That's a stupid idea. The current system is actually surprisingly decent. You can't possibly lose money from someone stealing a credit card. Either you call the company and disable it or you perform a chargeback. Not to mention most merchants won't ship to anywhere other than your billing address without verification from you, which pretty much makes obtaining merchandise in a fraudulent manner next to impossible.
Your scheme would require hundreds of dollars in hardware in order to buy stuff, and you would have to drag around a card reader with you everywhere (I often make online purchases from random places). I'd say a system like that would pretty much kill off e-commerce. Also, maybe you have smartcards in Europe, but I've yet to see a single smartcard-based credit card here in the US. Virtually all credit cards here are regular magstripes.
Wrong. The program is outputting copyrighted material (images from the GTK theme, for instance). The themes for GNOME have varying copyrights. It would definitely be a good idea (not to mention polite) to get permission before putting copyrighted material in a book. By your argument, copying a Windows binary with cp would remove Microsoft's copyright on it, which is clearly not the case.
I don't think the FSF is irrational; I think people just don't understand what they are about. Their explicit purpose is to advance free software. Open source (in general) is more about standardization than free software, so the FSF often takes the opposite viewpoint.
I pretty much agree with the rest of your point. Standardization, such as making the operating system a commodity, can go a long way. There is no justification for paying fees to a single entity (Microsoft, Sun, IBM, whoever) for a commodity product with zero marginal cost. Clearly, it's in the best interest of many companies to collaborate and share the results. But open source is not necessary for that, this has been done for years using licensing agreements. Obviously, open source has its advantages, but it's certainly not a viable business model for most software.
If you think clients would benefit from having the source, simply license the source along with the binary. This doesn't diminish any of your rights (except maybe trade secrets), and gives you the ability to sell the product and still provide all of the benefits of open source. This has been done for many years before Microsoft and their ilk came around and started selling only binaries.
Well, the problem is that he is dead-sure that open source is the way to go. Here's a quote:
How can I convince an older generation of business leaders that FOSS is the way of the future? Ideally, I would like to help the company setup a internal group that could expedite small internal projects to the market place via FOSS routes.
It doesn't seem like he wants to just give the management information. It seems like he is dead sure that open source is the way to go and assumes the "older generation" of business leaders don't know what they are doing. I'd say he is trying to make the decision instead of simply providing objective information.
Or even simpler: sell the software for $500k, and then sell the support for another $200k a year. Nobody's gotten rich from open source yet, but the former approach is a pretty good way to make money. You think Adobe would have as much money as they do if they gave away all of their products and charged for support? Don't forget that anyone can provide support, it's a very competitive business.
I still don't get why people think open source will be so great for their company. It's like giving away large-screen TVs for free and hoping to make money from people buying extended warranties.
Um, that's a really good way to get fired. If you are a programmer, stick to programming. Don't get into things you know nothing about. You wouldn't want the VP lecturing to you about programming. Don't tell other people how to do their job. You've already suggested the possibility of open sourcing it, and they didn't like that idea. Arguing with top management is not a good career move.
I think his VP is right: open sourcing it doesn't make any sense. In fact, for 90% of the software out there, open source is not the best model as far as ROI is concerned. Unless you have something you want to make into a standard or you have other ways to compete, you won't win anything by open sourcing stuff.
Hate to break it to you, but IT guys don't work near live electrical appliances. That's reserved for those who get to mess with exposed 480V power buses or something (most industrial electrical panels don't have that much in terms of insulation, btw).
It's perfectly legal to discriminate on sexual orientation in the US. Even then, EOE laws only matter when you can prove discrimination in court (which is almost never). And if you do sue and win, guess who is going to get skipped over when job promotions come.
Comfortable employeess == not having to wear a suit and tie. Earrings don't make you more comfortable or more productive. They just make you look stupid.
It's all about projecting a certain image. Tattoos, piercings, and excessive jewelry (especially on males) make an extremely bad first impression. There's a good reason politicians and businessmen never have tattoos, piercings, and almost always wear a suit. I doubt all of them are equally narrow-minded.
Still, 150 grand for half a million cuecats is kinda steep for most people. Plus, that's like a frigging truckload of the damn things. Of course, if you can find 10 thousand people who want cuecats, it's a different story....
You are basically saying that there is some mysterious effect which makes competitions attract investment. It exists to some effect, but that money is quite limited (just try to start up a DARPA GC team). By NASA standards, that amount of money is miniscule. Trust me, nobody will compete in a contest to make a space shuttle replacement if it takes $2 billion to do that (even with a $50 million bounty).
First, you are making too many bad assumptions. What makes you think prizes will always attract 40x the amount of money? What makes you think anyone will attempt anything truly hard (ie. something NASA has trouble doing)? What exactly does NASA get from paying someone to pursue their pet space project? Let's say they funded the X prize. What would they be getting from it? Nothing except negative publicity. Yeah, the billionaires end up giving a few pennies to someone who makes cool toys, but space is much more expensive than $10 million here and there.
