The right question is "how do I become a better programmer?"
The answer is: write more code, and learn more programming techniques and languages. Also learn about infrastructure software like databases, and the more rigorous aspects of the OSes you use like networking and security.
Certainly you should read books, especially "programming methodology" types of things. Not because there's a silver bullet laying around, but because it helps you think about how to improve the quality and efficiency of your work.
But the bottom line is write lots of code. You can get lots of experience and help in this by joining some open source projects and contributing, or you can just work on your own projects or products.
If you have any time left in the month, you can lay in bed reading the computer mags. But really, if you join some real projects you'll spend too much time reading mailing lists to waste much time reading print mags.
Seems like the idea is that when users download google toolbar they will also get the JRE. This is a platform strategy, plain and simple. You can't have a google 'platform' unless folks download and install one first, and Java is a natural choice since it is mature and established.
It can be completely rational to allow an employee or contractor to acquire or maintain ownership rights over source code.
a) The employer isn't in the "software business" so all they really require is a license to the code. b) The employee values owning copyright to the code c) Most custom software development is so specific to a given business process that it is of little or no value to competitors without significant changes and specialization.
Just think of it as an alternative form of compensation in addition to the salary, possibly in lieu of some salary or other fringe benefits. In fact as a contractor I would be willing to give steep discounts on many contracts if given ownership of the code.
Larger employers would probably be less likely to accept the arrangement for various reasons, mostly because it's out of the norm so bureaucratic thinking won't let it happen. But entirely possible with smaller operations.
Best case for an employer is that the code takes on a life of its own... then they have the chance of getting a little market of programmers who know that codebase and compete with each other thus lowering the price for future maintenance, or at least concentrating expertise in a few highly qualified people instead of a whole bunch of people with a high learning curve.
Sure it is relevant. No he is not a whistleblower. I was attempting to make the point that contracts are not absolute, but that contracts that counter public policy may not be enforced.
In this case, the concern is freedom of speech, or more accurately, free flow of information about the operation of public companies and short of violating some trade secrets or seriously affecting the command and control structure of the company, one could argue that free speech in general is a public policy goal worth protecting. This gives another data point for investors and would-be investors, Microsoft customers, etc.
Also, Microsoft seems to be encouraging its employees to write blogs these days anyway. Given that, they may have a hard time firing this guy when they (and they will) figure out who he is (assuming he actually does work there and has an employment contract... unlikely, but who knows he could be the janitor or a well-connected outsider)
The government, in the form of the Judiciary in some cases will not enforce contracts which are contrary to public policy.
For example, whistleblower laws: your contract may say that you cannot talk to the press or government about anything "confidential." But if you find that "Baby Stroller" is likely to cause deaths, and you report it to a state or federal agency, the courts may not allow you to be sued for breach depending on the law of the particular state.
Same thing goes for employment contracts. In right to work states at least your ability to limit yourself in what you can commit to after termination of employment is limited.
Indentured servitude was a bad thing, and in some states it's considered contrary to public policy. There's a natural power imbalance between Microsoft and employee X. Sometimes the gov't finds it necessary to balance things out, and that's a good thing.
Inkscape's gui is pretty good.
Same goes for Firefox.
In fact, developers do tend to put in a lot of effort to seperate gui from program logic. So with the high value in so many open source codebases locked behind crappy interfaces, I think we'll start to see more optimization and reskin forks coming along.
They did it separating Mozilla from Firefox. I think it is happening with X.Org and GIMP too.
There are native GUIs for OpenOffice being built, so there's probably some hope there too.
http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php/
Heck, this kind of thing is even happening at the distro level with micro-linuxen such as Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux.
Well, not really, but it sure looks like they gave it a good shot. Another item in the past is the Cambridge Z88 laptop. Its 'Pipedream' application is a combination of spreadsheet and word processor in the same program.
I tend to agree that object linking/embedding isn't really the holy grail of desktop application convergence. I really don't get why this is so hard to do... every word processor has a table editor... why not drop in a full spreadsheet there? And presentations are mostly word processor docs with some large fonts and pretty animations. Not much going on there but some macros.
