I think this is a good thing. If networks start to feel bad about themselves, we do need to figure that out and give them some counseling. They need to have self-esteem and a sense of self-worth. Otherwise, they become more prone to symptoms of depression and self-destructive behavior - such as not communicating well with their peers, carelessly dispatching backhoes to construction projects near backbone lines, etc. We need to teach them to get over their fears and self doubt, and support them so that they feel more comfortable in the presence of others. If we would just pay more attention to the warning signs of such bad feelings, we might be able to help networks before it's too late.
Please mod the parent post up. If anything from Macromedia tanks my computer, I'd most rather have that site do it for me.
I took a web design class at my university's art dept. two years ago... not your typical "learn HTML and Javascript" course, rather entirely focused on WYSIWYG editors and visual communications... and they used Gabocorp as an example of what can really make you weep at your own pathetic visual design skills. Apparently the whole company is some kid from Puerto Rico who makes Flash presentations like B.B. King makes blues music.
The correct URL, for the lazy, is gabocorp.com. The old "dubuhya dubuhya dubuhya dot" at the front leads to a non-existent server. (Then again, what's the problem with adding an extra DNS entry? Only us geeks would moan about that, though).
I think there's a rogue moderator or two out there that took all of the comments relating to "Take the kid outside to socialize, don't lock him in the library" and modded them down as redundant.
I find that very poor behavior. Most of the comments were, indeed, redundant, but not in the sense that they all needed to be modded down. Now, ALL such comments are below the +5 limit, and if I had mod points I'd put every one of them back up there. I have a feeling someone disagreed with the point being made and did that on purpose.
It's a very good point. I was never considered a child prodigy, per se, but I was regarded as highly gifted and I was given opportunities at many instances in my childhood to advance at the expense of me remaining a normal, happy-go-lucky kid with the rest of my peers. I refused all such opportunities, went on to complete a pretty normal education, and now I'm just as smart as I ever was, except I DO have charisma, charm, and friendliness to sit on top of my masked arrogance and impatience!:-P (just kidding) Frankly, I never found academic pursuits interesting enough to dedicate myself to them like some people would have liked. I have a much broader understanding of life because of that.
Plus, people can actually talk to me. No offense to the Slashdot crowd, but I'm a Comp Sci major about to graduate, and I HATE every one of my peers in my department because they're all arrogant snobbish assholes. They can sit around on Friday night formatting their hard drives and messing around with Linux, but I think they're missing out on life. (Note that my point is that they do that all the time... I've spent Friday nights home on my computer, but I can ALSO go out to a bar and have a good time, which I'd rather do... and they can't do that, they'd be out of place)
My only regret was pointed out in another post... because I never put a consistent effort into school, I find it hard applying my intelligence consistently in anything. I'm technically diagnosed with ADD, but I'm sure that I could have trained myself to focus a lot better early on - had I been treated for having ADD prior to two years ago. Perhaps a missed opportunity, but I think everything happens for a reason, so no big deal.
Mod the hell out of me but I just wanted to say that.
Oh, I think it's funny that almost no one gave answers that the person had in mind, about real subject materials to present to the kid... I think any kid at 9 years old who says he wants to make an operating system is perhaps a little loopy anyway. I mean, I played with Legos as a kid, but I didn't say I wanted to build an office building.
... that theory would kind of be like discontinuing Windows 95/98/ME so that everyone would jump to Windows 2000. Aside from the issue of "If you don't buy a PS2, what guarantees you'll stick with Sony?"...
Sony apparently makes a very large chunk of it's profits from the original Playstation. The reason why Sony was supposed to take off into the stratosphere with the PS2 launch was that, even though they would be losing money on PS2 sales themselves, the licensing and the market share would add up to humongous bucks... that is, if they could get it into as many households as possible. Personally, I found the idea mind-boggling, as stomping out the Dreamcast while leading the other consoles by a year might have been the beginning of a home entertainment revolution...
But it didn't happen that way.
The difference? Sony no longer looks invincible. Dreamcast will have strong sales for another holiday season, and Sega will stay healthy for once, something that hasn't happened since Sega Genesis! Nintendo and MS now look very much fearsome on the horizon. And, Sony will prosper, but not nearly as much as it could have with more penetration into the market. Sony might actually be in TROUBLE, since it'll take a while for them to get heavy penetration into the market now, and the day-traders might not be too keen on that...
It would have been in their best interests to saturate the market with systems, at a loss, so they could sell more games for the system, at a huge profit (in licensing fees). Sony was prepared from the start to do that, and I don't think they changed strategy... I think they screwed up somewhere. But, they'll do well in the end.
However, the idea that Sony cut back on PS2 units to make more DVD players... it's possible, but not smart. Sony makes more revenue on game licensing (minus losses from hardware sales) than on DVD player sales no matter what. Considering that Sony can do a lot of things and have a lot of control (licensing revenue, product expandability and integration) if they sell a lot of PS2 units, it's in their best interests to do just that. DVD players, on the other hand, don't offer that... and for that matter, don't soothe the angry hordes outside the stores who can't get the must-have gift of the season (never piss off the consumer)...
It's wonderful that RMS won't have any children. We didn't need any more extremely rude, heartless bastards in the world that are capable of sending letters like this.
And to think, I didn't think I could have a lesser opinion of him being that I already considered him a mentally insane, socially isolated, thoroughly unpleasant radical communist hippie. Now I have found that it was possible.
Of course, I'll get modded down for my ruthlessness, but I'm allowed to have my informed opinion. I see everyone talking about him as a great man around here... in my eyes, he's simply a man of accomplishment and a man of strong opinions. However, a great man he is not. Great men probably wouldn't flame others over baby announcements.
I boast about 85 hours uptime only because I don't expect it out of Win9x code - long term stability and constant uptime is NOT supposed to be a feature of the OS I use, so it's a bonus that I see that somewhat. Besides, soon after I posted, I needed a reboot. (My DSL software/driver likes to stop working sometimes, and even though it doesn't really crash on me, I need the reboot to reconnect the DSL connection) That's irony for you.
How do I know that applications cause errors and not Windows itself? Well, first of all, Windows itself CAN cause errors. But you just have to apply a little common sense when assigning blame. If an application crashes randomly, if something like that usually doesn't happen with that particular application, and if the occurrence of such crashes among different applications is far greater than the occurence of crashes in particular programs, then you can say that the OS is flaky. However, if the same 2 or 3 programs crash all the time, and other programs that you use a lot do not crash often, and if you don't have those kind of crashes among most or all the programs you run, then I'd say that those 2 or 3 programs are suspect.
The rest of your post is an anti-corporate rant. MS is no better or worse than any other big corporation out there, and in general they do good thing for consumers at the expense of their freedom. I could start talking like Patrick Henry here, but let's face it... we're talking about PC's, not food or education. Besides, I don't want to think about a company bad-ass enough to bring down MS, as that possibility is just too scary...
I'm gonna be the 90th person to say this, but the feature is an option... it's kind of like the ActiveX settings under Internet Explorer, where you can run only certified applets... it's simply an option and/or a dialog box to confirm if you want to run a program that isn't certified.
