Trying create a carrot to dangle in front of these people is pointless. They don't want your carrot. They want to write the code that they want to write.
Uh yeah, that's the whole point of trying to arrange an alternate system so that other coders can write the code that end-users are willing to pay for. It's not like free open-source development would go away, but if you want a new feature added to your favourite app you can pay someone to add it instead of learning C and coding it yourself.
I would imagine that few end-users would be willing to pony up the cash to start up a big project under this scheme, but for more simple features it makes more sense. And I'm not just theorizing, I've actually donated to an open source project (dvgrab/kino) to get a feature I wanted (get dvgrab to output to a single.jpg at a specified interval so a firewire camcorder could act as webcam). It worked quite well and I think it is a good sign for the success of a project like the Open Code Market.
This is what I do when I travel abroad: First of all, buy a lot of cards that work with your camera, because you can never seem to have enough. Since my camera uses CF, I pack a USB CF reader that works with XP without having to install anything, and requires a simple install on 98/2K. When you get to a decent sized city I look at the option of net cafes -- a lot of them now have machines with CF readers already setup, call around first.
If that doesn't produce any results, the odds are pretty good that at least one of the places will be insecure enough to allow you to install the USB software. I suggest avoiding the high-end places because they tend to lock their machines down pretty good, and the low-rent places because they are often just kiosks with no USB ports at all.
Failing that, if you get stuck you can always go to a photography shop and get them to extract the files off of your card and onto a CD. It's a bit pricy (~$30 USD last time I checked in Nice France) but at the very least you have a CD that can be read by most net cafes -- if it doesn't work in the city you are in it will probably be okay in the next city.
Some people will feed you hype like WiFi, which works great in some places but not others. I had great luck with Starbucks/WiFi thing in the US last time I traveled there, but that won't help you as soon as you leave a major metro area -- even if you plan to go that route make sure you have a backup plan because otherwise you will risk running out of card space.
What a great 2003 invention those have been. Good thing we Americans came up with this brilliant innovation long before the industrious Japanese or the traitorous Europeans. Only with our great tradition of innovation and capitalism could our industries achieve new heights like these camera phones. Long live America!
I also saw it in Vancouver, and also loved it. However I feel compelled to point out what you and the orginal reviewer did not: this is good because it's goddamn FUNNY. This wasn't a case where I saw the performance and was impressed with his talent in a pretentious way (though he is of course very talented), this was a case when after it was done I could barely walk because my stomach hurt from laughing uproariously for an hour without stopping.
"If you either promote somebody's product for money..."
Er, what the fuck? Anyone who is involved in sales is ineligible to use this logo? If he means "If you use this logo to promote somebody's product for money" he should say it, otherwise it's just confusing.
Wow, it's almost like reality can't be summarized into a battle of Good vs. Evil. If slashdot can figure this out, perhaps someone can inform President Bush... there is still hope!
I love the idea, but hate the city they chose to set the game in. Why couldn't they pick a better city for this type of a game. I'm thinking of something like NYC which has lots of famous buildings, parks, bridges, etc. L.A. has... well... suburbs, and lots of them.
The other people responding have mentioned server software, but that is just part of the picture. Considering Microsoft, the money is in the OS lock-in. Classic monopolistic technique -- they embraced the competitive OSes, releasing browsers for many competing OS platforms (win31, solaris, macos) and gained a dominant market share. Once achieved, people develop for the IE platform, locking the end-users into IE. Then they kill off the browsers for other markets one by one until they are all gone.
Note: that is exactly what they did. And it's a textbook monopolistic play. In the hypothetical world that they feared, Netscape was the platform web developers built sites for, which would marginalize the OS platform -- exactly why they moved to stop it. What does shock me is that no one else seems to have answered your question.
Oh, and as for apple... personally I suspect that developing Safari was a defensive ploy, because they suspected that MacIE was doomed. They didn't want to appear to play catchup and released their browser ahead of time. I could be wrong, but that would be a good reason to develop their own browser.