Actually in the US, they tend to track students in a similar way, it is just all in the same school. We call it "honors track."
On the Honors track here, you take math every year through senior year, where you can get the equivalent of first semester of calculus. I took trig/icm in summer school because I was a little behind or else I wouldn't have made it to calculus in High School.
Generally if a student wants to be on the honors track, they can elect to, at least in High School. But the nice thing about the American system is that if you screw up you can choose to catch up at any point, even after high school we have community colleges where you can catch up on any subject you have a disadvantage in, and transfer to University.
Did you read the article? The point is that the basic science would have gotten done anyway.
The knowledge engine that is our university system, funded by government grants does a fine job of producing innovation. Money makes the world go round alright, but it doesn't take as much as Bayh-Dole has caused it to take in pharma. How much does it really cost to keep a reasonable number of scientists motivated, clothed, fed? Keep in mind that scientist types are not all that motivated by money anyway. Given enough of it, they could decide rationally to spend all of it on leisure time and sit on their brains all day.
Every manager understands that you need to keep folks a little hungry to keep them motivated.
In fact the article is making the point that all of the complex licensing agreements and formalities is slowing down the pace of research. The lines of implication are not clear, but it's still a fascinating hypothesis.
I'd guess that a lot of the unlicensed patents were unlicensed because they weren't worth all that much. And it's really hard to see how NOT sharing knowledge is good for science.
So, fund science by taxes. Let everyone own the resulting technology. Simple and effective.
Well, be a little forgiving of the poster... selling and marketing expenses are not normally included when calculating production cost, because those costs are not relevant in day to day production decisions.
Now then final price to consumer is a whole different ballgame. The company must factor in selling and admin overhead into that number. And then beyond Intel, there's going to be the cost of the distribution channel added on. That's probably where most of the cost factored into the final price comes from, not Intel.
Given efficient markets, the number "WITH all the overhead" you're looking for is what you see on pricewatch.com. Does that mean we couldn't get them cheaper? Well there is only one competitor to Intel, so you could argue that the market isn't all that efficient.
How do you store paper in a long term way without copying it? Clue: there isn't one.
You have to copy EVERYTHING to new media eventually. You need to have a plan, and you need to execute it. Simple as that. Paper will disintegrate, and yes, hardware will become obsolete. You just need to progress to the stone in the river before the current one is submerged.
But which is easier/cheaper to propagate to new media and make backup copies? Digital data in open, documented, implement formats, or paper? Which is cheaper and easier to store?
There's also the argument that computers become obsolete. Well, yeah... but I think you would have a hard time finding many computers in the last 25 years that don't have a software emulator around. All you need to do is archive an, ideally, open source emulation of the machine that implements the software, and fire it up to transfer the stuff to the next machine when it becomes necessary.
The only real impediment to survival of data is that it become uninteresting therefore not actively maintained.
I'll concede your point on patents not having to be enforced to be valid. That said, an unenforced patent has almost no real value, much less than copyright, especially since there are so many crap patents. A copyrighted work is unique, easily enforced.
But infringement *is* more cut and dried for copyright than patents. There is no similar concept to "prior art" in copyright. Either you copied it or you didn't. And usually it is easy to show. You always have a decent shot going up against a patent holder. You have almost none in a copyright case.
The only real gray area for copyright is art and music--- cases where someone is sued for infringement based on the first few notes of a song, for example. This is a whole lot like "independent authorship" that you say would never be an issue. Similar for BIOSes... even if there is only one way to do something, you still have to prove "clean room" development.
What you're saying is true for copyright and the GPL but not for software licenses in general.
Typical click-through software licenses limit what you can do with software. For example, reverse engineering is not allowed by most proprietary software. When you click, you are forming a contract, and these contracts do hold up in court as can be seen in the recent bnetd related decision.
