I just got done installing dotproject open-source groupware for Opera Columbus. After some tough negotitation, I won the contract (no contract really, they just hired me). They already have hosting with another provider. The provider wanted X to developed web-based project management; I serisouly undercut them with an application suite that was already ready. I had to do some user training, but that's about it for the hard part.
What I recommend is taking very little of your $1000, buy some cheap web hosting, and setting up some open source groupware. Spend a little bit more of that $1000 on printing manuals or throwing together a nice presentation -- charts and graphs, with binders, etc. Physical things, such as paper, will show people that you have an investment in what you are doing, and aren't just talking. They will have it to refer to later when they can't remember what you said. It shows stability and lastingness, that you will be there.
Be selective with the open sources packages, find the stuff that's 1. finished, 2. polished, and 3. easy to use for a non-techie. I highly recommend dotproject; the only problem is that it lacks printing.
Then, setup free demo accounts for users. Give them 30 or 60 day trials. Expect to spend some time training. Offer to do the initial setup, such as user accounts, etc. The people who use it and like it will gladly pay for the setup.
You can charge either 1. recurring fees for stuff you host. If you chose this, be prepared to go the extra mile for support when the thing crashes in the middle of the night. - or - 2. a larger, one-time setup fee for setting it up on their hosting providers. Be sure to specify rates for future support of the application if you do a 1x set up fee. Here is where you clean up when they need you.
Pick a minimum price you want, and always present something higher. That gives you room to negotiate. Geeks hate negotitaion, business people love it. Be prepared for it. Be prepared to walk away from deals where they want too much; those people are users and they will expect you to work for them 24/7 for way too little money. It's just not worth it.
I think I see better where your coming from now. But I think if you are unhappy with clones of Outlook, you should try to figure out specifically what about it you don't like, and let people know. Maybe design a skin? Most geeks I now adopt the attitude, "If there are no complaints, users/customers are happy with it". If you see your favorite mail app evolving into an Outlook clone, you best speak up against it, and when you do, have an alternative path ready. You are giving silent support to Outlook cloning.
Me personally, I would like to see automatic, dynamic folder creation -- by sender, by subject, by date, etc. Also I would like to see automatic conversation threading. But I heard these features are in the upcoming version ot Outlook;)
There's a difference here. If you report a bug, you've told the maintainers "Here's the problem, here's how it should work". So now the maintainers know what to do, and they do it.
The problem here is that that you don't know what you want (or if you do, you're not telling us). "Something better" "Something different" -- what is that, exactly? Open source developers are not mind readers. They can't fix it if you don't tell them what's wrong. So far, you have not said what's wrong, nor how to fix it. The only thing you've said it "I don't like it", but you fail to say why. So, big surprise that no one has come up with something that pleases you.
I suggest instead of complaining, you sit down and figure out what the problem is, come up with a solution, and then let a developer know about it.
Well, if you are the one who wants it, then I concur that you should come up with it. This isyour project. I'm certain that other people can come up with something better, but why are your wants their project? If you're not part of the solution, your part of the problem, so shut your hole. The least you can do is brainstorm and think of something, draw a GUI mockup, etc.
" Why do all the open source email clients look exactly like Outlook? I've never particularily liked that view of email. Can't anyone think of anything better?"
Please entreat us, good sir! We are all ears - er, eyes!
If you are the one who doesn't like it, yet you can't come up with anything better, what makes you think that anyone else can/will?
IANAAE; that's an ill-informed theory, not a joke. But, if you have the mono-channel instrumental extraction of a stereo source (i.e. "the middle cut out"), then couldn't you invert it and mix it with a mono-channel version of the original stereo source and then lose what you heard in the extraction?
I did some experiments with the wave file sequencer Acid and found that I could easily extract loops I had mixed in with other loops. I could easily get back each original loop by adding the inverse -- in fact here's the whole experiment:
I had 3 samples: drums, synth, and vocals. I made a single wave file track that was 4 bars drums, 4 bars drums + synth, and 4 bars drums + synth + vocals. I took that track and mixed the inverted drum loop in and I got 4 bars silence, 4 bars synth, and then 4 bars synth + vocals. I assumed that I could then pull out the synth loop (since it was then alone), and invert it to extract the vocals. Then I thought that I didn't need any of the original samples; If I had only the song, I could start with a bar of drums, cut it just right, and invert it, and then pull every loop from the song.
So what's the difference between my experiment and mixing these stereo sources? I'm eager to know!:)
And, in a loser pays situation, how can someone have "VASTLY SUPERIOR legal resources"? If SomeCorp can spend $5 million on their lawyers, you can spend $5 million on your lawyers. You're going to win. They're going to pay your legal bills.
