Obviously, they're selling BSD in some fashion. As we all know,/. isn't just for Linux, it's for techies, and when you want a secure web server, BSD is something to think about.
If you wanted free adverts, it might be a good idea to wear your product t-shirt or hat, with the logo and web address and talk to a customer facing the web cam. Then your site can be slashdotted at no advertising cost...
It is true that you are being tracked, even by companies which say they have privacy restrictions on your data. A recent study in California found that the overwhelming majority of medical web sites have privacy statements saying that they won't keep info on you, but they do track you and collect your name, email, phone, and anything else they can get, and pass it on to third parties.
It is a real problem, but Jon is not describing it correctly. Let someone else post these things, ok? Don't go for that last shred of egoboo, let the real facts speak for themselves and let us draw the obvious conclusions.
The two things that usually kill a startup, of which 4 out of 5 fail are:
1. Cash Flow - you have to make payroll, you have to pay off your suppliers, you need to project this out long enough for the inevitable bumps in the road - this is where VCs are invaluable.
2. Go for the Close - you need someone who understands Sales - ask them for a committment, and keep asking. Have forms ready and waiting, not "somewhere else". Don't wait too long.
Oh, bonus one:
3. Be willing to adapt to the marketplace. Don't lose your ethics, though, the Feds and State govt will get you and prison ain't no fun.
One of the things I like about stories like this is that you get information on HOW TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
Good point. For example, if you live in Washington State, you can contact your state legislators at www.leg.wa.gov as well as the committees - for both the Senate and the House. Most other states have similar URLs.
But make sure, when contacting people, that you give your name, address, zip and phone. Ones without are usually filtered. Ask politely and give them URL links to info in the emails.
As scott__ said to me today, having a web pad is interesting, but having a wireless modem for a Linux-based Transmeta chip web pad is really interesting.
This is something that people will buy for their homes, as well as for their offices. When a car dealer can carry around the pad and order it for you on the lot - that's web-enabled data entry. When your doctor can run the web front end for the medical database in the secure internal wireless LAN in the clinic and update your data while giving you a check up - that's interesting.
When I can undock the web pad from the fridge or TV holder and start the bath, turn on the outside lights, check the web cam from my son's room, look at his homework chart from the school (darn, he has one of those silly papers due!), see that my Cisco stock is at $562 a share at the limit I set to sell some, sell the stock in the aftermarket, transfer the funds to my credit card, set Expedia for Linux searching for cheap fares to Hawaii, and cook dinner - now you're talking!
A good point about Quicktime. If MSFT did port to Linux, they could hold off QuickTime. Noone said it had to be "as good as" the Windows MediaPlayer. In fact, if they plan well, they can make it just slightly inferior, so that people have less of a reason to choose Linux.
And then they can make sure that anything they do release for Linux uses MediaPlayer, locking you into the MSFT way.
No, we need freely-available source code so games can be ported to any system, Linux or otherwise.
It's a nice theory, and you're welcome to start your own Open Source gaming code team, but I'm not willing to wait 20 years for this concept to gain in mind share. I need games now, and I need them in Linux. And as a game designer back in the 80s, I really doubt Open Source is going to happen any time soon so that I get the coolest games now.
Basically, it's economics. I've got money, I want to buy Linux games, will settle for iMac, but won't buy Windows. And I don't want to wait 18 months for a port. I'm not the only person in this position, and the sooner the market wakes up and smells the green, the faster Linux drivers will be written for sound and video cards. These drivers, of course, should be Open Source. But the game code? Yeah, right...
An interesting post, but it is not true that people will always choose the free product over the expensive product. Many electronics goods (CD players, for example) are perceived to be better if they are priced above $1000, than if the same product were priced below $500. And any electronic good priced below $100 is generally perceived to be inferior.
The problem for Open Source is this: the free product that human nature would regard as inferior (as it is not hoarded or hard to get and thus expensive) is actually superior in quality.
Sadly, this does not apply to documentation. One of the areas of software development that is indirectly subsidized by excessive pricing is documentation - for a software product to be perceived to be superior, it must both be priced excessively (e.g. Oracle) and it must have high-quality documentation. If it has very bad documentation (e.g. most Open Source software), it is perceived as inferior.
One of my favorite utilities back in the old Apple II+ days was: free, no documentation, but the best thing to get the job done. Commercial competitors could sell their less well designed competing software utility for hundreds of dollars, with nice documentation, and get away with it. If my utility had just had documentation, it might have survived; it never did, so people kept shoving money at the inferior competitors.
Microsoft understands these truths. We need to remember the following:
If you are producing Open Source software and wish to be perceived as producing quality software, you must produce quality documentation.
