Just send a mail to somebody in say Tanzania (Just rendomly picked a country in Africa, nothing else) with the relevant document and send him a check. he converts it and sends it to you.
I can see it now:
DEAR SIR, I AM DR ABU OSAMA, OF TANZANIA. I HAVE ACCUMULATED US$435 MILLION BY TRANSCRIBING MICROSOFT E-BOOKS FOR YOUR FELLOW CITIZENS. uNFORTUNATELY, THE CORRUPT GOVERNMENT OF MY COUNTRY MAKES IT BOTH DIFFICULT AND NECESSARY TO MOVE THE MONEY TO THE US. PLEASE SEND ME YOUR BANK DETAILS, SO THAT i MAY WIRE THE MONEY TO YOUR ACCOUNT.....
The number the BIOS reports is just some fake value for legacy compatibility with 1980s era PC BIOS design.
Correct. It is my understanding, based on having disassembled many hard drives over the years, that the usual design has one head on each side of each platter. The heads are all moved by a single stepping motor, so that you can read all the bytes in a given ring (all the rings on both sides of all the platters) before you have to step. Reading the data in the ring is fast, stepping is slower.
... more heads don't buy you anything,...
Breaking up the storage capacity across more platters (i.e., more heads) means that you can read more sectors before you have to seek. Ceteris paribus, that should mean better average performance. It seems that higher density on the platter should have the same effect: more bytes in the ring.
... except more heat and noise...
This surprises me. Do more platters make more heat and noise? Maybe because they mean more rotating mass? Maybe it shouldn't surprise me, after all.
I've never seen a design with two sets of heads and two stepper motors. That would amount to implementing hardware raid within the drive, I think, but without the extra redundancy and reliability provided by the usual RAID-on-several-drives method.
The interesting question is whether it is better to have more platters (and thus more heads) all in one case, or more platters scattered across several hard drives. Probably, if speed, cost, and reliability all matter, the best approach is IDE hardware RAID. If we're defining speed in terms of sustained bandwidth, of course, we might want to look at SCSI.
I don't usually complain about moderation, but this shouldn't be +5.
The GPL is not an unrestricted license.
True, the GPL does not remove all restrictions which copyright law imposes. How is that relevant to the matter at hand? The matter at hand (I think) is whether we should ensure that standards are implementable by free/Libre software.
I would tend to oppose the use of a standard in which the specification is GPL'd...
The GPL doesn't really make sense when we're talking about something like a document. That's why the FSF folks came up with their free document license. Again, there seems to be no connection to the matter at hand. Now look at the next paragraph:
If the author of a GPL'd work wishes to submit the protocol involved as a standard, then let him submit it as FREE. He can keep the code GPL'd, but the standard must be free for use -- even by commercial entities.
This seems to confirm the confusion that the earlier lines hinted at. This talks about restrictions on the text of standards, rather than restrictions on the use of standards.
This post seems to me to be off-topic. It is tangentially related, perhaps, but it definitely doesn't advance the discussion.
It might be considered inflammatory, and it almost seems to be deliberately confused, as if it were intended to provoke impassioned responses. In short, it has a smell of troll, or simple ignorance. Now, look at the moderation:
Three insightfuls and an informative? Moderators, if you don't know, don't moderate. Somebody with some mod points should tack on a couple more Overrated's, too.
The traffic lights where I used to live had such a photo receptor. The emergency vehicles had BRIGHT, focused xenon strobes which triggered them. I couldn't aim my headlights high enough to hit them, and my 4 D-cell maglight wasn't bright enough.
I thought about making a strobe/parabolic reflector combo, but just never got around to it. The first question to answer would be: ``has anyone thought to outlaw it in my jurisdiction yet?''
It occurs to me that there are a couple of points which I left out of that first reply.
How much of a company's profit does the accounting department earn? ``None'' and ``all'' seem equally defensible. They may not be making any money giving away software, but they may be making quite a bit elsewhere that they would never have made without having given away that software.
For a company like Sun, how much more would they be loosing if they hadn't opened things like Staroffice? After all, profits can be negative. Sun's decision to open Staroffice may well have minimized those negative profits.
SEC filings are great, but they are legal documents, written to meet the SEC requirements. They do have lots of useful stuff, but they also have a lot of boiler-plate, and little of speculation about how things might have been. You are unlikely to see something like: ``Our decision to open source FOO is responsible for the fact that our server sales slumped by 25% rather than 35%.'' After all, how would you prove that to an SEC accountant? Why would you even try?
SGI gave us their journaling file system. Sun gave us Staroffice. IBM has given a laundry list, but I'm drawing a blank for specifics. There was an announcement on/. yesterday about a ``christmas gift'' from IBM, but they've done a lot more than that.
Each of these are doing that for only one reason: that intellectual ``property'' has more value to them if they share it. IBM sells services. They can't make much money servicing Microsoft's software, so they popularize things like Linux. THey also sell hardware, and if making the OS cheaper helps them to sell their high-profit-margin servers, they'd be fools not to do anything which makes that OS cheaper. Sun opened Staroffice for exactly that reason. I'm sure that SGI had a similar rational.
