an obligation that must be cleared. You may not even know what the eventual plans for the code you're writing are - perhaps they're going to resell the system at a later date? In which case you've just created a situation which requires approval first.
"On the other hand, if you use any software that has a EULA, an actual use license, then you are perhaps agreeing to something when you start using it. But I've never seen any open source software with a EULA."
The specific producst mentioned were Sun's JDK (which we'll skip as it's not open-source), Eclipse and Apache. So looking at the final two.
From the Eclipse Public License page:
"THE ACCOMPANYING PROGRAM IS PROVIDED UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS ECLIPSE PUBLIC LICENSE ("AGREEMENT"). ANY USE, REPRODUCTION OR DISTRIBUTION OF THE PROGRAM CONSTITUTES RECIPIENT'S ACCEPTANCE OF THIS AGREEMENT.".
From the Apache License page:
"TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE, REPRODUCTION, AND DISTRIBUTION"
(emphasis added by me).
So yes, the licenses discussed have terms for use. And the JDK certainly does.
My frustrations abound in the corporate world but after what SCO pulled, maybe this insane precaution is necessary?
Well, the speed of the process is a matter for your corporation. But the precautions? Yes, absolutely necessary. Remember that by using hte software, you are agreeing to a license of some kind (GPL, Apache...whatever). If you are an officer of the company, you have just created a legal obligation for your corporation. One it might not have had any plans to take on.
So yes, clearance of the license is required and sensible. This is the case for any license - open-source, proprietory, anything. Just because you can get the software immediately downloaded and installed without shelling out cash doesn't make it any less of a risk.
Even by an utter slob's standards, though is no way in hell that thing can be considered neat. Not on this earth, not on any other earth either. I'll try to restrain obvious Apple fanboy'ism, but it's interesting they've attached to an already G5-a-like case. With the exception of the latest quads, which are apparently a bit messy internally, you can see what 'neat' actually means when applied to water-cooling by looking at the Power Macs. I'm sure people on the PC side can point me to considerably more aesthetically pleasing installations than this too.
If it's any consolation, the Toshiba Satellite A75 I purchased last January is also a piece of junk. It is almost impossible to run at high clock speed without overheating. Anything that is both processor- and disk-intensive (like, say, a system-wide antivirus scan) is almost guaranteed to overheat the system. When it overheats, it spontaneously shutsdown.
Don't know if it applies to your system (and with it's age, you don't want to be playing these games anyway) but I recently revived a Dell Inspiron 8000 that had the same problem. I'll skip on what I tried before I reliased this was the issue, but the final solution was to scrape off the old thermal paste and put new paste on the CPU. Since then, not a single shutdown due to overheating.
The only thing keeping this battle from being won already is where the porn industry stands.
You know, I keep reading this and I just don't think it's true anymore. It may have been the deciding factor in VHS vs Beta, but time moves on and now I would suggest that online access would be the more common way to get that kind of stuff. I don't think the porn industry will have that much to say in this particular fight.
Option 4 please: "Less annoying than dozens of wankers posting duplicate "Dupe!" posts". The irony of posting the fiftieth "It's a dupe! Proves the editors aren't reading" post just seems completely lost on some people...
Microsoft always has been and always be a Gates/Ballmer-led company
Well, no. Microsoft used to be a Gates-Allen company, and it's arguable as to whether figureheads aside it was actually an Allen-Gates company. It used to be a lot better than it is now too. Sounds hard to believe I know, but in the late eighties some of us were actually rooting for Microsoft, not against.
I like the pun, but I'm going to take the idea seriously for a moment.
Google do a Jabber-based service. AOL of course do AIM. Do you think they'd consider merging the two networks? Because a Jabber-based AIM would be a major boost for the protocol. They're adding voice to it, perhaps video next?
Of course I'm getting ahead of myself, 5% is just that - 5%. But still, it's worth a thought. And yes, I'm biased. I'm an iChat user which supports Jabber, and it would be useful to have the Jabber protocol grow in functionality and see the Jabber gateways to other networks start acting as a universal switching point.
You do not fall under the new regulatory framework, unless you do a public offering, route your own traffic (multi-homed) etc etc.
Interesting. I have 32 IP addresses assigned to the one box, and this has all been handled through my limited company so I suppose you could argue that it's a public offering. The boxes run apache instances but also Postfix, so there is a public mail server out there.
I think from your description that I'm outside of the framework, but can't exactly put my finger on why. Does what I've said come under the 'no routing' bit? Or is having the multiple IP addreesses (all on the same subnet of course) classed as diong routing?
I run a co-lo webserver as a sideline to my limited company. It's based in the UK, and houses around sixteen low traffic sites. It generates no money - I really just wanted a raw server out in the wild and sold space on it to known friends who felt the same - we exactly cover our hosting costs and no more.
