I hate to say it but your example only bolsters the argument that those who oppose this kind of invasion of privacy do so because they have something to hide or want to get away with something.
Fact it, most OSS developers contribute for their own benefit, be that notoriety, experience gained or the sheer pleasure of it.
I think this is the biggest misconception of the opensource industry. The amazing software developers making some of the best software out there today are not working for peanuts. The fact is that most of the work is done by people for their own financial benefit. I've done it, IBM does it, apple does it and tens of thousands of other organizations do it. It is much cheaper to add a few features to an oss product than it is to implement a solution from the ground up or buy a 3rd party solution.
Lets look at a non-main-stream example. Asterisk - The Open Source Linux PBX. Most of the development of this software is being funded by a company call digium to further the sale of their pbx related hardware and other services (support etc). Pick any other successful project, the Linux Kernel, Apache, MySQL and you will find people working for real money with a vast majority of that money coming from people who are financially benefiting from the software.
The most important things that keeps the vast majority of shoppers from stealing DVDs, or anything else for that matter, are honesty and morals.
HaHaha! No, it's the threat of jail, fines, criminal records and violence. Just wait until one can download a DVD in under 10 minutes on Kazaa, then we'll what kind of role "honesty and morals" play. . . . . .
Granted taking a physical DVD is theft while downloading one is copyright infringement; morally they are similar.
We had a similar problem at Sparklit (www.sparklit.com if you interested). We ended up developing a CRM from the ground up. We started with something simple and over the years it has grown into a very robust system rivaling anything I have seen.
Every person we have shown it to says something to the effect of "Wow, Why don't you sell this?".
Some of the features are:
Automatic Re-occurring Subscriptions (Discounts/Usage Charges etc are supported) Automatic Credit Card Billing Support Incidents/Tickets (with multiple statuses/email notification etc) Reporting: Revenue/Income/Product growth/Usage etc User memos/phone logs Debit/Credit Manager Fraud Manager User Output Tracker (Can track a users usage of the site in real-time. Useful for debugging.) Debt Manager - (Automatic Processes owing accounts through 7 steps "Email Invoice/Snail Mail Invoice/Legal Notices/Collection Agency etc" all without any human intervention)
And much more stuff that is very specific to our system. The point is that you can write a specific app that will perform much better than 3rd party "generic" apps. It is the specific things that will save you time. For example our support request system has a feature that will automatically alert me via Jabber when a support request comes in. It will then analyze the ticket looking for common keywords and suggest a list of "Quick Answers" to respond with. Due to the level integration required with our other systems a third party solution was out of the question. You might find the same.
A couple of years ago I got a DSL line from a local company. I felt good about giving my business to a local company rather than the regional telephone company.
A few months go by and I receive an invoice for ~$80. Apparently, they had modified there agreement to redefine unlimited to mean 6GB/month and were charging $10/GB overages.
I didn't say anything to them. I called the BBB and the CRTC (Canadian equivalent of the FTC) and when I had a couple of hours free I filed a lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgment stating that I didn't owe them any money, court costs and treble damages for breach of contract. My damages were the cost of having a replacement service installed and business interruptions.
They ended up paying me $250 plus court costs as a settlement. Although, I still wish I hadn't settled.
Well, some small bit of the energy translates to movement (ie, vibrational energy). Otherwise, yes
No, even that ends up as heat. The spinning of your hard drives eventually stops and the energy is converted to heat. Just like rubbing two sticks together. Even the sound and light that doesn't escape your house becomes heat.
Dude, you don't understand. Eventually all of the energy is converted to heat. It is the lowest form of enery. All of the electrical energy that goes into your computer has to go somewhere. That is basic conservation of energy. It all ends up as heat. Wether it is first used to spin your had drive or power your ram. In the end it all becomes heat.
The only energy that escapes your house is a very small amount light (for your monitor,leds [if you have windows near by]) and a very very small amount of sound energy (from your fans etc). Where is all the other energy going?
A computer is hardly an efficient space heater. (An effective one, yes, but mostly because current systems use huge amounts of power.) If you want to save energy, turn off the PC when you're not going to be using it and use the furnace.
Utter Nonsense. A computer is a 100% effcient space heater, just like any electrical device. Your 300 watt computer is going to produced as much heat as a 300 watt heater. If you are using standard electric heating your are not saving any energy by turning off your computer, tv, stereo, fridge or any other electrical device. (During the winter ofcourse).
Do people throw around mod points like candy? penny candy? mmmmm candy...
Simple, if you are the only spammer who can get past the filters your message is far more valuable.
I setup spamassasin for my dad. He hardly gets any spam, however, the odd spam that does get through receives his undivided attention for about 5 - 10 seconds (until he figures out it is spam. He is pretty trusting with his email). This would change if he got flooded with spam everyday.
6to4 is the technology to replace NAT. For one IPv4 address you get 65536 times the current size of the internet addresses for use in your local company.
This is a solution to a problem that nobody has (on par with the spagehtti strainer lid and pot combo). I've never heard of a anyone running out of IPs in the private range.
IPv6 will only take off when (and if) it is needed to solve real problems that cost people money.
