The One ring had no adornment, no diamonds, rubys etc.
Oh, about Diamonds not forever, neither is graphite. Protons are unstable, you know. But then, so are human bodies - tough...
Easy: You get a more open standard, compatibility with USB 1 devices, and significantly lower cost.
USB2 will be integrated on all motherboards very soon, Firewire will remain an add-on option. USB will be king of the landscape, Firewire will live on like SCSI.
A solution to this dilemma would be to still be able to disclaim liability - on the condition that the user has access to the source. This is the case for many large M$ customers already, and would clearly mark Open Source software as 'use at own risk'.
The reasoning behind is that with source in hand, anyone can verify the suitability of the software for a given purpose, absence of backdoors, critical bugs and things - and if a bug turns up, it can be corrected in a matter of hours or days, keeping actual business damage very low.
It would of course also carry all the usual benefits of Open Source, like transparancy, competence distribution, easy adaption for specific purposes, documented document formats and the like.
For a long time, we didn't have a Really Good audio editor to use in our magazine (and put on our cover CD) when writing about sound editing and conversion. The rest are either complex crippleware (GoldWave, CoolEdit), or too bad to be considered.
Audacity fits the entry-level bill nicely with a few Very Obvious buttons right up front, and when you dig in, has lots of good stuff underneath.
> The rating tends to be signifcantly higher shortly after release than a few years later. Audience overwhelmed by the cinema experience versus video watchers?
Easy: The people who take fights to see it first rate it higher.
Uhh, this sounds hard for your innovative startup who cannot risk major liability lawsuits...
I think publishing the source should allow the disclaimers to be in force. MS does publish the source to some customers, and GNU to everybody. With the source you can (in principle) verify the functionality and absence of backdoors, and you can (in real life) fix problems yourself instead of having to wait for a Service Pack or other official upgrade.
That should permit the current market to proceed without too much disruption, and still allow small companies to market great ideas without risk of getting sued off the planet in case of a critical bug.
It's the economy of scale, or rather the lack thereof. Since SCSI is sold in tiny numbers, recouping development costs, logistics, profits etc. has to be much higher for selling SCSI to be worthwhile. The 'SCSI myth' of superiour reliability helps to sustain the existence of the drives, at a cost.
Or, to put it another way, it's just much easier to make a decent living off a 100 cheap IDE drives than the rare SCSI.
Could be made very simple - you can disclaim responsibility if you supply the source.
Then:
You can verify the functionality before using the software.
You can fix anything that turns out to be broken.
You can contribute to the community at will without fear of being sued.
Anyone has a legally respected way to do this.
This could easily apply selectively, like when a coorporation participates in the MS Shared Source program - then also MS earns the right to disclaim liability towards that customer.
OTOH, if a company decides to hide the inner workings of a program, it's perfectly fine - they trust their code, and they guarantee that it works for its intended purpose.
Being a CD-rom editor, I'm faced with this problem continously. I do find lots of neat software that has all kinds of snags and limitations that causes me to ditch it from our cover CD. Most important is that the user can get a healthy amount of work done without being pushed around. Greatest turn-offs, in order of diminishing importance:
Nags. If you want permission to pester our readers, forget it. You're out.
Intrusive Adware. If the ads can't easily be ignored, we find something else. Discreet ads are generally OK.
Crippleware. If you can't give a healthy dose of features in the trial version, forget it.
Time limits. Marking this as Shareware is stupid, though. It's a Demo, period.
Registration. While an annoyance, we make it sure that even our readers can figure it out. No problem for a serious application.
We trust serious SW companies not to release the address list to spammers. Call us optimistic, (we are:) and we consider getting the user in contact with the web site a very legitimate thing to do.
In case anyone here does shareware: We see lots of nice little shareware utilities riddled with nags and cripples. Sometimes we have a little talk with the author and convince him that he's much better off with no nags and 6-digit distributions than vice versa.
A serious user will, IMO, not be turned off by being requested to register for the download. I believe you're mainly missing out the folks that wouldn't purchase the application anyway, and this even saves you bandwith.
-Henrik
Hi. I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your.sig and help me spread.
> What limitations keep us from packing a bunch of those together to make a more powerful battery?
Risk of explosion. The tigther you pack the energy, the smaller is the distance, and the greater the risk of a short circuit - and the greater the consequence, as well.
Remember, batteries, like dynamite, have both poles of the energy component inside. If all of that energy is released at once, your laptop becomes a handgranade.
In contrast, a car or a fuel cell doesn't have that problem. You store one component in the device and pull the opposing component out of the air (well, yes) on demand.
The basic concept behind the fuel cells makes it extremely promising. If only they can get the price/capacity equation to balance...
> What about the generated heat?
Is way less than current battery types (notice it gets very hot in use). Fuel cells generate energy without combustion, that's the trick.
If you don't publish the source, you're liable. Hiding the inside of a program is perfectly OK - assuming that you take full responsibility for the manner it works.
If you publish the source, you can be extempted. Exposing the inner workings, anyone can verify the suitability of the software for a given purpose.
MS plays safe by not being responsible (sueable) for their bugs. If they where requested to either FIX them holes before release or publish the source, they'd concentrate on security before feature count, which would be double good.
Only problem is, this way of cutting things would hardly feed the lawyers:)
Dead tree books don't crash in the software sense, and are not crapped over by bugs in your code either.
They do crash in the hardware sense, but are way superiour in their survivability chances. Any dealer wanting to sell me an e-book must first drop it 5 ft. on a hard surface without blinking.
