Or maybe you grew older and had more to compare it against.
The problem with that argument is that it has a very short window. It works perhaps for my pre-teen late 70's self. However, it doesn't work at all for:
Objective numbers for the audiences. If you adjust for inflation, Star Wars (original movie) is the second box office grosser of all time, barely being beaten out by Gone with the Wind. No other movie in the series even makes the top 10. I remember more than a month after the Star Wars release waiting in a line wrapping around the theater for a ticket. We'd all pass the time in line comparing how many times we'd already seen it. I remember six times being a pretty ho-hum number. You just do not see that today. Heck you don't even see it for opening day on a Star Wars sequel.
My father, who by your accounting was a jaded adult with better things to compare it to at the time. He was more gaga over the first movie than I was. He bought a newfangled VCR just so he could watch it more (on a pirated tape. They didn't officially release it for years).
My kids, most of whom are young enough that they got to experience all of the movies for the first time on home video. They are all convinced the first series, are way better.
They tried that when it was only going 60. It probably would have worked if it had a 20th century French personality. But he clearly got a Renault with a 14th century French personality, and it instead egaged in a suicidal calvary charge.
There are two big obstacles to making "accurate" progress bars.
First off, often it would require you to predict the future. Often the only way to know for sure exactly how long the operation will take is to perform the operation and see how long it takes. (see the Halting Problem) If I could accurately predict the future, I sure as hell wouldn't be sitting here in a dingy cubicle writing GUI code for you.
Secondly, you don't want that. Studies show that the progress bars users like best are ones that speed up as they go along. Steady bars are annoying to wait for, and bars that slow down or stop for long periods are downright frustrating to users.
It also shows he's still a bit out of touch, and still thinking stylus-centric
It isn't odd at all. Its perfectly in character for him. This is the same guy who looked at a impending revolution in ease of copying things, and thought to himself, "What this new ecosystem needs is old-fashioned steam-press era copyright law applied to it".
Bill Gates wasn't really born in the era of electronic information, and either never fully understood it, or just flat out isn't a fan of its implications for society.
From my observation of 10ish years on slashdot (I didn't register until some time of lurking,) slashdot *was* almost entirely in favor of apple, but no longer.
More like 15 years here, and I have to say, I don't really remember that. I do seem to remember Apple being a pioneer in software patent trolling.
Then again, I don't remember a lot of things these days...
Well, that's another good possibility: Give the software away and make money off the hardware. That model wouldn't work for everyone, but folks selling Rock Band style games could easily have done it. I hate to think what my closet would start looking like if this caught on though.:-)
I've actually advocated with my employer (a commercial flight simulation developer) that they should adopt that model. Our "hardware" costs in the millions, and our software certianly doesn't do anything particularly useful (if it runs at all) without it. The real money in this business is in selling time on the trainers anyway.
I've done it myself (with the original version of OpenToken). It worked out great for everyone. The community got a great tool, and the company got accellerated development and code excercise out of a tool they were previously using in-house. Everyone was a winner.
However, that doesn't appear to be what he's asking. It appears that he was defining "success" as donation revenue being higher than proprietary software "toll" revinue, in particular for a game. That's a totally different question, and has almost nothing to do with Open Source licensing. Proprietary "freeware" games face exactly this issue, so the sensible thing to do is look at how they work. I'm not an expert on this model, but I understand they generally have a very low donation rate. So if you want to may it pay better, it would have to be something that will gain way more users as freeware than would have bought it as a traditional "toll booth" model game. Here's an SE question on this exact subject (warning, the answers aren't encouraging).
Most folks making money in OpenSource software that I'm aware of do it by selling services associated with the OpenSource software. For instance, that's how Red Hat makes money off of cywgin, and how AdaCore makes money off of the gnu Ada compiler (Gnat). I'm unaware of anybody doing that with OpenSource games. Possibilites in that space that come to mind are taking donations for feature additions (top grossing feature gets coded next!), or hosting ads on the game server.
So what? Every now and then, in a moment of weakness, I do something stupid too. I bet you have as well. We shouldn't have to worry about malicous people swarming around us just waiting for one mistake to ruin our lives for their benifit. This isn't the wild serengheti. Or at least it shouldn't be. That's not the society I want to live in.
This is because our legal system makes this assumption. Wishful thinking does not make laws go away. If you release software with no license, then it is legally presumed to have full copyright protection. You need to explicitly give up your rights.
