Yeah, but I'm saying it runs well with all the shine to my tastes. If yours are more exacting, turn off some shine.
You're not going to be running Photoshop on it (some have, but I wouldn't expect it to be a good experience), but it runs well enough for everyday stuff.
It'll even run some of your outdated games pretty well--the biggest block is the weird resolution and crappy IGA drivers.
I'm not saying the Linux version is worse or better or anything. It's nice enough. But if you prefer Windows, these machines will do it well.
I've got an Eee with Windows XP installed on it and it runs just fine, even at the stock 630Mhz. Overclocked up to 850Mhz, which mine is perfectly stable at, it's genuinely snappy.
XP isn't too much of a resource hog even with all the chrome on, and you can turn most of it off if it does impact performance.
It's really no different than the Duron 800Mhzish I had back in the early 2000s. The only downside is the small screen, but the 2nd generation fixes that this year with a full-sized 9" 1000x600 screen.
Sounds to me like you're arguing my point. I'm 35, and extremely net- and tech-aware. However, I've been on BBSes since I was 12 or so, and have worked in the industry for nearly 15 years.
Most of my peers weren't into the geeky computers back in high school, and are probably fairly novice computer users now. Phish in a barrel, as it were.
So like I said, this is a case where I don't think parental education is necessarily the best (or at least most consistent) kind. I think comparisons to personal finance, driver's ed, and, arguably, sex ed are good ones. Central education with good information makes sense.
I think Red Hat is being prudent in picking a battle they can possibly win. It's easier to substantiate costs and difficulty within your own sub-industry.
Any solution that covers open source has a good chance of covering the rest of the industry too. It would at least set a great precedent.
If what's taught is at all reasonable and accurate, this makes sense to me.
I imagine today's parents are probably young enough to figure it out, but not all of us are necessarily internet-aware in the way the current generation of children is.
This is a case where centralized teaching really does make more sense than parent-by-parent teaching, due to levels of experience and technological literacy needed. As long as it's just passing information, I'm all for it.
Sorry if you read it as a bigger-dick contest. I don't mean it that way. I like Java too.
I just feel that some languages guide students one way, some languages guide students another. You're right that a sufficiently interested student, or sufficiently well-crafted program can transcend any language. Still, some serve education better than others.
One other aspect of Java I didn't bring up before, but possibly relevant here: starting students out on something as "thick" as Java sets them up to, well, believe in magic.
By that, I mean there's a whole lot going on behind the scenes that they can't reasonably understand for quite awhile. Essentially, it's starting out with an attitude of "trust the framework," with "analyze the framework" coming later.
For reasons I'm not sure I can fully articulate, this bugs me. I think a healthy sense of paranoia about framework and library solutions is good in a programmer. I certainly think that one should think twice about using something if one doesn't know how it works.
Again, this is a difference between applied programming and computer science. In applied programming, you should generally just trust the framework, or you never get anything done. But the best programmers I know are the ones who'll trust-but-verify.
Yeah. Unfortunately, my high school didn't really have much of a computer science program, so no A.P. Pascal for me.
In that time period, you would've been using Turbo Pascal, probably TP6. It would've actually been fine for what you were learning (the pointer/memory model was pretty much taken straight from C) if they'd paced it better.
I agree, re: bolting on OOP to everything. I'm big on OOP, but I think you need some time without it to see what the optimal uses really are.
Mine wasn't much different. Structured programming in Turbo Pascal for the first year, then branched out from there. You had advanced structures classes taught in C, basic OOP taught in C++, and CPU/architecture taught in ASM.
After that, you branched into the more esoteric or higher-level languages including, at the time, the just-emerging Java.
It's computer science, not applied programming. Those two things are different, but the latter has been sold as the former, more and more.
I hear what you're saying, and you're making good arguments for Java as a beginning applied language. In my college days, it was VB that they used for that, for many of the same reasons (except there was no command line at all).
However, I think a beginning computer science course should start at a somewhat lower level. It's important to understand the why and how, not just the what, and I think that should be introduced from the beginning.
There's a difference between managing your application's memory, and memory/opcode micromanagement. Any programmer should know what's going on with their application's allocated memory, even if they are trusting libraries to deal with it. If you don't know what -should- be happening, you never catch breaks in the libraries.
Generally, though, I agree with you. Practically, writing in assembly or doing anything similarly low-level is likely to be less efficient than trusting the compiler.