If you don't have $5 million, you can't hire a $5 million legal team. You have to pay up front. If you are the winner, then the loser will reimburse you for your legal expenses. Someone can have VASTLY SUPERIOR legal resources because they have VASTLY MORE MONEY THAN YOU. Just because SomeCorp wronged me and they can spend $5 million on there legal team doesn't mean I'm going to get a visit from the Federal Reserve Note Fairy and find bricks of cash underneath my pillow in the morning. I will still only have $2 for my lawyer[s], and that's all SomeCorp will have to pay when they lose the case.
I think that yes, technology is inherently stressful. Here's why: Our brains evolved on the plains of Africa, and they've changed little since. Our brains developed to process fractal and fluidic shapes such as grasses, trees, clouds, mountains and streams. We find these things inherently beatiful. They indicate food and raw materials from which to fashion a living. More broadly they denote health and growth.
Now that we live in cities, our visual system is deprived of much of the 'beatiful' input. Instead we have geometric shapes, which architecture employs to make buildings that don't fall down. (Remember when fractals first hit popular media? Eveyone was all 'ooh aah' -- even when you see one for the 100th time, it still has this intriguing beauty. Geomtric shapes don't have this.)
Also, our soundscape has radically changed. Instead of forest voices, we hear whirs and hums of machines. I know personally that my stress level drops immediately when I turn of the computer that has loud fans.
Long story short, our evolution in Africa created brains that was attracted to certain things, and sought them out, becuase they helped us survive. We are deprived of that stimulation these days.
Now, I'm not saying we all need to go back to living in caves, but maybe as a start, we could have more plants in homes, or trees in cities. Perhaps use fractal shapes in our architecture -- an interesting person to look at is the artist Hundertwasser. He drew pictures and designed models of buildings that had a natural appeal. They were based on wavy shapes, not geometric.
This is different. Google has won the search engine wars. It's not up for grabs anymore. This means that people will seek out google on their fresh-from-the-showroom pc, no matter what Microsoft has plopped in front of them. The only way MS can get them to switch now is to provide something better than google. Unlikely, IMHO.
If MS is forced to sell XPLite or whatever, all that will happen is that MS spends a negligible amount to disable some features in Win XP, make sure it is on the shelves for a while, and then retire it. Is there a requirement to have this as an option on new OEM computers? Will computers that come with XP Lite installed be cheaper? I doubt it.
Seriously. No one will buy this.
It won't hurt MS one bit. They will jump at the first chance to get rid of this product. The question then becomes, how long can the courts force MS to make a product available, when no one is buying it? More importantly, why? Will it really address the issues?
An anonymous reader? Hah! I've traced the pirate back to the ip 234.4.119.181! So much for slashdot anonymity! Which just goes to show... You should have used FreeNet[tm].
You were using those commands on a win32 environment? Running cygwin, or what?
Do those commands have Aida's 28000 component library so you know what the thing actually is, or do they just tell you the chips on the bus? Do they show you the event log and software installations?
So, yes, you should fell a little stupid, esp. after you try it.;)
What if you want to print your ownmoney (i.e.i, not copies of other money)? Many organizations and artists do this, using patterns found in typical national currencies. Would anti-counterfeiting software interfere with this totally legal activity?
Aida32 is a great windows-based system information application. It's wonderfully complete --- I've used it countless times to find drivers for those 'unknown devices' (modems, sound cards, network cards) that windows can't recognize, and that I didn't want to take out of the machine. However, it doesn't really do diagnostics, such as checking memory or serial ports.
Free for personal use, businesses must register. Well worth it.
Well, you correctly identified the agent, which was 'he'. It seems to me that the ambiguity of the sentence is not that great. Actually, I bet if we did a study, most American English speakers would agree with you. God bless science!
Most modern linguists would disagree with you. Yes it's true, different langauges order their sentences differently. Japanese goes Object - Verb - Subject while English goes Subject - Verb - Object. Finnish has postpositions and English has prepositions. But the reigning idea in linguistics is that languages are 'functionally equivalent' -- that all languages are equally capable of expressing any idea that one language is capable of expressing. Now maybe an Arabian goat herder doesn't have the background to understand American Football rules, but that doesn't mean that Arabic creates a totally different thought mode in its users.