On one hand, perhaps MS should not make itself the lone entity in charge of certification. It IS a bit of a power position (just like the MPAA has a lot of power to wield when it comes to movie ratings... they can let mass violence and gratuitous sex by with an R rating, but Clerks got an NC-17) and perhaps they'd be doing a better service to the world by forming a certification committee composed of members from other high profile tech companies. This may have already been planned... and it's nothing new in the tech industry, either.
But, on the other hand... rarely do I run anything that comes with the OS and experience a crash. I use Win98SE with Internet Explorer on a very regular basis, and right now I'm on 85 hours uptime - not an unusual occurance, and certainly not bad for a consumer OS. I also run a lot of programs from other software companies and hardware makers (drivers), and in general they never crash either. Basically, if I want Windows to crash, I know what to do - start playing lots of Java games in IE, start 30 applications at once, or install lots of iffy beta-test software. That, in the past, has caused me endless pain with Windows. AND Linux. (Well, I only ran Red Had 6.0 a couple of times, I can't help that Netscape locked up the whole system 15 minutes after installing the OS) Essentially, it's a lot of bad programming on the part of non-Microsoft companies that causes Windows to crash. With the bad rap that people give their OS for all its crashing, they can't help but sit back and take it... unless they can tell people what to run that won't crash, which would save them some face in the long run. I also believe that perhaps this is a great way for them to increase the stability of the OS for the everyday user... that is, the user that chooses to run certified programs only. Otherwise, you're on your own...
Another thing... maybe it's a move to reduce/filter tech support calls better? With 90% of the consumer OS market, can you blame them for wanting to do that?
Oh, I have no doubt of the possible uses of the Iridium constellation/network. I was just saying that none of them were particuarly practical, even though it would do the world some good to keep the satellites up for some of those purposes. (which it looks like will happen)
Also, the cost of launching such satellites from square one is always a consideration when deciding whether or not to use an existing constellation, but you also have to think that satellites are not very versatile to begin with - they're designed to fit their purpose, and usually don't come with a lot of extras. I was quite surprised, for example, that the bandwidth coming off of the Iridium satellites was rather paltry (something like 9.6 kbps) when, perhaps, if they could handle 300kbps channels instead, Iridium could have been a portable broadband contender. Retrofitting satellites for increased capacity, however, is not an option... it's at least far cheaper (and possible) to just launch another bunch of satellites.
And, I think it's better to put money in the bank for a future constellation of cheaper, higher bandwidth (T3 speeds to anywhere!) satellites rather than spend it all just keeping track of and maintaining an existing, somewhat unuseful network.
Of course, in this case, the satellites are cheap anyway: the reason why Iridium is defunct as a business is that they couldn't make enough money to keep up with their massive debt payments. So, now they're bankrupt, and their creditors (the satellite builders and launchers) get paid virtually nothing - which in the end, means that the satellites now cost almost nothing to build and launch, for whoever wants them. I might be exaggerating the cost of maintaining the constellation - that part might be actually very cheap, hence cash burn wouldn't be a problem for anyone who gets the assets but not the debt.:)
It's nice that people want to save Iridium... and Mir too, for that matter... but...
This is kind of a pack rat mentality with satellites, don't you think?
I mean, I see all these Slashdotters who don't want to see all these satellites end up in the Pacific Ocean somewhere, but can we actually think of a good use for any of these things? Probably not. Mir is/was useful, but it's old, slightly dangerous, and about to become obsolete by the ISS (or any other future projects like it). On the other hand, Iridium was practically useful to almost no-one, although their sale now indicates that someone thought of something it could do...
And it does have a substantial cost to government/commercial agencies to keep track of and control these things in orbit. "Sentimental value" means pretty much nothing to taxpayers and stockholders...
But... more importantly... we have to realize the concept of sunk costs, and we must make practical decisions for the future... that is, do we spend money keeping these satellites up, or do we use that money for better satellites down the line?
In this particular case, it would have been interesting to see Iridium make it as a company. But if they didn't, and we had to de-orbit the satellites, why boo-hoo about it? It's a responsible decision. And no one's going to be operating a ham-radio network or something like that off of all those very expensive satellites, so unless someone's got a great use for them, why bother?
The upside is that we get to see more Iridium Flares... (if someone remembers what I'm talking about, there's a website for it, but I forgot the link...)
Re:It's not that clear cut
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You raise a lot of good points. I never said it was simple... although I may have simplified.
I'm kind of tired of arguing the whole point anyway. The electoral college isn't perfect, but somehow I don't think this is the time to discuss it anyway. I think we should discuss the faults of all the 2-party system + candidates + campaign + election + the media combined.
Someone said how living in Oregon usually means your vote doesn't count because a president is declared on the news before their polls close. That's the media's fault. The whole 19,000 invalidated votes is probably a fault of the election process, and basically a lot of the disgust among the American people is a result of the parties, the campaigns, and the media combined.
Again, I don't care who's elected. I think they're both qualified. And the electoral college isn't going to have a negative effect on the outcome of this election... but I just want it to be decided and for everyone to shut up and stop whining. People are getting killed in Israel, there's a US warship being towed back home with a 60x40ft hole in the side of it, and the stock market is dropping. We have better things to think about right now.
Hey, no one had to mod it up in the first place... maybe it's a good post that provokes an interesting discussion... and perhaps we can discuss whatever the hell we want on slashdot, damn the moderators.
Yea, my post is off-topic, but it branched off into another discussion. So don't complain about the discussion on the side, and don't expect us all to talk about only what Slashdot decides to bring up.
My post has been moderated down since, and I assume that someone just as dickheaded as you is responsible. I have the karma to spare (I'm well above 25 to get my nice +1 bonus) but it angers me that a post moderated three times +1 Interesting gets a late -1 Offtopic just because there's a bored moderator out there with points to spare and a stick up his ass.
BTW, If I had mod points and no posts in this topic, I would NOT mod you down. Your post has merit in this discussion, even though I disagree with it.
I'm surprised no one accused me of karma whoring yet.
Re:what the electoral college REALLY means...
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Never mind. My bad.
Re:At least...you're not afraid to rant
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Wanting to lobby the electoral college is different from wanting to re-take the votes of a whole county in Florida.
Penalty kicks... hmm, maybe we should use Kansas tiebreaker. Can either of them throw a football?:)
I don't approve of "one citizen, one vote", and I don't support representation by state, either. The original Founding Fathers of this country DIDN'T TRUST THE PUBLIC. And neither do I. Hell, I don't trust myself to vote... I voted in a county (in Florida, hahaha) that I live 1000 miles away from in the Northeast... and except for the Presidential election, I just filled in random circles. How can I be trusted as a voter? I can't. I voted irrationally. As most of the country does, too. But then again, a presidential election usually isn't as meaningful as it sounds, other than the control given to a party at that point (the president decides the whole Executive branch of government, and it's basically his/her party that gets that whole branch of government to rule), so our system of giving the people the choice but not really trusting them anyway kind of works. In the end, as long as qualified people are in office, it's all kind of irrelevant... and the president is kind of nothing more than homecoming king anyway.