However, I still think ASM-level programming should be taught because it breaks down operations to the most granular level. It also gives some level of exposure to the lowest level of programming, and allows one to figure out if that sort of thing is right for them.
You do need to have some number of people who know how to do this. They're the ones who write compilers, debuggers, drivers, and embedded code.
Embedded architectures, in particular, are probably going to be a increasingly large market for programmers. I doubt there'll ever be a One-True-Architecture that can cover all the hardware permutations, so some degree of low-level knowledge will be needed.
I didn't take AP CS--it wasn't available to me in the 80s, when I was in high school. I'm just speaking CS education in general.
The same arguments apply for early undergrad courses, which have also moved towards Java in many schools (probably the real reason the AP courses have moved too).
I do understand that you have to learn the algorithms, despite the presence of the standard libraries. I'm saying some of the impact is lost when you know there's a perfectly good built-in solution right over there.
To be fair, the same is true for C++ and the STL, which is why I'm a fan of C for initial language learning. It's low-enough level that there's not a lot of functionality built in, but still reasonably platform-generic.
Frankly, I still prefer (modern) Pascal over C. The readability factor is nice for teaching. However, it's so out of vogue now in the US (Delphi is still reasonably popular in Europe and Asia) that it's difficult to make a case for spending a lot of time in it.
Part of the problem is that with Java, you have to learn class/object semantics up front in order to be at all useful. This clouds the lessons of the fundamentals in ways that simple structured language semantics do not.
Another part is that Java already has reasonable solutions in the standard libraries for any fundamental structure. This makes all work purely academic. This isn't necessarily a big deal, but can affect motivation.
Also, understanding pointers and how memory is laid out is a pretty fundamental thing, wouldn't you say? If we lose that, then any mid- or low-level language becomes esoteric.
I think it makes much more sense to teach starting at the mid-level (C, C++-without-classes, perhaps even a modern flavor of Basic or Pascal) then radiate outwards to both low-level (ASM) programming and higher-level (C#, Java, Delphi, etc.) languages, as well as to non-C-likes (LISP, Haskell, etc.).
The distribution license is relevant because programmers are most likely to complete a project in a predictable manner when you pay them.
Corporations only pay for things that show them a demonstrable return. So far, -most- corporations still look askance at sinking money into code they're then going to open source.
As for your second question, I believe my company does, in fact do this. I won't speculate further as to their reasons.
What I will say, though, is that I don't think the value proposition behind contributing to open source necessarily works for most companies. Again, it's case-by-case, but for most companies, the right answer will be paid support from someone else.
That means either for-pay software development, or again, the very successful open source projects that attract commercialization. No QA, no support, no corporate interest. That's just the way of it.
Well, OK, point taken. But I think this is probably a case where I was a little too shotgun in my examples.
I should have acknowledged that there are a handful of techs where OSS solutions started out as the standard, web servers (with Apache) being one of them.
That's also a very promising phenomenon, but so far seems to be limited largely to administration tools, and more specifically, to administration tools running primarily on non-Windows OSes.
I think that has more to do with the internet's dominant technologies having been initially been built on (or at least realized in) OSS by academics and grassroots, rather than corporate software. The standards were set by OSS.
My take is that was a a bit of a special-case phenomenon. It was a combination of a whole emerging industry being pretty much being ignored by corporate America until it was already semi-mature, and the fact that the industry was driven by people invested in a social movement that artifically guided the development and adoption.
If we, the community, can continue to identify emerging technologies without good corporate support, and get in there first, then we have a chance for further success along the same lines.
Really, open source's chance for success in any given market is the same as any other software company's chance for success in any given market, and predicates on similar factors: timing, suitability to task, polish, cost, and marketing.
It's just that once the bright people identify the hole in the market, how quickly can the respective models plug it and get presence, and how quickly can they get the word out?
I used to work for Cygnus/Red Hat, as a matter of fact. I have some visibility into that process.
Do you not realize that nobody ever pays you to work on an OSS project until the project itself is sufficiently successful to attract either commercialization of support, or corporate use as a lynchpin product?
But you're right. I did munge the free-as-in-beer software development process with open source. There's nothing preventing a revolution in paid, open-source software...except for the fact that it's only been demonstrated to be somewhat financially viable, and only in a handful of arenas.
It's still a small percentage of all the ones that exist. And the ones in widespread use don't cover every core business software need.
