Way to go, Nokia!
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I love to see when a company understands that giving something away they will get ten times more in return. And nowadays that happens too rarely.
For a while it seemed that Nokia is about to lose to its competitors, because of Symbian and bad software. This will totally remedy it. I've also heard from Nokia insiders that they're actively dumping everything related to Symbian. It won't take more than couple of years and all their phones use Qt.
Seeing how well Apple has been selling iPhone applications, I can only imagine the potential Qt phones have in future. With Symbian that just wasn't possible, it was a total nightmare for the developers.
I have strange feeling that this laptop will be more popular in western world than in developing countries. I, for one, will definately buy it, just have a nice new gadget. $100 is cheap for any gadget.
But hey! I have an idea. Let's make the price $200 in western world and each computer that we buy, will give one for free to someone in developing countries! $200 isn't much for a working computer. Plus, atleast for once, you get a good feeling for buying something that you don't really need:)
What makes mind control interesting, that is not usually thought of, is awareness of it. Since our brain is controlling everything we do, altering its functioning would propably go unnoticed. In movies characters usually try to fight againts mind control and even in everyday thoughts we imagine mind control to be something that is againts our will. When you think of it a bit further, you might notice that what mind control actually does, is make our emotions balanced in the way that we actually want to do what it wants us to do. As stated in the article, rats repeatedly did things againts logical behaviour. Now, if you think how many of your actions is based on logic and how many on emotions, you might be able to guess my point.
But then again, this is just my theory. I hope your can prove it wrong. Only variable that would definately prove it wrong, would be existence of a soul. It would provide us something that can't be affected by change of chemical balance in brain. But more likely is that each and every one of us is under some kind of mind control. Everything affects our emotions, from food to movies, regardless of if it resides physically in our brain or affects through our senses.
I hope this finally changes attitudes of business leaders. I've been working in software business for a decade now and never have I seen a software company where experts were valued above salesmen. When a salesman makes a big contract, it's like he is the king of the world. Whole company has to kneel before him (just a metaphor). When there are lay offs, the salesmen are last to go. But what we all slashdotters know and Google has now implemented, is that a deal with a customer is just a materialization of work done by the whole workforce of a company. It's not the moment when the contract is signed, that customer decides to order. It's the whole run where project managers convince the customer with a well done project, coders produce a product which customer loves, and other project people spend long hours with the customer assuring him that we really care for him. In the end, salesman is just there to present the work done by others.
Many business leaders have began to realize, that people aren't using Google's product because they're running nice commercials on TV, but because they're just good products. It's no wonder why there have been so much polemic about bad quality of software products. Atleast where I've worked, all products have been done with a minimum effort. When a first alpha version start to emerge, business leader have already arranged massive demonstration events to customers. Focus from finishing the product shifts to making a good demonstration. Google makes a difference here. Unlike its competitors (like Micro$oft), its products actually work and what I've said many times to myself, a good product sells itself.
I hope those investors (in the article), that are looking for companies to fill up market gaps left by Google, understand it's not the market gap people are willing to buy. People are looking for good products that also might fill up a market gap in the process.
I've been using MS Office since the first version came out and I'm still waiting some basic features. For example there's still no news reader in Outlook?!?!?! Sure, Outlook Express has a built-in news reader but it doesn't have a calendar. I must be a lousy user, because I can't name a single thing that would've improved my Office usability since Office'97 was released.
Microsoft Word - A very good WYSIWYG word processor, but what's the difference between 1997 version and 2006 version? Please Do Not say Clippy. I can do everything I need with the WinWord'97. I know that the latest version consumes about ten times more disk space, memory and processor power.. well that's a feature, right?
Microsoft Excel - A very good spreadsheet program. I bet there are zillion new macro based features added since 1997, but I also bet that 99% of users never use them.
Microsoft Access - Ok, what the hell is this? I've seen lots of Access 'applications' and ALL OF THEM had to be rewritten in real programming language. Access is like a bad imitation of a database, which lures semi-coder-guys to write cash register programs with it. Then, after Access 'database' hits something like 20 000 entries, it just crashes. It either gets so slow you can barely open it or it doesn't work at all. I hate to say this, but Access is a curse. A hint to all small businesses: DO NOT MESS WITH ACCESS, NO MATTER HOW EASY AND NICE IT SEEMS. IT WILL EAT YOU ALIVE EVENTUALLY.