There is also netscape/mozilla. They just needed someone else to do the development that they no longer had the resources to do alone. Opening their code let them do that without selling the whole company.
If a company opens code that they couldn't sell anyway, they get at least as many competent developers working on it, at the same cost. They get at least as much revenue. There will be at least as much demand for support contracts. Others will be able to bid on those support contracts, but a fraction of something is bigger than all of nothing...
This phenomenon has gone on long enough that academics are begining to try to explain it. Learner and Tyrole have a paper out, this isn't academic, but is accessible, this looks interesting, but I haven't done more than glance at it.
Every company needs some sort of motivation for creating Open Source software.
IBM, SGI, Sun, and probably a lot of others that should pop into my mind all create opensource software, and profit by doing so. All of them are hardware/services companies, and the free libre/open source software which they create enable them to sell more hardware and services.
I suspect that if you talked to the management of any of those companies, you would find that they have avoided charging for some things in order to avoid being perceived as slimeballs. The WebGUI bunch seems to have chosen to charge ONLY (judging by the blurb here on/.) for something for which it seems slimy to charge. There may be a more charitable interpretation, but the ``no sharing'' clause looks like evidence for the ``they are slimeballs'' theory.
They're/.'ed, so I don't know the details of their license. If they've used a libre license (e.g., GPL), their attempt to monopolize information will probably fail.
Unfortunately for them, the perception of sliminess is quite likely to keep folks from using/popularizing/improving their product, and so they are probably not going to derive any of the benefits which should come from a libre license. That's really bad for them if they have chosen to use a libre license, and given up the possibility of a monopoly on the code.
This sort of silliness may force them to release a new version under a proprietary license. Then they can say: ``That opensource crap doesn't work!''
I guess it just goes to show that there is no idea so good that a greedy fool can't ruin it.
I [SIC]single hit of heroin is all you need to become addicted. This has been documented, mentioned in interviews with many heroin addicts.
I know a woman who tried heroin. Once. She said: ``I'll never do that again, it's too nice''. If you intended your statement to be universal, that proves you wrong. She was not addicted after one use.
There is physical addiction, which is easily broken in most cases, and there is psychological addiction, which can be more difficult. They say (and that same friend confirmed for me) that cocain's physical addiction is trivial to break, but the psycological addiction is extremely difficult to break.
Heroin's physical addiction takes three terrible days to break. Some who are physically weakened are rumored to have died from the withdrawal. THe psycological addiction is again a different matter.
People who have happy, fullfilling lives don't tend to become addicted to drugs, cocaine included. When they do become physically addicted, they break the addiction and continue (what's left of) their lives. Others eagerly become addicted to the first drug they can get their hands on, and the next, and the next. Marijuana is not physically addictive, but I knew someone who got addicted to it. He eventually moved on to other drugs.
Would my car perform any better if I had the precise engineering details about how every little part worked?
Yes, you do, and yes, it does.
You may not have those details to hand, but they are available to you. You may not want those details, but they are available to folks who are able to use them. That's why your fancy-schmancy modern car is significantly better than Grandpa's Model T.
... most would prefer to buy Microsoft (Ford, Chrysler, Mercedes, etc.) rather than hacking up a Linux (junkyard car...
How about Microsoft (1950's Rolls Royce clone, with a trouble-prone Chevy engine) versus Linux (modern Subaru)?
... I think Microsoft and other American companies getting more business means that there'll be more jobs here on the homefront. Just a thought...I'm not economic genius...
Right. You aren't. We can get jobs through trade with India. We don't have to sell them software to trade. Your conclusion may be obvious, but it is quite possibly wrong.
I find Windows 2000 to be perfectly usable on a Pentium II-233. I find a PIII-500 to be ponderous when running KDE.
Really? I have a 486 laptop with 12 MB, and a PII-233 laptop with 144MB. Win2k is out of the question on the first, and makes the second a real dog. Both are running Debian Woody, and both are completely functional. I use blackbox on the 486. I started with KDE on the PII, but eventually switched to Windowmaker, not because of speed but because I like its style. I still use many of the KDE utilities. The PII is fast enough for daily use on the job. That simply wasn't true for Win2k on that machine. I wonder if the difference reflects our different levels of experience with the two?
Look at Knoppix. [snip] The UI is tacky, it lacks comparable features that users are now accustomed to, and its only advantage is that it's free.
Which features are lacking? The BSODs? I use Win2k at work, and have booted up Knoppix at work when I need to run something which is Unix-only. The only thing Knoppix doesn't give me is a client for the MS email server. That's available for Linux, but not libre so not on Knoppix, I think.
The UI is tacky,...
This is not a valid criticism, if you accept the idea that MS products are ready for the desktop. One of the few unprompted opinions which my non-technical friends have expressed about WinXP is that it is UGLY. No one I work with likes the MS user interface, though all have grown accustomed to it. Or perhaps you meant that since KDE is so Windows-like, it is tacky and unusable?