Re:Oh no,! They'll.. wait.. what does this add?
on
RFID Casino Chips
·
· Score: 1
What will this add?... All RFID chips will mean is that you can't cheat.
If you are going to ask and answer your own questions what do you need us for?
The key to the video codec market is pr0n. The don't need to innovate they simply need ensure that most pr0n is in realmedia format.
Seriously, how many people downloaded their first media program to view porn?? Hands up.
Step 1) Hop on fast track and download loads of pr0n. Step 2) Re-encode into realmedia format. Step 3) Upload on a big fat pipe. Step 4) $$$ Profit $$$
Nobody is asking *you* to pay. People in NYC and other large urban centers pay taxes too. If they want to spend their tax money to quiten the city let them. Nobody complains about the miles and miles of highways built for tiny towns in the country.
You should help the cause by shutting up; you're making too much noise.
What is really bad are ads during North American sporting events.
In a Canadian/USA hockey game it is not only enough to plaster the boards with ads flash corporate logos across the screen embed ads in the ice surface and offer a full ten minutes of ads between the three periods. They also insert ads at every stoppage in play often causing you to misses portions of the game. I suspect that the game has been designed with so many maddening stoppages specifically to include more ads.
By contrast a world cup or European soccer game will run for a full 45 minute half with out any interruptions.
Re:Wait, the Video Phone succeeded?
on
Death of the PDA?
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· Score: 1
Of course, if I thought of an idea, it must already exist and have been implemented by someone.
They actually had a seperate remote that would set off the explosives. Also they didn't call the target themselves, they had to wait (sometimes for days) for a someone else to call the target. Then a voice analysis expert had to confirm the indentity of the person on the phone before they would set off the charge.
Let's just hope we have another decade or two to get ready before a big one is going to hit.
Yeah, its been 70 million years or so before the last "big one" hit. But we are running out of time... you better put on your tinfoil hat and dig your underground bomb shelter. Thats the bad news. The good news is that your y2k hording was not in vain. Get to work now before the sky starts falling.
Slashdot Mirror
and a competitor can come close to offering a product with equal sex appeal for less than $150.
Won't happen. The price is part of the sex appeal. The IPOD hit the right forumual. It's functional, modern and expensive/luxury.
No I didn't say that. My point was that the parents argument sucked. That is all.
I hate to say it but your example only bolsters the argument that those who oppose this kind of invasion of privacy do so because they have something to hide or want to get away with something.
Fact it, most OSS developers contribute for their own benefit, be that notoriety, experience gained or the sheer pleasure of it.
I think this is the biggest misconception of the opensource industry. The amazing software developers making some of the best software out there today are not working for peanuts. The fact is that most of the work is done by people for their own financial benefit. I've done it, IBM does it, apple does it and tens of thousands of other organizations do it. It is much cheaper to add a few features to an oss product than it is to implement a solution from the ground up or buy a 3rd party solution.
Lets look at a non-main-stream example. Asterisk - The Open Source Linux PBX. Most of the development of this software is being funded by a company call digium to further the sale of their pbx related hardware and other services (support etc). Pick any other successful project, the Linux Kernel, Apache, MySQL and you will find people working for real money with a vast majority of that money coming from people who are financially benefiting from the software.
These are my thoughts, correct me if I'm wrong.
The most important things that keeps the vast majority of shoppers from stealing DVDs, or anything else for that matter, are honesty and morals.
HaHaha! No, it's the threat of jail, fines, criminal records and violence. Just wait until one can download a DVD in under 10 minutes on Kazaa, then we'll what kind of role "honesty and morals" play.
.
.
.
.
.
Granted taking a physical DVD is theft while downloading one is copyright infringement; morally they are similar.
We had a similar problem at Sparklit (www.sparklit.com if you interested). We ended up developing a CRM from the ground up. We started with something simple and over the years it has grown into a very robust system rivaling anything I have seen.
Every person we have shown it to says something to the effect of "Wow, Why don't you sell this?".
Some of the features are:
Automatic Re-occurring Subscriptions (Discounts/Usage Charges etc are supported)
Automatic Credit Card Billing
Support Incidents/Tickets (with multiple statuses/email notification etc)
Reporting: Revenue/Income/Product growth/Usage etc
User memos/phone logs
Debit/Credit Manager
Fraud Manager
User Output Tracker (Can track a users usage of the site in real-time. Useful for debugging.)
Debt Manager - (Automatic Processes owing accounts through 7 steps "Email Invoice/Snail Mail Invoice/Legal Notices/Collection Agency etc" all without any human intervention)
And much more stuff that is very specific to our system. The point is that you can write a specific app that will perform much better than 3rd party "generic" apps. It is the specific things that will save you time. For example our support request system has a feature that will automatically alert me via Jabber when a support request comes in. It will then analyze the ticket looking for common keywords and suggest a list of "Quick Answers" to respond with. Due to the level integration required with our other systems a third party solution was out of the question. You might find the same.
A couple of years ago I got a DSL line from a local company. I felt good about giving my business to a local company rather than the regional telephone company.