The fact that the homecoming queen is now the junior Senator from New York is a more interesting result in my eyes, anyway:)
True, true... I am biased myself, although I don't claim affiliation to any party.
I'm just sick of the press in general. They always have the wrong angle on everything.
The only thing that I disagree with you on... we did NOT see as much crap about Gore as we did about Bush. Yea, we saw just as many incidents... but not nearly as often from Gore than from Bush. In other words, the media tends to dwell on certain things... and they stuck with making Bush look incompetent a little more than they did with Gore. While Gore was very much blasted for being boring for 8 years now, that's hardly something to convince anyone not to vote for him... and the press has forgotten that recently. (or maybe he loosened up a little, I dunno)
Of course, there's conservative press too. I'm not denying that. But at the same time, I think fact needs to be separated from opinion a little bit more. That's just overall with the press... kinda like how the media makes OJ look like a murderer even though he was never convicted (I won't dare make a call on that one, but it's obvious where the slant is with the media on that). Similarly, I hear few things in the media to counteract all the press generated by Abu Muima Jamal supporters... even though there's a lot of solid facts that pretty much make him a cop killer. I don't think it's about people being biased outright... I think they're just biased toward sensationalism. With the media, they're also slightly biased toward liberalism, and if you say they're not, then look at how right now Bush is pretty much the winner of the election but the big story is how Gore is challenging it... not that Bush won. Gore won't disappear from the news as a presidential candidate until every vote is counted... which is a shame, because I don't like the focus on the post-election bickering... it's disgraceful and disgusting, and it's making me want to move to Canada even more...
Well, from how you see it, it was certainly fair that the media DIDN'T give a lot of attention to these mistakes that Gore made... rather than call attention to them on a constant basis and demand that they need correcting (time spent correcting piddly mistakes and not addressing the issues).
I called Gore a pathological liar because he tells little lies so much it's not even funny. There's a lot more examples than the Internet thing... even though I think that it wasn't a slip up that he used that choice of words to describe his role in it (he probably thought he could get away with a fast one while still pretty much telling the truth, from one perspective). I heard the whole Vint Cerf thing... it confirmed what I already knew about Gore. As a politician, I think Gore is pretty good. I just wish he didn't lie so much.
Anyway, the press doesn't lean the other way like you're saying they do... they give a lot of negative attention to Republicans, and they rarely put them in a good light. Granted, most media outlets are a lot more objective than I'm giving them credit for, so it's not as bad as I originally made it look. But it's easy to ignore all the bad attention that you could give to Democrats too... and that's where the subtle bias is...
Well, apart from Wyoming, those states are out of the way. What I'm saying is that without the electoral college, it would be really easy for all the candidates to hit Boston -New York - Philadelphia - DC - Orlando - Miami - Dallas - Houston - Phoenix - San Diego - Los Angeles - San Francisco - Seattle - Denver - St. Louis - Chicago - Indianapolis - Cleveland - Cincinatti - Pittsburgh - Buffalo on one nationwide loop, and then leave the national media to fill in the blanks. But essentially, the campaigns would have to heavily favor cities - since more popular votes are there.
That said, the Electoral College isn't foolproof in preventing that... but I think the candidates spent a lot of time in out-of-the-way areas and not entirely in big cities, which is always a positive thing.
BTW your vote was more useful in the electoral college than in the nationwide tally anyway... because the nationwide tally doesn't count.:)
Re:what the electoral college REALLY means...
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The electoral college is based on population... the number of Congressmen in a state does not correlate to the number of electors. That's a common misconception.
If they did, Delaware would have to have more than ONE electoral vote. But they don't.
... you're not complaining about the Electoral College.
The media has been making a BIG deal about this now, and they're adding confusion to the situation... I don't understand how EVERY FRIGGEN GRAMMAR SCHOOL STUDENT now learns about the Electoral College at least 5 times in a normal academic career, and yet no one knows what the hell it's about. I'm guessing all the people complaining are the same people that don't know how to program a VCR, but anyway...
It turns out that the Electoral College is a fabulous method of electing a president, for a couple of reasons:
* Small states and areas with low population density are not ignored
* In the case that something awful happens (the president-elect turns out to be psycho after the election, we've elected the Anti-Christ, or god forbid they die in a plane crash, etc...) the electors don't HAVE to go with the people's vote... they can break ranks and vote whichever way they want to. Remember, a candidate needs 50% of the electoral college to win, or else it goes to the House of Representatives - so in the case of a close election, a few defecting electors can change the process drastically. Not what we want to happen in a normal election, but it's there as a safety.
* It turns out that each person's vote is more powerful that way. You vote for a small portion of the big vote, but you have a much bigger contribution to your portion of the vote compared to if you just had a general popular election.
* Finally, it's the only thing that prevents the presidential election from being a full-blown popularity contest. Basically, if we go to a direct-election system, we might as well change the position's title from "president" to "homecoming king".
Of course, even though it's not that hard to understand, no one in this country even has the sense of civic duty to remember how it works after they've been told ninety times. Now, in this election, there's been more talk than ever about getting rid of it...
Well, actually it just seems that way... because the media is really hyping that up now. Why? Because Gore won the popular vote and may not win the election! If it were the other way around, would there be a commotion this big? No. The media, no offense to Democrats, are a bunch of stupid liberals who insert craploads of bias into news reports and try to get the American public to think on the side of the Democrats. I don't want to get into it (it would make a great IRC session in the future to discuss this), but there's a lot of "coincidences" in major media reports that show a subtle but nauseating bias... Hence how Dubya looks like a complete moron but no one thinks it's a big deal that Gore is a pathological liar. (Disclaimer: I prefer neither candidate nor party in terms of the election... I think they both suck) Anyway, the Electoral College didn't swing in their favor, and the media now wants to cry foul over the whole system after 200 years... just like Gore wants a whole county in Florida to vote again because 19,000 don't know how to vote. (And, after the fact, probably shouldn't be voting either) It's convenient to make a big scene over something when you didn't get your way.
Folks, the success of the Electoral College is PROVEN by this election. Gore won the popular vote by less than 200,000 votes overall - when almost 100,000,000 people voted. That's a 0.2% margin. Meanwhile, Bush got 29 states to Gore's 20 - almost a 20% lead. But Gore has more Electoral Votes (leaving Florida) - just not enough to win the election. In an election this close, between two candidates that are both unsatisfactory, it's probably best that something random and meaningless decides it - that is, the recount of the votes in Florida. Bush could have gotten another 200,000 votes easily had he campaigned strongly in New York and California... however, the country doesn't revolve around New York and California (maybe New York, perhaps:-P ), there's a lot of other places to concentrate on. And just to show you how effective Bush was in spreading his campaign, he stole Gore's own homestate... if you're an uncontroversial, well-liked former senator and current vice president with a good track record politically, and you can't win your own homestate... that makes you a fuckup.
Oh, the Electoral College, in this case, is making up for the fact that our nightly newscasts and talk shows were filled with video clips of mispronounced words, unsubstantiated reports about heavy drug use, and jokes about "being led around by daddy" referencing our Republican candidate. In an election this close, it's proper payback to assume that the 200,000 vote gap might have swung the other way because of the disgraceful slanderous media coverage.
