It only seems expensive in comparison to cheap Dell boxes. But if you factor in the quality of the hardware you quickly realize that Apple computers are not such a bad deal. Plus with apple computers you truly get a Computing System (TM) out of the box that just works....and no you don't with Windows. I spent most of a day installing a new copy of XP on a Dell server. I spend less than 1 hour on an identical computer with Fedora Core4.
I don't currently own a Mac, but I did recently get to play with a friends developer Intel based Mac and I can assure that I will be purchasing a Mac next. It get all the power and developer tools I get with Linux, and the just works part that makes using computers fun. Sure I will always keep Linux around, but I also have no problem paying for a product that is developed 100%. Most open source projects (mine included) are developed 80%. No one wants to put the final finishing touches on projects that don't make money, because those aspects of coding, and document writing just aren't as fun as hacking.
uh...dude have you used both browsers in the last year?
No seriously you are totally righ both browsers were developed by highly skilled engineers... No one is dsputing that. However one group of engineers (for whatever reason...boss said so perhaps) has not been competitive in the last 2.5 years...go download Firefox, you can see for your self.
You are wrong on so many levels it just hurts. Ok let's just assume for a second that your future comes true and all shrink wrapped sotware becomes obsolete.
Now insteed of starting a company to produce a new product I start a company to provide support. So who's gonna write the software for me to support? I sure as hell am not going to write it because I would be wasting resources. Once I spent some large amount developing the software I would then give it away and open the door to competition who played no part in the development. You are crazy if you think this business model is going to fly.
What will happen is a lot of mass cosumer level software (browsers, operating systems, word editors, email) will become open source and basically free. However next generation software will still be closed source and companies will be able to generate profits from it until an equivalnt open source product is around to compete...in the mean time said company should be working on the next product that they can sell.
As an aside not you should (if you are not already) conribute to a couple of OSS projects. Most of these projects have 1 developer. Sometimes they get 2-3. The Linux kernal, mozilla, open office and apache are the exceptions to the rule. Don't think for a second that you are going to start an open source project in a small niche area and have tons of people flooding in to help you. You will get ton's of users, but you will get very very few if any contibutors.
Also were are all the great open source games at? Do you even know of any projects out there that are taking a serious stab at it? I don't. Professonal software development is hard. Great open source project are far and few between (same can be said for commercial projects). My money say's that an experienced developer who has enough money to hire 10 really good programmers to do a job will alway's produce better, more complete code, in a faster time frame. Hey, don't get me wrong I love OSS, but let's be real it isn't going to put all software developers out of busness. Also most coders are not going to be willing to suffer through a CS degree so they can provide phone support.
The world will survive with several business models just as it has sine the bggining of time. What I find really really funny is a bunch of geeks on slashdot even talking about business models. How many of us have actually written a business plan and used it to get funding?
"Lets be fair, the lab didn't want to help anyone with their knowledge except themselves and their shareholders."
As someone who works in the Drug Industry as a computational chemist I take quite a bit of offense to your statment. Quite a lot of us care about the patients. In fact at our last in house conference Paul Anderson (ex American Chemical Society President) gave a talk titled: Patients first Profits second. We do care. Perhaps you don't care about your job but most of us in this field do care about our jobs and the significance of what we are tyring to do.
I for one would rather take the little pill the the "EVIL" drug company produces as opposed to eating leaves. Wouldn't you? Now that we have established that lets figure out how we can do that? Oh wait we have a system called a patent system that allows just that. Investors put up the money to pay us scientists (who often times have huge debt in order to get our PhD's) so that we can figure out a way to take your leaves and make a pill so that the world benifits. But all you can see with your short short sitedness is the Evil American Empire Hell Bent on Global Dominiation trying steal the drug from the littel guy.
"And the answer is no, no one should have a patent on the compound, not peru or the company. "
Right and you think someone is just going to spend 50-100 million dollars to put out the next drug without any kind of patent protection?
Look people we all agree that software patents are bad, but patents to have a place and a purpose. The drug industry would not exist without them. It takes a lot of serious technology to discover, scale up, and bring to market a new drug. This is not something a 16 kid will be doing in his bedroom.
Besides the company will mostly likely only get a process patent and not a composition of matter patent. So in essence they do not own the chemical structure but rather a method of making the compound. This will leave the door open to others trying to find a simpler cheaper way to make the compoud.
I saw my next door neighbor shoot a bird of a power line with an arrow when I was a kid. We used to shoot a good bit in our back yards. He was pretty good, but I was like damn man you just killed a bird with your bow!
That is a totally true story...must have been like 16 at the time.