So what the software vendors cannot control by copyright, they can instead control by contract, at least to the extent that a "breach of contract" civil suit is a threat to the user. For reverse engineering, for example, the liability can be quite significant, even without the kinds of statutory damages that copyright law provides for.
The GPL is not a club to use against software patents (though it should do what it can to prevent attacks on the GPL itself). The hack that is the GPL only works because copyrights don't cost anything, and even if you register them, it doesn't cost much. Patents are in the thousands of dollars, and defending them (a requirement for them to be valid) is just out of the question for smaller organizations. Copyright is an entirely different animal, it does not have to be defended to be valid. And infringement is much more cut and dried for copyright.
What really needs to happen is that IBM and other OSS-friendlies should stop cross-licensing their patents to ANYBODY except under terms that as you describe, require the licensor to license their own patents to OSS.
Now that's a club. Imagine the liability involved. Right now the system is analogous to everyone having nuclear weapons that they can somehow only point at the little countries. Without cross-licensing, everyone would have live nukes pointed at their corporate neighbors.
Will it happen? No. We'd have a better chance of getting the law changed, but I know no one is holding their breath on that either.
The new GPL (which no one has seen) does not "prohibit use by (software) patent owners."
The only comment from fsf on this is is that you will lose your license to use a particular piece of software if you sue users/creators of that piece of software for patent infringement. Not scary at all.
Besides the comment is meaningless, since a license is for users and redistributors of your code not the creator of the code. You can't license yourself out of your own code unless you transfer ownership to another party in a contractually valid way, or release to the public domain.
So the question for "Corporate America" is why aren't you leaning on the server vendors to reduce the cost and thereby price of the equipment supplied to you by using open source operating systems and applications on appropriate hardware where applicable?
Sure you may not want to build and support your own servers. But you can't say you don't want the lowest price you can get at the level of quality required.
Plenty of people ride bikes in busy areas, and are not dead, myself included.
Ride with traffic, follow the rules of the road, ride conservatively (never assume a driver can see you), have proper reflectors and wear bright colored clothes at night (a white t-shirt will do). Oh, and don't ride in the gutter. Occupy your space in the lane, so that everyone knows you're not kidding... you're IN the lane, they HAVE to move.
The good thing is that sensible drivers will go out of their way to move completely around you.
If there's something really worth protecting, they could patent it.
But many companies don't and try to use trade secret law instead, which is a legitimate tool. As long as the company takes steps to protect proprietary information from disclosure, then the court may find someone liable for disclosing it.
But really, trade secret law should be kept very weak, since with a blanket NDA it could cover just about anything. We need some clear bright-line tests before an injunction should be allowed to prevent someone from working for a competitor, or becoming a competitor.
Coca Cola uses trade secret to protect the formula for Coke. A good strategy since the patent would have expired long ago. But there is something very specific there that they are protecting: a recipe for making a beverage. It's self-contained, understandable, not broad and amorphous like "whatever you work on or invent while you are here."
Yes there's a contract involved. Not all clauses of all contracts are enforceable, nor should they be. Some things are indeed sacred, and human thought and freedom are foremost on the list. If a company wants to stop you from leaving and taking your brain elsewhere, they can just pay you what it's worth to keep you from going.
Imagine as an engineer actually getting paid what you are truly worth when you come up with the next big idea. I've worked at companies that had an NDA and at companies that didn't. The rewards for coming up with big ideas were much better at the companies that did not have NDAs.
If you're in a good computer science program, you *will* learn how to program. Theory is great, and you need to know it, and they do teach it to you. But they also get into the practical details of at least one or two programming languages. They teach you data structures, different programming methodologies, software engineering, etc. Depending on your focus you may get into relational databases, or more into the formal math end of things.
If you come out of a CS program not knowing how to code you picked the wrong school, period. The flip side is if you come out of a CS program not knowing about finite automata, context free grammars, and algorithm analysis you also got gipped.
The skills of a computer scientist are a superset of the skills of a "programmer" in the abstract (i.e. language differences aside).