MicroSoft PowerPoint - Well this is something. You can draw up different shapes of objects and write text in them!!! Wow!!! Have you seen Apple's Keynote? If not, let me tell you.. it's like Powerpoint plus ten years of development.. oh wait.. Powerpoint hasn't changed a bit in last ten years!
Microsoft Frontpage - If you want to design a web page, Frontpage is NOT the program for it. I don't know to whom it's meant for, but I wouldn't recommend it to a beginner and I've never heard of a professional that uses Frontpage.
Couldn't we just get a Office lite and M$ can feed the bloated crap to those who don't actually use their programs, but like to click different buttons and see how they throw errors boxes at your face.
I'm sorry if my comment sounds a bit sarcastic, but I'm sick and tired of installing new Office, that requires double amount processing power, only because I can't read files from customers without it.
It's very common these days that good series are cancelled in middle of a season. iTunes TV-series sales will make a change to that. When new series launches in the USA, it only has about 300 million potential viewers, but when the same show launces on iTunes, it has about two billion potential viewers.
Many people don't yet even realize what this might do to the industry. There will become more and more scifi series, because TV-companies don't have to rely on US Scifi fans only. And that's just the beginning. Soon you'll able to order tv-series like you order magazines now. Fans might even start to have their own tailored episodes or even whole series.
I'll sincerely welcome iTunes. It will change the industry - mark my words. Difference to other Video-on-demand services is that iTunes is 'the standard'. It's safe to buy there and you don't have to worry about having to deal with some strange proprietary DRM software.
"But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free"
That must be one of the most stupid comments I've ever read. There are about 4 500 million people on this planet who can't record it from television without a satellite disc. Getting something like Lost from an online store is something I've been waiting for ages. It's not about some certain series, it's about same philosophy as in iTunes, there's a never-ending library of albums that you can download when ever you want.
Since VCDs became leechable online, I've downloaded thousands of movies. Last year alone I lost two terabytes of movies in hard disk failures. I'm sick and tired of downloading and archiving everything by myself. It has nothing to do with the money. I can't watch everything when it comes out and especially non-main-stream movies vanish from the Internet in couple of months. There's no other way than download and archive it by yourself, if you wan't to watch it eventually. Ofcourse I could order the same thing from a DVD-shop, but takes over a week. When I want to watch something, I want to do it that day, otherwise 'mood for the movie' is gone.
If iTunes starts to sell movies and series, I'm in! 1-2euros per episode is not much. A good set of pay-tv channels cost 30-50euros/month (atleast where I live). That's about 40e/2e = 20 episodes / month, which is about a season of any tv-series. Therefore, you could buy twelve seasons of tv-episodes for the price of a set of pay-tv channels. At the moment there are barely six series running that I watch, sometimes even less.
And about the video iPod. Fancy technical journalists are comparing it to those pocket tvs that existed over 10 years ago. They didn't sell that well. But has anything changed? Hell yes! I owned one of those crappy tvs at the time. It consumed a set of AA-batteries in two hours and its LCD screen was something like 80x60 pixels. You could barely read subtitles. And they're comparing those to movie iPod.. if it works even half as well as music iPod, it's gonna be a killer product! Mark my words.
With that formula Windows' profit margin is about 99.9%, because CD only costs 10c to make.
As a software professional, I've never been able to calculate real profit margin of any product that contains any kind of a software. Especially in a big company, you got different software modules from different products linked together. For example if software module A costs $500,000 to develop and it's sold with $1000 per license. Then you have a software module B that cost $2,000,000 to develop, and sold $100 per license. Both of those modules are sold separately, but then you decide to use both of their technology to develop a product C. It costs additional $100,000. All of those modules continue to sell separately. What is profit margin of product C? Do you count in only the $100,000 or that part of A and B, which haven't been covered by license sales? What about company's administration costs, marketing costs, etc.
And that was an extremely simple example. Old company has thousands of software modules, all linked to each other in some way. You can never really point out the actual cost of a product in software business.
My point is: The only way to know the real margins of a product, is to see how good salaries are in that company (as long as it is profitable)
PS. I bet iPod family's UI design has cost ten times more to develop than any other competitor's product's. There are countless number of factors that you can't even imagine when considering those margins. (But as a software manager, I consider it an advantage. No matter how bad failure a development project is, you can always trick those business directors to believe that it actually was a success. You'll just sweep those man-months under the carpet (of some other project/product) and say you used a software module that was developed by other project.)
I work as an R&D director in a medium size software company. Some time ago we hired a very promising director. She immediately became close friends with our managing director. At the time I didn't see anything wrong with it. But changes were about to come..