My point there is really that for-pay software will still be dominant for some software types, some business software included. I wouldn't look towards businesses going 100% or even mostly% open-source anytime soon.
We're talking about widespread usage of a very limited number of the total open source projects out there.
It's not like this means corporate America will fully embrace or even prefer open source products. It just means that LAMP solutions will be installed in nearly every company.
What is good about this is that it "pops" the bubble: open source software can successful. But I don't know that it says anything about whether it's an optimal solution for business. I think that's case-by-case.
I think what this is really proving is that there is a certain point at which a software product becomes a commodity. A word processor is a word processor, and for the most part, a browser is a browser. Certainly, a web server is a web server, and doesn't even differentiate on UI. Any changes to the basic template are going to be pretty incremental.
Open-source isn't exactly what you'd call the fastest or most direct method to produce a product. Nothing replaces real dedicated, paid resources. However, if it can create a usable product by the time the market turns largely into commodity, you're pretty much guaranteed adoption.
When they're all basically the same, free looks mighty good.
I always thought a better analogy would be something like:
I own a lake. I charge admission to go swimming in my lake, which is otherwise not fenced-in or restricted in any way. At night, while I'm asleep, you go swimming in my lake.
Outside the obvious (and irrelevant) issue of trespass, do you owe me money?
There are some things you can say:
* It's stupid to not fence in a lake, and expect nobody to go swimming in it. Unfortunately, that ends up being an argument for DRM.
* Lakes should be free for everyone to swim in. Obviously, we have plenty of precedent for controlling access to "enjoyment" of a source that would cost the same to maintain and run regardless of the number of participants (movie theaters, for a simple example).
* This analogy is stupid. I'm not sure that it is. A media license and an admission work in much the same way, with much the same purpose.
The fact is that the RIAA's entire business model depends on most people paying admission. That certainly doesn't excuse their current tactics, which are reprehensible.
However, anyone with a level of personal responsibility and objectivity has to recognize that if you break an existing business model by not playing the game, the business model will change. In this case, the cultural shift towards file-sharing was damned near instantaneous in industry terms, so all the changes have been heavily reactive: draconian DRM, litigation, etc.
I hope the RIAA goes down in flames. I also hope a general understanding is gained by the public that widespread casual media piracy, whether you think it's right or wrong, will throw the status quo out the window when it becomes notable enough (and it probably already has).
What we get in return may or may not be better. We can get better shopkeepers, maybe, but any media distribution business model is going to have to rely either on honor (legally enforced or otherwise) or external restrictions like DRM. Take your pick.
As far as I know, that pretty much describes switched-digital video, which is the other tech they're supposedly leveraging to pack in new channels. To the extent I've been able to tell, it involves filtering channels at a neighborhood level, only sending the ones down the last-mile cable trunks that the neighborhood is actually watching. That effectively does what you're talking about, while still allowing bandwidth to be consolidated between houses.
The downside is that the current CableCard spec doesn't know how to talk to SDV, so can't access the switched channels. That shuts out third-party tuners. However, a solution was announced for Tivo late last year, though I've lost track of it since.
As an software automation engineer--i.e. foot in both dev and QA--I can tell you that unit-testing and black box testing tend to find very different kinds of bugs. Among other things, black box testing is in-system, whereas unit-testing is not.
Furthermore, at a well-run software company, QA goes far beyond simple software testing. The QA department, more than any other role aside from the Project Manager, should be involved in every stage of the software development process. Software quality starts from the requirements, and goes all the way to the delivery. This gives you an excellent view, end to end, with a stake in each part.
There's not a complete overlap between the QA skillset and the development skillset. I'm not saying it's necessarily vital to go through QA if what you want to do is develop, but it'll make you into a more aware and probably a better developer. That's something that should be considered.
I don't believe Stardock has ever released a piece of shareware. GalCiv OS/2 was third-party published, and their Windows stuff has all been commercial. They have the occasional freebie or demo, but they're primarily a commercial company.
They also had the Steam/Stardock Central model going before Valve did, and Wardell knows a little something about the entertainment software industry.
My Hyundai uses the same lighting as VW. I've not noticed a difference, but I turn it down to near-minimum to keep glare low at night. There's also the fact that I'm used to sleeping in the light of blue LEDs--my clock radio uses them, and my computer setup in the bedroom is rife with peripherals that glow blue since the color became trendy amongst the gamer/mod set.