Second, you are way off base on your discussion of ROI. The payoff for something like WiMax is measured in months, and Intel isn't even investing too much money in it. Even something like HDTV (which will probably have rather large ROI in the long term) causes companies to drag feet, just because they don't want to spend money now and get a return in 5 years. Nobody will invest billions when there's a 1% chance of a project even paying for itself within 50 years.
I suppose that depends on where you work. IT departments usually aren't bad, but don't pay well at all and seem to fire their best people when they have budget cuts. Academic departments are usually pretty good and have intelligent people there (there aren't too many really stupid professors out there). Administrative departments are probably worse, since they are filled with bureaucrats and politicians. It really depends on the school, though.
Well, that would kind of defeat the point of it being disposable, so it would be a really stupid idea. I'm sure that they aren't losing any money on them at $30 each (+13.00 processing fee if you return it). Not that many people are hackers, you know. I'd be surprised if more than 1000 of those actually got bought by hackers.
Yeah, how about the transistor and about 60% of the stuff they print in EE textbooks these days? I don't think Google's nifty map software or text ads can quite match that.
Yeah, like Intel can just flush all of their know-how and design work down the toilet and design a superfast PPC chip in less than a year. The only reason they are that good at what they do is because they have been working on the x86 for about 30 years now. I don't see them switching over to PPC just for Apple.
Wow. You just said all I wanted to say. I still cannot fathom why the hell they decided to make circuit boards that way, and this crap requires a $50k machine. I mean, making a socket for a DIP package is at the limits of their machine, and the DIP package is already in the process of getting phased out because it is so large!
Also, have you seen the.doc file with the description of the circuit on that robot? It's a perfect example of why mechanical engineers should not try electrical engineering. They have TWO LARGE DC MOTORS hooked up directly to the I/O port of a frigging microcontroller! I'd be surprised if the thing works at all.
Seriously, this would be an outstanding research project for a high school student with access to such a machine. It does not qualify as university-level research at all.
Wrong. As I read it, the only requirement is that you owned the PDA for some time between june 1, 1999 and may 4, 2005. Of course, buying one from Ebay now would technically be fraud, but would be impossible to prove.
This is just stupid. If you bother to read the article, and look at the website, you will see that this is complete BS. First, this robot exists only as an idea. Second, it's a pretty stupid idea.
This is an obvious ploy to get research funding from someone for a fairly pointless project. I've seen lots of these; the best indicator is the talk-to-results ratio. This project has lots of the former, and none of the latter. The GPL is just thrown around because it is a buzzword.
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That's a stupid idea. The current system is actually surprisingly decent. You can't possibly lose money from someone stealing a credit card. Either you call the company and disable it or you perform a chargeback. Not to mention most merchants won't ship to anywhere other than your billing address without verification from you, which pretty much makes obtaining merchandise in a fraudulent manner next to impossible.
Your scheme would require hundreds of dollars in hardware in order to buy stuff, and you would have to drag around a card reader with you everywhere (I often make online purchases from random places). I'd say a system like that would pretty much kill off e-commerce. Also, maybe you have smartcards in Europe, but I've yet to see a single smartcard-based credit card here in the US. Virtually all credit cards here are regular magstripes.
Wrong. The program is outputting copyrighted material (images from the GTK theme, for instance). The themes for GNOME have varying copyrights. It would definitely be a good idea (not to mention polite) to get permission before putting copyrighted material in a book. By your argument, copying a Windows binary with cp would remove Microsoft's copyright on it, which is clearly not the case.
I don't think the FSF is irrational; I think people just don't understand what they are about. Their explicit purpose is to advance free software. Open source (in general) is more about standardization than free software, so the FSF often takes the opposite viewpoint.
I pretty much agree with the rest of your point. Standardization, such as making the operating system a commodity, can go a long way. There is no justification for paying fees to a single entity (Microsoft, Sun, IBM, whoever) for a commodity product with zero marginal cost. Clearly, it's in the best interest of many companies to collaborate and share the results. But open source is not necessary for that, this has been done for years using licensing agreements. Obviously, open source has its advantages, but it's certainly not a viable business model for most software.
If you think clients would benefit from having the source, simply license the source along with the binary. This doesn't diminish any of your rights (except maybe trade secrets), and gives you the ability to sell the product and still provide all of the benefits of open source. This has been done for many years before Microsoft and their ilk came around and started selling only binaries.
Well, the problem is that he is dead-sure that open source is the way to go. Here's a quote:
How can I convince an older generation of business leaders that FOSS is the way of the future? Ideally, I would like to help the company setup a internal group that could expedite small internal projects to the market place via FOSS routes.
It doesn't seem like he wants to just give the management information. It seems like he is dead sure that open source is the way to go and assumes the "older generation" of business leaders don't know what they are doing. I'd say he is trying to make the decision instead of simply providing objective information.
Or even simpler: sell the software for $500k, and then sell the support for another $200k a year. Nobody's gotten rich from open source yet, but the former approach is a pretty good way to make money. You think Adobe would have as much money as they do if they gave away all of their products and charged for support? Don't forget that anyone can provide support, it's a very competitive business.
I still don't get why people think open source will be so great for their company. It's like giving away large-screen TVs for free and hoping to make money from people buying extended warranties.