Then again, if this were Bush vs. Bradley, I'd probably be outraged right now. But Bradley was another one that the media viciously killed right away, so badly and obviously that Bush should consider himself lucky. But hey, that's what you get when you aren't a party puppet like Gore is.
McCain learned the same lesson in the other party, as well...
Good point... but I just want to bring up something OT then...
Open source/GPL (two different things), in my eyes, does not mean "profitless". Yes, in the real world, that happens to be the way it works, but not necessarily so. I believe that perhaps old software models become obsolete in the face of OS/GPL software, but that doesn't mean that there's no business to be done with it...
That said, how come releasing the source effectively kills revenue for a program? Or, more directly, why hasn't anyone figured out how to make a profit off of something that you can see how it works? Is the way the software industry works akin to the idea of a secret recipie?
For example, nobody but The Coca-Cola Company knows how to make Coca-Cola. If they released the recipie for their universally popular soft drink, they could still make money selling it, as a distributor... however, they would become drastically less profitable and/or go out of business due to everyone ripping off the recipie at home. But why can't Coca-Cola still make money selling Coca-Cola then? Making chocolate milk isn't hard... but people still buy Yoo-Hoo. There are 5 billion shampoos out there that use the exact same active ingredient, yet there's a lot of money being made on shampoo...
Still, most people assume that releasing the source is the end of a project's ability to make money - aside from mercy donations. Even when that's clearly not the case with some programs, those situations are seen as exceptions to the rule. And, of course, the GPL means that you CAN'T make money from directly selling a program covered by it - so you'd have to be rather creative to make money writing GPL programs.
This is the big issue that I don't understand with the Slashdot crowd.
I understand why everyone likes the idea of Linux, and Open Source, and the GPL... they're very fresh, very innovative movements. But what I don't understand is how everyone got to this point without addressing some of the gaping holes in some of these ideas. On one hand, the general situation/idea is that no one's making money off of this... so then how do you expect it to really matter to anyone? Businesses don't trust hobby projects (no matter how good they are), the software industry would rather make tons of money like it has been with its "cathedral", and end-users want a glossy, appealing finished product. On the other hand, it's very possible for these concepts to succeed in business - so then why isn't there a lot of progress in that area? Don't you think that all of these movements would surely come to light in grand fashion and be embraced by the world if there were ways to get people motivated with more than anti-capitalism and personal glory?
I'll say this, at the risk of my karma:
* I don't have Linux installed. I had it once, but I never used it much. I personally found it awkward and counterproductive. Maybe that's because it was RedHat 6.0:) I found that my limited Unix experience was almost of no use when it came to configuring and using basic programs under Linux, due to my unfamiliarity with the overall environment. My needs in a personal computer are better fufilled in Windows 98 at this point... although I admit that I would like to be more creative on my PC than Win98 allows. It's my basic needs that were awkward in Linux, and from what I understand they haven't gotten any less awkward since. It might be different if I had money to buy a spare computer with all supported hardware and a better, more stable distro... but I don't. This is probably what stops a lot of people from getting into it.
* Open Source is a fine idea because it promotes code reuse, peer review, and shared programming research/discussion. Its biggest problem is that it hasn't done anything substantial, yet. Code reuse is still a touchy subject with issues in intellectual property, compatibility, and liability. There isn't a computer language that fits perfectly with Open Source and mass distribution yet - most languages are proprietary or obscure, and C/C++ is not the best way to communicate ideas with human beings (there's no standard/automatic system of commenting code to make up for this, either). Plus, anyone who wants to make money will not distribute source code to the world when it's not usually justifiable or practical. These things have to be worked out... writing code for a hobby OS, arguing on the web against the naysayers, and trying to convince your boss to hop on the bandwagon are all not productive ways of helping the movement. If there's anything we learned so far, it's that working together isn't as easy as it sounds.
* The GPL and the FSF are counterproductive at this point. The GPL, aside from all of the practical "negatives" of Open Source, is a house of cards. As a rational thinking person, the GPL is well written and comes from good intentions, but it stands useless if (or when) a judge decides that it cannot be upheld. It needs to be tested in court, but it's a little late for that now. Then, there's the problem that it's viral - it wants to infect everything that it touches. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to apply the GPL all the time.. but sometimes it is, for some situations. Therefore we must all remember that it's a SPECIALTY solution for a license, and that applying software licenses isn't always an easy, cut-and-paste task - we need to promote more thinking and communication on this idea, not simply adapt situations to the GPL whenever possible. And finally - the FSF movement is a radical, extreme, revoltionary concept that should be taken with a grain of salt. It all comes from someone who is very brilliant, but also who has a different set of morals and values than most of us. If we accept his values and promote them to the world, we're turning him into God. I get the feeling that there aren't many people thinking about things like he is... and it's like a herd mentality at this point.
I just wanted to say all that because I disagree with the idea of the GPL as a "poison pill". (although it's funny here) There's a lot of good ideas and good people on Slashdot... there's a great potential for this crowd. I simply wish that people would stop getting caught up in the stupid shit and start pushing the limits of our intelligence. Then maybe we all won't have to worry about working 60 hour weeks and having no lives on the side...
If it's graduate work, then it belongs to the university. If you have to do it for school, it belongs to the school, unless you claim a prior copyright... but for work done specifically for an academic career, it should belong to the school. Otherwise, I think schools would be more inclined to hire grad students as employees rather than give them a graduate program to follow...
BTW many colleges (and jobs) come up with the funding for graduate students' educations, hence anything the graduate student does on the companies' time should belong to them, not the student. It's only fair that way.
Again, if you have an idea THAT GOOD, don't submit it as a project. Save it for another time, or quit school/work entirely. Invariably, someone else will take all the meaningful credit and/or the money for the idea.
I know someone in my college who paid off his loans because he got in on the VA Linux IPO - all because he co-wrote some GPL'ed utility program that got in the major distros... And I know he did it on his spare time, in college, and the university was NOT demanding any profits. That's how most college-based contributions arise... not from schoolwork, but from spare time. So while the issue is valid, it's mostly irrelevant.
Generally, if you have a good idea, do yourself a favor... don't submit it as a project to someone else (either for work or for school)... that's like trying to make a donation to a sperm clinic and instead they wind up keeping your balls...
Of course I was only joking... but I knew about that, and I know that Kasparov whined a lot about that. Generally, it wasn't quite fair at all. Then again, it was an accomplishment for the computer to be able to beat him like that... considering that chess can't be "solved" (apparently all the atoms in the universe working as a computer can't solve chess, or something like that).
Didn't ya know, that's what all the rappers call New Jersey now... New Jerusalem. (They share the abbreviation NJ too) Katz lives there, he should know...
Katz is the original gangsta!
Of course I don't know how the Net is like New Jersey... I've never heard it referred to as the "Information SuperTurnpike".