Actually, in the USA it may not even be possible to do that. The way our copyright laws are written, everything appliciable is automatically copyrighted. You can sign your rights away to another holder, but there's no provision for abolishing them whatsoever. The closest you can (safely) come is to use the CC0 licence (full license text here).
More likely they thought there must be some secret information on their servers that explains why they say the crap they do. They can't possibly really be that stupid.
I can answer this one. Bob Gordon is looking at the wrong things. The real "revolutions" in history have all been information revolutions. Some poeple get too mesmerized by the effects of them to look for the common causes. You have language, then writing, then printing, then electronic information. Each one allowed members of the society that used it access to orders of magnitude more information than previous ones, essentially putting them in a whole different class.
The implication of this is that if you really want to advance society, find it a more efficient way to copy, store, and process information.
More to the point, how will progress be made without death? It is a commonly held trusim that change in scientific thought happens more by believers in old paradigms dying out, rather than being converted by the evidence of new discoveries. As Max Planck said, "Science advances one funeral at a time."
Societal change most likely happens the same way. It is quite possible that our short lifespans are part of natural selection's design to keep our societies flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions.
If we'd conqured aging in the 1900's, most likely we'd still be living in a society today that believes in the Luminiferous aether, and that supports Jim Crow laws.
I don't think a friend who doesn't want to get into a fight that you drunkenly started is any less of a friend, they're just tired of putting up with your crap.
“When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'.”
-- Attributed to Groucho Marx
To me this is the best defintion I've seen of the difference between the USA's relationship with the UK and its relationship with the rest of its supposed allies.
Your guess would be wrong. OFA is the Obama campaign organization with the nifty software and databases that ran his GOTV effort. The DNC, like the RNC, is a separate organization from any particular candidate's election organization. The POTUS candidates generally take their "NC" over if and only if they win the office. If they fail, there's generally a big fight inside the party for control of the National Committee (which is how we got Howard Dean at the DNC after 2000 and Michael Steele at the RNC after 2004). To make matters worse, there are also the partys' House and Senate campaign comittees (the DCCC, DSCC, RCCC, and RSCC) which are typically run by up-and-coming members of those bodies to try to make a name for themselves (or more accrurately, get lucky catching a wave election to take credit for). These don't have any direct relation to the *NC's either, except that a lot of the same folks tend to be involved in both.
I haven't seen the copyrights in question, but a far better "guess" would be that it is owned by Obama's OFA. Now that Obama (probably) isn't ever running for anything again, the OFA really has no more mission. So what is to become of the organization, and its valuable databases and software, is what is currently under discussion.
Heh. I actually worked on a COMSEC job once upon a time. So its quite possible I once knew the answer to this question, but have since forgotten it. That's part of the fun of getting old.
Those numbers don't tell the real story. Old Windows XP passwords could be cracked on average 2011 hardware at about 10 million (1e7) combinations / second.
This is precisely what I don't understand about this whole escalating password strength/cracker war we are in. If you are operating a server, and some user attempts to log in with an incorrect password a suspiciously large amount of times in a row (say >100 for the sake of argument), why the hell are you letting him guess at the password 999,900 more times?
I understand that there are rainbow table attacks where a password can be reverse-engineered ahead of time based on the hash value stored on the server, but in that case why the hell are you letting outsiders read your password hash file? Isn't that the security breach, not the weakness of my password?
One advantage many people either don't realise or don't think about is expectations. I knew from an early age I was going to attend and graduate from college, perhaps even graduate school. My parents did, and that was just what comes next after grade school, middle school, and high school. I remember being suprised at many of my friends my senior year not knowing what they were going to do next. How could someone not know? College is next!
So when troubles came (as they eventually do for everyone), I knew any path forward was going to include me sticking it out and graduating. I had a girlfriend whose mother had dropped out out college. She was having a rough time with a paper she needed to get a good grade on, and just decided that was it. She was quitting college. I remember my utter shock at this, as that had simply never occurred to me as an option.
A person's expectations for themselves are very powerful, and that is strongly affected by their background.
There was a discussion like this a few years ago. If I have time I'll go find my post. But I went through Forbes' top 20, and found a little more than half inherited a large amount of their wealth. Pretty much all the rest hit it big in either tech or investing.
So basically, if you wanna be rich in the USA, your best options are to either be born to the right people, or to hit the right numbers in the tech or Wall Street lotteries.
Seeing as I got an automated message castigating me for not filling out my electronic timesheet for 12/30 (a vacation day), and I heard tales of some folks getting a double paycheck and being asked to pay the extra back, I'm guessing the answer is no.
Also, are you sure that his code is that terrible?