There was a well liked and very good technical worker in my team. Only problem was his appereance. The director couldn't stand the way he was. He was fat, quiet and wore an old sweatsuit all the time. Technical guy was very content with his appearance and felt no reason to make any changes.
Just in few months she succeeded to turn the whole management board againts this guy. He suddenly became a lazy and unreliable worker, who created a bad athmosphere to the whole office. When I found about the claims, it was too late. I tried to stand up for him, but couldn't defend him. The director was too cunning and I was too naive -- although I'm not anymore.
That wasn't the only trick the she pulled, but it was last one againts me. I found out that only way to avoid those tricks was not to talk to her at all.
I don't want to make this story long by telling about the ways she acted or methods she used. You propably can image them anyway. It's all charm, but totally hollow.
Problem is that the director still works in our company. I have no tools to fight againts a psychopath and I don't want to risk my position by showing it what I truly think. To psychopath its all black and white, if you're not on their side, you're an enemy.
War againts piratism has never been about the money. It's about control over the distribution channel. When people have free access to music, they tend to listen albums they like, not the ones that records companies have invested millions in.
When radios became common goods it scared hell out of records companies. Atleast until they realized they could control what's played on radio and use it as a marketing channel. There have been other inventions too, but all of them were conquered by record companies, until the Internet..
You will never see a business model that gives power to the people -- in music industry anyway. Otherwise those ideas, presented by that guy, were great. They would work perfectly in an ideal world.
As most of the Internet piratism, this problem exists only because there is no legal way of doing it. I live in area where I have to wait for years to see those shows you are currently watching in US or in UK as well.
I would be happy to pay to see those shows. Especially if I would get them in HDTV resolution as I do now from torrents. But I have no legal way of getting them. I have no choice but to download them illegally.
It's funny how companies blame piratism when their own business model is from the beginning of 20th century and doesn't work at all with new technology.
I have only one message to those TV/Movie companies: Please, put up your own torrent sites with a price tag on files.
After reading the article I had a flashback about old computer games, where "mysterious force" would tug you back when you reached the end of the area.
How funny it would be if our world ended after Pluto and the stars would only be 'a painted backcloth'. I wonder what kinda effect it would have on our society. Scientist would propably spend years trying to explaing the phenomena, until one day a human could travel to the edge and verify the obvious.
Or maybe the aliens that run our world on their supercomputer have not yet coded the rest of the universe. Let's wait for few more years and see if 'the mysterious force' has been removed:)
In my opinion Star Trek died when Roddenberry died.
What we see nowadays is a soap opera in Star Trek clothes.
All new Trek-series made after 1991 have been pure BS. There have been only about 2-3 good episodes per season. I'm personally ashamed what Star Trek has become.
Statistically 1% isn't much, but let's look at the numbers. There are almost 500 million web users in the world. Thereby 1% means five million people. That's more than a small country!
If five million isn't significant, then what is? How many software products you know that has more than five million ACTIVE users in total?
Five million people have lots of friends. If those friends are introduced to Firefox the number will double soon. In my opinion, this is just the beginning. Snowball has started to roll.
Why does it have to be do-not-spam registry. Why not please-spam-me-registry. Just make spamming illegal to all addresses, but those that are in the registry.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier to make a law that would condemn spamming, period. I bet about 90% of voters don't like to receive spam. Why we have to make the effort to block spammers, when lawmakers should be on our side?
Every time there has been article about a strange patent on slashdot, hundreds of people have presented prior-art cases.
I understand that patent officers can't review profoundly every patent, especially when software patents swarm in great numbers.
Why not to use power of the Internet to review those patents. Similar to grid computing, but using users' brain capacity.
There could be either web pages similar to slashdot or networked review application. Hundreds of thousands users could review those patents and those who found prior-art cases would get a reward (part of the money applicant had spent on the patent application).
I bet you have plenty of opposite opinions, so don't hold back.
So, in near future we will have dozen places that claim to be Atlantis. Is this going to be as with Santa Claus. There are atleast ten different countries claiming to be Santa's home countries.
How do you define which is the real Atlantis? I bet there are many forgotten cities that distantly match description written almost 3000 years ago.
Can Atlantis be identified without a doubt? If so, then how?
"...can only call other phones that use the same technology."
The article seem to have forgotten to mention that (almost) all 3G mobile phones have native SIP support. It means that in near future all mobile phones, atleast in Europe can call via SIP.
Since Microsoft Netmeeting has SIP support, and Linux has its own SIP stacks, you might be expecting a SIP boom soon.