I don't think most linguists would agree with you. For your "he dropped to the ground", I think most native American English speakers would assume it to mean that he fell, from a failure of his own balance. English typically uses the passive voice when it's not necessary to specify the agent. In this case, I think the average speaker would assume that the agent was "he". Certainly it's not specified in the statement you give, but human language relies on an immense amount of shared assumption.
So a buch of cave guys played skull bashing games. What does this have to do with mating? My guess is that while 'the guys' were off in the woods, spanking each other, chanting "thank you sir, may I have another?!", the smart, sensitive caveguys had started a band with instruments they built, wrote love songs and poetry, cried and wept, and seduced women .
"Hm. Son like poetry. Not want go hunting with guys. Uses bow make music. Son remind me of that nerd Grog. Hey! Hm. Idea gone."
You ignored the part in my original question about theories. The context in which people are using Occam's razor on theories are areas like physics and biology. In those fields, we are making assumptions about the nature of the data that don't seem to have been demonstrably warranted, in my opinion. Sure, it's been demonstrated mathematically in math, but what about cosmological or population models?
Slashdot Mirror
I just got done installing dotproject open-source groupware for Opera Columbus. After some tough negotitation, I won the contract (no contract really, they just hired me). They already have hosting with another provider. The provider wanted X to developed web-based project management; I serisouly undercut them with an application suite that was already ready. I had to do some user training, but that's about it for the hard part.
What I recommend is taking very little of your $1000, buy some cheap web hosting, and setting up some open source groupware. Spend a little bit more of that $1000 on printing manuals or throwing together a nice presentation -- charts and graphs, with binders, etc. Physical things, such as paper, will show people that you have an investment in what you are doing, and aren't just talking. They will have it to refer to later when they can't remember what you said. It shows stability and lastingness, that you will be there.
Be selective with the open sources packages, find the stuff that's 1. finished, 2. polished, and 3. easy to use for a non-techie. I highly recommend dotproject; the only problem is that it lacks printing.
Then, setup free demo accounts for users. Give them 30 or 60 day trials. Expect to spend some time training. Offer to do the initial setup, such as user accounts, etc. The people who use it and like it will gladly pay for the setup.
You can charge either
1. recurring fees for stuff you host. If you chose this, be prepared to go the extra mile for support when the thing crashes in the middle of the night.
- or -
2. a larger, one-time setup fee for setting it up on their hosting providers. Be sure to specify rates for future support of the application if you do a 1x set up fee. Here is where you clean up when they need you.
Pick a minimum price you want, and always present something higher. That gives you room to negotiate. Geeks hate negotitaion, business people love it. Be prepared for it. Be prepared to walk away from deals where they want too much; those people are users and they will expect you to work for them 24/7 for way too little money. It's just not worth it.
Me personally, I would like to see automatic, dynamic folder creation -- by sender, by subject, by date, etc. Also I would like to see automatic conversation threading. But I heard these features are in the upcoming version ot Outlook ;)
The problem here is that that you don't know what you want (or if you do, you're not telling us). "Something better" "Something different" -- what is that, exactly? Open source developers are not mind readers. They can't fix it if you don't tell them what's wrong. So far, you have not said what's wrong, nor how to fix it. The only thing you've said it "I don't like it", but you fail to say why. So, big surprise that no one has come up with something that pleases you.
I suggest instead of complaining, you sit down and figure out what the problem is, come up with a solution, and then let a developer know about it.
Well, if you are the one who wants it, then I concur that you should come up with it. This is your project. I'm certain that other people can come up with something better, but why are your wants their project? If you're not part of the solution, your part of the problem, so shut your hole. The least you can do is brainstorm and think of something, draw a GUI mockup, etc.
Please entreat us, good sir! We are all ears - er, eyes!
If you are the one who doesn't like it, yet you can't come up with anything better, what makes you think that anyone else can/will?
I did some experiments with the wave file sequencer Acid and found that I could easily extract loops I had mixed in with other loops. I could easily get back each original loop by adding the inverse -- in fact here's the whole experiment:
I had 3 samples: drums, synth, and vocals. I made a single wave file track that was 4 bars drums, 4 bars drums + synth, and 4 bars drums + synth + vocals. I took that track and mixed the inverted drum loop in and I got 4 bars silence, 4 bars synth, and then 4 bars synth + vocals. I assumed that I could then pull out the synth loop (since it was then alone), and invert it to extract the vocals. Then I thought that I didn't need any of the original samples; If I had only the song, I could start with a bar of drums, cut it just right, and invert it, and then pull every loop from the song.