A few months go by and I receive an invoice for ~$80. Apparently, they had modified there agreement to redefine unlimited to mean 6GB/month and were charging $10/GB overages.
I didn't say anything to them. I called the BBB and the CRTC (Canadian equivalent of the FTC) and when I had a couple of hours free I filed a lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgment stating that I didn't owe them any money, court costs and treble damages for breach of contract. My damages were the cost of having a replacement service installed and business interruptions.
They ended up paying me $250 plus court costs as a settlement. Although, I still wish I hadn't settled.
Well, some small bit of the energy translates to movement (ie, vibrational energy). Otherwise, yes
No, even that ends up as heat. The spinning of your hard drives eventually stops and the energy is converted to heat. Just like rubbing two sticks together. Even the sound and light that doesn't escape your house becomes heat.
Dude, you don't understand. Eventually all of the energy is converted to heat. It is the lowest form of enery. All of the electrical energy that goes into your computer has to go somewhere. That is basic conservation of energy. It all ends up as heat. Wether it is first used to spin your had drive or power your ram. In the end it all becomes heat.
The only energy that escapes your house is a very small amount light (for your monitor,leds [if you have windows near by]) and a very very small amount of sound energy (from your fans etc). Where is all the other energy going?
A computer is hardly an efficient space heater. (An effective one, yes, but mostly because current systems use huge amounts of power.) If you want to save energy, turn off the PC when you're not going to be using it and use the furnace.
Utter Nonsense. A computer is a 100% effcient space heater, just like any electrical device. Your 300 watt computer is going to produced as much heat as a 300 watt heater.
If you are using standard electric heating your are not saving any energy by turning off your computer, tv, stereo, fridge or any other electrical device. (During the winter ofcourse).
Do people throw around mod points like candy? penny candy? mmmmm candy...
Nevertheless, for day-to-day photography my wife's Canon digital camera is perfectly adequate
Did anybody else read this as "day-to-day pornography"?
I had to read the reply and then read it again.
Simple, if you are the only spammer who can get past the filters your message is far more valuable.
I setup spamassasin for my dad. He hardly gets any spam, however, the odd spam that does get through receives his undivided attention for about 5 - 10 seconds (until he figures out it is spam. He is pretty trusting with his email). This would change if he got flooded with spam everyday.
Yea, sure, if they plan on keeping track of all the bathrooms.
Wow. 16.7 million bathrooms. They must drink a lot of beer.
I would really like to know why Slashdot keeps posting fantastical stories from that ratings-driven rag.
Maybe it's because those 26 people are doing a really good job?!?
6to4 is the technology to replace NAT. For one IPv4 address you get 65536 times the current size of the internet addresses for use in your local company.
This is a solution to a problem that nobody has (on par with the spagehtti strainer lid and pot combo). I've never heard of a anyone running out of IPs in the private range.
IPv6 will only take off when (and if) it is needed to solve real problems that cost people money.
What will this add? ... All RFID chips will mean is that you can't cheat.
If you are going to ask and answer your own questions what do you need us for?
P.S. That was a joke....
Ummm, no it wasn't. You may *think* it was a joke, but trust me it wasn't.
That's a terribly stupid idea. It would never work. In fact all your ideas are stupid. Now go away.
/me runs off to the patent office with my lawyer in tow.
P.S. please post any other stupid ideas you may have.
The key to the video codec market is pr0n. The don't need to innovate they simply need ensure that most pr0n is in realmedia format.
Seriously, how many people downloaded their first media program to view porn?? Hands up.
Step 1) Hop on fast track and download loads of pr0n.
Step 2) Re-encode into realmedia format.
Step 3) Upload on a big fat pipe.
Step 4) $$$ Profit $$$
Intersting fact..
My grandfather used to sprinkle the books in his law library with DDT to preserve them. He died at the age of 85.
Why should I pay to make their lives more quiet?
Nobody is asking *you* to pay. People in NYC and other large urban centers pay taxes too. If they want to spend their tax money to quiten the city let them. Nobody complains about the miles and miles of highways built for tiny towns in the country.
You should help the cause by shutting up; you're making too much noise.
What is really bad are ads during North American sporting events.
In a Canadian/USA hockey game it is not only enough to plaster the boards with ads flash corporate logos across the screen embed ads in the ice surface and offer a full ten minutes of ads between the three periods. They also insert ads at every stoppage in play often causing you to misses portions of the game. I suspect that the game has been designed with so many maddening stoppages specifically to include more ads.
By contrast a world cup or European soccer game will run for a full 45 minute half with out any interruptions.
Of course, if I thought of an idea, it must already exist and have been implemented by someone.
s/implemented/patented/
They actually had a seperate remote that would set off the explosives. Also they didn't call the target themselves, they had to wait (sometimes for days) for a someone else to call the target. Then a voice analysis expert had to confirm the indentity of the person on the phone before they would set off the charge.
Let's just hope we have another decade or two to get ready before a big one is going to hit.
Yeah, its been 70 million years or so before the last "big one" hit. But we are running out of time... you better put on your tinfoil hat and dig your underground bomb shelter. Thats the bad news. The good news is that your y2k hording was not in vain. Get to work now before the sky starts falling.