Well, I'm not real sure, but some of the webpages make it seem like The Sims will be MPAA of R or more. Not sure if I want that level of detail...
But, are you sure it doesn't matter if it comes out for Linux or Windows first? Think about it... if Linux is always the "we'll port to Linux if we're sure we can make a bundle" platform, we'll always be dealing with code optimized for Windows, not for Linux.
I don't want to have to wait 18 months to get it on Linux!
This is why I make darn sure I record all the Linux Games and Books I buy for the Neilsen Home Shopping Panel - so they know I spend money on Linux Games. And I try not to buy the Windows games, just the Mac compatibles (for my son's iMac).
(with apologies to Brittney Spears) It's all about the market share, It's all about the dumb dumb Divx dumb dumb, And I think I'll just buy Linux games today...
Since SimCity 3000 is slated to go, that's one of my biggies, but we need to be in the First Wave of game releases. Maxis should be working with Loki to port The Sims to Linux ASAP! Use the work on SimCity 3000 to springboard, do a big ad campaign to push the fact it's Ready For The 21st Century!
Oh... but maybe some other moderator also thought the post was interesting?
Now, if we could just get nanotech moderating, we could just let those nanobots (or threadbots) moderate for us, searching out those first posters and moderating them down, so that we could just use our moderation points to moderate the ACs up.
When I checked the wishlist-FAQ, I noticed it said: "Standards Compliance: The aim for the first release is full support for the W3C standards of HTML 4, XML 1, CSS 1 and DOM 1. There is some support for CSS 2, DOM 2, and XHTML, XSL, XLink and MathML, but whether any of these will make it into the first release of Mozilla is unknown."
So, dumb question, but is there any XHTML support? Wishful thinking that we might get XHTML 1.0 support perhaps, but this is the killer app of standards for business nowadays.
Umm, if you've got the moderation lobster (I had one yesterday), doesn't the act of posting in a thread undo your moderating? That's the way I remember it....
Here's the new Labs Same as the old Labs Sitting in the Silicon Sun And secretly making a gun...
The question one needs to be asking is: How much Black Budget is being spent on nanotech? And how will the public budget be subsidizing the Black Budget for basic research?
I'm basing this on memories of my uncle, who worked at Sandia, and the real truth to where our research bucks go. He did solar cells, but most of the budget for that was for Black Budget satellite systems, which had a need to be more covert.
Doesn't that exclude most of the female technogeeks? For example, my neighbour, Micosoftie that she is, is one heck of a technogeek, and if I could just sway her over from the Dark Side (TM), she could be in the running for this, except - she's blond and has no beard. But brains, yup, tons of those...
Actually, the best method of copyrighting would be to register it with the Library of Congress. I did that with almost everything I wrote, back in the days. As I recall, it's pretty darn cheap, plus it makes it (eventually) available to all search engines as a published work once they put it on the Web. Darn hard to patent something to which you already have published copyright. You can copyleft it within the text, if you truly wish to be Open Source about it, too.
All we need to do is start sending "State Secrets" through the relay, and alert the gov't.
Hmmm. Maybe we could relay through the PPC - especially the military side where the Party Techies live? Wouldn't that be fun if they had to purge themselves?
And, as a bonus, they'd imprison the only ones who could stop the script kiddies...
Actually, I knew that Pacific HiTech had changed to TurboLinux, but spaced on their distro's new name. I don't use it, I use gasp Red Hat.
The point is, nonetheless, that if we are to think of things that LinuxZeroPointFive could do better, it would probably lie in the other language support area.
But it looks like they're using Debian and RedHat distros, awkwardly disguised as their own, so I think they really aren't serious about doing anything than taking profit on the PenguinMania in the current stock market bubble.
One of their comments was: A suite of graphical monitoring tools would be a great addition to Red Hat's Linux distribution.
I have to say, this is a very good point. While totally disagreeing with their evaluation ranking (guess they only give you points if you place ads in their magazines), this is something that Linux is weak on.
I'm starting to think the other thing is multi-language documentation. I might try my hand at some of the French documentation, and maybe get back into Spanish or German if there's a real need. But there's a lot of things that aren't real easy to find out for the non-technogeeks.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, they're selling BSD in some fashion. As we all know, /. isn't just for Linux, it's for techies, and when you want a secure web server, BSD is something to think about.
...
If you wanted free adverts, it might be a good idea to wear your product t-shirt or hat, with the logo and web address and talk to a customer facing the web cam. Then your site can be slashdotted at no advertising cost
I suppose this will help the Linux on IMac cause.
...
Yeah, maybe I can configure my son's iMac to dual-boot so he can play my Linux games
Has anyone been using the FireWire with Linux - I'd like to hear about how robustly this was implemented?