I also don't have a good concept of how bright these LEDs need to be to be effective. TFA says he's testing 2.5, 5, and 7.5 lux lights. Wiki has 1 lux as "moonlight at high altitude at tropical latitudes" and 10 lux as "Candle at the distance of [1 ft]," but I don't know if the scale is linear or otherwise (and I'm sure wavelength affects perceived brightness as well).
I do believe that whatever the intentions were (and I suspect style) they'll certainly crow about the benefits if this bears out.:)
Hey, at least we can both say we argue for what we believe in.
It's interesting you bring up public places as a comparison. Public indecency (in the sense of profanity) statutes have been repeatedly struck down as unconstitutional. Public land is the one place where I can reasonably expect to go and curse loudly all day. I can shout f-bombs in a playground, and short of wandering into another offense like inciting a riot, it'll still be legal. Nobody can remove me for or otherwise prevent me from speaking in any manner I want on public land. This is as opposed to private land, where a private decision can be made to not allow me to behave in such a manner.
So, I agree it's a good analogy, but I come to some different conclusions than you. You don't have the right to expect any level of decent speech from others in public, and I don't see why you should on the public airwaves either.
You're certainly correct in that I muddled things on the indecency/obscenity constitutionality. I should never have said there was a constitutional exception for obscenity laws. I don't think obscenity statutes are constitutional either, in the ideological sense, however the Supreme Court has decided. They're legal, because the Supreme Court has decided so, but the Constitution did not provide for that exception and I don't think that decision should have been made. Indecency statutes are even further off the path of constitutionality.
Re: V-Chip, I acknowledge that the current implementation has weaknesses. Any voluntary rating/blocking system will, and I believe that the alternative is anathema.
What if instead of bitching every time the networks let through a live expletive, parent watchdog groups bitched as loudly about ratings not being accurate, and pushed the same sort of market pressure there? The problems you outline -can be fixed- but there is a chicken/egg problem of having to get people behind the tech before the tech can be refined to suit the people. As long as nobody's looking, of course the networks will take advantage of the lack of scrutiny.
But it's a decent voluntary replacement for government censorship, which is also a poor excuse for effective parenting and incredibly damaging in a civic sense, to boot. In other words, of the two pre-parent-censorship solutions at hand, it's by far the better one.
Sure, your TV-PG show may have some TV-14 slop in it. I buy that the ratings, being voluntary, are sometimes gamed. However, it probably won't have TV-MA content in it. The V-Chip isn't a replacement for parental oversight, it's supposed to be a backup plan to keep the damage limited--just like FCC censorship is.
I'm also of the opinion that if someone is trying to micromanage their children's stimuli to such a degree that they need precise control, they're setting up for a big disappointment in the reality of the situation.
I'd rather have kids that can hear profanity all day and understand that there are rules and social consequences for using the words in the real world--in other words, prepared for life as it really is--than try to keep them ignorant through the equivalent of an abstinence campaign. By going the zero-tolerance route, the ability to guide through the situation is lost.
You lost me at "not the consumer's responsibility to pay." It's not the government's responsibility, right, or privilege to define indecent content. The 1st Amendment has an obscenity exception, not an indecency exception. The FCC's oversight on indecent content is against the letter and spirit of the Constitution, and I sincerely hope the 1978 decision is overturned or at least severely gutted.
It absolutely is the consumer's responsibility to manage their own familial censorship/monitoring, including paying for whatever they need to pay for to feel effective doing it. It's the consumer's responsibility because the government cannot and should not be trusted with censoring media. Regarding some of the other responses, I'm not sure how my pointing out the V-Chip translated into a lack of respect for proactive parenting. It's a tool for proactive parenting, just like the guy's DVR logs are a tool. Downplaying the presence of such a tool by saying "people haven't adopted it yet" and then encouraging people not to adopt it seems self-serving to me.
Regarding the ratings, they're voluntary, like every other ratings system on media in the US. If they weren't, they'd be before the Supreme Court on 1st Amendment issues in no time flat. Take them for what they're worth. It doesn't replace the need to screen what your kid watches, but it's a guideline.
Regarding the statistics, I agree it's a damned shame that parents won't take a proactive step like buying a TV with new technology to help them parent their children effectively. That doesn't make it the government's job to step in--it just makes it a damned shame. The government isn't there to fix all your problems.