Does anyone know where a FAQ exists for using NTLM with Mozilla? I've been through every dialog box in the preferences and googled for it to no avail. I saw this announcement as exactly was I was looking for to allow me to stop using IE at work, but I've yet to get it working.
What good is a feature that is too obscured to use?
As a happy owner of a sparkling new Tosihba laptop, it would be nice to see what kind of USB2 support I actually got with my machine. Does anyone have any ideas on how to find what version of USB2 your hardware is on either Linux or WindowsXP?
You are right, K5 is not a good replacement for slashdot. K5 is great, much better slashdot IMO. But it isn't a slashdot replacement. It serves a different purpose than slashdot, and so some people will prefer one, others will prefer other things.
But the scoop engine is great at what Skim123 is talking about: the users select the stories, and the moderation system is superior to slashdot. So instead of going to kuro5hin where you don't like the split technology/culture articles, create a slashdot clone from the scoop code.
Scoop is a wonderful engine, and quite easy to administer. You could easily have a slashdot lookalike up and running in days. And I have heard that the server requirements for scoop are lower than slash for a low-end machine -- but don't quote me on that one.
While that would be trivial to write, the usefulness of that is almost nill. Even most of the users that I am responisble for now understand that a.VBS file or a "macro" in their word files is something bad. They don't really know _why_ but in any case they've figured out the connection by now.
If I've trained them properly, they would delete your email promptly! (Hopefully)
God, I can't wait for K5 to come back so I can get out of here. I really can't believe that michael actually insulted you for contributing to Slashdot! What a riot... it's almost as entertaining as adequacy.org!
Hmm... I wonder what would happen if he found out that I was the "michael is a wanker" troll. Ooops. =)
Everything here is still the "Company Standard" Win95 install, except for a few NT4 workstaions (mostly engineers) and a few 386/486 vintage machines still running Win3.1
It's nice to know that I'm not the only one that has to support Win95 machines! =)
I just want to know... how the DOJ (and by extension everyone else)can possibly see that MS is anything BUT a monopoly. They're growing, not shrinking, and the government seems to detect no problem with this.
For starters? The economic concept of monopoly power holds that a "monopoly" is not an absolute, it is a point on a scale. Where they are on the scale is uncertain.
Microsoft is not only company in any market segment they are in, thus they are not an absolute monopoly like the power companies are (and how the phone and cable companies used to be). However, because of their dominant share of the desktop PC and office suite market they have a fairly high degree of monopoly power. The barriers to entry in the industry are the entrenched applications using the the Win32 API, and the implementation of the MSOffice file formats. That being said, there are many factors that limit their monopoly power.
The internet and java are (were?) starting to make client less important. This limits the impact of the dominance of the Win32 API.
Pirating is rampant. This limits their monopoly power over pricing especially in the home market (*YES IT DOES*).
Crossplatform development is progressing as people can write QT applications that can be ported to several platforms including Win32. Again this reduces the the dominance of the Win32 API.
Viable free alternatives are emerging (StarOffice 6, Netscape 6.1, Mandrake 8.1). Again this reduces the the dominance of the Win32 API.
File format filters (In StarOffice6 for example) are getting extremely good at reading.DOC and.XLS which limit the impact of the MSOffice monopoly power.
The bottom line? Yes, Microsoft has a high degree of monopoly power, but it's not cut-and-dry about how much power they have. And it's certainly not cut-and-dry what to do about them either. Certainly it is important to limit the impact of their potential leverage (For example that Passport, Messenger, Hotmail, and MSN Photos are bundled with XP) from their existing markets, but don't think for a minute that it is simple. It's not.
Not in the sense that a GTA player is likely to go out and steal a car, but rather that it allows a culture to slip steadily closer to a hellish society in which crime is tolerated in order to entertain the public. This is not unlike the Colosseum in ancient Rome, in which murders took place between god-fearing christians for the sake of the public's amusement.
[...]