Christ man all the moderators must be windows admins tonight. Seems like every crack at windows is being modded down. You know what...screw you moderators I bless this poster with...well my make believe funny moderation
I agree. Regardless of what some people say Windows is an inferior development platform. Most cross platform code these day's is written on the Unix side and then ported to the Windows side. I mean for christs sake why can't I use a cout statment with a qt based application in Windows? WTF? If I sound frustrated that's because I am. Normally I am a happy developer coding along in Linux, but every month or so I must take a week of my life to port this crap to windows because most of my GD users are to F'in lazy to use a real OS.
MOD ME DOWN...my Karma was just about even again.
So as soon as you windows users quite using that damn OS the sooner the world of software development can move forward. Until then expect second rate application on Windows.
" Now excellent back end. They made the OS (middleware) irrelevent."
really? That's an interesting view. Surely you had an OS that managed the driver for the either net card that you connected to the network with. They did not now...nor will they ever make the OS irrelevant. Somethings technologies do well computing in the browser and some do not!
I have to agree with you. For me the itch usually wakes me up around 3 a.m. Something I just have to finish or try. I have been writing code since I was around 12 on an old commodore 64. I am 32 now. I took a few CS classes in college but I am mostly self taught. So to those considering a career in this field here are some worthless tidbits from my observations.
If you find it laboring to read an algorithms book then you might want to find a different field.
On the same note. If you don't understand algorithms to the point of being able to modify them to fit different scenarios then go back and reread your algorithms book and then get some literature papers on new modern algorithms...good stuff.
If you only learned assembler because a teacher told you to then you might want to find another field. Sure you don't NEED it now...but damn it sure is cool to take advantage of the SSE registers with in-line assembler.
If you believe that only those who suffer through classes are the elite...again you might want to find another field. In this field my friends only those with a true interest will rise to the top. Sure it might be easier to learn when a teacher gives you the correct material, but what about the 16 year kid who learns an algorithm because it was the only way to solve the problem efficiently...who do you think understands it better??
If you learn a new scripting language only because you think it will help your carear as opposed to learning it because you are really curious about how it is different then you should probably find a new career because learning new languages is a pain if you don't really want to learn it. On that note go learn Ruby...what a cool cool language. As a scientific programmer I don't really get to use it much but it is a remarkable language.
Oh and on the topic of languages....go learn FORTRAN. If you don't know the fundamentals of FORTRAN then it is like being a rock musician without studying the blues. If nothing else you will understand why so many of us HATE that language. Plus you will gain a new found respect for the software written by the previous generation. That was some tough shit given the tools they used.
If you find that you only have a passing interest in math...you might consider a new career. Math and logic are the foundations of programming. Really good CS people are typically pretty good math people. Not saying you can't code without math ability, but you probably can't code as good as someone with math ability.
In essence if you aren't one of those people who loves to learn on his own. CS is gonna be a tough field for you. Most really good programmers have a mix of CS and hacker qualities. They use the good engineering practices from the CS side in combination with the need to scratch an itch from the hacker side.
Well those are my thoughts...back to itch scratching. been up since 3 am today. Needed a slashdot break.
good question...just give me the forever pill and I sir wil provide you with the answer to you question.
Seriously
"How will we prevent the extreme accumulation of wealth that this would allow if it is not equally accessible to everyone?"
And how is it going to be any different. We already have several people with over a billion dollars in net woth. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around how much a billion is. I would say that at some point (perhaps a billion) more doesn't provide you with anything so why keep trying?
Thanks for the great link. My Mom who sells real estate in southern Florida is convinced that her market is immune!! I will be forwarding her this link.
Perhaps you should read the whole license...or at least as far as item 5.
5. A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a "work that uses the Library". Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.
Or if that is to much trouble then at least read the clause which you are quoting. it say's if you distribute the LIBRARY then you must distribute the code.
Since all the legal wording is so tough for you why don't we just have a look at what the authors actaully mean.
" For example, on rare occasions, there may be a special need to encourage the widest possible use of a certain library, so that it becomes a de-facto standard. To achieve this, non-free programs must be allowed to use the library. A more frequent case is that a free library does the same job as widely used non-free libraries. In this case, there is little to gain by limiting the free library to free software only, so we use the Lesser General Public License."
And please don't give me this crap about how you can charge for open source programs. The intent of the LGPL is to foster use of a particlular library. Both commercial and non commercial. You take away the LGPL and Linux goes bye-bye to almost all commercial developers. For instance the Mesa openGL like librarys. You can build closed source application that work with them and it is perfectly valid.
Slashdot Mirror
Where would you like those fried served?
It only seems expensive in comparison to cheap Dell boxes. But if you factor in the quality of the hardware you quickly realize that Apple computers are not such a bad deal. Plus with apple computers you truly get a Computing System (TM) out of the box that just works....and no you don't with Windows. I spent most of a day installing a new copy of XP on a Dell server. I spend less than 1 hour on an identical computer with Fedora Core4.