So basically the MS line was, "You guys in Jordan cannot hope to have the skills and smarts to possibly put together quality software, no matter how much you put your mind to it."
I think that has always been the MS line. Sometimes it is stated as: ``You folks here at _____ can't possibly justify the expense of developing what our [lying] salesmen [wrongly] claim that we can provide.''
Some of the best minds in the world have been working on open source and libre software [1] since before MS first stole time on a university mainframe. They've always worked to make systems which filled their needs, and so open source and libre software has always been aimed at what we used to call power users. It has been hard to learn, easy to use, and powerful.
MS has succeeded in large part because of their marketing efforts. Opensource/libre has succeeded as far as it has because of technical merit. Now we see some marketing being applied to these same systems which were making it on their technical merits. Redhat, Mandrake, and now Debian desktop are all making libre software accessible to the clueless. FUD seems to be loosing its effect. MS is starting to panic. Hence, we see this sort of ill-thought-out nonsense from the salesmen.
Figure out how much it costs per hour for all your employees to be re-educated, your IT department to fix potential issues, etc.
Also figure that you're going to be paying that money anyway, because of employee turnover and forced upgrades. In the next decade, you're going to have to provide computer training at least once for every position which uses a computer. You may do it formally, on budget, or informally, off budget, but you will pay for it, whatever platform you choose.
Do you want to add license fees and license compliance costs onto those training costs?
Do you want to have to do that retraining at Microsoft's whim, rather than when it suits you?
Do you want to remove the option to move legacy applications to new hardware/software platforms?
If you can answer a resounding ``YES!'' to all those questions, then you can safely choose proprietary solutions. All others should avoid them where possible.
... how to draw a picture with the command line...
How about LaTeX? Metafont? TeXdraw?
... or edit a video...
I don't do this, so I don't know what's possible. I do know that if it can't be done from the command line, it can't be automated. I suspect that folks who do this for a living have something like a CLI available. Any video editors out there who can comment?
... or make a 3D model...
The command line is certainly not the only option here. Autocad has had an optional interface for a graphics tablet since its early days. It was, and is, useful for some tasks. Autocad is a large lisp program, and autocad users use the CLI to define 3-d models, to program in lisp, and probably for a lot of other things. Some parts of some of these tasks can also be handled via GUI.
The CLI is probably optimal for ease-of-use for many tasks. It is surprisingly easy to use even for freehand drawing. If what you are looking for is easy-to-teach-to-your-pet-monkey, the point, click and drool interface will probably save you a fortune in bananas.
If it's your code, in the sense that you own the copyright, neither the BSD nor the GPL place additional restrictions on you. If it's not your code, both licenses REMOVE restrictions which would otherwise be imposed by copyright law.
Thus, in my words, that line was ``stupidly wrong'' as you wrote it. That was impolite, but I can't find a gentler way to put it which is still adequate. I couldn't gather the `` [GPL derived software developed by myself]'' part from the talk about Apple and their license which preceded and followed the line in question. Even if I had, I would have had the same reaction.
You are right that the various open and free licenses are out of the question if you choose to release your work in binary form only. In that case, you are choosing a more restrictive license than the GPL. The GPL is not too restrictive, rather, it is not restrictive enough to suit your needs. Again, your choice of words implied to me that you had missed the essential point: if you are the copyright holder, you have all the rights. If you are not, you have only those rights which are granted by law or by license. A more restrictive license retains more of those rights for the copyright holder.
The reason I used such strong language is that neither copyright law nor the GPL is new. These ideas have been around for a long time now, and I think that a lot of the FUD and confusion which is so prevalent is the result of unclear language, fuzzy definitions and fuzzy thinking.
Getting slightly off the topic of this thread, if our ``intellectual property'' laws were reasonably functional, there would be no good reason not to release source code, since it would then be adequately protected even if published.
The GPL places severe restirictions on what I can and cannot do with my software by requiring me to provide source.
That statement is stupidly wrong.
If it is YOUR software, YOU hold the copyright, and YOUR decision to grant me additional rights by letting me have your software under the GPL places no additional restrictions on you. It removes restrictions which copyright law would otherwise have placed on me.
If you are not the copyright holder, then it is NOT your software. You have no right to redistribute the software, and you have no right to distribute derivative works, unless the copyright holder gives you a license, e.g., the GPL or BSD license, which includes those rights.
If I license my software to you under the GPL, I am leaving in place several restrictions imposed by copyright law which the BSD license would remove. These are not restrictions on your software; they are restrictions on your distribution of MY software. If you choose to make a derivative work from my software, the law says that for you to distribute that derivative work is a violation of my copyright. The GPL removes some of those restrictions, and the BSD license removes a few more, but those restrictions are on what you can do with MY work. In this scenario, there is nothing that you have a legal right to distribute, unless that right is granted by license.
I suspect that most of the folks who whinge about the GPL's ``restrictions on their software'' haven't any software of their own, in the sense of being the copyright holder. What they are really saying is that the GPL forbids them to put restrictions on other people's software!