Well, it turns out to run on Shadow on POSE there is a workaround, just need to open datebook and todo list before running Shadow.prc for the first time.
Brief? It's usually a mistake to discount opportunities because they will eventually go away.
The gap between now and eventually is often big enough to make bags of money in the interim. I'd argue that in this case people will be using POTS for a very long time. Even if it was only 10 years (it will be longer than that) it would still be a long time. Would you have believed that most people would still be on dial-up access at this point in time?
The VoIP-to-POTS gateways are exactly why there is money to be made in VoIP. You're right in that aspect, there's really no other reason (a free directory could be created no problem), and there's nothing to be done about it except marginalize those on POTS-only service. But the nature of the beast is that is a ways down the road.
Anyway the value proposition on the merits doesn't really make sense to most people... they would be trading a near 100% reliable voice communication network for a much less reliable one-off ISP gatewaying you to the Internet, with a different one-off ISP gatewaying you back on to the POTS system. So switching isn't in the offing for sensible, practical reasons, not just because there are those that are slow to adopt newest tech.
Yes WE learned at a BASIC command prompt. But that was then... perhaps the natural stepping stone today is HTML, JavaScript, then on to bigger stuff.
A text editor and a web browser is an interactive, instant gratification environment. Easy to place text and graphics and he/she can instantly show his friends and parents what they've done by putting it on a personal web site.
-- John.
Slashdot Mirror
The right question is "how do I become a better programmer?"
The answer is: write more code, and learn more programming techniques and languages. Also learn about infrastructure software like databases, and the more rigorous aspects of the OSes you use like networking and security.
Certainly you should read books, especially "programming methodology" types of things. Not because there's a silver bullet laying around, but because it helps you think about how to improve the quality and efficiency of your work.
But the bottom line is write lots of code. You can get lots of experience and help in this by joining some open source projects and contributing, or you can just work on your own projects or products.
If you have any time left in the month, you can lay in bed reading the computer mags. But really, if you join some real projects you'll spend too much time reading mailing lists to waste much time reading print mags.
-- John.
Seems like the idea is that when users download google toolbar they will also get the JRE. This is a platform strategy, plain and simple. You can't have a google 'platform' unless folks download and install one first, and Java is a natural choice since it is mature and established.
.Net?
What was Google's alternative,
-- John.
It can be completely rational to allow an employee or contractor to acquire or maintain ownership rights over source code.
a) The employer isn't in the "software business" so all they really require is a license to the code.
b) The employee values owning copyright to the code
c) Most custom software development is so specific to a given business process that it is of little or no value to competitors without significant changes and specialization.
Just think of it as an alternative form of compensation in addition to the salary, possibly in lieu of some salary or other fringe benefits. In fact as a contractor I would be willing to give steep discounts on many contracts if given ownership of the code.
Larger employers would probably be less likely to accept the arrangement for various reasons, mostly because it's out of the norm so bureaucratic thinking won't let it happen. But entirely possible with smaller operations.
Best case for an employer is that the code takes on a life of its own... then they have the chance of getting a little market of programmers who know that codebase and compete with each other thus lowering the price for future maintenance, or at least concentrating expertise in a few highly qualified people instead of a whole bunch of people with a high learning curve.
-- John.
Sure it is relevant. No he is not a whistleblower. I was attempting to make the point that contracts are not absolute, but that contracts that counter public policy may not be enforced.
In this case, the concern is freedom of speech, or more accurately, free flow of information about the operation of public companies and short of violating some trade secrets or seriously affecting the command and control structure of the company, one could argue that free speech in general is a public policy goal worth protecting. This gives another data point for investors and would-be investors, Microsoft customers, etc.
Also, Microsoft seems to be encouraging its employees to write blogs these days anyway. Given that, they may have a hard time firing this guy when they (and they will) figure out who he is (assuming he actually does work there and has an employment contract... unlikely, but who knows he could be the janitor or a well-connected outsider)
-- John.