I don't currently own a Mac, but I did recently get to play with a friends developer Intel based Mac and I can assure that I will be purchasing a Mac next. It get all the power and developer tools I get with Linux, and the just works part that makes using computers fun. Sure I will always keep Linux around, but I also have no problem paying for a product that is developed 100%. Most open source projects (mine included) are developed 80%. No one wants to put the final finishing touches on projects that don't make money, because those aspects of coding, and document writing just aren't as fun as hacking.
Or maybe you are just a retard.
uh...dude have you used both browsers in the last year?
No seriously you are totally righ both browsers were developed by highly skilled engineers... No one is dsputing that. However one group of engineers (for whatever reason...boss said so perhaps) has not been competitive in the last 2.5 years...go download Firefox, you can see for your self.
You are wrong on so many levels it just hurts. Ok let's just assume for a second that your future comes true and all shrink wrapped sotware becomes obsolete.
Now insteed of starting a company to produce a new product I start a company to provide support. So who's gonna write the software for me to support? I sure as hell am not going to write it because I would be wasting resources. Once I spent some large amount developing the software I would then give it away and open the door to competition who played no part in the development. You are crazy if you think this business model is going to fly.
What will happen is a lot of mass cosumer level software (browsers, operating systems, word editors, email) will become open source and basically free. However next generation software will still be closed source and companies will be able to generate profits from it until an equivalnt open source product is around to compete...in the mean time said company should be working on the next product that they can sell.
As an aside not you should (if you are not already) conribute to a couple of OSS projects. Most of these projects have 1 developer. Sometimes they get 2-3. The Linux kernal, mozilla, open office and apache are the exceptions to the rule. Don't think for a second that you are going to start an open source project in a small niche area and have tons of people flooding in to help you. You will get ton's of users, but you will get very very few if any contibutors.
Also were are all the great open source games at? Do you even know of any projects out there that are taking a serious stab at it? I don't. Professonal software development is hard. Great open source project are far and few between (same can be said for commercial projects). My money say's that an experienced developer who has enough money to hire 10 really good programmers to do a job will alway's produce better, more complete code, in a faster time frame. Hey, don't get me wrong I love OSS, but let's be real it isn't going to put all software developers out of busness. Also most coders are not going to be willing to suffer through a CS degree so they can provide phone support.
The world will survive with several business models just as it has sine the bggining of time. What I find really really funny is a bunch of geeks on slashdot even talking about business models. How many of us have actually written a business plan and used it to get funding?
"Lets be fair, the lab didn't want to help anyone with their knowledge except themselves and their shareholders."
As someone who works in the Drug Industry as a computational chemist I take quite a bit of offense to your statment.
Quite a lot of us care about the patients. In fact at our last in house conference Paul Anderson (ex American Chemical Society President) gave a talk titled: Patients first Profits second. We do care. Perhaps you don't care about your job but most of us in this field do care about our jobs and the significance of what we are tyring to do.
I for one would rather take the little pill the the "EVIL" drug company produces as opposed to eating leaves. Wouldn't you? Now that we have established that lets figure out how we can do that? Oh wait we have a system called a patent system that allows just that. Investors put up the money to pay us scientists (who often times have huge debt in order to get our PhD's) so that we can figure out a way to take your leaves and make a pill so that the world benifits. But all you can see with your short short sitedness is the Evil American Empire Hell Bent on Global Dominiation trying steal the drug from the littel guy.
Christ man get at least a small grip on reality.
"And the answer is no, no one should have a patent on the compound, not peru or the company. "
Right and you think someone is just going to spend 50-100 million dollars to put out the next drug without any kind of patent protection?
Look people we all agree that software patents are bad, but patents to have a place and a purpose. The drug industry would not exist without them. It takes a lot of serious technology to discover, scale up, and bring to market a new drug. This is not something a 16 kid will be doing in his bedroom.
Besides the company will mostly likely only get a process patent and not a composition of matter patent. So in essence they do not own the chemical structure but rather a method of making the compound. This will leave the door open to others trying to find a simpler cheaper way to make the compoud.
I saw my next door neighbor shoot a bird of a power line with an arrow when I was a kid. We used to shoot a good bit in our back yards. He was pretty good, but I was like damn man you just killed a bird with your bow!
That is a totally true story...must have been like 16 at the time.
Christ man all the moderators must be windows admins tonight. Seems like every crack at windows is being modded down. You know what...screw you moderators I bless this poster with...well my make believe funny moderation
Nah Nah na boo boo!
Damn it! You made me spit me beer out laughing. Son of a bitch...that was a waste of Corsendonk Christmas Ale.
I agree. Regardless of what some people say Windows is an inferior development platform. Most cross platform code these day's is written on the Unix side and then ported to the Windows side. I mean for christs sake why can't I use a cout statment with a qt based application in Windows? WTF? If I sound frustrated that's because I am. Normally I am a happy developer coding along in Linux, but every month or so I must take a week of my life to port this crap to windows because most of my GD users are to F'in lazy to use a real OS.