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is a good thing. If networks start to feel bad about themselves, we do need to figure that out and give them some counseling. They need to have self-esteem and a sense of self-worth. Otherwise, they become more prone to symptoms of depression and self-destructive behavior - such as not communicating well with their peers, carelessly dispatching backhoes to construction projects near backbone lines, etc. We need to teach them to get over their fears and self doubt, and support them so that they feel more comfortable in the presence of others. If we would just pay more attention to the warning signs of such bad feelings, we might be able to help networks before it's too late.
Have you hugged your network today?
Please mod the parent post up. If anything from Macromedia tanks my computer, I'd most rather have that site do it for me. I took a web design class at my university's art dept. two years ago... not your typical "learn HTML and Javascript" course, rather entirely focused on WYSIWYG editors and visual communications... and they used Gabocorp as an example of what can really make you weep at your own pathetic visual design skills. Apparently the whole company is some kid from Puerto Rico who makes Flash presentations like B.B. King makes blues music. The correct URL, for the lazy, is gabocorp.com. The old "dubuhya dubuhya dubuhya dot" at the front leads to a non-existent server. (Then again, what's the problem with adding an extra DNS entry? Only us geeks would moan about that, though).
I think there's a rogue moderator or two out there that took all of the comments relating to "Take the kid outside to socialize, don't lock him in the library" and modded them down as redundant.
:-P (just kidding) Frankly, I never found academic pursuits interesting enough to dedicate myself to them like some people would have liked. I have a much broader understanding of life because of that.
I find that very poor behavior. Most of the comments were, indeed, redundant, but not in the sense that they all needed to be modded down. Now, ALL such comments are below the +5 limit, and if I had mod points I'd put every one of them back up there. I have a feeling someone disagreed with the point being made and did that on purpose.
It's a very good point. I was never considered a child prodigy, per se, but I was regarded as highly gifted and I was given opportunities at many instances in my childhood to advance at the expense of me remaining a normal, happy-go-lucky kid with the rest of my peers. I refused all such opportunities, went on to complete a pretty normal education, and now I'm just as smart as I ever was, except I DO have charisma, charm, and friendliness to sit on top of my masked arrogance and impatience!
Plus, people can actually talk to me. No offense to the Slashdot crowd, but I'm a Comp Sci major about to graduate, and I HATE every one of my peers in my department because they're all arrogant snobbish assholes. They can sit around on Friday night formatting their hard drives and messing around with Linux, but I think they're missing out on life. (Note that my point is that they do that all the time... I've spent Friday nights home on my computer, but I can ALSO go out to a bar and have a good time, which I'd rather do... and they can't do that, they'd be out of place)
My only regret was pointed out in another post... because I never put a consistent effort into school, I find it hard applying my intelligence consistently in anything. I'm technically diagnosed with ADD, but I'm sure that I could have trained myself to focus a lot better early on - had I been treated for having ADD prior to two years ago. Perhaps a missed opportunity, but I think everything happens for a reason, so no big deal.
Mod the hell out of me but I just wanted to say that.
Oh, I think it's funny that almost no one gave answers that the person had in mind, about real subject materials to present to the kid... I think any kid at 9 years old who says he wants to make an operating system is perhaps a little loopy anyway. I mean, I played with Legos as a kid, but I didn't say I wanted to build an office building.
That was the Twin Pines Mall.
(UPDATE Hill Valley SET TREES = (TREES - 1) Where FAST MOVING DELOREAN = TRUE)
Ooops, it was the Lone Pine Mall.
... that theory would kind of be like discontinuing Windows 95/98/ME so that everyone would jump to Windows 2000. Aside from the issue of "If you don't buy a PS2, what guarantees you'll stick with Sony?"...
Sony apparently makes a very large chunk of it's profits from the original Playstation. The reason why Sony was supposed to take off into the stratosphere with the PS2 launch was that, even though they would be losing money on PS2 sales themselves, the licensing and the market share would add up to humongous bucks... that is, if they could get it into as many households as possible. Personally, I found the idea mind-boggling, as stomping out the Dreamcast while leading the other consoles by a year might have been the beginning of a home entertainment revolution...
But it didn't happen that way.
The difference? Sony no longer looks invincible. Dreamcast will have strong sales for another holiday season, and Sega will stay healthy for once, something that hasn't happened since Sega Genesis! Nintendo and MS now look very much fearsome on the horizon. And, Sony will prosper, but not nearly as much as it could have with more penetration into the market. Sony might actually be in TROUBLE, since it'll take a while for them to get heavy penetration into the market now, and the day-traders might not be too keen on that...
It would have been in their best interests to saturate the market with systems, at a loss, so they could sell more games for the system, at a huge profit (in licensing fees). Sony was prepared from the start to do that, and I don't think they changed strategy... I think they screwed up somewhere. But, they'll do well in the end.
However, the idea that Sony cut back on PS2 units to make more DVD players... it's possible, but not smart. Sony makes more revenue on game licensing (minus losses from hardware sales) than on DVD player sales no matter what. Considering that Sony can do a lot of things and have a lot of control (licensing revenue, product expandability and integration) if they sell a lot of PS2 units, it's in their best interests to do just that. DVD players, on the other hand, don't offer that... and for that matter, don't soothe the angry hordes outside the stores who can't get the must-have gift of the season (never piss off the consumer)...
It's wonderful that RMS won't have any children. We didn't need any more extremely rude, heartless bastards in the world that are capable of sending letters like this.
And to think, I didn't think I could have a lesser opinion of him being that I already considered him a mentally insane, socially isolated, thoroughly unpleasant radical communist hippie. Now I have found that it was possible.
Of course, I'll get modded down for my ruthlessness, but I'm allowed to have my informed opinion. I see everyone talking about him as a great man around here... in my eyes, he's simply a man of accomplishment and a man of strong opinions. However, a great man he is not. Great men probably wouldn't flame others over baby announcements.
I boast about 85 hours uptime only because I don't expect it out of Win9x code - long term stability and constant uptime is NOT supposed to be a feature of the OS I use, so it's a bonus that I see that somewhat. Besides, soon after I posted, I needed a reboot. (My DSL software/driver likes to stop working sometimes, and even though it doesn't really crash on me, I need the reboot to reconnect the DSL connection) That's irony for you.
How do I know that applications cause errors and not Windows itself? Well, first of all, Windows itself CAN cause errors. But you just have to apply a little common sense when assigning blame. If an application crashes randomly, if something like that usually doesn't happen with that particular application, and if the occurrence of such crashes among different applications is far greater than the occurence of crashes in particular programs, then you can say that the OS is flaky. However, if the same 2 or 3 programs crash all the time, and other programs that you use a lot do not crash often, and if you don't have those kind of crashes among most or all the programs you run, then I'd say that those 2 or 3 programs are suspect.
The rest of your post is an anti-corporate rant. MS is no better or worse than any other big corporation out there, and in general they do good thing for consumers at the expense of their freedom. I could start talking like Patrick Henry here, but let's face it... we're talking about PC's, not food or education. Besides, I don't want to think about a company bad-ass enough to bring down MS, as that possibility is just too scary...
I'm gonna be the 90th person to say this, but the feature is an option... it's kind of like the ActiveX settings under Internet Explorer, where you can run only certified applets... it's simply an option and/or a dialog box to confirm if you want to run a program that isn't certified.