The government, in the form of the Judiciary in some cases will not enforce contracts which are contrary to public policy.
For example, whistleblower laws: your contract may say that you cannot talk to the press or government about anything "confidential." But if you find that "Baby Stroller" is likely to cause deaths, and you report it to a state or federal agency, the courts may not allow you to be sued for breach depending on the law of the particular state.
Same thing goes for employment contracts. In right to work states at least your ability to limit yourself in what you can commit to after termination of employment is limited.
Indentured servitude was a bad thing, and in some states it's considered contrary to public policy. There's a natural power imbalance between Microsoft and employee X. Sometimes the gov't finds it necessary to balance things out, and that's a good thing.
-- John.
Inkscape's gui is pretty good.
Same goes for Firefox.
In fact, developers do tend to put in a lot of effort to seperate gui from program logic. So with the high value in so many open source codebases locked behind crappy interfaces, I think we'll start to see more optimization and reskin forks coming along.
They did it separating Mozilla from Firefox. I think it is happening with X.Org and GIMP too.
There are native GUIs for OpenOffice being built, so there's probably some hope there too.
http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php/
Heck, this kind of thing is even happening at the distro level with micro-linuxen such as Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux.
Hey they had that for IBM PC-XTs ;-)
http://www.framework.com/fw/aboutfw.htm
Well, not really, but it sure looks like they gave it a good shot. Another item in the past is the Cambridge Z88 laptop. Its 'Pipedream' application is a combination of spreadsheet and word processor in the same program.
I tend to agree that object linking/embedding isn't really the holy grail of desktop application convergence. I really don't get why this is so hard to do... every word processor has a table editor... why not drop in a full spreadsheet there? And presentations are mostly word processor docs with some large fonts and pretty animations. Not much going on there but some macros.
-- John.
Actually in the US, they tend to track students in a similar way, it is just all in the same school. We call it "honors track."
On the Honors track here, you take math every year through senior year, where you can get the equivalent of first semester of calculus. I took trig/icm in summer school because I was a little behind or else I wouldn't have made it to calculus in High School.
Generally if a student wants to be on the honors track, they can elect to, at least in High School. But the nice thing about the American system is that if you screw up you can choose to catch up at any point, even after high school we have community colleges where you can catch up on any subject you have a disadvantage in, and transfer to University.
-- John.
Did you read the article? The point is that the basic science would have gotten done anyway.
The knowledge engine that is our university system, funded by government grants does a fine job of producing innovation. Money makes the world go round alright, but it doesn't take as much as Bayh-Dole has caused it to take in pharma. How much does it really cost to keep a reasonable number of scientists motivated, clothed, fed? Keep in mind that scientist types are not all that motivated by money anyway. Given enough of it, they could decide rationally to spend all of it on leisure time and sit on their brains all day.
Every manager understands that you need to keep folks a little hungry to keep them motivated.
In fact the article is making the point that all of the complex licensing agreements and formalities is slowing down the pace of research. The lines of implication are not clear, but it's still a fascinating hypothesis.
I'd guess that a lot of the unlicensed patents were unlicensed because they weren't worth all that much. And it's really hard to see how NOT sharing knowledge is good for science.
So, fund science by taxes. Let everyone own the resulting technology. Simple and effective.
Well, be a little forgiving of the poster... selling and marketing expenses are not normally included when calculating production cost, because those costs are not relevant in day to day production decisions.
Now then final price to consumer is a whole different ballgame. The company must factor in selling and admin overhead into that number. And then beyond Intel, there's going to be the cost of the distribution channel added on. That's probably where most of the cost factored into the final price comes from, not Intel.
Given efficient markets, the number "WITH all the overhead" you're looking for is what you see on pricewatch.com. Does that mean we couldn't get them cheaper? Well there is only one competitor to Intel, so you could argue that the market isn't all that efficient.
-- John.
How do you store paper in a long term way without copying it? Clue: there isn't one.