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Yeah, but I'm saying it runs well with all the shine to my tastes. If yours are more exacting, turn off some shine.
You're not going to be running Photoshop on it (some have, but I wouldn't expect it to be a good experience), but it runs well enough for everyday stuff.
It'll even run some of your outdated games pretty well--the biggest block is the weird resolution and crappy IGA drivers.
I'm not saying the Linux version is worse or better or anything. It's nice enough. But if you prefer Windows, these machines will do it well.
I've got an Eee with Windows XP installed on it and it runs just fine, even at the stock 630Mhz. Overclocked up to 850Mhz, which mine is perfectly stable at, it's genuinely snappy.
XP isn't too much of a resource hog even with all the chrome on, and you can turn most of it off if it does impact performance.
It's really no different than the Duron 800Mhzish I had back in the early 2000s. The only downside is the small screen, but the 2nd generation fixes that this year with a full-sized 9" 1000x600 screen.
Sounds to me like you're arguing my point. I'm 35, and extremely net- and tech-aware. However, I've been on BBSes since I was 12 or so, and have worked in the industry for nearly 15 years.
Most of my peers weren't into the geeky computers back in high school, and are probably fairly novice computer users now. Phish in a barrel, as it were.
So like I said, this is a case where I don't think parental education is necessarily the best (or at least most consistent) kind. I think comparisons to personal finance, driver's ed, and, arguably, sex ed are good ones. Central education with good information makes sense.
I think Red Hat is being prudent in picking a battle they can possibly win. It's easier to substantiate costs and difficulty within your own sub-industry.
Any solution that covers open source has a good chance of covering the rest of the industry too. It would at least set a great precedent.
If what's taught is at all reasonable and accurate, this makes sense to me.
I imagine today's parents are probably young enough to figure it out, but not all of us are necessarily internet-aware in the way the current generation of children is.
This is a case where centralized teaching really does make more sense than parent-by-parent teaching, due to levels of experience and technological literacy needed. As long as it's just passing information, I'm all for it.
Sorry if you read it as a bigger-dick contest. I don't mean it that way. I like Java too.
I just feel that some languages guide students one way, some languages guide students another. You're right that a sufficiently interested student, or sufficiently well-crafted program can transcend any language. Still, some serve education better than others.
One other aspect of Java I didn't bring up before, but possibly relevant here: starting students out on something as "thick" as Java sets them up to, well, believe in magic.
By that, I mean there's a whole lot going on behind the scenes that they can't reasonably understand for quite awhile. Essentially, it's starting out with an attitude of "trust the framework," with "analyze the framework" coming later.
For reasons I'm not sure I can fully articulate, this bugs me. I think a healthy sense of paranoia about framework and library solutions is good in a programmer. I certainly think that one should think twice about using something if one doesn't know how it works.
Again, this is a difference between applied programming and computer science. In applied programming, you should generally just trust the framework, or you never get anything done. But the best programmers I know are the ones who'll trust-but-verify.
Yeah. Unfortunately, my high school didn't really have much of a computer science program, so no A.P. Pascal for me.
In that time period, you would've been using Turbo Pascal, probably TP6. It would've actually been fine for what you were learning (the pointer/memory model was pretty much taken straight from C) if they'd paced it better.
I agree, re: bolting on OOP to everything. I'm big on OOP, but I think you need some time without it to see what the optimal uses really are.
Mine wasn't much different. Structured programming in Turbo Pascal for the first year, then branched out from there. You had advanced structures classes taught in C, basic OOP taught in C++, and CPU/architecture taught in ASM.
After that, you branched into the more esoteric or higher-level languages including, at the time, the just-emerging Java.
Here's the thing:
It's computer science, not applied programming. Those two things are different, but the latter has been sold as the former, more and more.
I hear what you're saying, and you're making good arguments for Java as a beginning applied language. In my college days, it was VB that they used for that, for many of the same reasons (except there was no command line at all).
However, I think a beginning computer science course should start at a somewhat lower level. It's important to understand the why and how, not just the what, and I think that should be introduced from the beginning.
There's a difference between managing your application's memory, and memory/opcode micromanagement. Any programmer should know what's going on with their application's allocated memory, even if they are trusting libraries to deal with it. If you don't know what -should- be happening, you never catch breaks in the libraries.
Generally, though, I agree with you. Practically, writing in assembly or doing anything similarly low-level is likely to be less efficient than trusting the compiler.