Perhaps it is a media problem; if the government owned a few media outlets, it would be able to put writers and producers with old fashioned values back on the TV, replacing the ratings whores we have today.
Ever heard of adequacy.org? Judging from your posting you could be a valuable contributer there. Just a thought.
For years we've been reading Slashdot, wondering who the "anonymous coward" was. But thanks to a slipup in/. management in the current article, the truth has been revealed.
If we define a personal computer as something that looks and misbehaves like what we have today, there will be no such thing as a personal computer a few decades from now.
I understand now what you are talking about, with one difference: I think the "computer" in a few decades will be more similar to a server than a PC, with specialized devices (games, video, audio, "pc" applications, handhelds, etc) linking through that.
You notice how the article you replied to was talking about "home computers" in the sense of a PC? There is a world of difference between a PC and a computer chip embedded in a DVD player.
Obviously many devices we use in our daily lives (including many telephones) use microprocessors... even my technlogocally illterate grandparents know that. If you didn't notice any computers in your living you weren't looking very hard!
The fundamental difference between you and a plant
on
Patented Seeds
·
· Score: 1
There's fundamentally no difference between me and a plant.
Okay, dropping the obvious humor potential here in your comparison of yourself to a plant, you actually lead into a good point.
Taking things to extremes is usually a very good way of dermining the logical conclusion of a philosophical argument, which is what you are addressing.
However, in the practical world that we live in, these arguments do not necessarily apply. In every legal system I know of, there are substantial legal rights that are given to people that supercede anything that relates to plantlife. So it isn't a fair comparison, not even for the sake of taking the argument to its logical conclusion.
But Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Tom Burt said the software giant could help more schools under the proposed settlement, distributing more software at a lower cost than if the same schools went out and bought programs on the open market.
In later remarks, Motz expressed some sympathy for Microsoft's explanation, saying that the potential harm to competition had to be weighed against the settlement providing "more bang for the buck" than just handing out cash
This actually makes sense if you think about it. Since it costs microsoft next to nothing to distribute the software once it has been produced, they can "help" schools a lot more by providing more $$ than a simple cash giveaway would, for the same dollar value.
Think of it this way: if the goal of the settlement is to help the children at the schools, the deal makes sense. However, if the goal is to punish microsoft in the worst way they can, the deal doesn't make sense. To tell the truth, I'm not sure which would be better, but it seems the judge is leaning towards trying to get the most value to the most schools.
The principle of sunk costs is not so simple as you make it out to be.
True enough, I didn't want to get into too much economic theory! =) I tried to point out what you mentioned that the retraining costs would be a tradeoff, but I didn't include that in my sunk costs bit.
I'm working at a company that uses JCL and COBOL, some of it written before I was born
Owch! I feel for you... I'm forced to work with a legacy VB app and I can only rewrite one.DLL at a time.
It takes years of invested time and experience to become at all proficient at any comprehensive productivity application. No one wants to throw that investment away, just to move to Linux.
Yeah. Nobody wants to throw away an substatial investment like that. But are you aware with the economic concept of sunk costs? The idea is pretty simple, in that once costs are incurred they don't matter anymore. The only costs that matter are future costs.
Since MS has a forced (or strongly persuasive) upgrade cycle is also an investment that should not be underrated. As StarOffice gets better and better (and it seems to be) and remains free... the margin narrows.
A person ( or a corporation) has to make the tradeoff between 3 factors while switching: features, familiarity, and cost. Right now, MSoffice blows SOffice5.2 out of the water on features and familiarity, but loses on cost. But if the features are pretty similar, then the only tradeoff is between cost and familiarity. IF the cost of upgrading (or purchasing new machines) with Windows and MSOffice is greater or equal to the retraining costs for Linux and StarOffice, then people will start to switch.
It's happening already as the Linux GUI gets easier to use, and more feature-rich and user friendly.
Slashdot Mirror
Trying create a carrot to dangle in front of these people is pointless. They don't want your carrot. They want to write the code that they want to write.