On one hand, perhaps MS should not make itself the lone entity in charge of certification. It IS a bit of a power position (just like the MPAA has a lot of power to wield when it comes to movie ratings... they can let mass violence and gratuitous sex by with an R rating, but Clerks got an NC-17) and perhaps they'd be doing a better service to the world by forming a certification committee composed of members from other high profile tech companies. This may have already been planned... and it's nothing new in the tech industry, either.
But, on the other hand... rarely do I run anything that comes with the OS and experience a crash. I use Win98SE with Internet Explorer on a very regular basis, and right now I'm on 85 hours uptime - not an unusual occurance, and certainly not bad for a consumer OS. I also run a lot of programs from other software companies and hardware makers (drivers), and in general they never crash either. Basically, if I want Windows to crash, I know what to do - start playing lots of Java games in IE, start 30 applications at once, or install lots of iffy beta-test software. That, in the past, has caused me endless pain with Windows. AND Linux. (Well, I only ran Red Had 6.0 a couple of times, I can't help that Netscape locked up the whole system 15 minutes after installing the OS) Essentially, it's a lot of bad programming on the part of non-Microsoft companies that causes Windows to crash. With the bad rap that people give their OS for all its crashing, they can't help but sit back and take it... unless they can tell people what to run that won't crash, which would save them some face in the long run. I also believe that perhaps this is a great way for them to increase the stability of the OS for the everyday user... that is, the user that chooses to run certified programs only. Otherwise, you're on your own...
Another thing... maybe it's a move to reduce/filter tech support calls better? With 90% of the consumer OS market, can you blame them for wanting to do that?
Oh, I have no doubt of the possible uses of the Iridium constellation/network. I was just saying that none of them were particuarly practical, even though it would do the world some good to keep the satellites up for some of those purposes. (which it looks like will happen)
:)
Also, the cost of launching such satellites from square one is always a consideration when deciding whether or not to use an existing constellation, but you also have to think that satellites are not very versatile to begin with - they're designed to fit their purpose, and usually don't come with a lot of extras. I was quite surprised, for example, that the bandwidth coming off of the Iridium satellites was rather paltry (something like 9.6 kbps) when, perhaps, if they could handle 300kbps channels instead, Iridium could have been a portable broadband contender. Retrofitting satellites for increased capacity, however, is not an option... it's at least far cheaper (and possible) to just launch another bunch of satellites.
And, I think it's better to put money in the bank for a future constellation of cheaper, higher bandwidth (T3 speeds to anywhere!) satellites rather than spend it all just keeping track of and maintaining an existing, somewhat unuseful network.
Of course, in this case, the satellites are cheap anyway: the reason why Iridium is defunct as a business is that they couldn't make enough money to keep up with their massive debt payments. So, now they're bankrupt, and their creditors (the satellite builders and launchers) get paid virtually nothing - which in the end, means that the satellites now cost almost nothing to build and launch, for whoever wants them. I might be exaggerating the cost of maintaining the constellation - that part might be actually very cheap, hence cash burn wouldn't be a problem for anyone who gets the assets but not the debt.
It's nice that people want to save Iridium... and Mir too, for that matter... but...
This is kind of a pack rat mentality with satellites, don't you think?
I mean, I see all these Slashdotters who don't want to see all these satellites end up in the Pacific Ocean somewhere, but can we actually think of a good use for any of these things? Probably not. Mir is/was useful, but it's old, slightly dangerous, and about to become obsolete by the ISS (or any other future projects like it). On the other hand, Iridium was practically useful to almost no-one, although their sale now indicates that someone thought of something it could do...
And it does have a substantial cost to government/commercial agencies to keep track of and control these things in orbit. "Sentimental value" means pretty much nothing to taxpayers and stockholders...
But... more importantly... we have to realize the concept of sunk costs, and we must make practical decisions for the future... that is, do we spend money keeping these satellites up, or do we use that money for better satellites down the line?
In this particular case, it would have been interesting to see Iridium make it as a company. But if they didn't, and we had to de-orbit the satellites, why boo-hoo about it? It's a responsible decision. And no one's going to be operating a ham-radio network or something like that off of all those very expensive satellites, so unless someone's got a great use for them, why bother?
The upside is that we get to see more Iridium Flares... (if someone remembers what I'm talking about, there's a website for it, but I forgot the link...)
You raise a lot of good points. I never said it was simple... although I may have simplified.
I'm kind of tired of arguing the whole point anyway. The electoral college isn't perfect, but somehow I don't think this is the time to discuss it anyway. I think we should discuss the faults of all the 2-party system + candidates + campaign + election + the media combined.
Someone said how living in Oregon usually means your vote doesn't count because a president is declared on the news before their polls close. That's the media's fault. The whole 19,000 invalidated votes is probably a fault of the election process, and basically a lot of the disgust among the American people is a result of the parties, the campaigns, and the media combined.
Again, I don't care who's elected. I think they're both qualified. And the electoral college isn't going to have a negative effect on the outcome of this election... but I just want it to be decided and for everyone to shut up and stop whining. People are getting killed in Israel, there's a US warship being towed back home with a 60x40ft hole in the side of it, and the stock market is dropping. We have better things to think about right now.
Hey, no one had to mod it up in the first place... maybe it's a good post that provokes an interesting discussion... and perhaps we can discuss whatever the hell we want on slashdot, damn the moderators.
Yea, my post is off-topic, but it branched off into another discussion. So don't complain about the discussion on the side, and don't expect us all to talk about only what Slashdot decides to bring up.
My post has been moderated down since, and I assume that someone just as dickheaded as you is responsible. I have the karma to spare (I'm well above 25 to get my nice +1 bonus) but it angers me that a post moderated three times +1 Interesting gets a late -1 Offtopic just because there's a bored moderator out there with points to spare and a stick up his ass.
BTW, If I had mod points and no posts in this topic, I would NOT mod you down. Your post has merit in this discussion, even though I disagree with it.
I'm surprised no one accused me of karma whoring yet.
Never mind. My bad.
Wanting to lobby the electoral college is different from wanting to re-take the votes of a whole county in Florida.
:)
:)
Penalty kicks... hmm, maybe we should use Kansas tiebreaker. Can either of them throw a football?
I don't approve of "one citizen, one vote", and I don't support representation by state, either. The original Founding Fathers of this country DIDN'T TRUST THE PUBLIC. And neither do I. Hell, I don't trust myself to vote... I voted in a county (in Florida, hahaha) that I live 1000 miles away from in the Northeast... and except for the Presidential election, I just filled in random circles. How can I be trusted as a voter? I can't. I voted irrationally. As most of the country does, too. But then again, a presidential election usually isn't as meaningful as it sounds, other than the control given to a party at that point (the president decides the whole Executive branch of government, and it's basically his/her party that gets that whole branch of government to rule), so our system of giving the people the choice but not really trusting them anyway kind of works. In the end, as long as qualified people are in office, it's all kind of irrelevant... and the president is kind of nothing more than homecoming king anyway.
The fact that the homecoming queen is now the junior Senator from New York is a more interesting result in my eyes, anyway
True, true... I am biased myself, although I don't claim affiliation to any party.