However, I still think ASM-level programming should be taught because it breaks down operations to the most granular level. It also gives some level of exposure to the lowest level of programming, and allows one to figure out if that sort of thing is right for them.
You do need to have some number of people who know how to do this. They're the ones who write compilers, debuggers, drivers, and embedded code.
Embedded architectures, in particular, are probably going to be a increasingly large market for programmers. I doubt there'll ever be a One-True-Architecture that can cover all the hardware permutations, so some degree of low-level knowledge will be needed.
I didn't take AP CS--it wasn't available to me in the 80s, when I was in high school. I'm just speaking CS education in general.
The same arguments apply for early undergrad courses, which have also moved towards Java in many schools (probably the real reason the AP courses have moved too).
I do understand that you have to learn the algorithms, despite the presence of the standard libraries. I'm saying some of the impact is lost when you know there's a perfectly good built-in solution right over there.
To be fair, the same is true for C++ and the STL, which is why I'm a fan of C for initial language learning. It's low-enough level that there's not a lot of functionality built in, but still reasonably platform-generic.
Frankly, I still prefer (modern) Pascal over C. The readability factor is nice for teaching. However, it's so out of vogue now in the US (Delphi is still reasonably popular in Europe and Asia) that it's difficult to make a case for spending a lot of time in it.
Part of the problem is that with Java, you have to learn class/object semantics up front in order to be at all useful. This clouds the lessons of the fundamentals in ways that simple structured language semantics do not.
Another part is that Java already has reasonable solutions in the standard libraries for any fundamental structure. This makes all work purely academic. This isn't necessarily a big deal, but can affect motivation.
Also, understanding pointers and how memory is laid out is a pretty fundamental thing, wouldn't you say? If we lose that, then any mid- or low-level language becomes esoteric.
I think it makes much more sense to teach starting at the mid-level (C, C++-without-classes, perhaps even a modern flavor of Basic or Pascal) then radiate outwards to both low-level (ASM) programming and higher-level (C#, Java, Delphi, etc.) languages, as well as to non-C-likes (LISP, Haskell, etc.).
The distribution license is relevant because programmers are most likely to complete a project in a predictable manner when you pay them.
Corporations only pay for things that show them a demonstrable return. So far, -most- corporations still look askance at sinking money into code they're then going to open source.
As for your second question, I believe my company does, in fact do this. I won't speculate further as to their reasons.
What I will say, though, is that I don't think the value proposition behind contributing to open source necessarily works for most companies. Again, it's case-by-case, but for most companies, the right answer will be paid support from someone else.
That means either for-pay software development, or again, the very successful open source projects that attract commercialization. No QA, no support, no corporate interest. That's just the way of it.
Well, OK, point taken. But I think this is probably a case where I was a little too shotgun in my examples.
I should have acknowledged that there are a handful of techs where OSS solutions started out as the standard, web servers (with Apache) being one of them.
That's also a very promising phenomenon, but so far seems to be limited largely to administration tools, and more specifically, to administration tools running primarily on non-Windows OSes.
I think that has more to do with the internet's dominant technologies having been initially been built on (or at least realized in) OSS by academics and grassroots, rather than corporate software. The standards were set by OSS.
My take is that was a a bit of a special-case phenomenon. It was a combination of a whole emerging industry being pretty much being ignored by corporate America until it was already semi-mature, and the fact that the industry was driven by people invested in a social movement that artifically guided the development and adoption.
If we, the community, can continue to identify emerging technologies without good corporate support, and get in there first, then we have a chance for further success along the same lines.
Really, open source's chance for success in any given market is the same as any other software company's chance for success in any given market, and predicates on similar factors: timing, suitability to task, polish, cost, and marketing.
It's just that once the bright people identify the hole in the market, how quickly can the respective models plug it and get presence, and how quickly can they get the word out?
I used to work for Cygnus/Red Hat, as a matter of fact. I have some visibility into that process.
Do you not realize that nobody ever pays you to work on an OSS project until the project itself is sufficiently successful to attract either commercialization of support, or corporate use as a lynchpin product?
But you're right. I did munge the free-as-in-beer software development process with open source. There's nothing preventing a revolution in paid, open-source software...except for the fact that it's only been demonstrated to be somewhat financially viable, and only in a handful of arenas.
It's still a small percentage of all the ones that exist. And the ones in widespread use don't cover every core business software need.
