The only difference between that patent speak monstrosity and scheduled delivery services as old as humans is "by the computer system". Replace it with "by a person and an abacus" and you can find prior art that's ten thousand years old. The fact that the actual lawsuits you could win using the patent will only impact a narrow combination of claims doesn't dull the chilling effect on society of having patents in an area. And Amazon starts with the presumption of patent malice due to the equally ridiculous 1-click patent. This one does nothing to sway that bias.
People are willing to pay a bit for trustworthy binaries from a reputable, believed legitimate source like the known author of the program. I don't run binaries from random sources like torrent sites for a lot of reasons. If there was no legitimate market for things that it's possible to get for free, the ITunes store wouldn't make any money. As I said, the key is to make things easy for people to buy, and right now the market for things like phone apps says anything over a few dollars is too much to expect. Only businesses pay non-trivial recurring license fees, and even there only if they have to. If you provide legitimate binaries for free and rely on donations from them to survive, you shouldn't be surprised that most people will take the free ones and move along. That is then the easiest thing to do.
If you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer, you don't end up downloading source. Consumers buy things that are packaged in a way that makes them easy to buy. Given the large chunks of the market are moving toward mobile and tablet consumption, that trend if accelerating if anything. Releasing source code has value to a narrow set of users who are not exactly famous for their spending.
For games, you can give away source code and sell the packaged product. Providing source does not require giving the binaries for free; that's the standard free speech vs. free beer distinction. If it's equally easy to pay for something or not pay for something, people will choose not to pay for it. Duh.
As for revenue from a development tool, that's a different market. That whole idea only works if you increase your market share so much by making it free that you make up for lost sales in some way. But the people who value source code to their development tools are a very competitive market. Your development tool has to be very good to do better than other free solutions. The assumption that releasing source by itself will drive people to your tool is a very poor one. The author here is extrapolating way too much from that narrow example.
At best they're Apple circa 2001, before the iPod. That's not a happy place. Dell already tried a music player in 2003 and it didn't go anywhere. Dell has been circling the drain since the.com crash, and its competitors have just been getting leaner and stronger the whole time.
Let me see if I have this right. Monty builds up MySQL AB into a functional project that a lot of people depend on. Then he sells it, cashes out big, and abandons it. And now people are falling for this again? Fool me twice, shame on me.
Tools whose sole purpose is frustrating RMAs are all around. I have a WD drive with 500 uncorrectable bad secots. Each time I run a scan, it gives out *one*, switches to repair, and that's it--better now. No, it isn't next scan will find the next error. Hours of work, no RMA, no working drive.
If you have a SSD where failures are total collapse, they can be more cost effective to repair, just due to the price tag. Just encrypt your data on there if you want it to resist RMA theft.
You details on the shady Seagate failure weakens your point about low SSD reliabiliy. Those sound like >50% AFR models, and any decent SSD could to better. At least they telegraphed what they were going to do with the warranty drop. Saying what used to be up to a 5 year warranty, it's now 1 year, it shows product longevity is not even remotely on their priorities.
Right now I use Intel 320 Series SSD (with capacitor backup for power failure). Regular drives are WD Red: their 24x7-NAS drive, turned for early error reporting. It's the only SATA drive on the market that has even the possibility to be good.
In addition to mechanical tools, making sense of the model/year specific data on the OBD-II port is a mess too. The best I've gotten from anyone but my car's dealer since those were "standardized" in 1996 is "the car computer is not happy". My cynical side suspects much of the secrecy around engine tuning is protected under the excuse of emissions control, but is just as much a revenue protection issue.
The hybrids are a nice win on boot time. On many benchmarks, you'd be better off spending that money on more RAM though. Hybrid drives beat regular ones, sure, but you have to match cost and compare against having more memory.
Seagate's hybrid drives will have a much bigger win when they finally release the write caching firmware. The disappointing schedule on that has made me regret buying one of those. I would have been better off just paying for all SSD in the first place, or more RAM.
Apple's "Fusion" drives are a SSD and a regular drive combined into a single logical volume with software. This is not a novel approach. ZFS has promoted using a SSD along with regular storage via its ARC cache for many years. In 2010 DragonFly BSD added the swapcache using a similar idea.
The anecdotes from places like Coding Horror are just that: anecdotes. Were early SSD failure rates higher up to 2011 than regular drives? I think they've gotten better as years pass. What about now though? Even the 2011 survey from Tom's Hardware already put SSD reliability as already higher than regular drives.
I've had plenty of spinning drives that didn't last more than a hundred days too. Hard drive controllers fail with no warning, just like SSD ones do. I think this is emphasized as more associated with SSD failures because it's the only way SSDs die.