Thanks for the BoothCam! But I still want a roving webcam ...
As usual, Jon almost got it. But not quite.
It is true that you are being tracked, even by companies which say they have privacy restrictions on your data. A recent study in California found that the overwhelming majority of medical web sites have privacy statements saying that they won't keep info on you, but they do track you and collect your name, email, phone, and anything else they can get, and pass it on to third parties.
It is a real problem, but Jon is not describing it correctly. Let someone else post these things, ok? Don't go for that last shred of egoboo, let the real facts speak for themselves and let us draw the obvious conclusions.
C'mon, isn't one of you wired to be mobile? I'll settle for BoothCams if that's all you got, but pictures, I need pictures!
The two things that usually kill a startup, of which 4 out of 5 fail are:
1. Cash Flow - you have to make payroll, you have to pay off your suppliers, you need to project this out long enough for the inevitable bumps in the road - this is where VCs are invaluable.
2. Go for the Close - you need someone who understands Sales - ask them for a committment, and keep asking. Have forms ready and waiting, not "somewhere else". Don't wait too long.
Oh, bonus one:
3. Be willing to adapt to the marketplace. Don't lose your ethics, though, the Feds and State govt will get you and prison ain't no fun.
One of the things I like about stories like this is that you get information on HOW TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
Good point. For example, if you live in Washington State, you can contact your state legislators at www.leg.wa.gov as well as the committees - for both the Senate and the House. Most other states have similar URLs.
But make sure, when contacting people, that you give your name, address, zip and phone. Ones without are usually filtered. Ask politely and give them URL links to info in the emails.
As scott__ said to me today, having a web pad is interesting, but having a wireless modem for a Linux-based Transmeta chip web pad is really interesting.
This is something that people will buy for their homes, as well as for their offices. When a car dealer can carry around the pad and order it for you on the lot - that's web-enabled data entry. When your doctor can run the web front end for the medical database in the secure internal wireless LAN in the clinic and update your data while giving you a check up - that's interesting.
When I can undock the web pad from the fridge or TV holder and start the bath, turn on the outside lights, check the web cam from my son's room, look at his homework chart from the school (darn, he has one of those silly papers due!), see that my Cisco stock is at $562 a share at the limit I set to sell some, sell the stock in the aftermarket, transfer the funds to my credit card, set Expedia for Linux searching for cheap fares to Hawaii, and cook dinner - now you're talking!
A good point about Quicktime. If MSFT did port to Linux, they could hold off QuickTime. Noone said it had to be "as good as" the Windows MediaPlayer. In fact, if they plan well, they can make it just slightly inferior, so that people have less of a reason to choose Linux.
And then they can make sure that anything they do release for Linux uses MediaPlayer, locking you into the MSFT way.
Would we have to fight against Maxwell Smart then?
Sure. You take Maxwell Smart, I'll take 99.
No, we need freely-available source code so games can be ported to any system, Linux or otherwise.
...
It's a nice theory, and you're welcome to start your own Open Source gaming code team, but I'm not willing to wait 20 years for this concept to gain in mind share. I need games now, and I need them in Linux. And as a game designer back in the 80s, I really doubt Open Source is going to happen any time soon so that I get the coolest games now.
Basically, it's economics. I've got money, I want to buy Linux games, will settle for iMac, but won't buy Windows. And I don't want to wait 18 months for a port. I'm not the only person in this position, and the sooner the market wakes up and smells the green, the faster Linux drivers will be written for sound and video cards. These drivers, of course, should be Open Source. But the game code? Yeah, right
An interesting post, but it is not true that people will always choose the free product over the expensive product. Many electronics goods (CD players, for example) are perceived to be better if they are priced above $1000, than if the same product were priced below $500. And any electronic good priced below $100 is generally perceived to be inferior.
The problem for Open Source is this: the free product that human nature would regard as inferior (as it is not hoarded or hard to get and thus expensive) is actually superior in quality.
Sadly, this does not apply to documentation. One of the areas of software development that is indirectly subsidized by excessive pricing is documentation - for a software product to be perceived to be superior, it must both be priced excessively (e.g. Oracle) and it must have high-quality documentation. If it has very bad documentation (e.g. most Open Source software), it is perceived as inferior.
One of my favorite utilities back in the old Apple II+ days was: free, no documentation, but the best thing to get the job done. Commercial competitors could sell their less well designed competing software utility for hundreds of dollars, with nice documentation, and get away with it. If my utility had just had documentation, it might have survived; it never did, so people kept shoving money at the inferior competitors.
Microsoft understands these truths. We need to remember the following:
If you are producing Open Source software and wish to be perceived as producing quality software, you must produce quality documentation.