.jpg at a specified interval so a firewire camcorder could act as webcam). It worked quite well and I think it is a good sign for the success of a project like the Open Code Market.
Uh yeah, that's the whole point of trying to arrange an alternate system so that other coders can write the code that end-users are willing to pay for. It's not like free open-source development would go away, but if you want a new feature added to your favourite app you can pay someone to add it instead of learning C and coding it yourself.
I would imagine that few end-users would be willing to pony up the cash to start up a big project under this scheme, but for more simple features it makes more sense. And I'm not just theorizing, I've actually donated to an open source project (dvgrab/kino) to get a feature I wanted (get dvgrab to output to a single
This is what I do when I travel abroad: First of all, buy a lot of cards that work with your camera, because you can never seem to have enough. Since my camera uses CF, I pack a USB CF reader that works with XP without having to install anything, and requires a simple install on 98/2K. When you get to a decent sized city I look at the option of net cafes -- a lot of them now have machines with CF readers already setup, call around first.
If that doesn't produce any results, the odds are pretty good that at least one of the places will be insecure enough to allow you to install the USB software. I suggest avoiding the high-end places because they tend to lock their machines down pretty good, and the low-rent places because they are often just kiosks with no USB ports at all.
Failing that, if you get stuck you can always go to a photography shop and get them to extract the files off of your card and onto a CD. It's a bit pricy (~$30 USD last time I checked in Nice France) but at the very least you have a CD that can be read by most net cafes -- if it doesn't work in the city you are in it will probably be okay in the next city.
Some people will feed you hype like WiFi, which works great in some places but not others. I had great luck with Starbucks/WiFi thing in the US last time I traveled there, but that won't help you as soon as you leave a major metro area -- even if you plan to go that route make sure you have a backup plan because otherwise you will risk running out of card space.
What a great 2003 invention those have been. Good thing we Americans came up with this brilliant innovation long before the industrious Japanese or the traitorous Europeans. Only with our great tradition of innovation and capitalism could our industries achieve new heights like these camera phones. Long live America!
I also saw it in Vancouver, and also loved it. However I feel compelled to point out what you and the orginal reviewer did not: this is good because it's goddamn FUNNY. This wasn't a case where I saw the performance and was impressed with his talent in a pretentious way (though he is of course very talented), this was a case when after it was done I could barely walk because my stomach hurt from laughing uproariously for an hour without stopping.
The best $12 CAD I ever spent, I dare say.
Wow, it's almost like reality can't be summarized into a battle of Good vs. Evil. If slashdot can figure this out, perhaps someone can inform President Bush... there is still hope!
I love the idea, but hate the city they chose to set the game in. Why couldn't they pick a better city for this type of a game. I'm thinking of something like NYC which has lots of famous buildings, parks, bridges, etc. L.A. has... well... suburbs, and lots of them.
No.
The other people responding have mentioned server software, but that is just part of the picture. Considering Microsoft, the money is in the OS lock-in. Classic monopolistic technique -- they embraced the competitive OSes, releasing browsers for many competing OS platforms (win31, solaris, macos) and gained a dominant market share. Once achieved, people develop for the IE platform, locking the end-users into IE. Then they kill off the browsers for other markets one by one until they are all gone.
Note: that is exactly what they did. And it's a textbook monopolistic play. In the hypothetical world that they feared, Netscape was the platform web developers built sites for, which would marginalize the OS platform -- exactly why they moved to stop it. What does shock me is that no one else seems to have answered your question.
Oh, and as for apple... personally I suspect that developing Safari was a defensive ploy, because they suspected that MacIE was doomed. They didn't want to appear to play catchup and released their browser ahead of time. I could be wrong, but that would be a good reason to develop their own browser.
Does anyone know where a FAQ exists for using NTLM with Mozilla? I've been through every dialog box in the preferences and googled for it to no avail. I saw this announcement as exactly was I was looking for to allow me to stop using IE at work, but I've yet to get it working.