SIP is probably the future of IP calling. It has some very nice features in it that make it work well with other messaging applications like "InstantMessaging". I'd say put your money on SIP now.
The webpage says "report is created for each program identifying the specific locations of potential security vulnerabilities"
All programmers know that high level languages create very large binary files. A small program that prints few lines written in Visual Basic, might take hundreds of kilobytes space. Hundreds of kilobytes might mean even millions of lines of assembly code.
Let's take an example. The bugscan reports that there are bugs on lines 24.234, 93.234, 134.834, 342.234, 534.444, 767.835 and 822.511 out of 1.023.890 lines. The BugScan might even report that those lines are from abcd.dll, efgh.dll, ijkl.dll and aaaa.dll. Do you now feel reliefed? No, I didn't think so either. I mean that BugScan might be very useful on low level languages, but when there are ten layers of different libraries between your code and the machine code, I bet the usefulness is not that high.
I've been involved with wireless programming and Java since late 90's. So far Java hasn't lived up to its promises. Sure, you can do nice games on mobile phones, but real programming is a joke.
For an example six months ago I had to do a little program that sent data through Nokia 9210's irDa port. API seemed to support it, so I made a program that used the irDA. Unfortunately the program never could open the irDa port. After days of research I finally found out that Nokia had NEVER implemented the irDa port correctly to the library that Java used. They had a typo in the port name, but nobody seemed to care about 'a minor flaw' at Nokia. The bug had been there for years and there was no way you could use irDa with Java in Nokia 9210(i).
After that I just switched to the C++ and everything worked perfectly.
The problem with mobile phones and Java generally is that if hardware interface is not implemented correctly, you can do nothing about it. Can you imagine yourself coding hundreds of hours a Java program and finally realising that the API hasn't been yet implemented fully and the program can never run. Ok, maybe not never, but would you like to wait years before you get fully implemented API?
From the article "The quality of machinima movies today rivals Toy Story five years ago, Rehbock said."
I think that says it all. There have been home-made videos, home-made (music) CDs, home-made food, etc. for ages. Technology has just made it possible to spread home-mades to another area. The picture itself isn't even half of the movie. Those hundreds of people working on a Hollywood movie, aren't for nothing.
It doesn't really matter whether you can do those movies at home or not, it still takes hundreds of people to make a quality flick. I've seen many machinimas and in my opinion, this is just hype. Machinimas are a wonderful idea and finally people can do movies about anything they can imagine. But I still believe that machinimas need atleast dozens of people to become even TV-series level.
This reminds me of a situation around ten years ago. Just before harddrives became 'huge'. Most of you probably remember DOS extensions that allowed packing the harddrive content, so that you got 'a way more free space'. Yeah, sure. It worked somehow until you had to switch to other OS or packing system. None of the packed data, could be used anymore, unless you reinstalled the same version of the same packing program that was originally used. I remember how I lost a whole harddrive of data, because I couldn't find the original DOS version I had used when installed the packing system.
Not being able to read the data is just one of the problems. Have you ever packed 1GB of data? It takes a Long Time and you Have To pack it even if you are not going to burn it, if you want to know whether it fits in the CD.
There are dozens of reasons why this 'invention' is not going to work. But most of all. In my opinion, this is the sign of the end of the CD age.
PS. If you ever have packed MP3 or Divx files, you know already that they might even take more space when zipped/rarred/etc. Plextor is not a miracle worker!
When the spam is filtered at user-account level, you can only do it by parsing a single mail in some way and determine if it's spam or not. It's like trying to tell whether a movie is bad by looking at one picture. If the spam could be filtered at the server level, by comparing mails that are received into to different accounts, you could really tell which ones are part of a mass-mail (spam).
One problem with this is the right to open other people's mail. But you could use some basic scrambling (rot-13) to make sure that no one sees the inside. It wouldn't make difference to the comparing script.
Mailing lists might cause a problem too but wouldn't it be easier to allow the mailing lists you belong to than trying to block the ones you don't belong to?
The company I work for ordered a demo from one of the demogroups. It was displayed on a wide screen plasma-tv with hifi speakers at popular trade show. It was like a magnet for the customers. Most of the customers had never seen anything like it before and they stood there for minutes just staring and blinking their eyes.
The demo cost only few hundred euros because it was made by teenagers. But the quality was way above anything what we would've got from a design office for thousands of euros. I sincerely recommend everyone in a management position to use the skills of these democoders.