My point there is really that for-pay software will still be dominant for some software types, some business software included. I wouldn't look towards businesses going 100% or even mostly% open-source anytime soon.
We're talking about widespread usage of a very limited number of the total open source projects out there.
It's not like this means corporate America will fully embrace or even prefer open source products. It just means that LAMP solutions will be installed in nearly every company.
What is good about this is that it "pops" the bubble: open source software can successful. But I don't know that it says anything about whether it's an optimal solution for business. I think that's case-by-case.
I think what this is really proving is that there is a certain point at which a software product becomes a commodity. A word processor is a word processor, and for the most part, a browser is a browser. Certainly, a web server is a web server, and doesn't even differentiate on UI. Any changes to the basic template are going to be pretty incremental.
Open-source isn't exactly what you'd call the fastest or most direct method to produce a product. Nothing replaces real dedicated, paid resources. However, if it can create a usable product by the time the market turns largely into commodity, you're pretty much guaranteed adoption.
When they're all basically the same, free looks mighty good.
I always thought a better analogy would be something like:
I own a lake. I charge admission to go swimming in my lake, which is otherwise not fenced-in or restricted in any way. At night, while I'm asleep, you go swimming in my lake.
Outside the obvious (and irrelevant) issue of trespass, do you owe me money?
There are some things you can say:
* It's stupid to not fence in a lake, and expect nobody to go swimming in it. Unfortunately, that ends up being an argument for DRM.
* Lakes should be free for everyone to swim in. Obviously, we have plenty of precedent for controlling access to "enjoyment" of a source that would cost the same to maintain and run regardless of the number of participants (movie theaters, for a simple example).
* This analogy is stupid. I'm not sure that it is. A media license and an admission work in much the same way, with much the same purpose.
The fact is that the RIAA's entire business model depends on most people paying admission. That certainly doesn't excuse their current tactics, which are reprehensible.
However, anyone with a level of personal responsibility and objectivity has to recognize that if you break an existing business model by not playing the game, the business model will change. In this case, the cultural shift towards file-sharing was damned near instantaneous in industry terms, so all the changes have been heavily reactive: draconian DRM, litigation, etc.
I hope the RIAA goes down in flames. I also hope a general understanding is gained by the public that widespread casual media piracy, whether you think it's right or wrong, will throw the status quo out the window when it becomes notable enough (and it probably already has).
What we get in return may or may not be better. We can get better shopkeepers, maybe, but any media distribution business model is going to have to rely either on honor (legally enforced or otherwise) or external restrictions like DRM. Take your pick.
As far as I know, that pretty much describes switched-digital video, which is the other tech they're supposedly leveraging to pack in new channels. To the extent I've been able to tell, it involves filtering channels at a neighborhood level, only sending the ones down the last-mile cable trunks that the neighborhood is actually watching. That effectively does what you're talking about, while still allowing bandwidth to be consolidated between houses.
The downside is that the current CableCard spec doesn't know how to talk to SDV, so can't access the switched channels. That shuts out third-party tuners. However, a solution was announced for Tivo late last year, though I've lost track of it since.
As an software automation engineer--i.e. foot in both dev and QA--I can tell you that unit-testing and black box testing tend to find very different kinds of bugs. Among other things, black box testing is in-system, whereas unit-testing is not.
Furthermore, at a well-run software company, QA goes far beyond simple software testing. The QA department, more than any other role aside from the Project Manager, should be involved in every stage of the software development process. Software quality starts from the requirements, and goes all the way to the delivery. This gives you an excellent view, end to end, with a stake in each part.
There's not a complete overlap between the QA skillset and the development skillset. I'm not saying it's necessarily vital to go through QA if what you want to do is develop, but it'll make you into a more aware and probably a better developer. That's something that should be considered.
I don't believe Stardock has ever released a piece of shareware. GalCiv OS/2 was third-party published, and their Windows stuff has all been commercial. They have the occasional freebie or demo, but they're primarily a commercial company.
They also had the Steam/Stardock Central model going before Valve did, and Wardell knows a little something about the entertainment software industry.
My Hyundai uses the same lighting as VW. I've not noticed a difference, but I turn it down to near-minimum to keep glare low at night. There's also the fact that I'm used to sleeping in the light of blue LEDs--my clock radio uses them, and my computer setup in the bedroom is rife with peripherals that glow blue since the color became trendy amongst the gamer/mod set.
