You can't rely on objective factors to compare something that is inherently subjective. The human brain doesn't look at chrominance distortion numbers, it looks at the picture. Psychological factors play a big part in any lossy compression algorithm, so the only good way to test a video codec's quality is to look at it and see if it looks better than another codec.
OK, think about it. You and I have equal amounts of money. I spend half of my money developing the GPU, and half developing drivers, and release them as open-source. You spend 80% developing the GPU, and 20% developing the drivers because you can use whatever optimization techniques you found in my drivers to save a bunch of money. You will have a better GPU and probably better drivers. Therefore, is it to my advantage to release drivers as open-source?
Anyone can use it my ass. For home desktop-type use with no system administrator, maybe you're right. Even then, people generally don't know how to fix things when they break. For workstations, I would argue that a well-configured Linux system (with actual sysadmins running the show) is far superior to whatever can be done with Windows. For servers - certainly so.
At my rather large university, they have a big Exchange installation. They have Microsoft's own engineers supporting it, and it still goes down all the time. Once, the whole mail system went down for an entire week due to a bug in Exchange. It's a major expense and a pain in the ass for the IT department. In contrast, the UNIX mainframe that used to run the same mail system never had a single problem. This is kind of the point of this article.
That is not so for NVidia's video cards, however. They say that the driver is just as important as the GPU chip, and an open-source driver would give competitors a definite advantage. I am sure they would steal whatever source they wanted, since it's pretty much impossible to recognize small pieces of source code after it has been compiled.
Unless you want to be on-call 24 hours a day for the life of your basement webhosting business, I think you better let professionals handle it. After all, half the point of using someone like EV1 is to have someone else fix things when they break.
SCO is not disputing the GPL. They may be saying nasty things about it, but so what? A dispute over a license can take place in just one place -- a court. So far, they have sued IBM for an alleged contract violation, Autozone for an alleged copyright violation involving Unixware code, and DaimlerChrysler for a contract violation. Don't see the GPL involved anywhere.
Sure, so would I. But at the same time, that's not exactly web development, it's more application development with a web-based interface. As I always understood it, web development == developing a web site.
I could get into how difficult it is to design an interface to be used by people who don't even know what interface means, to implement a good custom search facility, to smartly generate dynamic content and the like, but it would probably be lost on the likes of you.
I didn't write that. That was a quote from the parent article. The closing tag got screwed up in my comment.
A "real" programmer is under your def someone who rights code not on the internet.
Not necessarily. It's just that most web development doesn't involve programming. For instance, something like Mapquest, eBay, Hotmail, or Google takes real programmers.
HTML programming may not be all that impressive but perl/php are similar to c++. You could even use c++ at times.
Simply knowing English does not make you a writer, and simply knowing C++ does not make you a programmer. They are just languages, and there is much more to both writing and programming than knowing the language.
A university computer science program involves at most one or two introductory classes where you actually practice writing C++ or whatever. The rest of it is much more involved.
Dynamic content huh? Have you even programmed a forum? It's not a simple task.
Yes I did. It's not exactly a trivial task, but it takes almost no design, just a lot of implementation. Especially if it's like every forum script I've seen, none of which are too scalable or well-thought-out. Generally, it's something along the lines of "let's store everything inside a few MySQL tables and hope it's fast enough." And then you get a site that begins to crap out when you have more than 50 simultaneous users.
It's certainly not extortion. It may be fraud. Depends on the nature of the bill, and the nature of the agreement.
I don't think there is any dispute as to the nature of the agreement. The guy volunteered to host and maintain the site in exchange for free publicity. Then he decided to stop doing so. But instead of handing the site and the domain over to the police department, he decided to try to shake money out of them. That certainly sounds believable, and the department's reaction is quite understandable.
Don't trust the media to get all the facts right. they tend to make small mistakes, and mishear things, and write what they think happened rather than what actually happened.
Sure, I take what the media says with a grain of salt. However, I would not believe a word a con artist says about him not being guilty when there is considerable evidence to the contrary.
In other words: while the newspaper could have written an article about him being prosecuted unjustly, there is no way in hell he would imply that he is guilty on his website.
Among my duties were: DB administration, network administration, DB design, DB implementation, server administration, site design, and PERL coding.