In the middle of 2011 Intel raised warranties to 5 years on the main SSD I use in my systems. In late 2011 Seagate dropped warranties to a year. If you don't care about high capacity, it's possible for a SSD to cost less per year than a mechanical drive now. That's not a glowing statement about the manufacturers thinking SSD is more likely to fail either.
And to go Logan's Run, retire anyone over 30 who still has the nerve to drive without perfect reflexes and vision. Also, eliminate people who drive while distracted by kids, they're a menace.
Unless you're capturing video all the time, you can't get a camera to distinguish between tailgating and just being close to a car because someone hit the brakes unexpectedly. The only way to be sure someone has been driving too close to other cars is a history of them rear-ending people.
Those artists still sell albums. There's new fans as one possible route. The new vinyl section of my local record store is amazingly busy lately, especially relative to the expectation I had years ago that it would not be there at all by now. Off your list, Rush just re-released and coaxed sales out of people for a "Super Deluxe Edition" of 2112 last year, on Blu-Ray. They added a surround mix, higher quality mastering, and a comic book. Cha-ching, $70 retail, and Amazon still places it as #4,213 in music--right around the same rank as Zoe Keating's top selling album (#3,487 in Music) at a fraction of the cost. l. Any of the old but popular bands can throw out an album with a single bonus track, studio or live one "from the vaults", and sell more copies than any cello player. Zoe is actually huge in the New Age Instrumental Music category. The best selling artist in that category (Philip Wesley) barely does better.
Anyway, your idea of the rock star being a historical quirk is true, but vinyl tooling isn't a driver. Plenty of little audiophile labels pressed unpopular records, in the depths of the years when LPs didn't sell. The biggest expense of releasing an album has always been marketing it usefully, which is part of how labels used to justify their percentage. Even studio time used to cost a lot more than the physical record production.
There were always a huge number of unknown bands floating around; know it's just easier to know about them all now. And labels also used to be able to target a large percentage of buying listeners just with a radio ad, even with some radio payola if they really wanted it, and the only way listeners could get a guaranteed repeat was to buy a copy. Popular things can still rack up big numbers like radio stations used to, but artists don't get very much money per view from YouTube either. The dynamics of sales and marketing have changed even more than the production side. How many videos are on YouTube compared with the number of TV stations? Same sort of shift.
Albums that are heavily multi-tracked in the studio, with musicians that don't tour, are very hard to play live. Electronic music is pretty easy in comparison. You do always have the option of triggering it and still sounding accurate.
As one of the first obvious examples, one reason The Beatles stopped touring is that it was logistically impossible to recreate their later albums in a live setting. Check out some of the good vocal reconstructions on Youtube, for songs like "When I'm 64" (1967) or "Because" (1970). You can't replicate people harmonizing with themselves live.
Having an string section used to happen regularly on popular music too. At least that's possible to reproduce if you schedule live shows with an orchestra. It's logistically difficult for anything but very popular rock bands, i.e. how the Moody Blues does some of their shows.
What does talent have to do with sales? Did Psy make millions of dollars because he's more talented than your average avant cello player? Of course not. Successful music companies sell what people buy, by definition. If they didn't they wouldn't be successful, in profit terms.
The idea that the music industry ever cultivated "talent" rather than sales is a historical fiction, based on selective memory. I first started getting albums in 1976. My first was the Blue Oyster Cult album with the cowbell epic "Don't Fear The Reaper". Know what was actually the top selling song from 1976? "Afternoon Delight" by the Starland Vocal Band. And then we had disco. It's been like that for a long time; most people only remember the good stuff from the past though. For every "Dark Side Of The Moon", there's a "Love Train"--those both from 1973.
There are lists of rendered obsolete apps for Lion, Mountain Lion, and IOS6 in a few minutes of searching. I'm most amused by how Instapaper started on the iPhone, became a widely lauded app, moved to Android, and then the core idea was integrated into IOS6 as Safari's Offline Reading feature. I suspect it's only the Android users who are keeping the company viable now.
"The hard way" here is to write software instead of buying it from Microsoft. If it weren't for geeks doing things the hard way, there wouldn't be an OpenOffice or a LibreOffice for trolls like you to use.
Slashdot Mirror
The only difference between that patent speak monstrosity and scheduled delivery services as old as humans is "by the computer system". Replace it with "by a person and an abacus" and you can find prior art that's ten thousand years old. The fact that the actual lawsuits you could win using the patent will only impact a narrow combination of claims doesn't dull the chilling effect on society of having patents in an area. And Amazon starts with the presumption of patent malice due to the equally ridiculous 1-click patent. This one does nothing to sway that bias.