... that for them to support open development of GPL software is really much like the Pope encouraging contraction!
Well, I hate to rain on your parade, but given the Catholic Church's position on contraception, and the fact that ``contraction''s are what force the baby out, I'd say that the Pope does encourage contraction!
It's my understanding that jury trials don't set precedent. I don't think they COULD set precedent: the jury makes findings of fact, the judge rules on law. There can't be precedents of fact. The facts in case A have nothing to do with case B. Precedents are about law: the law should be interpreted in case B the same way that it was in case A.
I think there is the chance for precedence here, from the judges instructions to the jury
So, the judge's instructions would be binding in other cases? For this to happen, I believe the decision would have to be appealed, on the basis that those particular instructions were somehow right/wrong. Then the decision of the appeals court would be binding, within its jurisdiction.
This is repetition, but it's important, so here's the main point again:
Notice that merely appealing isn't enough: if we want the appeal to rule on that issue, it must be specifically part of the appeal. No appeals court ruling on this, no precedent.
I'm sure that I've made some mistatements by now, but I don't think that they undermine my original point. Since I'm not a lawyer, it would be great if someone who's passed the bar could elaborate on this business of precedents.
This is certainly good news for Elcomsoft: they've won their battle. Unfortunately, it doesn't help much to win the war. This decision was by the jury. That means that it doesn't set a precedent, and won't help get the law overturned.
What this decision does do is show the government one way not to prosecute honest programmers and researchers. What it doesn't do is keep them from finding other ways, that will work.
To set a precedent, we need a judge's decision that the DMCA is/is not unenforceable/unconstitutional. That will make the DMCA a settled issue within that judge's jurisdiction. To make it effective nation-wide, it then needs to be appealed to the Supreme court, and upheld there.
If "IP Laws" worked then they *could* open the source, because the "laws" would prevent the source from being used in ways they don't want. In fact they are acting exactly like IP laws don't exist.
That's an excellent point. The whole purpose of our intellectual ``property'' laws is to stop this sort of silly secrecy. Patent requires disclosure, and I believe that copyright requires publication. We give the inventors/authors privileges to restrict the use of their works in order to encourage them to make their work public, not to allow them to more effectively keep secrets!
Yet another bit of evidence to add to the enormous mountain of evidence that our ``IP'' laws need reform.
If you ask any serious scientist why they research a problem, the answer should be, "Because it's there," not "Because I'll make some money." That's what separates scientists from economists.
I think that most academic economists are serious scientists, by this definition. In my limited experience, the ones who are interested mainly in making money for themselves soon get out of academics.
They have to provide separate RPMs for every single different optimisation for every CPU type???? I hope the kernel gets some semblance of binary compatability soon, that's nuts.
Yes, that's a big job; and, yes, that's nuts. Of course, when you have the source, you don't need binary compatibility!
It is certainly nice that nVidia is going to be making the same sort of effort for us that they make for the several versions of Windows. I realize that they're going to a lot of effort to provide binaries for a few of the distributions that I might use. Have they gotten around to Yellowdog yet?
I'm afraid that I'm not impressed by their effort, though. They have chosen, for their own good reasons, not to let volunteers from the comunity do it for them. This is like walking 20 miles, through the snow, uphill both ways to get to school, when you live next door to the school and the schoolbus would take you free.
``Yet another reason... to buy nVidia based graphics cards.''
So, does this mean that I'll be able to use the nVidia drivers on my non-x86 boxes? Will I be able to recompile the drivers when a new kernel breaks the existing version? Will I be able to recompile the drivers when an oddball, experimental kernel patch breaks them? If there's a bug/missing feature, will I (or my agent, if I care enough to pay out money for this) be able to fix it if nVidia won't do it my way?
No.
Yet another reason to buy, but it still doesn't deal with the same old, tired, but still compelling reasons not to. Sigh... I still just can't justify buying nVidia. Too bad.
1. The duh answer of them all of course is increased school funding. I relize however, if everyone got a decent education, we would have very few people willing to join the military and those who did would join one loaded with officers, and no cannon fodder, I mean elisted men.
There is a strong correlation between increasing expenditures and decreasing results, if you look at a time series for any random school district. There is no correlation between expenditures and results, if you look at panel data. As H.L. Menken (sp?) said, ``For every problem, there is an answer which is simple, attractive, and wrong.'' I think you've found it for this problem.
The answer here is for parents to demand more of their children, and more of their children's teachers. Given that most public schools are bureaucracies, they'll have to home school.
2. Not everyone needs to get a four year degree. There needs to be many more professional opportunities for people with 2 year degrees. It would increase tax revenue to have a better paid population, and reduce the burden on four year universities who can better use the money on people who need to spend the time in college.
You came so close on this one! Universities shouldn't be training construction managers (Purdue has a four-year program in that!). We need to encourage non-university, non-bachelors-degree education for crafts and trades.