Very impressive. I'm sure your degree in computer technology from DeVry or ITT helped a lot. Let's break that down:
DB administration - installing MySQL on a Redhat box from RPM and editing the configuration file. A challenging job for a 12 year old. network administration - it's so difficult to figure out how to connect an ethernet network together that they sell network-in-a-box kits at wal-mart these days DB design - Yes, it's very difficult to break things down into tables and to choose an appropriate data type. I'm impressed by your mad skillz. DB implementation - writing a SELECT query is so hard only a trained secretary could do it. server administration - it sure as hell takes knowledge and experience to hit RESET when the redhat box crashes and to use webmin when it works. site design - only a seasoned professional can write HTML, aside from a chimpanzee. PERL coding - OH NO NOT PERL CODING!!! That's so impossibly hard that it actually involves reading one of those "learn ____ in 24 hours" books.
I could get into how difficult it is to design an interface to be used by people who don't even know what interface means, to implement a good custom search facility, to smartly generate dynamic content and the like, but it would probably be lost on the likes of you.
You could get into that, or you could realize that a real programmer does things that are 10 to 100 times more complex as part of their everyday job. Writing a search routine for a small website seems hard until you try writing something as simple as a Tetris clone.
First of all, in what way is web development not programming? Is C#, PHP, Perl, etc not code?
Simply writing code is not always programming. An actual programmer is an individual with a computer science degree or equivalent experience. A programmer should be able to do things like analyze algorithms for efficiency, know about various data structures and what they are, and know how to analyze a large and complex problem.
Web development does not require those skills. Even if you write scripts in ASP, PHP, or Perl, it isn't necessarily programming. Usually, those scripts consist of very basic logic and don't do much more than spit out HTML from a database, parse input data, and put it back into a database. To call that programming is a stretch.
Of course, if you are developing something like Mapquest, Hotmail, or Google, it would involve actual programmers, but someone who develops websites with PHPNuke is not a programmer, just like someone who installs switches and outlets is not an electrical engineer.
it boils down simply to "he provided a service, sent a bill, bill went unpaid, he stopped providing the service".
Wrong. If I volunteer to do work for you for free, and then send you a bill for it, that is fraud and/or extortion.
Also, RTFA (in particular, the second link).
The second link is biased, because that's his own website. The first link (which goes to a somewhat unbiased newspaper) clearly says he asked for $300K.
It's highly unlikely that he worked full time on it. Even if he did, let's see: $50k for 3 years for a webmonkey: $150k (actually that's WAY TOO MUCH for a webmonkey. You could hire a real programmer for that much.) Dedicated hosting for $100/month: $100*36 = $3600. That's also way too much for a site that only gets 3.5 million hits a month (i.e. about 3,000 unique visitors a month). Total: $153,600. He asked for twice that.
And yes, this IS relevant. If he asked the county for $50/month to cover hosting expenses, it would have been a reasonable offer. Asking for $300K is extortion.
He contends that he did not ask for his initial investment back.
Good job reading the article, buddy. Here is a relevant quote:
Richard then demanded $300,000 of taxpayer dollars from the county. Richard said the money would offset the huge expense of running the Web site for the 33 months.
Let's see, how is that not asking for his investment back? Yes, I know, his own website says he didn't ask for money. And according to Philip Morris, smoking is good for your health.
Also, if I choose to provide you a service for free, and I tell you I'm going to stop providing you my volunteer work unless I get compensated, to call that extortion is ridiculous.
Correct. But he didn't just stop providing service, he threatened to cut it off unless he got paid an obscene sum of money. That's extortion.
You don't see greedy/selfish people work selflessly for 3 years with no return on investment.
Why don't you look at the website in archive.org? It looked like a piece of shit. Besides, even if he worked full-time on that POS for 3 years, $100K/year is not the going rate for a web designer.
Also, how the hell can you donate something and then ask for money back? What the guy did is regular extortion. Go read up on it sometime.
And because he mentioned that he needed to be paid to keep it open, that's extortion.
No, he agreed to host it for free. Then, as soon as it became popular (and the cops came to rely on it), he started saying that he will shut it down unless they pay him an obscene amount of money. If he offered a reasonable price or offered to hand over the website to the department, he would be all right. That's not what he did, however.
Care to give some reason why that statement isn't just a shovelfull from the dung pile?
Nobody will try disputing an obviously bulletproof contract. It's a waste of time, and you aren't going to win. OTOH, if a contract is poorly worded, there might be disputes as to meanings and it would see the inside of a courtroom much more often.