Any ideas?
Well, I'm not real sure, but some of the webpages make it seem like The Sims will be MPAA of R or more. Not sure if I want that level of detail ...
... if Linux is always the "we'll port to Linux if we're sure we can make a bundle" platform, we'll always be dealing with code optimized for Windows, not for Linux.
...
But, are you sure it doesn't matter if it comes out for Linux or Windows first? Think about it
I don't want to have to wait 18 months to get it on Linux!
This is why I make darn sure I record all the Linux Games and Books I buy for the Neilsen Home Shopping Panel - so they know I spend money on Linux Games. And I try not to buy the Windows games, just the Mac compatibles (for my son's iMac).
(with apologies to Brittney Spears)
It's all about the market share,
It's all about the dumb dumb Divx dumb dumb,
And I think I'll just buy Linux games today
It seems a number of people have clued in that we need to have a Linux version first .
...
Ports are great - StarCraft is the obvious one, as is SimCity 3000, and even The Sims, but
Game Developers should be writing for Linux and porting to Windows, not the other way around.
Since SimCity 3000 is slated to go, that's one of my biggies, but we need to be in the First Wave of game releases. Maxis should be working with Loki to port The Sims to Linux ASAP! Use the work on SimCity 3000 to springboard, do a big ad campaign to push the fact it's Ready For The 21st Century!
Will
Oh ... but maybe some other moderator also thought the post was interesting?
Now, if we could just get nanotech moderating, we could just let those nanobots (or threadbots) moderate for us, searching out those first posters and moderating them down, so that we could just use our moderation points to moderate the ACs up.
Wishful thinking, perhaps, but it would be nice.
When I checked the wishlist-FAQ, I noticed it said: "Standards Compliance: The aim for the first release is full support for the W3C standards of HTML 4, XML 1, CSS 1 and DOM 1. There is some support for CSS 2, DOM 2, and XHTML, XSL, XLink and MathML, but whether any of these will make it into the first release of Mozilla is unknown."
So, dumb question, but is there any XHTML support? Wishful thinking that we might get XHTML 1.0 support perhaps, but this is the killer app of standards for business nowadays.
Umm, if you've got the moderation lobster (I had one yesterday), doesn't the act of posting in a thread undo your moderating? That's the way I remember it ....
Here's the new Labs ...
Same as the old Labs
Sitting in the Silicon Sun
And secretly making a gun
The question one needs to be asking is: How much Black Budget is being spent on nanotech? And how will the public budget be subsidizing the Black Budget for basic research?
I'm basing this on memories of my uncle, who worked at Sandia, and the real truth to where our research bucks go. He did solar cells, but most of the budget for that was for Black Budget satellite systems, which had a need to be more covert.
"Best Open Source Developer Beard Award!"?
...
Doesn't that exclude most of the female technogeeks? For example, my neighbour, Micosoftie that she is, is one heck of a technogeek, and if I could just sway her over from the Dark Side (TM), she could be in the running for this, except - she's blond and has no beard. But brains, yup, tons of those
Actually, the best method of copyrighting would be to register it with the Library of Congress. I did that with almost everything I wrote, back in the days. As I recall, it's pretty darn cheap, plus it makes it (eventually) available to all search engines as a published work once they put it on the Web. Darn hard to patent something to which you already have published copyright. You can copyleft it within the text, if you truly wish to be Open Source about it, too.
Wish we could do that with the Human Genome.
All we need to do is start sending "State Secrets" through the relay, and alert the gov't.
...
Hmmm. Maybe we could relay through the PPC - especially the military side where the Party Techies live? Wouldn't that be fun if they had to purge themselves?
And, as a bonus, they'd imprison the only ones who could stop the script kiddies
Actually, I knew that Pacific HiTech had changed to TurboLinux, but spaced on their distro's new name. I don't use it, I use gasp Red Hat.
The point is, nonetheless, that if we are to think of things that LinuxZeroPointFive could do better, it would probably lie in the other language support area.
But it looks like they're using Debian and RedHat distros, awkwardly disguised as their own, so I think they really aren't serious about doing anything than taking profit on the PenguinMania in the current stock market bubble.
One of their comments was: A suite of graphical monitoring tools would be a great addition to Red Hat's Linux distribution.
I have to say, this is a very good point. While totally disagreeing with their evaluation ranking (guess they only give you points if you place ads in their magazines), this is something that Linux is weak on.
I'm starting to think the other thing is multi-language documentation. I might try my hand at some of the French documentation, and maybe get back into Spanish or German if there's a real need. But there's a lot of things that aren't real easy to find out for the non-technogeeks.