Slashdot Mirror
I love to see when a company understands that giving something away they will get ten times more in return. And nowadays that happens too rarely.
For a while it seemed that Nokia is about to lose to its competitors, because of Symbian and bad software. This will totally remedy it. I've also heard from Nokia insiders that they're actively dumping everything related to Symbian. It won't take more than couple of years and all their phones use Qt.
Seeing how well Apple has been selling iPhone applications, I can only imagine the potential Qt phones have in future. With Symbian that just wasn't possible, it was a total nightmare for the developers.
"First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi
I see we're on stage three now.
I have strange feeling that this laptop will be more popular in western world than in developing countries. I, for one, will definately buy it, just have a nice new gadget. $100 is cheap for any gadget.
:)
But hey! I have an idea. Let's make the price $200 in western world and each computer that we buy, will give one for free to someone in developing countries! $200 isn't much for a working computer. Plus, atleast for once, you get a good feeling for buying something that you don't really need
What makes mind control interesting, that is not usually thought of, is awareness of it. Since our brain is controlling everything we do, altering its functioning would propably go unnoticed. In movies characters usually try to fight againts mind control and even in everyday thoughts we imagine mind control to be something that is againts our will. When you think of it a bit further, you might notice that what mind control actually does, is make our emotions balanced in the way that we actually want to do what it wants us to do. As stated in the article, rats repeatedly did things againts logical behaviour. Now, if you think how many of your actions is based on logic and how many on emotions, you might be able to guess my point.
But then again, this is just my theory. I hope your can prove it wrong. Only variable that would definately prove it wrong, would be existence of a soul. It would provide us something that can't be affected by change of chemical balance in brain. But more likely is that each and every one of us is under some kind of mind control. Everything affects our emotions, from food to movies, regardless of if it resides physically in our brain or affects through our senses.
I hope this finally changes attitudes of business leaders. I've been working in software business for a decade now and never have I seen a software company where experts were valued above salesmen. When a salesman makes a big contract, it's like he is the king of the world. Whole company has to kneel before him (just a metaphor). When there are lay offs, the salesmen are last to go. But what we all slashdotters know and Google has now implemented, is that a deal with a customer is just a materialization of work done by the whole workforce of a company. It's not the moment when the contract is signed, that customer decides to order. It's the whole run where project managers convince the customer with a well done project, coders produce a product which customer loves, and other project people spend long hours with the customer assuring him that we really care for him. In the end, salesman is just there to present the work done by others.
Many business leaders have began to realize, that people aren't using Google's product because they're running nice commercials on TV, but because they're just good products. It's no wonder why there have been so much polemic about bad quality of software products. Atleast where I've worked, all products have been done with a minimum effort. When a first alpha version start to emerge, business leader have already arranged massive demonstration events to customers. Focus from finishing the product shifts to making a good demonstration. Google makes a difference here. Unlike its competitors (like Micro$oft), its products actually work and what I've said many times to myself, a good product sells itself.
I hope those investors (in the article), that are looking for companies to fill up market gaps left by Google, understand it's not the market gap people are willing to buy. People are looking for good products that also might fill up a market gap in the process.
I've been using MS Office since the first version came out and I'm still waiting some basic features. For example there's still no news reader in Outlook?!?!?! Sure, Outlook Express has a built-in news reader but it doesn't have a calendar. I must be a lousy user, because I can't name a single thing that would've improved my Office usability since Office'97 was released.
Microsoft Word - A very good WYSIWYG word processor, but what's the difference between 1997 version and 2006 version? Please Do Not say Clippy. I can do everything I need with the WinWord'97. I know that the latest version consumes about ten times more disk space, memory and processor power.. well that's a feature, right?
Microsoft Excel - A very good spreadsheet program. I bet there are zillion new macro based features added since 1997, but I also bet that 99% of users never use them.
Microsoft Access - Ok, what the hell is this? I've seen lots of Access 'applications' and ALL OF THEM had to be rewritten in real programming language. Access is like a bad imitation of a database, which lures semi-coder-guys to write cash register programs with it. Then, after Access 'database' hits something like 20 000 entries, it just crashes. It either gets so slow you can barely open it or it doesn't work at all. I hate to say this, but Access is a curse. A hint to all small businesses: DO NOT MESS WITH ACCESS, NO MATTER HOW EASY AND NICE IT SEEMS. IT WILL EAT YOU ALIVE EVENTUALLY.
MicroSoft PowerPoint - Well this is something. You can draw up different shapes of objects and write text in them!!! Wow!!! Have you seen Apple's Keynote? If not, let me tell you.. it's like Powerpoint plus ten years of development.. oh wait.. Powerpoint hasn't changed a bit in last ten years!