Am I caught by this? It sounds like I am. Am I now expected to keep mail logs for two years and be legally liable if I don't? If so, I am almost certainly out of the business. Just not worth the risk to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I've sold four bits of software on eBay, and bought one. I bought Cubase SE for OS X, and sold MS Office 2k/MS Works 2k, iLife 04, OS X Panther and Cubase VST 5 (Windows). The Office 2k was an upgrade licence and the bundled Works qualified, so I'm counting that as one bit of software and so a single sale.
There is a market, but I doubt it's that high for games. I'd suggest that the average gamer is more amenable and less fussy about warzed stuff than the average business sale or creative is. Even creative is marginal, given the number of pirated Photoshop installs I've seen in my life.
Cheers,
Ian
Also in this section:
Nice to see this particular section of the press doing their bit to keep standards high.
Cheers,
Ian
Er...just pure bad nomenclature that was supposed to read.
Cheers,
Ian
Should be comp.mozilla, not top-level Mozilla. There's also a comp.infosystems.www hierarchy, which would seem a better place.
Think of the typical Windows Start menu, and what a mess it is because companies keep sticking their name in it rather than the name of the product or anything tied to the product's purpose. Usenet has gone the same way unfortunately.
Cheers,
Ian
Tabs aren't enabled in Safari by default, you need to go into preferences and switch them on. No, I have no idea why they don't just switch them on and have done with it.
Cheers,
Ian
The music? Well...I liked it, but sorry Stanford - it's mostly very derivative and most bands seem to be directly pretending to be another cmmercial one. What happened to colleges doing new forms of music and experimental stuff?
Cheers,
Ian
Those would be 'the minds from Pixar'. Disney merely distributed.
Disney has a system for writing good storys, and Pixar's people have a system for making them look really frickin cool.
Disney has written one good story in the last ten or fifteen years - Lilo and Stitch. The Lion King is good, but there's rather strong evidence it was just lifted from Kimba The White Lion. Even Lilo and Stitch wasn't the company's main focus at the time, I believe that was meant to be The Emporer's New Groove or something equally horrific.
Despite the above, I still think this is good news. However I see it as a potential improvement in Disney, not as anything great for Pixar per se.
Cheers,
Ian
Didn't see the article you're referring to, but I doubt the allegation is true. On the UK site, I sent a note pointing out that at one time it disproportiately picked up The Scotsman and The Guardian. Don't know what the Scotsman is considered, but The Guardian is a soft-left newspaper here.
I didn't think it was political bias even then, just thought the algorithm needed a kick to get a greater spread of sources. I suspect the same algorithm would have been used for both the US and UK sites, and so I imagine in the US by chance the appearance of bias fell to the right, rather than to the left as it did in the UK.
Cheers,
Ian
On meeting the guy, did you chuck him in the nearest river? Because that would have been the only meeting that loon would have been a good time for me. The stoned virus very nearly wiped out my A-Level computing project (UK exams taken at 18) and nearly got me banned from the lab as well. Had I not had an ST with some fairly nice sector copying programs, I would have lost everything with a week to go, and so my University chance would have been blown. And yeah backups, but I was still learning and you've got to remember that this virus stuff was still relatively new at the time (1989).
Cretins who write these things aren't being cool, they're just sociopathic idiots and should be treated as such.
Cheers,
Ian
This is a damned good point in fact, and one that did cross my mind at the time. It's actually my keyboard though - I always take my own keyboard and mouse to every job I go to (MS keyboard, Logitech 3-button mouse) as they normally provide the default Dell stuff which is pretty awful.
Cheers,
Ian
Or even to disassemble in fact. Gah. Mind you, dissamble sounds enough like a word that I think I'm going to try and bluff it out. Well, apart from posting my correction in front of an audience of thousands that is...
Cheers,
Ian
Step two. Get another tissue, scrub away at those keys for all I'm worth, including the gaps between them. Result? Keycaps more or less fine, keyboard as a whole still filthy - I could see stuff at the bottom of the keys.
Step three - the whole hog. To the astonishment of everyone around me at work, I got a screwdriver, unscrewed the keyboard and dissassembled it. More baby-wipes, more scrubbing away. Got tweezers to pull out bits from round the base of the keys. A shcok and awe campaign against the dirt lurking there, no less.
Result? Even with all that, it's still not sparkling clean. IDrastically better of course, but not perfect by any means. Looking at the state it's in at the moment, I'm guessing it will be time for the same exercise again in about a week or two's time.
The keyboard I use here is an MS 'Internet' keyboard by the way - nice enough. I'm going to have to go through the same sort of thing at home soon with an Apple Bluetooth keyboard, and I suspect that's going to be a pain to dissamble.