MOD ME DOWN...my Karma was just about even again.
So as soon as you windows users quite using that damn OS the sooner the world of software development can move forward. Until then expect second rate application on Windows.
" Now excellent back end. They made the OS (middleware) irrelevent."
really? That's an interesting view. Surely you had an OS that managed the driver for the either net card that you connected to the network with. They did not now...nor will they ever make the OS irrelevant. Somethings technologies do well computing in the browser and some do not!
I have to agree with you. For me the itch usually wakes me up around 3 a.m. Something I just have to finish or try. I have been writing code since I was around 12 on an old commodore 64. I am 32 now. I took a few CS classes in college but I am mostly self taught. So to those considering a career in this field here are some worthless tidbits from my observations.
If you find it laboring to read an algorithms book then you might want to find a different field.
On the same note. If you don't understand algorithms to the point of being able to modify them to fit different scenarios then go back and reread your algorithms book and then get some literature papers on new modern algorithms...good stuff.
If you only learned assembler because a teacher told you to then you might want to find another field. Sure you don't NEED it now...but damn it sure is cool to take advantage of the SSE registers with in-line assembler.
If you believe that only those who suffer through classes are the elite...again you might want to find another field. In this field my friends only those with a true interest will rise to the top. Sure it might be easier to learn when a teacher gives you the correct material, but what about the 16 year kid who learns an algorithm because it was the only way to solve the problem efficiently...who do you think understands it better??
If you learn a new scripting language only because you think it will help your carear as opposed to learning it because you are really curious about how it is different then you should probably find a new career because learning new languages is a pain if you don't really want to learn it. On that note go learn Ruby...what a cool cool language. As a scientific programmer I don't really get to use it much but it is a remarkable language.
Oh and on the topic of languages....go learn FORTRAN. If you don't know the fundamentals of FORTRAN then it is like being a rock musician without studying the blues. If nothing else you will understand why so many of us HATE that language. Plus you will gain a new found respect for the software written by the previous generation. That was some tough shit given the tools they used.
If you find that you only have a passing interest in math...you might consider a new career. Math and logic are the foundations of programming. Really good CS people are typically pretty good math people. Not saying you can't code without math ability, but you probably can't code as good as someone with math ability.
In essence if you aren't one of those people who loves to learn on his own. CS is gonna be a tough field for you. Most really good programmers have a mix of CS and hacker qualities. They use the good engineering practices from the CS side in combination with the need to scratch an itch from the hacker side.
Well those are my thoughts...back to itch scratching. been up since 3 am today. Needed a slashdot break.
Cheers.
good question...just give me the forever pill and I sir wil provide you with the answer to you question.
Seriously
"How will we prevent the extreme accumulation of wealth that this would allow if it is not equally accessible to everyone?"
And how is it going to be any different. We already have several people with over a billion dollars in net woth. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around how much a billion is. I would say that at some point (perhaps a billion) more doesn't provide you with anything so why keep trying?
Yep..that would be me. I would like to live forever.
LOL! not sure why that made me laugh so damned hard.
Thanks for the great link. My Mom who sells real estate in southern Florida is convinced that her market is immune!! I will be forwarding her this link.
Off topic...but funny as hell.
Whoa....dude! Like you aren't from the US...man that IS deep!
LOL.
Cheers.
Perhaps you should read the whole license...or at least as far as item 5.
5. A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a "work that uses the Library". Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.
Or if that is to much trouble then at least read the clause which you are quoting. it say's if you distribute the LIBRARY then you must distribute the code.
Since all the legal wording is so tough for you why don't we just have a look at what the authors actaully mean.
" For example, on rare occasions, there may be a special need to encourage the widest possible use of a certain library, so that it becomes a de-facto standard. To achieve this, non-free programs must be allowed to use the library. A more frequent case is that a free library does the same job as widely used non-free libraries. In this case, there is little to gain by limiting the free library to free software only, so we use the Lesser General Public License."
And please don't give me this crap about how you can charge for open source programs. The intent of the LGPL is to foster use of a particlular library. Both commercial and non commercial. You take away the LGPL and Linux goes bye-bye to almost all commercial developers. For instance the Mesa openGL like librarys. You can build closed source application that work with them and it is perfectly valid.
Got it? Good.
No you are the moron.
To see a list of all the great command that you can learn about with man simply hit your tab button twice.
[Tab] [Tab]
And in other news....90% of all programmers claim to be better than 90% of all programmers.
If you use QT you have much more. I do a goo d bi tof cross platform development and QT makes going between windows/Linux/OSX trivial.
You do of course realize that most software is targeted at niche markets right?