What good is a feature that is too obscured to use?
As a happy owner of a sparkling new Tosihba laptop, it would be nice to see what kind of USB2 support I actually got with my machine. Does anyone have any ideas on how to find what version of USB2 your hardware is on either Linux or WindowsXP?
Thanks for clearing that up, Brian. I was wondering what happened to that page. Damn slashdot effect works in comments now.
But the scoop engine is great at what Skim123 is talking about: the users select the stories, and the moderation system is superior to slashdot. So instead of going to kuro5hin where you don't like the split technology/culture articles, create a slashdot clone from the scoop code.
Scoop is a wonderful engine, and quite easy to administer. You could easily have a slashdot lookalike up and running in days. And I have heard that the server requirements for scoop are lower than slash for a low-end machine -- but don't quote me on that one.
While that would be trivial to write, the usefulness of that is almost nill. Even most of the users that I am responisble for now understand that a .VBS file or a "macro" in their word files is something bad. They don't really know _why_ but in any case they've figured out the connection by now.
If I've trained them properly, they would delete your email promptly! (Hopefully)
Okay, maybe that's just wishful thinking!
Hmm... I wonder what would happen if he found out that I was the "michael is a wanker" troll. Ooops. =)
It's nice to know that I'm not the only one that has to support Win95 machines! =)
Microsoft is not only company in any market segment they are in, thus they are not an absolute monopoly like the power companies are (and how the phone and cable companies used to be). However, because of their dominant share of the desktop PC and office suite market they have a fairly high degree of monopoly power. The barriers to entry in the industry are the entrenched applications using the the Win32 API, and the implementation of the MSOffice file formats. That being said, there are many factors that limit their monopoly power.
The bottom line? Yes, Microsoft has a high degree of monopoly power, but it's not cut-and-dry about how much power they have. And it's certainly not cut-and-dry what to do about them either. Certainly it is important to limit the impact of their potential leverage (For example that Passport, Messenger, Hotmail, and MSN Photos are bundled with XP) from their existing markets, but don't think for a minute that it is simple. It's not.
If you pay close attention to the article, they forgot to remove the link to the Coward's email address: Anonymous Coward! So, John (James?)(Joe??)(Jimmy?) Hopkins, now we know who you are...
You notice how the article you replied to was talking about "home computers" in the sense of a PC? There is a world of difference between a PC and a computer chip embedded in a DVD player.
Obviously many devices we use in our daily lives (including many telephones) use microprocessors... even my technlogocally illterate grandparents know that. If you didn't notice any computers in your living you weren't looking very hard!
Taking things to extremes is usually a very good way of dermining the logical conclusion of a philosophical argument, which is what you are addressing.
However, in the practical world that we live in, these arguments do not necessarily apply. In every legal system I know of, there are substantial legal rights that are given to people that supercede anything that relates to plantlife. So it isn't a fair comparison, not even for the sake of taking the argument to its logical conclusion.
Think of it this way: if the goal of the settlement is to help the children at the schools, the deal makes sense. However, if the goal is to punish microsoft in the worst way they can, the deal doesn't make sense. To tell the truth, I'm not sure which would be better, but it seems the judge is leaning towards trying to get the most value to the most schools.
Since MS has a forced (or strongly persuasive) upgrade cycle is also an investment that should not be underrated. As StarOffice gets better and better (and it seems to be) and remains free... the margin narrows.
A person ( or a corporation) has to make the tradeoff between 3 factors while switching: features, familiarity, and cost. Right now, MSoffice blows SOffice5.2 out of the water on features and familiarity, but loses on cost. But if the features are pretty similar, then the only tradeoff is between cost and familiarity. IF the cost of upgrading (or purchasing new machines) with Windows and MSOffice is greater or equal to the retraining costs for Linux and StarOffice, then people will start to switch.
It's happening already as the Linux GUI gets easier to use, and more feature-rich and user friendly.