I'm just sick of the press in general. They always have the wrong angle on everything.
The only thing that I disagree with you on... we did NOT see as much crap about Gore as we did about Bush. Yea, we saw just as many incidents... but not nearly as often from Gore than from Bush. In other words, the media tends to dwell on certain things... and they stuck with making Bush look incompetent a little more than they did with Gore. While Gore was very much blasted for being boring for 8 years now, that's hardly something to convince anyone not to vote for him... and the press has forgotten that recently. (or maybe he loosened up a little, I dunno)
Of course, there's conservative press too. I'm not denying that. But at the same time, I think fact needs to be separated from opinion a little bit more. That's just overall with the press... kinda like how the media makes OJ look like a murderer even though he was never convicted (I won't dare make a call on that one, but it's obvious where the slant is with the media on that). Similarly, I hear few things in the media to counteract all the press generated by Abu Muima Jamal supporters... even though there's a lot of solid facts that pretty much make him a cop killer. I don't think it's about people being biased outright... I think they're just biased toward sensationalism. With the media, they're also slightly biased toward liberalism, and if you say they're not, then look at how right now Bush is pretty much the winner of the election but the big story is how Gore is challenging it... not that Bush won. Gore won't disappear from the news as a presidential candidate until every vote is counted... which is a shame, because I don't like the focus on the post-election bickering... it's disgraceful and disgusting, and it's making me want to move to Canada even more...
Well, from how you see it, it was certainly fair that the media DIDN'T give a lot of attention to these mistakes that Gore made... rather than call attention to them on a constant basis and demand that they need correcting (time spent correcting piddly mistakes and not addressing the issues).
I called Gore a pathological liar because he tells little lies so much it's not even funny. There's a lot more examples than the Internet thing... even though I think that it wasn't a slip up that he used that choice of words to describe his role in it (he probably thought he could get away with a fast one while still pretty much telling the truth, from one perspective). I heard the whole Vint Cerf thing... it confirmed what I already knew about Gore. As a politician, I think Gore is pretty good. I just wish he didn't lie so much.
Anyway, the press doesn't lean the other way like you're saying they do... they give a lot of negative attention to Republicans, and they rarely put them in a good light. Granted, most media outlets are a lot more objective than I'm giving them credit for, so it's not as bad as I originally made it look. But it's easy to ignore all the bad attention that you could give to Democrats too... and that's where the subtle bias is...
Well, apart from Wyoming, those states are out of the way. What I'm saying is that without the electoral college, it would be really easy for all the candidates to hit Boston -New York - Philadelphia - DC - Orlando - Miami - Dallas - Houston - Phoenix - San Diego - Los Angeles - San Francisco - Seattle - Denver - St. Louis - Chicago - Indianapolis - Cleveland - Cincinatti - Pittsburgh - Buffalo on one nationwide loop, and then leave the national media to fill in the blanks. But essentially, the campaigns would have to heavily favor cities - since more popular votes are there.
:)
That said, the Electoral College isn't foolproof in preventing that... but I think the candidates spent a lot of time in out-of-the-way areas and not entirely in big cities, which is always a positive thing.
BTW your vote was more useful in the electoral college than in the nationwide tally anyway... because the nationwide tally doesn't count.
The electoral college is based on population... the number of Congressmen in a state does not correlate to the number of electors. That's a common misconception.
If they did, Delaware would have to have more than ONE electoral vote. But they don't.
... you're not complaining about the Electoral College.
:-P ), there's a lot of other places to concentrate on. And just to show you how effective Bush was in spreading his campaign, he stole Gore's own homestate... if you're an uncontroversial, well-liked former senator and current vice president with a good track record politically, and you can't win your own homestate... that makes you a fuckup.
The media has been making a BIG deal about this now, and they're adding confusion to the situation... I don't understand how EVERY FRIGGEN GRAMMAR SCHOOL STUDENT now learns about the Electoral College at least 5 times in a normal academic career, and yet no one knows what the hell it's about. I'm guessing all the people complaining are the same people that don't know how to program a VCR, but anyway...
It turns out that the Electoral College is a fabulous method of electing a president, for a couple of reasons:
* Small states and areas with low population density are not ignored
* In the case that something awful happens (the president-elect turns out to be psycho after the election, we've elected the Anti-Christ, or god forbid they die in a plane crash, etc...) the electors don't HAVE to go with the people's vote... they can break ranks and vote whichever way they want to. Remember, a candidate needs 50% of the electoral college to win, or else it goes to the House of Representatives - so in the case of a close election, a few defecting electors can change the process drastically. Not what we want to happen in a normal election, but it's there as a safety.
* It turns out that each person's vote is more powerful that way. You vote for a small portion of the big vote, but you have a much bigger contribution to your portion of the vote compared to if you just had a general popular election.
* Finally, it's the only thing that prevents the presidential election from being a full-blown popularity contest. Basically, if we go to a direct-election system, we might as well change the position's title from "president" to "homecoming king".
Of course, even though it's not that hard to understand, no one in this country even has the sense of civic duty to remember how it works after they've been told ninety times. Now, in this election, there's been more talk than ever about getting rid of it...
Well, actually it just seems that way... because the media is really hyping that up now. Why? Because Gore won the popular vote and may not win the election! If it were the other way around, would there be a commotion this big? No. The media, no offense to Democrats, are a bunch of stupid liberals who insert craploads of bias into news reports and try to get the American public to think on the side of the Democrats. I don't want to get into it (it would make a great IRC session in the future to discuss this), but there's a lot of "coincidences" in major media reports that show a subtle but nauseating bias... Hence how Dubya looks like a complete moron but no one thinks it's a big deal that Gore is a pathological liar. (Disclaimer: I prefer neither candidate nor party in terms of the election... I think they both suck) Anyway, the Electoral College didn't swing in their favor, and the media now wants to cry foul over the whole system after 200 years... just like Gore wants a whole county in Florida to vote again because 19,000 don't know how to vote. (And, after the fact, probably shouldn't be voting either) It's convenient to make a big scene over something when you didn't get your way.
Folks, the success of the Electoral College is PROVEN by this election. Gore won the popular vote by less than 200,000 votes overall - when almost 100,000,000 people voted. That's a 0.2% margin. Meanwhile, Bush got 29 states to Gore's 20 - almost a 20% lead. But Gore has more Electoral Votes (leaving Florida) - just not enough to win the election. In an election this close, between two candidates that are both unsatisfactory, it's probably best that something random and meaningless decides it - that is, the recount of the votes in Florida. Bush could have gotten another 200,000 votes easily had he campaigned strongly in New York and California... however, the country doesn't revolve around New York and California (maybe New York, perhaps
Oh, the Electoral College, in this case, is making up for the fact that our nightly newscasts and talk shows were filled with video clips of mispronounced words, unsubstantiated reports about heavy drug use, and jokes about "being led around by daddy" referencing our Republican candidate. In an election this close, it's proper payback to assume that the 200,000 vote gap might have swung the other way because of the disgraceful slanderous media coverage.