I await the new console with gesture support. There is one gesture I regularly make to systems that are so broken I have to use the console.
You had two rocks?
Almost right, except the best chemical to mix with BSD is acid.
People are willing to pay a bit for trustworthy binaries from a reputable, believed legitimate source like the known author of the program. I don't run binaries from random sources like torrent sites for a lot of reasons. If there was no legitimate market for things that it's possible to get for free, the ITunes store wouldn't make any money. As I said, the key is to make things easy for people to buy, and right now the market for things like phone apps says anything over a few dollars is too much to expect. Only businesses pay non-trivial recurring license fees, and even there only if they have to. If you provide legitimate binaries for free and rely on donations from them to survive, you shouldn't be surprised that most people will take the free ones and move along. That is then the easiest thing to do.
If you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer, you don't end up downloading source. Consumers buy things that are packaged in a way that makes them easy to buy. Given the large chunks of the market are moving toward mobile and tablet consumption, that trend if accelerating if anything. Releasing source code has value to a narrow set of users who are not exactly famous for their spending.
For games, you can give away source code and sell the packaged product. Providing source does not require giving the binaries for free; that's the standard free speech vs. free beer distinction. If it's equally easy to pay for something or not pay for something, people will choose not to pay for it. Duh.
As for revenue from a development tool, that's a different market. That whole idea only works if you increase your market share so much by making it free that you make up for lost sales in some way. But the people who value source code to their development tools are a very competitive market. Your development tool has to be very good to do better than other free solutions. The assumption that releasing source by itself will drive people to your tool is a very poor one. The author here is extrapolating way too much from that narrow example.
At best they're Apple circa 2001, before the iPod. That's not a happy place. Dell already tried a music player in 2003 and it didn't go anywhere. Dell has been circling the drain since the .com crash, and its competitors have just been getting leaner and stronger the whole time.
I guess all those krauts at Nuremberg were right... they were just following orders.
I had to scroll down this far to see the thread hit by Godwin? Man, Slashdot really is falling apart.
3. Profit!
The Green party doesn't accept campaign contributions from corporate sponsors.
Insuring that they will never win. Hint: advertising works.
Let me see if I have this right. Monty builds up MySQL AB into a functional project that a lot of people depend on. Then he sells it, cashes out big, and abandons it. And now people are falling for this again? Fool me twice, shame on me.
The minute you can pull data from every offshore bank account.
Tools whose sole purpose is frustrating RMAs are all around. I have a WD drive with 500 uncorrectable bad secots. Each time I run a scan, it gives out *one*, switches to repair, and that's it--better now. No, it isn't next scan will find the next error. Hours of work, no RMA, no working drive.
If you have a SSD where failures are total collapse, they can be more cost effective to repair, just due to the price tag. Just encrypt your data on there if you want it to resist RMA theft.
You details on the shady Seagate failure weakens your point about low SSD reliabiliy. Those sound like >50% AFR models, and any decent SSD could to better. At least they telegraphed what they were going to do with the warranty drop. Saying what used to be up to a 5 year warranty, it's now 1 year, it shows product longevity is not even remotely on their priorities.
Right now I use Intel 320 Series SSD (with capacitor backup for power failure). Regular drives are WD Red: their 24x7-NAS drive, turned for early error reporting. It's the only SATA drive on the market that has even the possibility to be good.
In addition to mechanical tools, making sense of the model/year specific data on the OBD-II port is a mess too. The best I've gotten from anyone but my car's dealer since those were "standardized" in 1996 is "the car computer is not happy". My cynical side suspects much of the secrecy around engine tuning is protected under the excuse of emissions control, but is just as much a revenue protection issue.
The hybrids are a nice win on boot time. On many benchmarks, you'd be better off spending that money on more RAM though. Hybrid drives beat regular ones, sure, but you have to match cost and compare against having more memory.
Seagate's hybrid drives will have a much bigger win when they finally release the write caching firmware. The disappointing schedule on that has made me regret buying one of those. I would have been better off just paying for all SSD in the first place, or more RAM.
Apple's "Fusion" drives are a SSD and a regular drive combined into a single logical volume with software. This is not a novel approach. ZFS has promoted using a SSD along with regular storage via its ARC cache for many years. In 2010 DragonFly BSD added the swapcache using a similar idea.
The anecdotes from places like Coding Horror are just that: anecdotes. Were early SSD failure rates higher up to 2011 than regular drives? I think they've gotten better as years pass. What about now though? Even the 2011 survey from Tom's Hardware already put SSD reliability as already higher than regular drives.