The current system cheats everyone. The crafts and trades people, and the engineers, have to suffer through a lot of distribution requirements which preserve the illusion that they are getting a university education. This means that the classes must be dumbed down to be accessible to the unscholarly and uninterested (notice I didn't say stupid). The result is that the engineers don't get the in-depth techincal education they need, and the scholars don't get the education they need either.
3. Companies that spend a sigifigant portion (~75%) of thier R&D money in Univeristy based Labs would recive an huge tax break.
4. Medical Advancement: Place a 20 blackout on the production of generics and in return drug companies must reduce prices by 75%. New drug prices are high in this country because a company must recoup the billions it spent on R&D in the first 3 years to make any sort of profit, because after 5 it can be made by anyone dirt cheap.
This give companies much more capital and incentive to innovate instead of copy what the other guy did and sell it cheaper.
5. Government Funded Hard Science: If we rely only on corperations to fund research, then we are going to be limmited to innovations that will make a profit, and we will be worthless as a civilization.
Are (3) and (5) contradictory? Probably not. On the other hand, given the amount of damage that corporate funding seems to be doing to academic research, your (3) might be counter productive. Finally, (4) is just a re-jiggering of the patent laws, and while it might be a good start, it isn't nearly far-reaching enough.
Furthermore, the US has been subsidising drug development and low drug prices in Canada and Europe by allowing high drug prices here to drive innovation. As long as we're chasing pie in the sky, let's force those socialist free riders to start paying their fair share!
Slashdot Mirror
Is your company hiring? Do you do any numeric or scientific programming? If so, I could be interested.
I can see it now:
Capslock off...Correct. It is my understanding, based on having disassembled many hard drives over the years, that the usual design has one head on each side of each platter. The heads are all moved by a single stepping motor, so that you can read all the bytes in a given ring (all the rings on both sides of all the platters) before you have to step. Reading the data in the ring is fast, stepping is slower.
Breaking up the storage capacity across more platters (i.e., more heads) means that you can read more sectors before you have to seek. Ceteris paribus, that should mean better average performance. It seems that higher density on the platter should have the same effect: more bytes in the ring.
This surprises me. Do more platters make more heat and noise? Maybe because they mean more rotating mass? Maybe it shouldn't surprise me, after all.
I've never seen a design with two sets of heads and two stepper motors. That would amount to implementing hardware raid within the drive, I think, but without the extra redundancy and reliability provided by the usual RAID-on-several-drives method.
The interesting question is whether it is better to have more platters (and thus more heads) all in one case, or more platters scattered across several hard drives. Probably, if speed, cost, and reliability all matter, the best approach is IDE hardware RAID. If we're defining speed in terms of sustained bandwidth, of course, we might want to look at SCSI.
The GPL is not an unrestricted license.
True, the GPL does not remove all restrictions which copyright law imposes. How is that relevant to the matter at hand? The matter at hand (I think) is whether we should ensure that standards are implementable by free/Libre software.
I would tend to oppose the use of a standard in which the specification is GPL'd ...
The GPL doesn't really make sense when we're talking about something like a document. That's why the FSF folks came up with their free document license. Again, there seems to be no connection to the matter at hand. Now look at the next paragraph:
If the author of a GPL'd work wishes to submit the protocol involved as a standard, then let him submit it as FREE. He can keep the code GPL'd, but the standard must be free for use -- even by commercial entities.
This seems to confirm the confusion that the earlier lines hinted at. This talks about restrictions on the text of standards, rather than restrictions on the use of standards.
This post seems to me to be off-topic. It is tangentially related, perhaps, but it definitely doesn't advance the discussion.
It might be considered inflammatory, and it almost seems to be deliberately confused, as if it were intended to provoke impassioned responses. In short, it has a smell of troll, or simple ignorance. Now, look at the moderation:
Moderation Totals: Insightful=3, Informative=1, Overrated=1, Total=5.
Three insightfuls and an informative? Moderators, if you don't know, don't moderate. Somebody with some mod points should tack on a couple more Overrated's, too.
I thought about making a strobe/parabolic reflector combo, but just never got around to it. The first question to answer would be: ``has anyone thought to outlaw it in my jurisdiction yet?''
How much of a company's profit does the accounting department earn? ``None'' and ``all'' seem equally defensible. They may not be making any money giving away software, but they may be making quite a bit elsewhere that they would never have made without having given away that software.
For a company like Sun, how much more would they be loosing if they hadn't opened things like Staroffice? After all, profits can be negative. Sun's decision to open Staroffice may well have minimized those negative profits.
SEC filings are great, but they are legal documents, written to meet the SEC requirements. They do have lots of useful stuff, but they also have a lot of boiler-plate, and little of speculation about how things might have been. You are unlikely to see something like: ``Our decision to open source FOO is responsible for the fact that our server sales slumped by 25% rather than 35%.'' After all, how would you prove that to an SEC accountant? Why would you even try?
SGI gave us their journaling file system. Sun gave us Staroffice. IBM has given a laundry list, but I'm drawing a blank for specifics. There was an announcement on /. yesterday about a ``christmas gift'' from IBM, but they've done a lot more than that.