An example: you steal my GPL program and incorporate it into a proprietary program. I catch you doing that. Are you going to want to go to court, dispute the lawfulness of the GPL, and face large fines in the process, or would you rather settle on the spot?
In my experience, the computer simplifies repairs. If you have a dead oxygen sensor, it will tell you that it has a dead oxygen sensor. 30 minute repair job. If your mechanical carburetor is misadjusted or clogged, you have to check about a million other things and then take the thing to all of its 100,000 pieces and rebuild it. And then it turns out it was something else.
Besides, I don't think the computer will be much of a problem if you happen to have a nuke explode near your car.
Good luck proving actual damages because of such a violation. After all, the author would not see one extra penny if they fully complied with the license. You might get some punitive damages, but even that's unlikely. The GPL imposes more restrictions and you could argue that the violations were more serious and caused actual damages. IANAL of course.
Actually, I think you are trolling. Most licenses have not been "tested" in a court of law, and they don't need to be "tested" to be perfectly good. In fact, a license that has never been disputed is probably stronger than one that has been challenged in court. I don't see too many people saying that Microsoft's EULA is unenforceable, because it clearly is. That license imposes many more restrictions on end-users than the GPL or any free software license does, so it would be much more vulnerable. Yet nobody challenged it so far.
Besides, the AT&T case had nothing to do with the BSD license and everything to do with the fact that AT&T failed to properly register its copyrights (a procedure that's no longer necessary).
Fighting a BSD license violation is pointless because you are unlikely to win any money. Perhaps you should license your program under the (L)GPL next time, then you would actually have a case.
Not only that, but you can go on their website, input your car model and zipcode, and it will show you what parts are in stock at your local store. You can order them right then and there and go to the store to pick them up.
Very few programs have any commercial value. In fact, there isn't a single commercially viable program that was written entirely by a single individual.
If you think you can make more money writing shareware or something in your free time, more power to you. But I would suggest getting with the program, it isn't 1988.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't rely on objective factors to compare something that is inherently subjective. The human brain doesn't look at chrominance distortion numbers, it looks at the picture. Psychological factors play a big part in any lossy compression algorithm, so the only good way to test a video codec's quality is to look at it and see if it looks better than another codec.
OK, think about it. You and I have equal amounts of money. I spend half of my money developing the GPU, and half developing drivers, and release them as open-source. You spend 80% developing the GPU, and 20% developing the drivers because you can use whatever optimization techniques you found in my drivers to save a bunch of money. You will have a better GPU and probably better drivers. Therefore, is it to my advantage to release drivers as open-source?
Anyone can use it my ass. For home desktop-type use with no system administrator, maybe you're right. Even then, people generally don't know how to fix things when they break. For workstations, I would argue that a well-configured Linux system (with actual sysadmins running the show) is far superior to whatever can be done with Windows. For servers - certainly so.
At my rather large university, they have a big Exchange installation. They have Microsoft's own engineers supporting it, and it still goes down all the time. Once, the whole mail system went down for an entire week due to a bug in Exchange. It's a major expense and a pain in the ass for the IT department. In contrast, the UNIX mainframe that used to run the same mail system never had a single problem. This is kind of the point of this article.
That is not so for NVidia's video cards, however. They say that the driver is just as important as the GPU chip, and an open-source driver would give competitors a definite advantage. I am sure they would steal whatever source they wanted, since it's pretty much impossible to recognize small pieces of source code after it has been compiled.
Unless you want to be on-call 24 hours a day for the life of your basement webhosting business, I think you better let professionals handle it. After all, half the point of using someone like EV1 is to have someone else fix things when they break.
SCO is not disputing the GPL. They may be saying nasty things about it, but so what? A dispute over a license can take place in just one place -- a court. So far, they have sued IBM for an alleged contract violation, Autozone for an alleged copyright violation involving Unixware code, and DaimlerChrysler for a contract violation. Don't see the GPL involved anywhere.
Yeah, I'd call that programming.
Sure, so would I. But at the same time, that's not exactly web development, it's more application development with a web-based interface. As I always understood it, web development == developing a web site.
I could get into how difficult it is to design an interface to be used by people who don't even know what interface means, to implement a good custom search facility, to smartly generate dynamic content and the like, but it would probably be lost on the likes of you.