You have to copy EVERYTHING to new media eventually. You need to have a plan, and you need to execute it. Simple as that. Paper will disintegrate, and yes, hardware will become obsolete. You just need to progress to the stone in the river before the current one is submerged.
But which is easier/cheaper to propagate to new media and make backup copies? Digital data in open, documented, implement formats, or paper? Which is cheaper and easier to store?
There's also the argument that computers become obsolete. Well, yeah... but I think you would have a hard time finding many computers in the last 25 years that don't have a software emulator around. All you need to do is archive an, ideally, open source emulation of the machine that implements the software, and fire it up to transfer the stuff to the next machine when it becomes necessary.
The only real impediment to survival of data is that it become uninteresting therefore not actively maintained.
I'll concede your point on patents not having to be enforced to be valid. That said, an unenforced patent has almost no real value, much less than copyright, especially since there are so many crap patents. A copyrighted work is unique, easily enforced.
But infringement *is* more cut and dried for copyright than patents. There is no similar concept to "prior art" in copyright. Either you copied it or you didn't. And usually it is easy to show. You always have a decent shot going up against a patent holder. You have almost none in a copyright case.
The only real gray area for copyright is art and music--- cases where someone is sued for infringement based on the first few notes of a song, for example. This is a whole lot like "independent authorship" that you say would never be an issue. Similar for BIOSes... even if there is only one way to do something, you still have to prove "clean room" development.
What you're saying is true for copyright and the GPL but not for software licenses in general.
2 0050901_decision.pdf
Typical click-through software licenses limit what you can do with software. For example, reverse engineering is not allowed by most proprietary software. When you click, you are forming a contract, and these contracts do hold up in court as can be seen in the recent bnetd related decision.
So what the software vendors cannot control by copyright, they can instead control by contract, at least to the extent that a "breach of contract" civil suit is a threat to the user. For reverse engineering, for example, the liability can be quite significant, even without the kinds of statutory damages that copyright law provides for.
http://www.eff.org/IP/Emulation/Blizzard_v_bnetd/
-- John.
The GPL is not a club to use against software patents (though it should do what it can to prevent attacks on the GPL itself). The hack that is the GPL only works because copyrights don't cost anything, and even if you register them, it doesn't cost much. Patents are in the thousands of dollars, and defending them (a requirement for them to be valid) is just out of the question for smaller organizations. Copyright is an entirely different animal, it does not have to be defended to be valid. And infringement is much more cut and dried for copyright.
What really needs to happen is that IBM and other OSS-friendlies should stop cross-licensing their patents to ANYBODY except under terms that as you describe, require the licensor to license their own patents to OSS.
Now that's a club. Imagine the liability involved. Right now the system is analogous to everyone having nuclear weapons that they can somehow only point at the little countries. Without cross-licensing, everyone would have live nukes pointed at their corporate neighbors.
Will it happen? No. We'd have a better chance of getting the law changed, but I know no one is holding their breath on that either.
-- John.
The new GPL (which no one has seen) does not "prohibit use by (software) patent owners."
The only comment from fsf on this is is that you will lose your license to use a particular piece of software if you sue users/creators of that piece of software for patent infringement. Not scary at all.
Besides the comment is meaningless, since a license is for users and redistributors of your code not the creator of the code. You can't license yourself out of your own code unless you transfer ownership to another party in a contractually valid way, or release to the public domain.
-- John.
So the question for "Corporate America" is why aren't you leaning on the server vendors to reduce the cost and thereby price of the equipment supplied to you by using open source operating systems and applications on appropriate hardware where applicable?
Sure you may not want to build and support your own servers. But you can't say you don't want the lowest price you can get at the level of quality required.
-- John.
We're all too young to die.
Plenty of people ride bikes in busy areas, and are not dead, myself included.
Ride with traffic, follow the rules of the road, ride conservatively (never assume a driver can see you), have proper reflectors and wear bright colored clothes at night (a white t-shirt will do). Oh, and don't ride in the gutter. Occupy your space in the lane, so that everyone knows you're not kidding... you're IN the lane, they HAVE to move.