So what's the difference between my experiment and mixing these stereo sources? I'm eager to know! :)
If you don't have $5 million, you can't hire a $5 million legal team. You have to pay up front. If you are the winner, then the loser will reimburse you for your legal expenses. Someone can have VASTLY SUPERIOR legal resources because they have VASTLY MORE MONEY THAN YOU. Just because SomeCorp wronged me and they can spend $5 million on there legal team doesn't mean I'm going to get a visit from the Federal Reserve Note Fairy and find bricks of cash underneath my pillow in the morning. I will still only have $2 for my lawyer[s], and that's all SomeCorp will have to pay when they lose the case.
Easy. Take your instrumental track, invert it, and then mix it with the song. Now all you have is the vocals.
Now that we live in cities, our visual system is deprived of much of the 'beatiful' input. Instead we have geometric shapes, which architecture employs to make buildings that don't fall down. (Remember when fractals first hit popular media? Eveyone was all 'ooh aah' -- even when you see one for the 100th time, it still has this intriguing beauty. Geomtric shapes don't have this.)
Also, our soundscape has radically changed. Instead of forest voices, we hear whirs and hums of machines. I know personally that my stress level drops immediately when I turn of the computer that has loud fans.
Long story short, our evolution in Africa created brains that was attracted to certain things, and sought them out, becuase they helped us survive. We are deprived of that stimulation these days.
Now, I'm not saying we all need to go back to living in caves, but maybe as a start, we could have more plants in homes, or trees in cities. Perhaps use fractal shapes in our architecture -- an interesting person to look at is the artist Hundertwasser. He drew pictures and designed models of buildings that had a natural appeal. They were based on wavy shapes, not geometric.
This is different. Google has won the search engine wars. It's not up for grabs anymore. This means that people will seek out google on their fresh-from-the-showroom pc, no matter what Microsoft has plopped in front of them. The only way MS can get them to switch now is to provide something better than google. Unlikely, IMHO.
Seriously. No one will buy this.
It won't hurt MS one bit. They will jump at the first chance to get rid of this product. The question then becomes, how long can the courts force MS to make a product available, when no one is buying it? More importantly, why? Will it really address the issues?
They don't make this apparent in their homepage. How do I use this? Is there an ODBC driver? Can I talk to it with a PHP driven website?
An anonymous reader? Hah! I've traced the pirate back to the ip 234.4.119.181! So much for slashdot anonymity! Which just goes to show...
You should have used FreeNet[tm].
"I don't remember anything about this 'Sue' woman. What do I care that she's using Linux?"
Do those commands have Aida's 28000 component library so you know what the thing actually is, or do they just tell you the chips on the bus? Do they show you the event log and software installations?
So, yes, you should fell a little stupid, esp. after you try it. ;)
What if you want to print your own money (i.e.i, not copies of other money)? Many organizations and artists do this, using patterns found in typical national currencies. Would anti-counterfeiting software interfere with this totally legal activity?
Free for personal use, businesses must register. Well worth it.
Well, you correctly identified the agent, which was 'he'. It seems to me that the ambiguity of the sentence is not that great. Actually, I bet if we did a study, most American English speakers would agree with you. God bless science!
Thank you. I don't doubt that you are correct. I never studied Japanese, just read about it in linguistics books.
Most modern linguists would disagree with you. Yes it's true, different langauges order their sentences differently. Japanese goes Object - Verb - Subject while English goes Subject - Verb - Object. Finnish has postpositions and English has prepositions. But the reigning idea in linguistics is that languages are 'functionally equivalent' -- that all languages are equally capable of expressing any idea that one language is capable of expressing. Now maybe an Arabian goat herder doesn't have the background to understand American Football rules, but that doesn't mean that Arabic creates a totally different thought mode in its users.
I don't think most linguists would agree with you. For your "he dropped to the ground", I think most native American English speakers would assume it to mean that he fell, from a failure of his own balance. English typically uses the passive voice when it's not necessary to specify the agent. In this case, I think the average speaker would assume that the agent was "he". Certainly it's not specified in the statement you give, but human language relies on an immense amount of shared assumption.
And why not? In the unix world, we already have a unix for people named Linus. Linux has a lot of catching up to do.
"Hm. Son like poetry. Not want go hunting with guys. Uses bow make music. Son remind me of that nerd Grog. Hey! Hm. Idea gone."
Are you in cahoots with my Rabbi?
You ignored the part in my original question about theories. The context in which people are using Occam's razor on theories are areas like physics and biology. In those fields, we are making assumptions about the nature of the data that don't seem to have been demonstrably warranted, in my opinion. Sure, it's been demonstrated mathematically in math, but what about cosmological or population models?