Each of these are doing that for only one reason: that intellectual ``property'' has more value to them if they share it. IBM sells services. They can't make much money servicing Microsoft's software, so they popularize things like Linux. THey also sell hardware, and if making the OS cheaper helps them to sell their high-profit-margin servers, they'd be fools not to do anything which makes that OS cheaper. Sun opened Staroffice for exactly that reason. I'm sure that SGI had a similar rational.
There is also netscape/mozilla. They just needed someone else to do the development that they no longer had the resources to do alone. Opening their code let them do that without selling the whole company.
If a company opens code that they couldn't sell anyway, they get at least as many competent developers working on it, at the same cost. They get at least as much revenue. There will be at least as much demand for support contracts. Others will be able to bid on those support contracts, but a fraction of something is bigger than all of nothing ...
This phenomenon has gone on long enough that academics are begining to try to explain it. Learner and Tyrole have a paper out, this isn't academic, but is accessible, this looks interesting, but I haven't done more than glance at it.
IBM, SGI, Sun, and probably a lot of others that should pop into my mind all create opensource software, and profit by doing so. All of them are hardware/services companies, and the free libre/open source software which they create enable them to sell more hardware and services.
I suspect that if you talked to the management of any of those companies, you would find that they have avoided charging for some things in order to avoid being perceived as slimeballs. The WebGUI bunch seems to have chosen to charge ONLY (judging by the blurb here on /.) for something for which it seems slimy to charge. There may be a more charitable interpretation, but the ``no sharing'' clause looks like evidence for the ``they are slimeballs'' theory.
They're /.'ed, so I don't know the details of their license. If they've used a libre license (e.g., GPL), their attempt to monopolize information will probably fail.
Unfortunately for them, the perception of sliminess is quite likely to keep folks from using/popularizing/improving their product, and so they are probably not going to derive any of the benefits which should come from a libre license. That's really bad for them if they have chosen to use a libre license, and given up the possibility of a monopoly on the code.
This sort of silliness may force them to release a new version under a proprietary license. Then they can say: ``That opensource crap doesn't work!''
I guess it just goes to show that there is no idea so good that a greedy fool can't ruin it.
I know a woman who tried heroin. Once. She said: ``I'll never do that again, it's too nice''. If you intended your statement to be universal, that proves you wrong. She was not addicted after one use.
There is physical addiction, which is easily broken in most cases, and there is psychological addiction, which can be more difficult. They say (and that same friend confirmed for me) that cocain's physical addiction is trivial to break, but the psycological addiction is extremely difficult to break.
Heroin's physical addiction takes three terrible days to break. Some who are physically weakened are rumored to have died from the withdrawal. THe psycological addiction is again a different matter.
People who have happy, fullfilling lives don't tend to become addicted to drugs, cocaine included. When they do become physically addicted, they break the addiction and continue (what's left of) their lives. Others eagerly become addicted to the first drug they can get their hands on, and the next, and the next. Marijuana is not physically addictive, but I knew someone who got addicted to it. He eventually moved on to other drugs.
Yes, you do, and yes, it does.
You may not have those details to hand, but they are available to you. You may not want those details, but they are available to folks who are able to use them. That's why your fancy-schmancy modern car is significantly better than Grandpa's Model T.
How about Microsoft (1950's Rolls Royce clone, with a trouble-prone Chevy engine) versus Linux (modern Subaru)?
Right. You aren't. We can get jobs through trade with India. We don't have to sell them software to trade. Your conclusion may be obvious, but it is quite possibly wrong.
1) Talk up linux.
2) When Bill and Melinda offer money, make nice.
3) Adopt Linux, and watch your people PROFIT.
4) Watch their tax recipts rise.
Whoops, that was 4 steps. Well, government projects usually go over budget.
I find Windows 2000 to be perfectly usable on a Pentium II-233. I find a PIII-500 to be ponderous when running KDE.
Really? I have a 486 laptop with 12 MB, and a PII-233 laptop with 144MB. Win2k is out of the question on the first, and makes the second a real dog. Both are running Debian Woody, and both are completely functional. I use blackbox on the 486. I started with KDE on the PII, but eventually switched to Windowmaker, not because of speed but because I like its style. I still use many of the KDE utilities. The PII is fast enough for daily use on the job. That simply wasn't true for Win2k on that machine. I wonder if the difference reflects our different levels of experience with the two?
Look at Knoppix. [snip] The UI is tacky, it lacks comparable features that users are now accustomed to, and its only advantage is that it's free.
Which features are lacking? The BSODs? I use Win2k at work, and have booted up Knoppix at work when I need to run something which is Unix-only. The only thing Knoppix doesn't give me is a client for the MS email server. That's available for Linux, but not libre so not on Knoppix, I think.
The UI is tacky, ...