Microsoft Frontpage - If you want to design a web page, Frontpage is NOT the program for it. I don't know to whom it's meant for, but I wouldn't recommend it to a beginner and I've never heard of a professional that uses Frontpage.
Couldn't we just get a Office lite and M$ can feed the bloated crap to those who don't actually use their programs, but like to click different buttons and see how they throw errors boxes at your face.
I'm sorry if my comment sounds a bit sarcastic, but I'm sick and tired of installing new Office, that requires double amount processing power, only because I can't read files from customers without it.
It's very common these days that good series are cancelled in middle of a season. iTunes TV-series sales will make a change to that. When new series launches in the USA, it only has about 300 million potential viewers, but when the same show launces on iTunes, it has about two billion potential viewers.
Many people don't yet even realize what this might do to the industry. There will become more and more scifi series, because TV-companies don't have to rely on US Scifi fans only. And that's just the beginning. Soon you'll able to order tv-series like you order magazines now. Fans might even start to have their own tailored episodes or even whole series.
I'll sincerely welcome iTunes. It will change the industry - mark my words. Difference to other Video-on-demand services is that iTunes is 'the standard'. It's safe to buy there and you don't have to worry about having to deal with some strange proprietary DRM software.
"But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free"
That must be one of the most stupid comments I've ever read. There are about 4 500 million people on this planet who can't record it from television without a satellite disc. Getting something like Lost from an online store is something I've been waiting for ages. It's not about some certain series, it's about same philosophy as in iTunes, there's a never-ending library of albums that you can download when ever you want.
Since VCDs became leechable online, I've downloaded thousands of movies. Last year alone I lost two terabytes of movies in hard disk failures. I'm sick and tired of downloading and archiving everything by myself. It has nothing to do with the money. I can't watch everything when it comes out and especially non-main-stream movies vanish from the Internet in couple of months. There's no other way than download and archive it by yourself, if you wan't to watch it eventually. Ofcourse I could order the same thing from a DVD-shop, but takes over a week. When I want to watch something, I want to do it that day, otherwise 'mood for the movie' is gone.
If iTunes starts to sell movies and series, I'm in! 1-2euros per episode is not much. A good set of pay-tv channels cost 30-50euros/month (atleast where I live). That's about 40e/2e = 20 episodes / month, which is about a season of any tv-series. Therefore, you could buy twelve seasons of tv-episodes for the price of a set of pay-tv channels. At the moment there are barely six series running that I watch, sometimes even less.
And about the video iPod. Fancy technical journalists are comparing it to those pocket tvs that existed over 10 years ago. They didn't sell that well. But has anything changed? Hell yes! I owned one of those crappy tvs at the time. It consumed a set of AA-batteries in two hours and its LCD screen was something like 80x60 pixels. You could barely read subtitles. And they're comparing those to movie iPod.. if it works even half as well as music iPod, it's gonna be a killer product! Mark my words.
With that formula Windows' profit margin is about 99.9%, because CD only costs 10c to make.
As a software professional, I've never been able to calculate real profit margin of any product that contains any kind of a software. Especially in a big company, you got different software modules from different products linked together. For example if software module A costs $500,000 to develop and it's sold with $1000 per license. Then you have a software module B that cost $2,000,000 to develop, and sold $100 per license. Both of those modules are sold separately, but then you decide to use both of their technology to develop a product C. It costs additional $100,000. All of those modules continue to sell separately. What is profit margin of product C? Do you count in only the $100,000 or that part of A and B, which haven't been covered by license sales? What about company's administration costs, marketing costs, etc.
And that was an extremely simple example. Old company has thousands of software modules, all linked to each other in some way. You can never really point out the actual cost of a product in software business.
My point is: The only way to know the real margins of a product, is to see how good salaries are in that company (as long as it is profitable)
PS. I bet iPod family's UI design has cost ten times more to develop than any other competitor's product's. There are countless number of factors that you can't even imagine when considering those margins. (But as a software manager, I consider it an advantage. No matter how bad failure a development project is, you can always trick those business directors to believe that it actually was a success. You'll just sweep those man-months under the carpet (of some other project/product) and say you used a software module that was developed by other project.)
I work as an R&D director in a medium size software company. Some time ago we hired a very promising director. She immediately became close friends with our managing director. At the time I didn't see anything wrong with it. But changes were about to come..