I didn't write that. That was a quote from the parent article. The closing tag got screwed up in my comment.
A "real" programmer is under your def someone who rights code not on the internet.
Not necessarily. It's just that most web development doesn't involve programming. For instance, something like Mapquest, eBay, Hotmail, or Google takes real programmers.
HTML programming may not be all that impressive but perl/php are similar to c++. You could even use c++ at times.
Simply knowing English does not make you a writer, and simply knowing C++ does not make you a programmer. They are just languages, and there is much more to both writing and programming than knowing the language.
A university computer science program involves at most one or two introductory classes where you actually practice writing C++ or whatever. The rest of it is much more involved.
Dynamic content huh? Have you even programmed a forum? It's not a simple task.
Yes I did. It's not exactly a trivial task, but it takes almost no design, just a lot of implementation. Especially if it's like every forum script I've seen, none of which are too scalable or well-thought-out. Generally, it's something along the lines of "let's store everything inside a few MySQL tables and hope it's fast enough." And then you get a site that begins to crap out when you have more than 50 simultaneous users.
It's certainly not extortion. It may be fraud. Depends on the nature of the bill, and the nature of the agreement.
I don't think there is any dispute as to the nature of the agreement. The guy volunteered to host and maintain the site in exchange for free publicity. Then he decided to stop doing so. But instead of handing the site and the domain over to the police department, he decided to try to shake money out of them. That certainly sounds believable, and the department's reaction is quite understandable.
Don't trust the media to get all the facts right. they tend to make small mistakes, and mishear things, and write what they think happened rather than what actually happened.
Sure, I take what the media says with a grain of salt. However, I would not believe a word a con artist says about him not being guilty when there is considerable evidence to the contrary.
In other words: while the newspaper could have written an article about him being prosecuted unjustly, there is no way in hell he would imply that he is guilty on his website.
Among my duties were: DB administration, network administration, DB design, DB implementation, server administration, site design, and PERL coding.
Very impressive. I'm sure your degree in computer technology from DeVry or ITT helped a lot. Let's break that down:
DB administration - installing MySQL on a Redhat box from RPM and editing the configuration file. A challenging job for a 12 year old.
network administration - it's so difficult to figure out how to connect an ethernet network together that they sell network-in-a-box kits at wal-mart these days
DB design - Yes, it's very difficult to break things down into tables and to choose an appropriate data type. I'm impressed by your mad skillz.
DB implementation - writing a SELECT query is so hard only a trained secretary could do it.
server administration - it sure as hell takes knowledge and experience to hit RESET when the redhat box crashes and to use webmin when it works.
site design - only a seasoned professional can write HTML, aside from a chimpanzee.
PERL coding - OH NO NOT PERL CODING!!! That's so impossibly hard that it actually involves reading one of those "learn ____ in 24 hours" books.
I could get into how difficult it is to design an interface to be used by people who don't even know what interface means, to implement a good custom search facility, to smartly generate dynamic content and the like, but it would probably be lost on the likes of you.
You could get into that, or you could realize that a real programmer does things that are 10 to 100 times more complex as part of their everyday job. Writing a search routine for a small website seems hard until you try writing something as simple as a Tetris clone.
First of all, in what way is web development not programming? Is C#, PHP, Perl, etc not code?
Simply writing code is not always programming. An actual programmer is an individual with a computer science degree or equivalent experience. A programmer should be able to do things like analyze algorithms for efficiency, know about various data structures and what they are, and know how to analyze a large and complex problem.
Web development does not require those skills. Even if you write scripts in ASP, PHP, or Perl, it isn't necessarily programming. Usually, those scripts consist of very basic logic and don't do much more than spit out HTML from a database, parse input data, and put it back into a database. To call that programming is a stretch.
Of course, if you are developing something like Mapquest, Hotmail, or Google, it would involve actual programmers, but someone who develops websites with PHPNuke is not a programmer, just like someone who installs switches and outlets is not an electrical engineer.
it boils down simply to "he provided a service, sent a bill, bill went unpaid, he stopped providing the service".
Wrong. If I volunteer to do work for you for free, and then send you a bill for it, that is fraud and/or extortion.
Also, RTFA (in particular, the second link).
The second link is biased, because that's his own website. The first link (which goes to a somewhat unbiased newspaper) clearly says he asked for $300K.
Full time + hardware/hosting costs.