Um, that's a really good way to get fired. If you are a programmer, stick to programming. Don't get into things you know nothing about. You wouldn't want the VP lecturing to you about programming. Don't tell other people how to do their job. You've already suggested the possibility of open sourcing it, and they didn't like that idea. Arguing with top management is not a good career move.
I think his VP is right: open sourcing it doesn't make any sense. In fact, for 90% of the software out there, open source is not the best model as far as ROI is concerned. Unless you have something you want to make into a standard or you have other ways to compete, you won't win anything by open sourcing stuff.
I don't advocate anything. I'm just pointing out the facts.
Hate to break it to you, but IT guys don't work near live electrical appliances. That's reserved for those who get to mess with exposed 480V power buses or something (most industrial electrical panels don't have that much in terms of insulation, btw).
It's perfectly legal to discriminate on sexual orientation in the US. Even then, EOE laws only matter when you can prove discrimination in court (which is almost never). And if you do sue and win, guess who is going to get skipped over when job promotions come.
Comfortable employeess == not having to wear a suit and tie. Earrings don't make you more comfortable or more productive. They just make you look stupid.
It's all about projecting a certain image. Tattoos, piercings, and excessive jewelry (especially on males) make an extremely bad first impression. There's a good reason politicians and businessmen never have tattoos, piercings, and almost always wear a suit. I doubt all of them are equally narrow-minded.
Still, 150 grand for half a million cuecats is kinda steep for most people. Plus, that's like a frigging truckload of the damn things. Of course, if you can find 10 thousand people who want cuecats, it's a different story....
You are basically saying that there is some mysterious effect which makes competitions attract investment. It exists to some effect, but that money is quite limited (just try to start up a DARPA GC team). By NASA standards, that amount of money is miniscule. Trust me, nobody will compete in a contest to make a space shuttle replacement if it takes $2 billion to do that (even with a $50 million bounty).
First, you are making too many bad assumptions. What makes you think prizes will always attract 40x the amount of money? What makes you think anyone will attempt anything truly hard (ie. something NASA has trouble doing)? What exactly does NASA get from paying someone to pursue their pet space project? Let's say they funded the X prize. What would they be getting from it? Nothing except negative publicity. Yeah, the billionaires end up giving a few pennies to someone who makes cool toys, but space is much more expensive than $10 million here and there.
Second, you are way off base on your discussion of ROI. The payoff for something like WiMax is measured in months, and Intel isn't even investing too much money in it. Even something like HDTV (which will probably have rather large ROI in the long term) causes companies to drag feet, just because they don't want to spend money now and get a return in 5 years. Nobody will invest billions when there's a 1% chance of a project even paying for itself within 50 years.
Heh. I think that your attitude is part of the problem here. If you try to piss people off, they will try to piss you off too.
I suppose that depends on where you work. IT departments usually aren't bad, but don't pay well at all and seem to fire their best people when they have budget cuts. Academic departments are usually pretty good and have intelligent people there (there aren't too many really stupid professors out there). Administrative departments are probably worse, since they are filled with bureaucrats and politicians. It really depends on the school, though.
Well, that would kind of defeat the point of it being disposable, so it would be a really stupid idea. I'm sure that they aren't losing any money on them at $30 each (+13.00 processing fee if you return it). Not that many people are hackers, you know. I'd be surprised if more than 1000 of those actually got bought by hackers.
Yeah, how about the transistor and about 60% of the stuff they print in EE textbooks these days? I don't think Google's nifty map software or text ads can quite match that.
Yeah, like Intel can just flush all of their know-how and design work down the toilet and design a superfast PPC chip in less than a year. The only reason they are that good at what they do is because they have been working on the x86 for about 30 years now. I don't see them switching over to PPC just for Apple.
No, it's called crapflooding.
Wow. You just said all I wanted to say. I still cannot fathom why the hell they decided to make circuit boards that way, and this crap requires a $50k machine. I mean, making a socket for a DIP package is at the limits of their machine, and the DIP package is already in the process of getting phased out because it is so large!
.doc file with the description of the circuit on that robot? It's a perfect example of why mechanical engineers should not try electrical engineering. They have TWO LARGE DC MOTORS hooked up directly to the I/O port of a frigging microcontroller! I'd be surprised if the thing works at all.
Also, have you seen the
Seriously, this would be an outstanding research project for a high school student with access to such a machine. It does not qualify as university-level research at all.
Actually, this would screw you over. This lawsuit only covers bad capacitors, and all m100s are out of warranty now.
Wrong. As I read it, the only requirement is that you owned the PDA for some time between june 1, 1999 and may 4, 2005. Of course, buying one from Ebay now would technically be fraud, but would be impossible to prove.
This is just stupid. If you bother to read the article, and look at the website, you will see that this is complete BS. First, this robot exists only as an idea. Second, it's a pretty stupid idea.
This is an obvious ploy to get research funding from someone for a fairly pointless project. I've seen lots of these; the best indicator is the talk-to-results ratio. This project has lots of the former, and none of the latter. The GPL is just thrown around because it is a buzzword.