Well, yeah, it is relevant. They are supporting an non-MS implementation of an MS product on a non-MS platform. I know that Slashdot crowd can spin almost anything to be anti-Microsoft, but the idea that this is some sort of MS plot is absurd.
"Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems."
So MS engineers worked overtime to make an opensource implementation of their product work on a an OS that competes with Windows. Which is what I said.
And I noticed that you didn't have an answer for the point of my post, which was that on something like this, MS is going to take crap no matter what they do.
Yes, you are overly cynical. Let's face it, for some folks MS just can't win... if they implement something early, it's a trap, if they implement it just in time, they are just making the gesture, and if they don't implement it, they are trying to squash the competition. How about just appreciating the fact that some MS employees work hard to support a platform that competes directly with their own?
As I assume many "virtual Palestinians" have condemned virtual Hamas for using their own population as human shields while targetting virtual Israeli civilians.
Unless you are building something simple software development going to take a group of people and a chunk of time. If it's interesting to a group of developers who are willing to work on it for free, that's great, but otherwise you have to raise capital, and the folks supplying capital would like to see a return on investment. Selling the software is one way to get that return.
Proprietary isn't evil / nasty / only practiced by necrophiles. It exists because it's a reasonable business model. Without proprietary software, a lot of software that people need wouldn't be available.
I got a little further but the stuff about working anytime with people around the globe just activated my gag reflex. My last company (which was amazingly poorly run) had the whole "we'll farm stuff out to the India team and work 24x7" mentality. And typically the way it worked was
. Monday: you need to get some web service in India configured so you can test. So you shoot off an email. . Tuesday: you get back a message that the guy who knows anything has quit. You ask who replaced him. . Wednesday: you get a message asking why you need to know. You shoot off a copy of your message from Monday. . Thursday: you get a message asking what it was you wanted again? You send a rephrasing of your Monday message. . Friday: it's a holiday in Bangalore so maybe you'll be luckier next week.
Any time I see some exec talking about the global workforce and working anytime, day or night, I flash back to this experience.
How do you think they discovered they (Israel) had the right to displace people and confiscate their lands?
Um... you do know that Israel was created by international accord, right? The ONLY reason that it's more than a tiny chunk of land is that its neighbors instantly invaded once after the United Nations created it. On several occasions Israel has given back large chunks of territory in exchange for peace. If Hamas ever gets serious of peace, instead of slaughtering civilians, the same will happen for Gaza.
That's too bad, I had been hoping that instead of an international agreement it had been done the way all other national groups ended up on their particular patch of dirt, by superior firepower.
Well, if you're going to use an analogy, use an appropriate one. Such as the residents of El Paso electing a government whose goal is to slaughter the surrounding Chinese, and that government actively participating in the firing of missles at Chinese civilians.
By the way, how the hell did the Chinese manage to capture Texas?
I hear ya... that's about as dumb as thinking that you'll be able to still play your CDs and DVDs 5-10 years from now. I mean, no way you're going to want to watch Lord of the Rings or listen to music that your currently love in 5 or 10 years, right?
So you were only available 2 days a week, and you're upset that your boss couldn't somehow schedule all of the work to occur those 2 days? You say "he placed another employee to deal with issues that came up while I was out of the office"... what was he supposed to do? Put the problem on hold 4-5 days till you were available?
It's one thing to say "this is my code, my system, no one else touches it without talking to me first" if you are available normal working hours. If you aren't available, guess what, someone else is going to have to deal with the "issues" that come up while you are out of the office. Where I work, people are nervous if there's only one full time employee who understands how to do something, having a part-timer be the only one would be utterly unacceptable, unless the function is pretty marginal to being with.
If you want to see how well done a graphical interface can be with puzzles, get The Longest Journey. It's close to 10 years old now, so the graphics are dated, but it has really really really good puzzles. It's a great example of how an adventure game can work really well with a point and click interface. I'm surprised that Yahtzee didn't mention it.
Personally, I don't miss the demise of trying lots and lots and lots of words in a text adventure until you find out what word was coded into the program.
That's right, but I can also choose not to trust a company whose business relies on the vendor lock in of non-Free software.
So you are saying that if a company does not release the source code to ALL of its software, any software that it does open source is tainted?
There are situations where I would want to pay for Free code and might not use such Free code unless I could pay for pro level support. But... I do not want to pay them for non-Free code.
Again, it's your choice. You can take the open source code and pay anyone you care to for maintanance. The fact that this company happens to sell a product that isn't open source is utterly irrelevant.
The company has release open source, you can choose open source, there's no lockin. That's YOUR choice.