In general, I agree with this comeback. However, assuming he is right about putting entire programs into one procedure, then either they work at a "Hello World" factory, or yes the guy's code sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe you grew older and had more to compare it against.
The problem with that argument is that it has a very short window. It works perhaps for my pre-teen late 70's self. However, it doesn't work at all for:
The fact is, most folks are not Gen-Xers.
Did they think to ask the car to surrender?
They tried that when it was only going 60. It probably would have worked if it had a 20th century French personality. But he clearly got a Renault with a 14th century French personality, and it instead egaged in a suicidal calvary charge.
(honestly curious how this gets modded)
Well, looking at my modding and responses so far, I have to give Slashdot +2 for understanding the world, and -2 for understanding sarcasm.
It also shows he's still a bit out of touch, and still thinking stylus-centric
It isn't odd at all. Its perfectly in character for him. This is the same guy who looked at a impending revolution in ease of copying things, and thought to himself, "What this new ecosystem needs is old-fashioned steam-press era copyright law applied to it".
Bill Gates wasn't really born in the era of electronic information, and either never fully understood it, or just flat out isn't a fan of its implications for society.
From my observation of 10ish years on slashdot (I didn't register until some time of lurking,) slashdot *was* almost entirely in favor of apple, but no longer.
More like 15 years here, and I have to say, I don't really remember that. I do seem to remember Apple being a pioneer in software patent trolling.
Then again, I don't remember a lot of things these days...
False dilemma. Profit seeking capitalists have done far more good for the world than philanthropists
Precisely. Ask yourself, who has contributed more to making the world a better place: Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr., or Bill Gates and Sam Walton?
(honestly curious how this gets modded)
Well, that's another good possibility: Give the software away and make money off the hardware. That model wouldn't work for everyone, but folks selling Rock Band style games could easily have done it. I hate to think what my closet would start looking like if this caught on though. :-)
I've actually advocated with my employer (a commercial flight simulation developer) that they should adopt that model. Our "hardware" costs in the millions, and our software certianly doesn't do anything particularly useful (if it runs at all) without it. The real money in this business is in selling time on the trainers anyway.
I've done it myself (with the original version of OpenToken). It worked out great for everyone. The community got a great tool, and the company got accellerated development and code excercise out of a tool they were previously using in-house. Everyone was a winner.
However, that doesn't appear to be what he's asking. It appears that he was defining "success" as donation revenue being higher than proprietary software "toll" revinue, in particular for a game. That's a totally different question, and has almost nothing to do with Open Source licensing. Proprietary "freeware" games face exactly this issue, so the sensible thing to do is look at how they work. I'm not an expert on this model, but I understand they generally have a very low donation rate. So if you want to may it pay better, it would have to be something that will gain way more users as freeware than would have bought it as a traditional "toll booth" model game. Here's an SE question on this exact subject (warning, the answers aren't encouraging).
Most folks making money in OpenSource software that I'm aware of do it by selling services associated with the OpenSource software. For instance, that's how Red Hat makes money off of cywgin, and how AdaCore makes money off of the gnu Ada compiler (Gnat). I'm unaware of anybody doing that with OpenSource games. Possibilites in that space that come to mind are taking donations for feature additions (top grossing feature gets coded next!), or hosting ads on the game server.
So what? Every now and then, in a moment of weakness, I do something stupid too. I bet you have as well. We shouldn't have to worry about malicous people swarming around us just waiting for one mistake to ruin our lives for their benifit. This isn't the wild serengheti. Or at least it shouldn't be. That's not the society I want to live in.
This is because our legal system makes this assumption. Wishful thinking does not make laws go away. If you release software with no license, then it is legally presumed to have full copyright protection. You need to explicitly give up your rights.
Actually, in the USA it may not even be possible to do that. The way our copyright laws are written, everything appliciable is automatically copyrighted. You can sign your rights away to another holder, but there's no provision for abolishing them whatsoever. The closest you can (safely) come is to use the CC0 licence (full license text here).
More likely they thought there must be some secret information on their servers that explains why they say the crap they do. They can't possibly really be that stupid.
They didn't mention the 32GB Surface for users on a budget. When you get that one, you actually owe them 9 GB.
I can answer this one. Bob Gordon is looking at the wrong things. The real "revolutions" in history have all been information revolutions. Some poeple get too mesmerized by the effects of them to look for the common causes. You have language, then writing, then printing, then electronic information. Each one allowed members of the society that used it access to orders of magnitude more information than previous ones, essentially putting them in a whole different class.