This is not a valid criticism, if you accept the idea that MS products are ready for the desktop. One of the few unprompted opinions which my non-technical friends have expressed about WinXP is that it is UGLY. No one I work with likes the MS user interface, though all have grown accustomed to it. Or perhaps you meant that since KDE is so Windows-like, it is tacky and unusable?
I think that has always been the MS line. Sometimes it is stated as: ``You folks here at _____ can't possibly justify the expense of developing what our [lying] salesmen [wrongly] claim that we can provide.''
Some of the best minds in the world have been working on open source and libre software [1] since before MS first stole time on a university mainframe. They've always worked to make systems which filled their needs, and so open source and libre software has always been aimed at what we used to call power users. It has been hard to learn, easy to use, and powerful.
MS has succeeded in large part because of their marketing efforts. Opensource/libre has succeeded as far as it has because of technical merit. Now we see some marketing being applied to these same systems which were making it on their technical merits. Redhat, Mandrake, and now Debian desktop are all making libre software accessible to the clueless. FUD seems to be loosing its effect. MS is starting to panic. Hence, we see this sort of ill-thought-out nonsense from the salesmen.
1. Think of Knuth and TeX, or Fateman, Schelter, et al and Macsyma/Maxima.
Also figure that you're going to be paying that money anyway, because of employee turnover and forced upgrades. In the next decade, you're going to have to provide computer training at least once for every position which uses a computer. You may do it formally, on budget, or informally, off budget, but you will pay for it, whatever platform you choose.
Do you want to add license fees and license compliance costs onto those training costs?
Do you want to have to do that retraining at Microsoft's whim, rather than when it suits you?
Do you want to remove the option to move legacy applications to new hardware/software platforms?
If you can answer a resounding ``YES!'' to all those questions, then you can safely choose proprietary solutions. All others should avoid them where possible.
How about LaTeX? Metafont? TeXdraw?
I don't do this, so I don't know what's possible. I do know that if it can't be done from the command line, it can't be automated. I suspect that folks who do this for a living have something like a CLI available. Any video editors out there who can comment?
The command line is certainly not the only option here. Autocad has had an optional interface for a graphics tablet since its early days. It was, and is, useful for some tasks. Autocad is a large lisp program, and autocad users use the CLI to define 3-d models, to program in lisp, and probably for a lot of other things. Some parts of some of these tasks can also be handled via GUI.
The CLI is probably optimal for ease-of-use for many tasks. It is surprisingly easy to use even for freehand drawing. If what you are looking for is easy-to-teach-to-your-pet-monkey, the point, click and drool interface will probably save you a fortune in bananas.
If it's your code, in the sense that you own the copyright, neither the BSD nor the GPL place additional restrictions on you. If it's not your code, both licenses REMOVE restrictions which would otherwise be imposed by copyright law.
Thus, in my words, that line was ``stupidly wrong'' as you wrote it. That was impolite, but I can't find a gentler way to put it which is still adequate. I couldn't gather the `` [GPL derived software developed by myself]'' part from the talk about Apple and their license which preceded and followed the line in question. Even if I had, I would have had the same reaction.
You are right that the various open and free licenses are out of the question if you choose to release your work in binary form only. In that case, you are choosing a more restrictive license than the GPL. The GPL is not too restrictive, rather, it is not restrictive enough to suit your needs. Again, your choice of words implied to me that you had missed the essential point: if you are the copyright holder, you have all the rights. If you are not, you have only those rights which are granted by law or by license. A more restrictive license retains more of those rights for the copyright holder.
The reason I used such strong language is that neither copyright law nor the GPL is new. These ideas have been around for a long time now, and I think that a lot of the FUD and confusion which is so prevalent is the result of unclear language, fuzzy definitions and fuzzy thinking.
Getting slightly off the topic of this thread, if our ``intellectual property'' laws were reasonably functional, there would be no good reason not to release source code, since it would then be adequately protected even if published.
That statement is stupidly wrong.
If it is YOUR software, YOU hold the copyright, and YOUR decision to grant me additional rights by letting me have your software under the GPL places no additional restrictions on you. It removes restrictions which copyright law would otherwise have placed on me.
If you are not the copyright holder, then it is NOT your software. You have no right to redistribute the software, and you have no right to distribute derivative works, unless the copyright holder gives you a license, e.g., the GPL or BSD license, which includes those rights.
If I license my software to you under the GPL, I am leaving in place several restrictions imposed by copyright law which the BSD license would remove. These are not restrictions on your software; they are restrictions on your distribution of MY software. If you choose to make a derivative work from my software, the law says that for you to distribute that derivative work is a violation of my copyright. The GPL removes some of those restrictions, and the BSD license removes a few more, but those restrictions are on what you can do with MY work. In this scenario, there is nothing that you have a legal right to distribute, unless that right is granted by license.
I suspect that most of the folks who whinge about the GPL's ``restrictions on their software'' haven't any software of their own, in the sense of being the copyright holder. What they are really saying is that the GPL forbids them to put restrictions on other people's software!
Well, I hate to rain on your parade, but given the Catholic Church's position on contraception, and the fact that ``contraction''s are what force the baby out, I'd say that the Pope does encourage contraction!