It's highly unlikely that he worked full time on it. Even if he did, let's see:
$50k for 3 years for a webmonkey: $150k (actually that's WAY TOO MUCH for a webmonkey. You could hire a real programmer for that much.)
Dedicated hosting for $100/month: $100*36 = $3600.
That's also way too much for a site that only gets 3.5 million hits a month (i.e. about 3,000 unique visitors a month).
Total: $153,600. He asked for twice that.
And yes, this IS relevant. If he asked the county for $50/month to cover hosting expenses, it would have been a reasonable offer. Asking for $300K is extortion.
He contends that he did not ask for his initial investment back.
Good job reading the article, buddy. Here is a relevant quote:
Richard then demanded $300,000 of taxpayer dollars from the county. Richard said the money would offset the huge expense of running the Web site for the 33 months.
Let's see, how is that not asking for his investment back? Yes, I know, his own website says he didn't ask for money. And according to Philip Morris, smoking is good for your health.
Also, if I choose to provide you a service for free, and I tell you I'm going to stop providing you my volunteer work unless I get compensated, to call that extortion is ridiculous.
Correct. But he didn't just stop providing service, he threatened to cut it off unless he got paid an obscene sum of money. That's extortion.
You don't see greedy/selfish people work selflessly for 3 years with no return on investment.
Why don't you look at the website in archive.org? It looked like a piece of shit. Besides, even if he worked full-time on that POS for 3 years, $100K/year is not the going rate for a web designer.
Also, how the hell can you donate something and then ask for money back? What the guy did is regular extortion. Go read up on it sometime.
And because he mentioned that he needed to be paid to keep it open, that's extortion.
No, he agreed to host it for free. Then, as soon as it became popular (and the cops came to rely on it), he started saying that he will shut it down unless they pay him an obscene amount of money. If he offered a reasonable price or offered to hand over the website to the department, he would be all right. That's not what he did, however.
Fedora blows ass.
Care to give some reason why that statement isn't just a shovelfull from the dung pile?
Nobody will try disputing an obviously bulletproof contract. It's a waste of time, and you aren't going to win. OTOH, if a contract is poorly worded, there might be disputes as to meanings and it would see the inside of a courtroom much more often.
An example: you steal my GPL program and incorporate it into a proprietary program. I catch you doing that. Are you going to want to go to court, dispute the lawfulness of the GPL, and face large fines in the process, or would you rather settle on the spot?
In my experience, the computer simplifies repairs. If you have a dead oxygen sensor, it will tell you that it has a dead oxygen sensor. 30 minute repair job. If your mechanical carburetor is misadjusted or clogged, you have to check about a million other things and then take the thing to all of its 100,000 pieces and rebuild it. And then it turns out it was something else.
Besides, I don't think the computer will be much of a problem if you happen to have a nuke explode near your car.
Master cylinder replacement ensues in 3...2...1...
Good luck proving actual damages because of such a violation. After all, the author would not see one extra penny if they fully complied with the license. You might get some punitive damages, but even that's unlikely. The GPL imposes more restrictions and you could argue that the violations were more serious and caused actual damages. IANAL of course.
Actually, I think you are trolling. Most licenses have not been "tested" in a court of law, and they don't need to be "tested" to be perfectly good. In fact, a license that has never been disputed is probably stronger than one that has been challenged in court. I don't see too many people saying that Microsoft's EULA is unenforceable, because it clearly is. That license imposes many more restrictions on end-users than the GPL or any free software license does, so it would be much more vulnerable. Yet nobody challenged it so far.
Besides, the AT&T case had nothing to do with the BSD license and everything to do with the fact that AT&T failed to properly register its copyrights (a procedure that's no longer necessary).
Fighting a BSD license violation is pointless because you are unlikely to win any money. Perhaps you should license your program under the (L)GPL next time, then you would actually have a case.
Ummm... that takes resources and doesn't stop frivolous lawsuits. Your best bet of fighting off frivolous lawsuits is in court.
Not only that, but you can go on their website, input your car model and zipcode, and it will show you what parts are in stock at your local store. You can order them right then and there and go to the store to pick them up.
Very few programs have any commercial value. In fact, there isn't a single commercially viable program that was written entirely by a single individual.
If you think you can make more money writing shareware or something in your free time, more power to you. But I would suggest getting with the program, it isn't 1988.