The problem, ironically, is what many "free" software advocates complain about... the confusion between zero-cost and freedom to do what you want. In this case, you really can have "free to do what you want" software, but that software is not "zero-cost"... you have to pay someone to support it. OR you can buy the closed source that comes with support. Either way, it's YOUR choice, and the company that released the software as open source has violated neither the letter nor the spirit of the open source movement.
And I'd love to hear why my original comment was moderated "flame-bait".
Why is there ANY problem with a company releasing source and not supporting it? Isn't that the whole purpose of Open Source? Isn't that why Stallman got into opening source in the first place... so he wouldn't be reliant on the vendor to fix code? If a company releases the source to a program, by definition that program is "Open Source".
It depends on whether you are truly using well known libraries or not, and how much extraneous code you pull in, just to avoid writing code. You can end up with huge blocks of unknown, potentially buggy code that you haven't written, haven't read, and which may have unknown side effects, just to save writing a few routines. Using code you haven't written isn't always a clear win, it's a tradeoff, and you have to evaluate the costs and benefits, as you would with any programming decision.
I can't speak to other frameworks, but from my experience with Hibernate, you hit the wall on its abilities pretty quickly. Had he written his own persistence layer, he'd be in a position to modify and grow that code. Instead, he's hit the wall, and now he's faced with a major rewrite, instead of an evolution. Database access / persistence is an area where you are WAY better off either using or writing a fairly thin layer and taking advantage of the power of the database, rather than trying to hide the database under a framework.
As I said "if you like the game". Of course if you don't like it, no, it isn't worth it. The original poster said that it was a great game... if it was free. All I'm saying is that IF you think it's a great game, $15 is a great bargain.
WOW is a great game.... When it's free. For $15 a month it's a complete ripoff.
Utter bullshit. For $15/month WoW is probably the greatest entertainment bargain on the planet. Let's see... $15 gets you 2 movie tickets. Or a cheap dinner. Or you could rent a couple of videos. Any of which last a couple of hours.
Or it gets you a month of fun with friends. As much time as you care to spend online. Yeah, if you don't like the game, it isn't worth, but if you think is a "great game" then it's truly a bargain.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, you've made my original point quite well.
Well, yeah, it is relevant. They are supporting an non-MS implementation of an MS product on a non-MS platform. I know that Slashdot crowd can spin almost anything to be anti-Microsoft, but the idea that this is some sort of MS plot is absurd.
From the Moonlight download page:
"Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems."
So MS engineers worked overtime to make an opensource implementation of their product work on a an OS that competes with Windows. Which is what I said.
And I noticed that you didn't have an answer for the point of my post, which was that on something like this, MS is going to take crap no matter what they do.
Yes, you are overly cynical. Let's face it, for some folks MS just can't win... if they implement something early, it's a trap, if they implement it just in time, they are just making the gesture, and if they don't implement it, they are trying to squash the competition. How about just appreciating the fact that some MS employees work hard to support a platform that competes directly with their own?
I'm curious as to how on earth this could have been modded "off-topic"... certainly hope this gets picked for meta-moderation.
What I wouldn't trade for some mod points... someone please mod the parent "informative"
As I assume many "virtual Palestinians" have condemned virtual Hamas for using their own population as human shields while targetting virtual Israeli civilians.
Unless you are building something simple software development going to take a group of people and a chunk of time. If it's interesting to a group of developers who are willing to work on it for free, that's great, but otherwise you have to raise capital, and the folks supplying capital would like to see a return on investment. Selling the software is one way to get that return.
Proprietary isn't evil / nasty / only practiced by necrophiles. It exists because it's a reasonable business model. Without proprietary software, a lot of software that people need wouldn't be available.
I got a little further but the stuff about working anytime with people around the globe just activated my gag reflex. My last company (which was amazingly poorly run) had the whole "we'll farm stuff out to the India team and work 24x7" mentality. And typically the way it worked was
. Monday: you need to get some web service in India configured so you can test. So you shoot off an email.
. Tuesday: you get back a message that the guy who knows anything has quit. You ask who replaced him.
. Wednesday: you get a message asking why you need to know. You shoot off a copy of your message from Monday.
. Thursday: you get a message asking what it was you wanted again? You send a rephrasing of your Monday message.
. Friday: it's a holiday in Bangalore so maybe you'll be luckier next week.
Any time I see some exec talking about the global workforce and working anytime, day or night, I flash back to this experience.
Um... you do know that Israel was created by international accord, right? The ONLY reason that it's more than a tiny chunk of land is that its neighbors instantly invaded once after the United Nations created it. On several occasions Israel has given back large chunks of territory in exchange for peace. If Hamas ever gets serious of peace, instead of slaughtering civilians, the same will happen for Gaza.