:)
I also don't have a good concept of how bright these LEDs need to be to be effective. TFA says he's testing 2.5, 5, and 7.5 lux lights. Wiki has 1 lux as "moonlight at high altitude at tropical latitudes" and 10 lux as "Candle at the distance of [1 ft]," but I don't know if the scale is linear or otherwise (and I'm sure wavelength affects perceived brightness as well).
I do believe that whatever the intentions were (and I suspect style) they'll certainly crow about the benefits if this bears out.
Hey, at least we can both say we argue for what we believe in.
It's interesting you bring up public places as a comparison. Public indecency (in the sense of profanity) statutes have been repeatedly struck down as unconstitutional. Public land is the one place where I can reasonably expect to go and curse loudly all day. I can shout f-bombs in a playground, and short of wandering into another offense like inciting a riot, it'll still be legal. Nobody can remove me for or otherwise prevent me from speaking in any manner I want on public land. This is as opposed to private land, where a private decision can be made to not allow me to behave in such a manner.
So, I agree it's a good analogy, but I come to some different conclusions than you. You don't have the right to expect any level of decent speech from others in public, and I don't see why you should on the public airwaves either.
You're certainly correct in that I muddled things on the indecency/obscenity constitutionality. I should never have said there was a constitutional exception for obscenity laws. I don't think obscenity statutes are constitutional either, in the ideological sense, however the Supreme Court has decided. They're legal, because the Supreme Court has decided so, but the Constitution did not provide for that exception and I don't think that decision should have been made. Indecency statutes are even further off the path of constitutionality.
Re: V-Chip, I acknowledge that the current implementation has weaknesses. Any voluntary rating/blocking system will, and I believe that the alternative is anathema.
What if instead of bitching every time the networks let through a live expletive, parent watchdog groups bitched as loudly about ratings not being accurate, and pushed the same sort of market pressure there? The problems you outline -can be fixed- but there is a chicken/egg problem of having to get people behind the tech before the tech can be refined to suit the people. As long as nobody's looking, of course the networks will take advantage of the lack of scrutiny.
But it's a decent voluntary replacement for government censorship, which is also a poor excuse for effective parenting and incredibly damaging in a civic sense, to boot. In other words, of the two pre-parent-censorship solutions at hand, it's by far the better one.
Sure, your TV-PG show may have some TV-14 slop in it. I buy that the ratings, being voluntary, are sometimes gamed. However, it probably won't have TV-MA content in it. The V-Chip isn't a replacement for parental oversight, it's supposed to be a backup plan to keep the damage limited--just like FCC censorship is.
I'm also of the opinion that if someone is trying to micromanage their children's stimuli to such a degree that they need precise control, they're setting up for a big disappointment in the reality of the situation.
I'd rather have kids that can hear profanity all day and understand that there are rules and social consequences for using the words in the real world--in other words, prepared for life as it really is--than try to keep them ignorant through the equivalent of an abstinence campaign. By going the zero-tolerance route, the ability to guide through the situation is lost.
You lost me at "not the consumer's responsibility to pay." It's not the government's responsibility, right, or privilege to define indecent content. The 1st Amendment has an obscenity exception, not an indecency exception. The FCC's oversight on indecent content is against the letter and spirit of the Constitution, and I sincerely hope the 1978 decision is overturned or at least severely gutted.
It absolutely is the consumer's responsibility to manage their own familial censorship/monitoring, including paying for whatever they need to pay for to feel effective doing it. It's the consumer's responsibility because the government cannot and should not be trusted with censoring media. Regarding some of the other responses, I'm not sure how my pointing out the V-Chip translated into a lack of respect for proactive parenting. It's a tool for proactive parenting, just like the guy's DVR logs are a tool. Downplaying the presence of such a tool by saying "people haven't adopted it yet" and then encouraging people not to adopt it seems self-serving to me.
Regarding the ratings, they're voluntary, like every other ratings system on media in the US. If they weren't, they'd be before the Supreme Court on 1st Amendment issues in no time flat. Take them for what they're worth. It doesn't replace the need to screen what your kid watches, but it's a guideline.
Regarding the statistics, I agree it's a damned shame that parents won't take a proactive step like buying a TV with new technology to help them parent their children effectively. That doesn't make it the government's job to step in--it just makes it a damned shame. The government isn't there to fix all your problems.