Well, anyone who relies on stock options is, frankly, an idiot. And I speak as someone with a whole passel of them. Stock options are like a prepetual lottery ticket. If you luck out, you get to cash up and be rich. If not, you have a fistful of nothing.
If you have a decent salary and stuff, stock options are a nice bonus. If you sacrifice a salary for the stock options, you're asking for a world of hurt.
If all this was about was stopping the bad guys from getting patents, one could simply publish "innovations" and thereby ensure they become prior art to ensure others cannot patent them.
Claiming that it is necessary to patent is disingenious at best.
You will probably find that your subsidized mp3 money is just a drop in the bucket of the university's anual budget.
Actually, at the local University in my city, a friend was doing analysis on web caching techniques, using the university caches for the research. A very large proportion (>20%, IIRC) of the traffic was porn - and the same year he finished his degree, the university had announced it had blon out its budget to the tune of something like $20-$40 per student due to unexpected Internet traffic costs.
The next year, they had to implement a user-pays scheme for students, which had not been the case previously. It made no difference that students were accessing study-relatred material, they now pay for it.
Now, it may well be that some small portion of that porn could have been relevant to the academinc work at the University, but I doubt it was. And the extra costs of adminning user pays, the loss of no-cost access for students studying stuff, and the blowouts were the result of people looking at what, for the most part, is rubbish. So it does cost the institutions.
Unfortunately, in the days of Elite (and also Zarch/Virus, to an extent), putting out a game with wireframe/flat-shaded graphics was acceptable. The gameplay on its own justified the release, simply because you didn't need an armada of artists to provide Joe Public with eye candy before a game could be released.
At the time, wireframe grahics were so far ahead of the curve on a home/desktop class system of the time, it is hard to draw a comparison to a recent game release - most of the "revolutionary" steps in recent games are evolutionary. The graphics in Elite were stunning to most people, and constitued eye candy.
Admittedly, there were no elaborate cutscenes of movie-level quality. OTOH, I'd question where those are necessary for a game to succeed.
Notice also that what I'm criticizing in particular is not the hardware, but rather the GUI, which is easy to see in the pix. It simply doesn't appear to fit the needs of a true PDA user.
Exactly. The reason that Microsoft's big push into PDAs has failed to unseat the Palm is because the Palm has a UI which works well within the limited screen real estate and works without a keyboard.
Microsft, OTOH, started their WinCE efforts trying to ram the Windows desktop down PDA users' throats, complete with poxy little keyboards and so forth, despite the fact it was never designed to work on PDA size screens.
On PDAs, usability is king - and trying to make the standard, pixel-hungry X setups work on a PDA has to count as an exercise in futility.
Let us assume, for a moment, that the Applications team at Microsoft has won some sort of politicial victory and is being allowed to port Office or parts thereof to Linux.
This would be a good thing for a bunch of people. I could get rid of Windows for a bunch of stuff, because I wouldn't need Word for preparing documents for people who are illiterate in any sensible document-preparation scheme.
It would be a good thing for Microsoft, who would get to make a bunch of money from Linux users who will end up using Office to match corporate standards, and would let them boost their antitrust defence by pointing to the Apps team developing for rival platforms.
The other place it would be a win for Microsoft, and a huge loss for free software, is that it would undermine a lot of the impetus behind free productivity apps. Why persist with Abiword and Gnumeric when you've got Word and Excel? Free software types know the answer to that question, but most people won't care, and potential rivals to Office will bite the dust to a lesser or greater degree.
But on an issue like this, who's going to fund a REAL survey?
Anyone who's noticed how much more games are becoming part of the culture. One of the guys at my work is about as committed to Quake as most amatuer sportspeople are to their sports code - he practises the same amount of time I would if I were a club rugby player. And that's hardly uncommon. So, from a cultural/sociological point of view, there should be an interest.
I mean who woulda thunk that RPG players would be shelling out their hard-earned magical items to the first pretty-young-virtual-elf that came along?