There was a well liked and very good technical worker in my team. Only problem was his appereance. The director couldn't stand the way he was. He was fat, quiet and wore an old sweatsuit all the time. Technical guy was very content with his appearance and felt no reason to make any changes.
Just in few months she succeeded to turn the whole management board againts this guy. He suddenly became a lazy and unreliable worker, who created a bad athmosphere to the whole office. When I found about the claims, it was too late. I tried to stand up for him, but couldn't defend him. The director was too cunning and I was too naive -- although I'm not anymore.
That wasn't the only trick the she pulled, but it was last one againts me. I found out that only way to avoid those tricks was not to talk to her at all.
I don't want to make this story long by telling about the ways she acted or methods she used. You propably can image them anyway. It's all charm, but totally hollow.
Problem is that the director still works in our company. I have no tools to fight againts a psychopath and I don't want to risk my position by showing it what I truly think. To psychopath its all black and white, if you're not on their side, you're an enemy.
If you have any ideas, please let me know.
That plan is very good, but not good enough.
War againts piratism has never been about the money. It's about control over the distribution channel. When people have free access to music, they tend to listen albums they like, not the ones that records companies have invested millions in.
When radios became common goods it scared hell out of records companies. Atleast until they realized they could control what's played on radio and use it as a marketing channel. There have been other inventions too, but all of them were conquered by record companies, until the Internet..
You will never see a business model that gives power to the people -- in music industry anyway. Otherwise those ideas, presented by that guy, were great. They would work perfectly in an ideal world.
As most of the Internet piratism, this problem exists only because there is no legal way of doing it. I live in area where I have to wait for years to see those shows you are currently watching in US or in UK as well.
I would be happy to pay to see those shows. Especially if I would get them in HDTV resolution as I do now from torrents. But I have no legal way of getting them. I have no choice but to download them illegally.
It's funny how companies blame piratism when their own business model is from the beginning of 20th century and doesn't work at all with new technology.
I have only one message to those TV/Movie companies: Please, put up your own torrent sites with a price tag on files.
After reading the article I had a flashback about old computer games, where "mysterious force" would tug you back when you reached the end of the area.
:)
How funny it would be if our world ended after Pluto and the stars would only be 'a painted backcloth'. I wonder what kinda effect it would have on our society. Scientist would propably spend years trying to explaing the phenomena, until one day a human could travel to the edge and verify the obvious.
Or maybe the aliens that run our world on their supercomputer have not yet coded the rest of the universe. Let's wait for few more years and see if 'the mysterious force' has been removed
In my opinion Star Trek died when Roddenberry died.
What we see nowadays is a soap opera in Star Trek clothes.
All new Trek-series made after 1991 have been pure BS. There have been only about 2-3 good episodes per season. I'm personally ashamed what Star Trek has become.
Statistically 1% isn't much, but let's look at the numbers. There are almost 500 million web users in the world. Thereby 1% means five million people. That's more than a small country!
If five million isn't significant, then what is? How many software products you know that has more than five million ACTIVE users in total?
Five million people have lots of friends. If those friends are introduced to Firefox the number will double soon. In my opinion, this is just the beginning. Snowball has started to roll.
Why does it have to be do-not-spam registry. Why not please-spam-me-registry. Just make spamming illegal to all addresses, but those that are in the registry.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier to make a law that would condemn spamming, period. I bet about 90% of voters don't like to receive spam. Why we have to make the effort to block spammers, when lawmakers should be on our side?
Every time there has been article about a strange patent on slashdot, hundreds of people have presented prior-art cases.
I understand that patent officers can't review profoundly every patent, especially when software patents swarm in great numbers.
Why not to use power of the Internet to review those patents. Similar to grid computing, but using users' brain capacity.
There could be either web pages similar to slashdot or networked review application. Hundreds of thousands users could review those patents and those who found prior-art cases would get a reward (part of the money applicant had spent on the patent application).
I bet you have plenty of opposite opinions, so don't hold back.
So, in near future we will have dozen places that claim to be Atlantis. Is this going to be as with Santa Claus. There are atleast ten different countries claiming to be Santa's home countries.
How do you define which is the real Atlantis? I bet there are many forgotten cities that distantly match description written almost 3000 years ago.
Can Atlantis be identified without a doubt? If so, then how?
"...can only call other phones that use the same technology."
The article seem to have forgotten to mention that (almost) all 3G mobile phones have native SIP support. It means that in near future all mobile phones, atleast in Europe can call via SIP.