That's too bad, I had been hoping that instead of an international agreement it had been done the way all other national groups ended up on their particular patch of dirt, by superior firepower.
Well, at least we agree that the analogy of trying to track down some secret terrorists in El Paso is complete nonsense.
Well, if you're going to use an analogy, use an appropriate one. Such as the residents of El Paso electing a government whose goal is to slaughter the surrounding Chinese, and that government actively participating in the firing of missles at Chinese civilians.
By the way, how the hell did the Chinese manage to capture Texas?
I hear ya... that's about as dumb as thinking that you'll be able to still play your CDs and DVDs 5-10 years from now. I mean, no way you're going to want to watch Lord of the Rings or listen to music that your currently love in 5 or 10 years, right?
So you were only available 2 days a week, and you're upset that your boss couldn't somehow schedule all of the work to occur those 2 days? You say "he placed another employee to deal with issues that came up while I was out of the office"... what was he supposed to do? Put the problem on hold 4-5 days till you were available?
It's one thing to say "this is my code, my system, no one else touches it without talking to me first" if you are available normal working hours. If you aren't available, guess what, someone else is going to have to deal with the "issues" that come up while you are out of the office. Where I work, people are nervous if there's only one full time employee who understands how to do something, having a part-timer be the only one would be utterly unacceptable, unless the function is pretty marginal to being with.
If you want to see how well done a graphical interface can be with puzzles, get The Longest Journey. It's close to 10 years old now, so the graphics are dated, but it has really really really good puzzles. It's a great example of how an adventure game can work really well with a point and click interface. I'm surprised that Yahtzee didn't mention it.
Personally, I don't miss the demise of trying lots and lots and lots of words in a text adventure until you find out what word was coded into the program.
That's right, but I can also choose not to trust a company whose business relies on the vendor lock in of non-Free software.
So you are saying that if a company does not release the source code to ALL of its software, any software that it does open source is tainted?
There are situations where I would want to pay for Free code and might not use such Free code unless I could pay for pro level support. But... I do not want to pay them for non-Free code.
Again, it's your choice. You can take the open source code and pay anyone you care to for maintanance. The fact that this company happens to sell a product that isn't open source is utterly irrelevant.
The company has release open source, you can choose open source, there's no lockin. That's YOUR choice.
The problem, ironically, is what many "free" software advocates complain about... the confusion between zero-cost and freedom to do what you want. In this case, you really can have "free to do what you want" software, but that software is not "zero-cost"... you have to pay someone to support it. OR you can buy the closed source that comes with support. Either way, it's YOUR choice, and the company that released the software as open source has violated neither the letter nor the spirit of the open source movement.
And I'd love to hear why my original comment was moderated "flame-bait".
Why is there ANY problem with a company releasing source and not supporting it? Isn't that the whole purpose of Open Source? Isn't that why Stallman got into opening source in the first place... so he wouldn't be reliant on the vendor to fix code? If a company releases the source to a program, by definition that program is "Open Source".
It's been a while so I'm going to be a bit vague, but as I recall we had trouble with relationships between objects.
It depends on whether you are truly using well known libraries or not, and how much extraneous code you pull in, just to avoid writing code. You can end up with huge blocks of unknown, potentially buggy code that you haven't written, haven't read, and which may have unknown side effects, just to save writing a few routines. Using code you haven't written isn't always a clear win, it's a tradeoff, and you have to evaluate the costs and benefits, as you would with any programming decision.
I can't speak to other frameworks, but from my experience with Hibernate, you hit the wall on its abilities pretty quickly. Had he written his own persistence layer, he'd be in a position to modify and grow that code. Instead, he's hit the wall, and now he's faced with a major rewrite, instead of an evolution. Database access / persistence is an area where you are WAY better off either using or writing a fairly thin layer and taking advantage of the power of the database, rather than trying to hide the database under a framework.
As I said "if you like the game". Of course if you don't like it, no, it isn't worth it. The original poster said that it was a great game... if it was free. All I'm saying is that IF you think it's a great game, $15 is a great bargain.
Utter bullshit. For $15/month WoW is probably the greatest entertainment bargain on the planet. Let's see... $15 gets you 2 movie tickets. Or a cheap dinner. Or you could rent a couple of videos. Any of which last a couple of hours.
Or it gets you a month of fun with friends. As much time as you care to spend online. Yeah, if you don't like the game, it isn't worth, but if you think is a "great game" then it's truly a bargain.
I think the poster was referring to being able to do things like eat, drink, and breathe.