's pretty amusing, for sure. It would be kind of interesting to get an idea of the thought process behind the action theough - to what degree it is based on traditional notions of "chivalry" and to what degree it is sad gits who imagine that someone will turn up on their doorstep offering sex 8)
Interesting results, pity about the survey.
on
Men Playing as Women
·
· Score: 1
While the results are kind of interesting, and probably tell us what we already knew (a bunch of guys like playing women for various reasons), this is hardly a decent study - a small, self selected sample is lousy methodology, and I'm surprised someone claiming academic credibility would conduct it that way.
Apple uses FreeBSD. Combine that with WindowMaker and it will look NeXT-ish, and by extension, Mac OS X ish.
Apart from small details. Like using X instead of Apple's render engine. And the fact that the 'lickable' OS X interface looks very little like the NeXT interface. And the lack of OpenStep APIs and hence feel. No Display PDF technology.
But apart from that, practically identical!
<flamebait>Is this some wort of measure of how desperate FreeBSD advocates have gotten to try and get people using FreeBSD, or is this guy just thick?</flamebait>
The problem with shareware was that too many not-so-good programs were distributed that asked for far too high prices.
Agreed. When I first started using Macintoshes regularly (from an Amiga background), I was appalled at the shareware scene - hacks that would be free on an Amiga were US$5-US$10; useful programs cost a bunch more.
Then, of course, I discovered GNU and BSD tools around the same time...
Amen. I was at a wedding yesterday. Helped myself to a pair of steaks, a whole pile of ham, and skipped the vegetables. Why wait in line for vegetables.
Microsoft are now an OpenSource company, releasing GPL products.
Must be time to juxtapose all those Microsoft press releases and interviews with senior figures wherein it was asserted that Microsoft customers had no interest in seeing the source.
Re: Rant. I find it ironic that CmdrTaco is complaining about people not having Linux & Microsoft stories appearing. I started reading ars techinca mainly because it currently has more interesting general science and technology stories than/. (like the holographic teacher systems).
Why on earth would Connectix open source a profitable application when they've never shown any interest in doing so before? What would be the point?
About the only possible kernel of truth I could see in this would be if they lose the law suit, and "accidentally" released the source so as to spit in Sony's eye.
Fine - but instead of one christian telling me about how I should live my life, and leaving me alone after I say 'I'm not interested', it is instead legions of people who all feel it is their personal duty to inform me that I am living my life 'wrong' and I should follow their madel, because it is 'right'.
While I disagree with most of the tenets of the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), I'll ive them credit for being up front when they want to discuss religion. They ask if you want to, and go away if you don't. And if you ask 'em not to visit again, they never will.
Compare them to obnoxious sects like the Seventh Day Adventists, who try to lie and weasel their way into your house and then keep coming back.
Mind you, they aren't as creepy as vile cults like Landmark.
I cannot understand how the interviewer managed to conclude that GIMP development raises questions over the viability of free software development, when, in the interview, Kimble and Mattias were so hugely complimentary towards the job later GIMP and GTK developers have done. Am I missing something?
Of course, if I were cynical, I might wonder if sweeping and dramatic claims about problems with free software might be aimed at selling more of the interviewer's book.
Perhaps you should try sniffing around in the real world some time.
Most educational institutions require unlimited rights to any IP you create while attentding them. So if you want to learn enough to create IP, you lose. Since most educational instiutions in the US are underfunded, they flog the rights to your work to the Intels, Microsofts, and General Electrics of this world.
Furthermore, in the US, taxpayer-funded government reasearch is a saleable commodity. So your tax dollars, which fund reseach at universities, NASA, and the ilk, are used to underwrite that basic research, which is patented and onsold to private industry - the little guy's tax dollars go to making Bill Gates richer. Moreover, the little guy's dollars go into a scheme which, to all intents and purposes, forever excludes him from benefitting from publicly funded research without paying a private company for the privilige.
Want a job to pay for that? So sad, sign away your IP rights when you sign up.
As it stands, US patent law generally, and in software in particular, promotes the interests of the already wealthy, at the expense of everyone else.
It wouldn't worry me much in.nz, but for the fact that US companies will inevitably begin to lean on their allies and trading partners to follow their fucked-up lead in all this.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, anyone who relies on stock options is, frankly, an idiot. And I speak as someone with a whole passel of them. Stock options are like a prepetual lottery ticket. If you luck out, you get to cash up and be rich. If not, you have a fistful of nothing.