I've had plenty of spinning drives that didn't last more than a hundred days too. Hard drive controllers fail with no warning, just like SSD ones do. I think this is emphasized as more associated with SSD failures because it's the only way SSDs die.
In the middle of 2011 Intel raised warranties to 5 years on the main SSD I use in my systems. In late 2011 Seagate dropped warranties to a year. If you don't care about high capacity, it's possible for a SSD to cost less per year than a mechanical drive now. That's not a glowing statement about the manufacturers thinking SSD is more likely to fail either.
And to go Logan's Run, retire anyone over 30 who still has the nerve to drive without perfect reflexes and vision. Also, eliminate people who drive while distracted by kids, they're a menace.
Unless you're capturing video all the time, you can't get a camera to distinguish between tailgating and just being close to a car because someone hit the brakes unexpectedly. The only way to be sure someone has been driving too close to other cars is a history of them rear-ending people.
Seriously, how many Y intersections are there in the civilized world which are not also provided with a merge lane on the tail of the Y?
I see you're not familiar with rural county roads in the US. You are lucky to get two full lanes.
Think of the children, with their tiny fingers.
Those artists still sell albums. There's new fans as one possible route. The new vinyl section of my local record store is amazingly busy lately, especially relative to the expectation I had years ago that it would not be there at all by now. Off your list, Rush just re-released and coaxed sales out of people for a "Super Deluxe Edition" of 2112 last year, on Blu-Ray. They added a surround mix, higher quality mastering, and a comic book. Cha-ching, $70 retail, and Amazon still places it as #4,213 in music--right around the same rank as Zoe Keating's top selling album (#3,487 in Music) at a fraction of the cost. l. Any of the old but popular bands can throw out an album with a single bonus track, studio or live one "from the vaults", and sell more copies than any cello player. Zoe is actually huge in the New Age Instrumental Music category. The best selling artist in that category (Philip Wesley) barely does better.
Anyway, your idea of the rock star being a historical quirk is true, but vinyl tooling isn't a driver. Plenty of little audiophile labels pressed unpopular records, in the depths of the years when LPs didn't sell. The biggest expense of releasing an album has always been marketing it usefully, which is part of how labels used to justify their percentage. Even studio time used to cost a lot more than the physical record production.
There were always a huge number of unknown bands floating around; know it's just easier to know about them all now. And labels also used to be able to target a large percentage of buying listeners just with a radio ad, even with some radio payola if they really wanted it, and the only way listeners could get a guaranteed repeat was to buy a copy. Popular things can still rack up big numbers like radio stations used to, but artists don't get very much money per view from YouTube either. The dynamics of sales and marketing have changed even more than the production side. How many videos are on YouTube compared with the number of TV stations? Same sort of shift.
Albums that are heavily multi-tracked in the studio, with musicians that don't tour, are very hard to play live. Electronic music is pretty easy in comparison. You do always have the option of triggering it and still sounding accurate.
As one of the first obvious examples, one reason The Beatles stopped touring is that it was logistically impossible to recreate their later albums in a live setting. Check out some of the good vocal reconstructions on Youtube, for songs like "When I'm 64" (1967) or "Because" (1970). You can't replicate people harmonizing with themselves live.
Having an string section used to happen regularly on popular music too. At least that's possible to reproduce if you schedule live shows with an orchestra. It's logistically difficult for anything but very popular rock bands, i.e. how the Moody Blues does some of their shows.
What does talent have to do with sales? Did Psy make millions of dollars because he's more talented than your average avant cello player? Of course not. Successful music companies sell what people buy, by definition. If they didn't they wouldn't be successful, in profit terms.
The idea that the music industry ever cultivated "talent" rather than sales is a historical fiction, based on selective memory. I first started getting albums in 1976. My first was the Blue Oyster Cult album with the cowbell epic "Don't Fear The Reaper". Know what was actually the top selling song from 1976? "Afternoon Delight" by the Starland Vocal Band. And then we had disco. It's been like that for a long time; most people only remember the good stuff from the past though. For every "Dark Side Of The Moon", there's a "Love Train"--those both from 1973.
The thing is, there was never a need for Voxer or Vine
You could have stopped here.
There are lists of rendered obsolete apps for Lion, Mountain Lion, and IOS6 in a few minutes of searching. I'm most amused by how Instapaper started on the iPhone, became a widely lauded app, moved to Android, and then the core idea was integrated into IOS6 as Safari's Offline Reading feature. I suspect it's only the Android users who are keeping the company viable now.
"The hard way" here is to write software instead of buying it from Microsoft. If it weren't for geeks doing things the hard way, there wouldn't be an OpenOffice or a LibreOffice for trolls like you to use.