Since Microsoft Netmeeting has SIP support, and Linux has its own SIP stacks, you might be expecting a SIP boom soon.
SIP is probably the future of IP calling. It has some very nice features in it that make it work well with other messaging applications like "InstantMessaging". I'd say put your money on SIP now.
The webpage says "report is created for each program identifying the specific locations of potential security vulnerabilities"
All programmers know that high level languages create very large binary files. A small program that prints few lines written in Visual Basic, might take hundreds of kilobytes space. Hundreds of kilobytes might mean even millions of lines of assembly code.
Let's take an example. The bugscan reports that there are bugs on lines 24.234, 93.234, 134.834, 342.234, 534.444, 767.835 and 822.511 out of 1.023.890 lines. The BugScan might even report that those lines are from abcd.dll, efgh.dll, ijkl.dll and aaaa.dll. Do you now feel reliefed? No, I didn't think so either. I mean that BugScan might be very useful on low level languages, but when there are ten layers of different libraries between your code and the machine code, I bet the usefulness is not that high.
I've been involved with wireless programming and Java since late 90's. So far Java hasn't lived up to its promises. Sure, you can do nice games on mobile phones, but real programming is a joke.
For an example six months ago I had to do a little program that sent data through Nokia 9210's irDa port. API seemed to support it, so I made a program that used the irDA. Unfortunately the program never could open the irDa port. After days of research I finally found out that Nokia had NEVER implemented the irDa port correctly to the library that Java used. They had a typo in the port name, but nobody seemed to care about 'a minor flaw' at Nokia. The bug had been there for years and there was no way you could use irDa with Java in Nokia 9210(i).
After that I just switched to the C++ and everything worked perfectly.
The problem with mobile phones and Java generally is that if hardware interface is not implemented correctly, you can do nothing about it. Can you imagine yourself coding hundreds of hours a Java program and finally realising that the API hasn't been yet implemented fully and the program can never run. Ok, maybe not never, but would you like to wait years before you get fully implemented API?
From the article "The quality of machinima movies today rivals Toy Story five years ago, Rehbock said."
I think that says it all. There have been home-made videos, home-made (music) CDs, home-made food, etc. for ages. Technology has just made it possible to spread home-mades to another area. The picture itself isn't even half of the movie. Those hundreds of people working on a Hollywood movie, aren't for nothing.
It doesn't really matter whether you can do those movies at home or not, it still takes hundreds of people to make a quality flick. I've seen many machinimas and in my opinion, this is just hype. Machinimas are a wonderful idea and finally people can do movies about anything they can imagine. But I still believe that machinimas need atleast dozens of people to become even TV-series level.
This reminds me of a situation around ten years ago. Just before harddrives became 'huge'.
Most of you probably remember DOS extensions that allowed packing the harddrive content, so that you got 'a way more free space'. Yeah, sure. It worked somehow until you had to switch to other OS or packing system. None of the packed data, could be used anymore, unless you reinstalled the same version of the same packing program that was originally used. I remember how I lost a whole harddrive of data, because I couldn't find the original DOS version I had used when installed the packing system.
Not being able to read the data is just one of the problems. Have you ever packed 1GB of data? It takes a Long Time and you Have To pack it even if you are not going to burn it, if you want to know whether it fits in the CD.
There are dozens of reasons why this 'invention' is not going to work. But most of all. In my opinion, this is the sign of the end of the CD age.
PS. If you ever have packed MP3 or Divx files, you know already that they might even take more space when zipped/rarred/etc. Plextor is not a miracle worker!
When the spam is filtered at user-account level, you can only do it by parsing a single mail in some way and determine if it's spam or not. It's like trying to tell whether a movie is bad by looking at one picture. If the spam could be filtered at the server level, by comparing mails that are received into to different accounts, you could really tell which ones are part of a mass-mail (spam).
One problem with this is the right to open other people's mail. But you could use some basic scrambling (rot-13) to make sure that no one sees the inside. It wouldn't make difference to the comparing script.
Mailing lists might cause a problem too but wouldn't it be easier to allow the mailing lists you belong to than trying to block the ones you don't belong to?
The company I work for ordered a demo from one of the demogroups. It was displayed on a wide screen plasma-tv with hifi speakers at popular trade show. It was like a magnet for the customers. Most of the customers had never seen anything like it before and they stood there for minutes just staring and blinking their eyes.
The demo cost only few hundred euros because it was made by teenagers. But the quality was way above anything what we would've got from a design office for thousands of euros. I sincerely recommend everyone in a management position to use the skills of these democoders.