If you have a decent salary and stuff, stock options are a nice bonus. If you sacrifice a salary for the stock options, you're asking for a world of hurt.
If all this was about was stopping the bad guys from getting patents, one could simply publish "innovations" and thereby ensure they become prior art to ensure others cannot patent them.
Claiming that it is necessary to patent is disingenious at best.
You will probably find that your subsidized mp3 money is just a drop in the bucket of the university's anual budget.
Actually, at the local University in my city, a friend was doing analysis on web caching techniques, using the university caches for the research. A very large proportion (>20%, IIRC) of the traffic was porn - and the same year he finished his degree, the university had announced it had blon out its budget to the tune of something like $20-$40 per student due to unexpected Internet traffic costs.
The next year, they had to implement a user-pays scheme for students, which had not been the case previously. It made no difference that students were accessing study-relatred material, they now pay for it.
Now, it may well be that some small portion of that porn could have been relevant to the academinc work at the University, but I doubt it was. And the extra costs of adminning user pays, the loss of no-cost access for students studying stuff, and the blowouts were the result of people looking at what, for the most part, is rubbish. So it does cost the institutions.
Unfortunately, in the days of Elite (and also Zarch/Virus, to an extent), putting out a game with wireframe/flat-shaded graphics was acceptable. The gameplay on its own justified the release, simply because you didn't need an armada of artists to provide Joe Public with eye candy before a game could be released.
At the time, wireframe grahics were so far ahead of the curve on a home/desktop class system of the time, it is hard to draw a comparison to a recent game release - most of the "revolutionary" steps in recent games are evolutionary. The graphics in Elite were stunning to most people, and constitued eye candy.
Admittedly, there were no elaborate cutscenes of movie-level quality. OTOH, I'd question where those are necessary for a game to succeed.
Given that ORA have siezed control of the camel as a trademark when associated with Perl. Which seems pretty patently absurd to me.
Or is it simply that Tim opposes poor use of intellectual property laws when the offender is not ORA.
Notice also that what I'm criticizing in particular is not the hardware, but rather the GUI, which is easy to see in the pix. It simply doesn't appear to fit the needs of a true PDA user.
Exactly. The reason that Microsoft's big push into PDAs has failed to unseat the Palm is because the Palm has a UI which works well within the limited screen real estate and works without a keyboard.
Microsft, OTOH, started their WinCE efforts trying to ram the Windows desktop down PDA users' throats, complete with poxy little keyboards and so forth, despite the fact it was never designed to work on PDA size screens.
On PDAs, usability is king - and trying to make the standard, pixel-hungry X setups work on a PDA has to count as an exercise in futility.
SGI wants you to think they actually care about opensource but really they don't.
Hmm. That'll explain why they contributed a journaling filesystem to the Linux kernel under the GPL, then.
Let us assume, for a moment, that the Applications team at Microsoft has won some sort of politicial victory and is being allowed to port Office or parts thereof to Linux.
This would be a good thing for a bunch of people. I could get rid of Windows for a bunch of stuff, because I wouldn't need Word for preparing documents for people who are illiterate in any sensible document-preparation scheme.
It would be a good thing for Microsoft, who would get to make a bunch of money from Linux users who will end up using Office to match corporate standards, and would let them boost their antitrust defence by pointing to the Apps team developing for rival platforms.
The other place it would be a win for Microsoft, and a huge loss for free software, is that it would undermine a lot of the impetus behind free productivity apps. Why persist with Abiword and Gnumeric when you've got Word and Excel? Free software types know the answer to that question, but most people won't care, and potential rivals to Office will bite the dust to a lesser or greater degree.
Anyone who's noticed how much more games are becoming part of the culture. One of the guys at my work is about as committed to Quake as most amatuer sportspeople are to their sports code - he practises the same amount of time I would if I were a club rugby player. And that's hardly uncommon. So, from a cultural/sociological point of view, there should be an interest.
I mean who woulda thunk that RPG players would be shelling out their hard-earned magical items to the first pretty-young-virtual-elf that came along?