I sortof like having a CD with the book, but they tend to give quite a price hike. Putting sample code on a web site is much better - also for updates.
Slashdot Mirror
Dev-C++ is a very nifty development environment.
And for AbiWord / OpenOffice - take both! I use primarily AbiWord 'cause it's so light, and OpenOffice when I need something more advanced.
Sure thing. It *is* the speed of light, since the photon is the carrier of this force.
12 light years would require it to fly at ½ the speed of light, which is not technichally feasible (unfortunately!)
Just go grab it, it's a great browser.
It is.
But they posted V 6.05 within 24 hours, making the fix available to Joe A. User before anyone else.
The One ring had no adornment, no diamonds, rubys etc. Oh, about Diamonds not forever, neither is graphite. Protons are unstable, you know. But then, so are human bodies - tough...
She was vastly surprised when she got them, but did say yes :)
You get a more open standard, compatibility with USB 1 devices, and significantly lower cost.
USB2 will be integrated on all motherboards very soon, Firewire will remain an add-on option. USB will be king of the landscape, Firewire will live on like SCSI.
Since birds descend from dinosaurs, that one riddle has finally been resolved. :)
The reasoning behind is that with source in hand, anyone can verify the suitability of the software for a given purpose, absence of backdoors, critical bugs and things - and if a bug turns up, it can be corrected in a matter of hours or days, keeping actual business damage very low.
It would of course also carry all the usual benefits of Open Source, like transparancy, competence distribution, easy adaption for specific purposes, documented document formats and the like.
Good luck :)
For a long time, we didn't have a Really Good audio editor to use in our magazine (and put on our cover CD) when writing about sound editing and conversion. The rest are either complex crippleware (GoldWave, CoolEdit), or too bad to be considered. Audacity fits the entry-level bill nicely with a few Very Obvious buttons right up front, and when you dig in, has lots of good stuff underneath.
Easy: The people who take fights to see it first rate it higher.
Unfortunately, we had planned a party at the company on that exact day! Daft...
Am still trying to sneak in to see Black Hawk Down. Reality beats fiction, hard!
Uh, make that an 8 GB drive...
I think publishing the source should allow the disclaimers to be in force. MS does publish the source to some customers, and GNU to everybody. With the source you can (in principle) verify the functionality and absence of backdoors, and you can (in real life) fix problems yourself instead of having to wait for a Service Pack or other official upgrade.
That should permit the current market to proceed without too much disruption, and still allow small companies to market great ideas without risk of getting sued off the planet in case of a critical bug.
Or, to put it another way, it's just much easier to make a decent living off a 100 cheap IDE drives than the rare SCSI.
- Then:
- You can verify the functionality before using the software.
- You can fix anything that turns out to be broken.
- You can contribute to the community at will without fear of being sued.
- Anyone has a legally respected way to do this.
This could easily apply selectively, like when a coorporation participates in the MS Shared Source program - then also MS earns the right to disclaim liability towards that customer.OTOH, if a company decides to hide the inner workings of a program, it's perfectly fine - they trust their code, and they guarantee that it works for its intended purpose.
- Nags. If you want permission to pester our readers, forget it. You're out.
- Intrusive Adware. If the ads can't easily be ignored, we find something else. Discreet ads are generally OK.
- Crippleware. If you can't give a healthy dose of features in the trial version, forget it.
- Time limits. Marking this as Shareware is stupid, though. It's a Demo, period.
- Registration. While an annoyance, we make it sure that even our readers can figure it out. No problem for a serious application.
We trust serious SW companies not to release the address list to spammers. Call us optimistic, (we areIn case anyone here does shareware: We see lots of nice little shareware utilities riddled with nags and cripples. Sometimes we have a little talk with the author and convince him that he's much better off with no nags and 6-digit distributions than vice versa.
A serious user will, IMO, not be turned off by being requested to register for the download. I believe you're mainly missing out the folks that wouldn't purchase the application anyway, and this even saves you bandwith.
-Henrik
Hi. I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your
Risk of explosion. The tigther you pack the energy, the smaller is the distance, and the greater the risk of a short circuit - and the greater the consequence, as well.
Remember, batteries, like dynamite, have both poles of the energy component inside. If all of that energy is released at once, your laptop becomes a handgranade.
In contrast, a car or a fuel cell doesn't have that problem. You store one component in the device and pull the opposing component out of the air (well, yes) on demand.
The basic concept behind the fuel cells makes it extremely promising. If only they can get the price/capacity equation to balance...
> What about the generated heat? Is way less than current battery types (notice it gets very hot in use). Fuel cells generate energy without combustion, that's the trick.
If you don't publish the source, you're liable. Hiding the inside of a program is perfectly OK - assuming that you take full responsibility for the manner it works.
If you publish the source, you can be extempted. Exposing the inner workings, anyone can verify the suitability of the software for a given purpose.
MS plays safe by not being responsible (sueable) for their bugs. If they where requested to either FIX them holes before release or publish the source, they'd concentrate on security before feature count, which would be double good.
Only problem is, this way of cutting things would hardly feed the lawyers :)
> I find this kind of act intolerable as there are very few of them left as it is.
Hey - with any luck there'll be more of them for the next generation!
-Henrik (awaiting my next generation in a few weeks
Dead tree books don't crash in the software sense, and are not crapped over by bugs in your code either. They do crash in the hardware sense, but are way superiour in their survivability chances. Any dealer wanting to sell me an e-book must first drop it 5 ft. on a hard surface without blinking. I sortof like having a CD with the book, but they tend to give quite a price hike. Putting sample code on a web site is much better - also for updates.