Then again, if this were Bush vs. Bradley, I'd probably be outraged right now. But Bradley was another one that the media viciously killed right away, so badly and obviously that Bush should consider himself lucky. But hey, that's what you get when you aren't a party puppet like Gore is.
McCain learned the same lesson in the other party, as well...
Good point... but I just want to bring up something OT then...
:) I found that my limited Unix experience was almost of no use when it came to configuring and using basic programs under Linux, due to my unfamiliarity with the overall environment. My needs in a personal computer are better fufilled in Windows 98 at this point... although I admit that I would like to be more creative on my PC than Win98 allows. It's my basic needs that were awkward in Linux, and from what I understand they haven't gotten any less awkward since. It might be different if I had money to buy a spare computer with all supported hardware and a better, more stable distro... but I don't. This is probably what stops a lot of people from getting into it.
Open source/GPL (two different things), in my eyes, does not mean "profitless". Yes, in the real world, that happens to be the way it works, but not necessarily so. I believe that perhaps old software models become obsolete in the face of OS/GPL software, but that doesn't mean that there's no business to be done with it...
That said, how come releasing the source effectively kills revenue for a program? Or, more directly, why hasn't anyone figured out how to make a profit off of something that you can see how it works? Is the way the software industry works akin to the idea of a secret recipie?
For example, nobody but The Coca-Cola Company knows how to make Coca-Cola. If they released the recipie for their universally popular soft drink, they could still make money selling it, as a distributor... however, they would become drastically less profitable and/or go out of business due to everyone ripping off the recipie at home. But why can't Coca-Cola still make money selling Coca-Cola then? Making chocolate milk isn't hard... but people still buy Yoo-Hoo. There are 5 billion shampoos out there that use the exact same active ingredient, yet there's a lot of money being made on shampoo...
Still, most people assume that releasing the source is the end of a project's ability to make money - aside from mercy donations. Even when that's clearly not the case with some programs, those situations are seen as exceptions to the rule. And, of course, the GPL means that you CAN'T make money from directly selling a program covered by it - so you'd have to be rather creative to make money writing GPL programs.
This is the big issue that I don't understand with the Slashdot crowd.
I understand why everyone likes the idea of Linux, and Open Source, and the GPL... they're very fresh, very innovative movements. But what I don't understand is how everyone got to this point without addressing some of the gaping holes in some of these ideas. On one hand, the general situation/idea is that no one's making money off of this... so then how do you expect it to really matter to anyone? Businesses don't trust hobby projects (no matter how good they are), the software industry would rather make tons of money like it has been with its "cathedral", and end-users want a glossy, appealing finished product. On the other hand, it's very possible for these concepts to succeed in business - so then why isn't there a lot of progress in that area? Don't you think that all of these movements would surely come to light in grand fashion and be embraced by the world if there were ways to get people motivated with more than anti-capitalism and personal glory?
I'll say this, at the risk of my karma:
* I don't have Linux installed. I had it once, but I never used it much. I personally found it awkward and counterproductive. Maybe that's because it was RedHat 6.0
* Open Source is a fine idea because it promotes code reuse, peer review, and shared programming research/discussion. Its biggest problem is that it hasn't done anything substantial, yet. Code reuse is still a touchy subject with issues in intellectual property, compatibility, and liability. There isn't a computer language that fits perfectly with Open Source and mass distribution yet - most languages are proprietary or obscure, and C/C++ is not the best way to communicate ideas with human beings (there's no standard/automatic system of commenting code to make up for this, either). Plus, anyone who wants to make money will not distribute source code to the world when it's not usually justifiable or practical. These things have to be worked out... writing code for a hobby OS, arguing on the web against the naysayers, and trying to convince your boss to hop on the bandwagon are all not productive ways of helping the movement. If there's anything we learned so far, it's that working together isn't as easy as it sounds.
* The GPL and the FSF are counterproductive at this point. The GPL, aside from all of the practical "negatives" of Open Source, is a house of cards. As a rational thinking person, the GPL is well written and comes from good intentions, but it stands useless if (or when) a judge decides that it cannot be upheld. It needs to be tested in court, but it's a little late for that now. Then, there's the problem that it's viral - it wants to infect everything that it touches. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to apply the GPL all the time.. but sometimes it is, for some situations. Therefore we must all remember that it's a SPECIALTY solution for a license, and that applying software licenses isn't always an easy, cut-and-paste task - we need to promote more thinking and communication on this idea, not simply adapt situations to the GPL whenever possible. And finally - the FSF movement is a radical, extreme, revoltionary concept that should be taken with a grain of salt. It all comes from someone who is very brilliant, but also who has a different set of morals and values than most of us. If we accept his values and promote them to the world, we're turning him into God. I get the feeling that there aren't many people thinking about things like he is... and it's like a herd mentality at this point.
I just wanted to say all that because I disagree with the idea of the GPL as a "poison pill". (although it's funny here) There's a lot of good ideas and good people on Slashdot... there's a great potential for this crowd. I simply wish that people would stop getting caught up in the stupid shit and start pushing the limits of our intelligence. Then maybe we all won't have to worry about working 60 hour weeks and having no lives on the side...
Here's the simple answer:
If it's graduate work, then it belongs to the university. If you have to do it for school, it belongs to the school, unless you claim a prior copyright... but for work done specifically for an academic career, it should belong to the school. Otherwise, I think schools would be more inclined to hire grad students as employees rather than give them a graduate program to follow...
BTW many colleges (and jobs) come up with the funding for graduate students' educations, hence anything the graduate student does on the companies' time should belong to them, not the student. It's only fair that way.
Again, if you have an idea THAT GOOD, don't submit it as a project. Save it for another time, or quit school/work entirely. Invariably, someone else will take all the meaningful credit and/or the money for the idea.
Doing work in college? Does that actually happen?
I know someone in my college who paid off his loans because he got in on the VA Linux IPO - all because he co-wrote some GPL'ed utility program that got in the major distros... And I know he did it on his spare time, in college, and the university was NOT demanding any profits. That's how most college-based contributions arise... not from schoolwork, but from spare time. So while the issue is valid, it's mostly irrelevant.
Generally, if you have a good idea, do yourself a favor... don't submit it as a project to someone else (either for work or for school)... that's like trying to make a donation to a sperm clinic and instead they wind up keeping your balls...
Of course I was only joking... but I knew about that, and I know that Kasparov whined a lot about that. Generally, it wasn't quite fair at all. Then again, it was an accomplishment for the computer to be able to beat him like that... considering that chess can't be "solved" (apparently all the atoms in the universe working as a computer can't solve chess, or something like that).
Let's see:
Kasparov was beaten by a computer...
then he was beaten by a human...
How would he fare against infinite monkeys?
Or better yet, if Kasparov was so good, imagine... a Beowulf cluster of him...
Or... if Kasparov linked to a commercial library, would RMS approve?
(doh)
Didn't ya know, that's what all the rappers call New Jersey now... New Jerusalem. (They share the abbreviation NJ too) Katz lives there, he should know...
Katz is the original gangsta!
Of course I don't know how the Net is like New Jersey... I've never heard it referred to as the "Information SuperTurnpike".