's pretty amusing, for sure. It would be kind of interesting to get an idea of the thought process behind the action theough - to what degree it is based on traditional notions of "chivalry" and to what degree it is sad gits who imagine that someone will turn up on their doorstep offering sex 8)
While the results are kind of interesting, and probably tell us what we already knew (a bunch of guys like playing women for various reasons), this is hardly a decent study - a small, self selected sample is lousy methodology, and I'm surprised someone claiming academic credibility would conduct it that way.
Apple uses FreeBSD. Combine that with WindowMaker and it will look NeXT-ish, and by extension, Mac OS X ish.
Apart from small details. Like using X instead of Apple's render engine. And the fact that the 'lickable' OS X interface looks very little like the NeXT interface. And the lack of OpenStep APIs and hence feel. No Display PDF technology.
But apart from that, practically identical!
<flamebait>Is this some wort of measure of how desperate FreeBSD advocates have gotten to try and get people using FreeBSD, or is this guy just thick?</flamebait>
The problem with shareware was that too many not-so-good programs were distributed that asked for far too high prices.
Agreed. When I first started using Macintoshes regularly (from an Amiga background), I was appalled at the shareware scene - hacks that would be free on an Amiga were US$5-US$10; useful programs cost a bunch more.
Then, of course, I discovered GNU and BSD tools around the same time...
Amen. I was at a wedding yesterday. Helped myself to a pair of steaks, a whole pile of ham, and skipped the vegetables. Why wait in line for vegetables.
Microsoft are now an OpenSource company, releasing GPL products.
Must be time to juxtapose all those Microsoft press releases and interviews with senior figures wherein it was asserted that Microsoft customers had no interest in seeing the source.
Re: Rant. I find it ironic that CmdrTaco is complaining about people not having Linux & Microsoft stories appearing. I started reading ars techinca mainly because it currently has more interesting general science and technology stories than /. (like the holographic teacher systems).
Why on earth would Connectix open source a profitable application when they've never shown any interest in doing so before? What would be the point?
About the only possible kernel of truth I could see in this would be if they lose the law suit, and "accidentally" released the source so as to spit in Sony's eye.
Fine - but instead of one christian telling me about how I should live my life, and leaving me alone after I say 'I'm not interested', it is instead legions of people who all feel it is their personal duty to inform me that I am living my life 'wrong' and I should follow their madel, because it is 'right'.
While I disagree with most of the tenets of the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), I'll ive them credit for being up front when they want to discuss religion. They ask if you want to, and go away if you don't. And if you ask 'em not to visit again, they never will.
Compare them to obnoxious sects like the Seventh Day Adventists, who try to lie and weasel their way into your house and then keep coming back.
Mind you, they aren't as creepy as vile cults like Landmark.
Aladdin. Or did you miss the interview where the owner explained he was now rich enough from the proceeds of ghostscript to be able to retire?
I cannot understand how the interviewer managed to conclude that GIMP development raises questions over the viability of free software development, when, in the interview, Kimble and Mattias were so hugely complimentary towards the job later GIMP and GTK developers have done. Am I missing something?
Of course, if I were cynical, I might wonder if sweeping and dramatic claims about problems with free software might be aimed at selling more of the interviewer's book.
Perhaps you should try sniffing around in the real world some time.
.nz, but for the fact that US companies will inevitably begin to lean on their allies and trading partners to follow their fucked-up lead in all this.
Most educational institutions require unlimited rights to any IP you create while attentding them. So if you want to learn enough to create IP, you lose. Since most educational instiutions in the US are underfunded, they flog the rights to your work to the Intels, Microsofts, and General Electrics of this world.
Furthermore, in the US, taxpayer-funded government reasearch is a saleable commodity. So your tax dollars, which fund reseach at universities, NASA, and the ilk, are used to underwrite that basic research, which is patented and onsold to private industry - the little guy's tax dollars go to making Bill Gates richer. Moreover, the little guy's dollars go into a scheme which, to all intents and purposes, forever excludes him from benefitting from publicly funded research without paying a private company for the privilige.
Want a job to pay for that? So sad, sign away your IP rights when you sign up.
As it stands, US patent law generally, and in software in particular, promotes the interests of the already wealthy, at the expense of everyone else.
It wouldn't worry me much in