I think there is the chance for precedence here, from the judges instructions to the jury
So, the judge's instructions would be binding in other cases? For this to happen, I believe the decision would have to be appealed, on the basis that those particular instructions were somehow right/wrong. Then the decision of the appeals court would be binding, within its jurisdiction.
This is repetition, but it's important, so here's the main point again:
Notice that merely appealing isn't enough: if we want the appeal to rule on that issue, it must be specifically part of the appeal. No appeals court ruling on this, no precedent.
I'm sure that I've made some mistatements by now, but I don't think that they undermine my original point. Since I'm not a lawyer, it would be great if someone who's passed the bar could elaborate on this business of precedents.
The bar exam, that is.
What this decision does do is show the government one way not to prosecute honest programmers and researchers. What it doesn't do is keep them from finding other ways, that will work.
To set a precedent, we need a judge's decision that the DMCA is/is not unenforceable/unconstitutional. That will make the DMCA a settled issue within that judge's jurisdiction. To make it effective nation-wide, it then needs to be appealed to the Supreme court, and upheld there.
That's an excellent point. The whole purpose of our intellectual ``property'' laws is to stop this sort of silly secrecy. Patent requires disclosure, and I believe that copyright requires publication. We give the inventors/authors privileges to restrict the use of their works in order to encourage them to make their work public, not to allow them to more effectively keep secrets!
Yet another bit of evidence to add to the enormous mountain of evidence that our ``IP'' laws need reform.
I think that most academic economists are serious scientists, by this definition. In my limited experience, the ones who are interested mainly in making money for themselves soon get out of academics.
Yes, that's a big job; and, yes, that's nuts. Of course, when you have the source, you don't need binary compatibility!
It is certainly nice that nVidia is going to be making the same sort of effort for us that they make for the several versions of Windows. I realize that they're going to a lot of effort to provide binaries for a few of the distributions that I might use. Have they gotten around to Yellowdog yet?
I'm afraid that I'm not impressed by their effort, though. They have chosen, for their own good reasons, not to let volunteers from the comunity do it for them. This is like walking 20 miles, through the snow, uphill both ways to get to school, when you live next door to the school and the schoolbus would take you free.
So, does this mean that I'll be able to use the nVidia drivers on my non-x86 boxes? Will I be able to recompile the drivers when a new kernel breaks the existing version? Will I be able to recompile the drivers when an oddball, experimental kernel patch breaks them? If there's a bug/missing feature, will I (or my agent, if I care enough to pay out money for this) be able to fix it if nVidia won't do it my way?
No.
Yet another reason to buy, but it still doesn't deal with the same old, tired, but still compelling reasons not to. Sigh ... I still just can't justify buying nVidia. Too bad.
There is a strong correlation between increasing expenditures and decreasing results, if you look at a time series for any random school district. There is no correlation between expenditures and results, if you look at panel data. As H.L. Menken (sp?) said, ``For every problem, there is an answer which is simple, attractive, and wrong.'' I think you've found it for this problem.
The answer here is for parents to demand more of their children, and more of their children's teachers. Given that most public schools are bureaucracies, they'll have to home school.
2. Not everyone needs to get a four year degree. There needs to be many more professional opportunities for people with 2 year degrees. It would increase tax revenue to have a better paid population, and reduce the burden on four year universities who can better use the money on people who need to spend the time in college.
You came so close on this one! Universities shouldn't be training construction managers (Purdue has a four-year program in that!). We need to encourage non-university, non-bachelors-degree education for crafts and trades.
The current system cheats everyone. The crafts and trades people, and the engineers, have to suffer through a lot of distribution requirements which preserve the illusion that they are getting a university education. This means that the classes must be dumbed down to be accessible to the unscholarly and uninterested (notice I didn't say stupid). The result is that the engineers don't get the in-depth techincal education they need, and the scholars don't get the education they need either.
3. Companies that spend a sigifigant portion (~75%) of thier R&D money in Univeristy based Labs would recive an huge tax break. 4. Medical Advancement: Place a 20 blackout on the production of generics and in return drug companies must reduce prices by 75%. New drug prices are high in this country because a company must recoup the billions it spent on R&D in the first 3 years to make any sort of profit, because after 5 it can be made by anyone dirt cheap. This give companies much more capital and incentive to innovate instead of copy what the other guy did and sell it cheaper. 5. Government Funded Hard Science: If we rely only on corperations to fund research, then we are going to be limmited to innovations that will make a profit, and we will be worthless as a civilization.
Are (3) and (5) contradictory? Probably not. On the other hand, given the amount of damage that corporate funding seems to be doing to academic research, your (3) might be counter productive. Finally, (4) is just a re-jiggering of the patent laws, and while it might be a good start, it isn't nearly far-reaching enough.
Furthermore, the US has been subsidising drug development and low drug prices in Canada and Europe by allowing high drug prices here to drive innovation. As long as we're chasing pie in the sky, let's force those socialist free riders to start paying their fair share!