The implication of this is that if you really want to advance society, find it a more efficient way to copy, store, and process information.
More to the point, how will progress be made without death? It is a commonly held trusim that change in scientific thought happens more by believers in old paradigms dying out, rather than being converted by the evidence of new discoveries. As Max Planck said, "Science advances one funeral at a time."
Societal change most likely happens the same way. It is quite possible that our short lifespans are part of natural selection's design to keep our societies flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions.
If we'd conqured aging in the 1900's, most likely we'd still be living in a society today that believes in the Luminiferous aether, and that supports Jim Crow laws.
Don't we need death?
I don't think a friend who doesn't want to get into a fight that you drunkenly started is any less of a friend, they're just tired of putting up with your crap.
“When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'.”
-- Attributed to Groucho Marx
To me this is the best defintion I've seen of the difference between the USA's relationship with the UK and its relationship with the rest of its supposed allies.
Your guess would be wrong. OFA is the Obama campaign organization with the nifty software and databases that ran his GOTV effort. The DNC, like the RNC, is a separate organization from any particular candidate's election organization. The POTUS candidates generally take their "NC" over if and only if they win the office. If they fail, there's generally a big fight inside the party for control of the National Committee (which is how we got Howard Dean at the DNC after 2000 and Michael Steele at the RNC after 2004). To make matters worse, there are also the partys' House and Senate campaign comittees (the DCCC, DSCC, RCCC, and RSCC) which are typically run by up-and-coming members of those bodies to try to make a name for themselves (or more accrurately, get lucky catching a wave election to take credit for). These don't have any direct relation to the *NC's either, except that a lot of the same folks tend to be involved in both.
I haven't seen the copyrights in question, but a far better "guess" would be that it is owned by Obama's OFA. Now that Obama (probably) isn't ever running for anything again, the OFA really has no more mission. So what is to become of the organization, and its valuable databases and software, is what is currently under discussion.
Heh. I actually worked on a COMSEC job once upon a time. So its quite possible I once knew the answer to this question, but have since forgotten it. That's part of the fun of getting old.
Why was I here again?
Those numbers don't tell the real story. Old Windows XP passwords could be cracked on average 2011 hardware at about 10 million (1e7) combinations / second.
This is precisely what I don't understand about this whole escalating password strength/cracker war we are in. If you are operating a server, and some user attempts to log in with an incorrect password a suspiciously large amount of times in a row (say >100 for the sake of argument), why the hell are you letting him guess at the password 999,900 more times?
I understand that there are rainbow table attacks where a password can be reverse-engineered ahead of time based on the hash value stored on the server, but in that case why the hell are you letting outsiders read your password hash file? Isn't that the security breach, not the weakness of my password?
One advantage many people either don't realise or don't think about is expectations. I knew from an early age I was going to attend and graduate from college, perhaps even graduate school. My parents did, and that was just what comes next after grade school, middle school, and high school. I remember being suprised at many of my friends my senior year not knowing what they were going to do next. How could someone not know? College is next!
So when troubles came (as they eventually do for everyone), I knew any path forward was going to include me sticking it out and graduating. I had a girlfriend whose mother had dropped out out college. She was having a rough time with a paper she needed to get a good grade on, and just decided that was it. She was quitting college. I remember my utter shock at this, as that had simply never occurred to me as an option.
A person's expectations for themselves are very powerful, and that is strongly affected by their background.
There was a discussion like this a few years ago. If I have time I'll go find my post. But I went through Forbes' top 20, and found a little more than half inherited a large amount of their wealth. Pretty much all the rest hit it big in either tech or investing.
So basically, if you wanna be rich in the USA, your best options are to either be born to the right people, or to hit the right numbers in the tech or Wall Street lotteries.
Seeing as I got an automated message castigating me for not filling out my electronic timesheet for 12/30 (a vacation day), and I heard tales of some folks getting a double paycheck and being asked to pay the extra back, I'm guessing the answer is no.
Also, are you sure that his code is that terrible?
In general, I agree with this comeback. However, assuming he is right about putting entire programs into one procedure, then either they work at a "Hello World" factory, or yes the guy's code sucks.
It doesn't have to be a requirement. At some point they will be scarce enough that it will just be eaiser not to use them.
After thinking about it, we should all try this. Everyone with a complaint about Microsoft, just go ahead and email it to "Fake Steve Ballmer" <SteveBallmer@Outlook.com>
My first complaint will be about the low-contrast microfiche-sized install keys they use on the Windows 8 install media...