Cheers,
Ian
"Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly magazine Annals of Improbable Research (www.improbable.com) and organiser of the Ig Nobel Prize"
(emphasis added by me)
ie, to all the people complaining: this is supposed to be flaming obvious.
Cheers,
Ian
Admittedly as applied to the original poster's situation that may be so, however as a general point in using the GPL with your development, eg. linking to libraries etc., it is still an obligation that must be cleared. You may not even know what the eventual plans for the code you're writing are - perhaps they're going to resell the system at a later date? In which case you've just created a situation which requires approval first.
"On the other hand, if you use any software that has a EULA, an actual use license, then you are perhaps agreeing to something when you start using it. But I've never seen any open source software with a EULA."
The specific producst mentioned were Sun's JDK (which we'll skip as it's not open-source), Eclipse and Apache. So looking at the final two.
From the Eclipse Public License page:
"THE ACCOMPANYING PROGRAM IS PROVIDED UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS ECLIPSE PUBLIC LICENSE ("AGREEMENT"). ANY USE, REPRODUCTION OR DISTRIBUTION OF THE PROGRAM CONSTITUTES RECIPIENT'S ACCEPTANCE OF THIS AGREEMENT. ".
From the Apache License page:
" TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE, REPRODUCTION, AND DISTRIBUTION"
(emphasis added by me).
So yes, the licenses discussed have terms for use. And the JDK certainly does.
Cheers,
Ian
Well, the speed of the process is a matter for your corporation. But the precautions? Yes, absolutely necessary. Remember that by using hte software, you are agreeing to a license of some kind (GPL, Apache...whatever). If you are an officer of the company, you have just created a legal obligation for your corporation. One it might not have had any plans to take on.
So yes, clearance of the license is required and sensible. This is the case for any license - open-source, proprietory, anything. Just because you can get the software immediately downloaded and installed without shelling out cash doesn't make it any less of a risk.
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian
"Most of the cooling system is external, sitting neatly atop the PC's case"
Also from the article:
A picture of this 'neat' set-up.
Even by an utter slob's standards, though is no way in hell that thing can be considered neat. Not on this earth, not on any other earth either. I'll try to restrain obvious Apple fanboy'ism, but it's interesting they've attached to an already G5-a-like case. With the exception of the latest quads, which are apparently a bit messy internally, you can see what 'neat' actually means when applied to water-cooling by looking at the Power Macs. I'm sure people on the PC side can point me to considerably more aesthetically pleasing installations than this too.
Cheers,
Ian
Don't know if it applies to your system (and with it's age, you don't want to be playing these games anyway) but I recently revived a Dell Inspiron 8000 that had the same problem. I'll skip on what I tried before I reliased this was the issue, but the final solution was to scrape off the old thermal paste and put new paste on the CPU. Since then, not a single shutdown due to overheating.
Cheers,
Ian
You know, I keep reading this and I just don't think it's true anymore. It may have been the deciding factor in VHS vs Beta, but time moves on and now I would suggest that online access would be the more common way to get that kind of stuff. I don't think the porn industry will have that much to say in this particular fight.
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian
Yep, you're right - I've got my timelines muddled up. Yea gods, I've been following this stuff for longer than I thought.
Cheers,
Ian
Well, no. Microsoft used to be a Gates-Allen company, and it's arguable as to whether figureheads aside it was actually an Allen-Gates company. It used to be a lot better than it is now too. Sounds hard to believe I know, but in the late eighties some of us were actually rooting for Microsoft, not against.
Cheers,
Ian
Google do a Jabber-based service. AOL of course do AIM. Do you think they'd consider merging the two networks? Because a Jabber-based AIM would be a major boost for the protocol. They're adding voice to it, perhaps video next?
Of course I'm getting ahead of myself, 5% is just that - 5%. But still, it's worth a thought. And yes, I'm biased. I'm an iChat user which supports Jabber, and it would be useful to have the Jabber protocol grow in functionality and see the Jabber gateways to other networks start acting as a universal switching point.
Cheers,
Ian
Interesting. I have 32 IP addresses assigned to the one box, and this has all been handled through my limited company so I suppose you could argue that it's a public offering. The boxes run apache instances but also Postfix, so there is a public mail server out there.
I think from your description that I'm outside of the framework, but can't exactly put my finger on why. Does what I've said come under the 'no routing' bit? Or is having the multiple IP addreesses (all on the same subnet of course) classed as diong routing?
Cheers,
Ian
Am I caught by this? It sounds like I am. Am I now expected to keep mail logs for two years and be legally liable if I don't? If so, I am almost certainly out of the business. Just not worth the risk to me.
Cheers,
Ian