The good thing is that sensible drivers will go out of their way to move completely around you.
-- John.
If there's something really worth protecting, they could patent it.
But many companies don't and try to use trade secret law instead, which is a legitimate tool. As long as the company takes steps to protect proprietary information from disclosure, then the court may find someone liable for disclosing it.
But really, trade secret law should be kept very weak, since with a blanket NDA it could cover just about anything. We need some clear bright-line tests before an injunction should be allowed to prevent someone from working for a competitor, or becoming a competitor.
Coca Cola uses trade secret to protect the formula for Coke. A good strategy since the patent would have expired long ago. But there is something very specific there that they are protecting: a recipe for making a beverage. It's self-contained, understandable, not broad and amorphous like "whatever you work on or invent while you are here."
Yes there's a contract involved. Not all clauses of all contracts are enforceable, nor should they be. Some things are indeed sacred, and human thought and freedom are foremost on the list. If a company wants to stop you from leaving and taking your brain elsewhere, they can just pay you what it's worth to keep you from going.
Imagine as an engineer actually getting paid what you are truly worth when you come up with the next big idea. I've worked at companies that had an NDA and at companies that didn't. The rewards for coming up with big ideas were much better at the companies that did not have NDAs.
-- John.
Well, I don't think you have it quite right.
If you're in a good computer science program, you *will* learn how to program. Theory is great, and you need to know it, and they do teach it to you. But they also get into the practical details of at least one or two programming languages. They teach you data structures, different programming methodologies, software engineering, etc. Depending on your focus you may get into relational databases, or more into the formal math end of things.
If you come out of a CS program not knowing how to code you picked the wrong school, period. The flip side is if you come out of a CS program not knowing about finite automata, context free grammars, and algorithm analysis you also got gipped.
The skills of a computer scientist are a superset of the skills of a "programmer" in the abstract (i.e. language differences aside).
-- John.
FWIW, Cygwin has an xserver built into it, so you don't even need to pay for an Exceed license.
-- John.
Well, it turns out to run on Shadow on POSE there is a workaround, just need to open datebook and todo list before running Shadow.prc for the first time.
-- John.
The GTD site reads like an Amway pitch. Bah.
Anyway, I just tried beta of ShadowPlan since the web site looked promising... the prc installs fine on POSE w/ Palm Vx emulation 3.5 ROM.
But on running and trying to create a "File" It crashes all over the place with pointer exceptions.
New, type a filename, click OK, then you get:
Shadow (4.2.1) just read from memory location
0x00004D52, which is in an unallocated chunk of
memory.
Hmm... too bad it's not open source, I'd be tempted to make some bugfixes.
-- John.
Brief? It's usually a mistake to discount opportunities because they will eventually go away.
The gap between now and eventually is often big enough to make bags of money in the interim. I'd argue that in this case people will be using POTS for a very long time. Even if it was only 10 years (it will be longer than that) it would still be a long time. Would you have believed that most people would still be on dial-up access at this point in time?
The VoIP-to-POTS gateways are exactly why there is money to be made in VoIP. You're right in that aspect, there's really no other reason (a free directory could be created no problem), and there's nothing to be done about it except marginalize those on POTS-only service. But the nature of the beast is that is a ways down the road.
Anyway the value proposition on the merits doesn't really make sense to most people... they would be trading a near 100% reliable voice communication network for a much less reliable one-off ISP gatewaying you to the Internet, with a different one-off ISP gatewaying you back on to the POTS system. So switching isn't in the offing for sensible, practical reasons, not just because there are those that are slow to adopt newest tech.
-- John.
Maude: "He's a good man. And thorough."
Yes WE learned at a BASIC command prompt. But that was then... perhaps the natural stepping stone today is HTML, JavaScript, then on to bigger stuff. A text editor and a web browser is an interactive, instant gratification environment. Easy to place text and graphics and he/she can instantly show his friends and parents what they've done by putting it on a personal web site. -- John.