Open Source scratches an itch. I write it to solve a problem. For example, talking about digital cameras, I wrote and open source'd Picture Pager, a Gallery Creator for digital images. Have been involved in and lead several others too. So I know where-of I speak with OpenSource and open-ness in general.
My closed Canon does everything I want it to, out of the box. It has been reliable, the RAW format has given me lots of flexibility, I can manipulate any features I care to either using the camera interface or afterwards with an EXIF or image editor. And if I didn't like it, there are ten other brands that are true competitors, with multiple models per. So I have no itches. The camera being "closed" is not causing any problems, and by providing them some ROI giving the vendors cause to invest, it has solved problems.
But CRTs will use less power than Plasmas. A lot less. And how much radiation are you getting from your television at a normal viewing distance? Remember radiation drops off exponentially with distance.
Two things aren't shocking here. First is the typical slashdot response of, "Oh, they were idiots, they used idiots, obviously it's their fault." Which isn't really very helpful; most people are, by slashdot standards, idiots. The goal of modern commercial software is to lower the bar such that idiots can use it safely. (That's distinct from the goal of so much open-source software, of providing more power to the gurus while scaring away women and children, to build up the developer's technical cred.)
The other thing that isn't shocking is that Windows is perceived, by some, as being lower cost and more reliable. And again, slashdotters will argue the moon away that it ain't so. And, again, for non-idiots in their lexicon, they're correct. But on average, they're wrong.
Years ago I build a pretty powerful product, cross-platform. Runs on BSD, Linux and Windows, using Sybase, SQL Server or MySQL. All but one sale over the years was Windows. Why? Because that's what the businesses use. Lower training costs. When things go wrong, they're fixable via GUI. Don't need to find a guru, any convenient semi-geek can do the job.
I've been very annoyed by this. I really expected BSD and Linux to take off. But corporates lack sufficient geekpower, on average, to use Linux. And that is the reality that too few geeks are willing to cater to. And I say this as someone who has, in the last year, done hardcore commercial development on all three platforms.
I just checked; the negative reviews are still there.
Amazon has an odd sorting scheme, but if you click "view all reviews", you can then further sort by rating or by usefulness. Do the latter. Look for most useful... all are voted useful but one or two stars, mentioning the website bullying. Then click for least useful... those are the five-star ones focusing on the story BEFORE the bullying came out.
Sometimes I think Microsoft is too large to have internally-consistent policies. I've met lots of Microsofties at all levels; most of them really seem to believe in reducing spam, viruses and security holes. And then there's the bean-counter divisions that see potential revenue and just can't pass it up.
So just imagine, in a year or so... Microsoft whitelists some spammers. Then Microsoft developes Outlook enhancements to block MSN-enabled spammers, for a minor upgrade cost. Then Microsoft MSN finds a way around this, for their premium spammers for an extra fee. Then there's always Microsoft, who promptly developes new Windows and Outlook work-arounds necessarily to close the viral windows enabling the premium ones... for a minor fee to the users.
But, ironically, I don't believe they do this on purpose. It's more like virus writers vs Norton Anti-Virus or a game of chess, with two entirely different sides that just coincidentally are under the same corporate umbrella.
The articles seem a bit lightweight, especially do what you could quickly glean from Steve's DigiCams or Imaging Resource or DP Review. I do agree with the little data in the article, specifically that above about 4MP, the average consumer doesn't benefit much. The big problem is that the lenses can't give you more than that, at the price and size range we're seeing.
But there's a huge benefit to this tech-race. More digital cameras. People with them, use them a lot more than they did with film. No cost to take, no cost to view, low cost to print or mail. I wrote an open-source project to make building galleries free-and-easy (primarily for my family initially, see it at Picture Pager on SourceForge) and that too is a benefit of digitals... they gain from the open source world.
So the only downside of 8MP cameras is that they're the Ferraris or Porsches of consumer-land. They push the technology, in a few years us mere mortals will benefit, but serious drivers and photographers benefit, at least slightly, now while bearing the hefty early-adopter price.
I'm a developer who travels a lot on business. Denmark and London last week, back in Washington this week. If I was to look at the average developement shop or developer, I'd probably agree.
But if I look at those that aren't suffering much right now, those doing well, I see that most of the successful U.S. deveopers and shops also specify things out. But, because we don't live and die by the regulation (those being cradle-to-grave parts of much of the world), we can also be more flexible more quickly. And we can prototype from the seat of our pants quickly.
A down side of "flexibility" though is that we often get called "not team players" if we don't instantly cow to the calls from sales and marketing every time a new feature idea pops up. One of my co-workers calls this "chasing butterflies", the lack of focus that results in never finishing anything. That's the downside that leads to bugs and slow development... and failed companies. But many more successful companies, including most of the ones I've been at, have actual product life cycles. There really are two tiers or classes of development companies that way.
The question is, why are there so many undisciplined shops? I think the answer is the easy money of the past. Suddenly we (developers) weren't being managed by engineers and developers, but rather by CFOs, shareholders and sales people. As the crunch continues, I suspect corporate Darwinism will continue and we'll scale back to more methodical practices again.
Then I started checking out some of the practices, and discovered that XP is actually pretty good. For example, pair programming seems to be able to produce the same results in about 55% of the time that one programmer would take, -->but with about 40% less software faults--.
Ummm... yeah... but only because the terms "schedule", "late", "success", "bug" and "software faults" have been redefined so substantially. When the results are held to the same standards (i.e. on the originally-desired schedule, with the originally-anticipated feature set, delivered in a form the end-user finds actually usable), I have yet to see XP work. It only works by redefining the goal to being the joy of programming rather than the delivery of product.
And isn't that a Microsoft trait? It's not a bug, it's an undocumented feature!
I wonder if this is a solution in search of a problem. Most E-Book readers probably already have PDAs and aren't real likely to carry an additional device. That's why convergence is always such a draw - we believe in fewer, not more, discrete devices. Meanwhile, slow adopters are still reading dead trees.
So what happened? Did Sony, who makes wonderful Clie PDAs (Palm-based), simply have a screen technology in need of a device and build a device to match and now are searching for a matching problem?
Yeah, they've shown that they can get much more bandwidth out of our wires. The bounds of Moores Law and related "theoretical limits" fall every few years. But the problem with this particular solution is that we have a huge entrenched market and severe commodity pressure on broadband already.
Maybe a new killer app will come along, but what companies are STILL rich from laying the old copper or even optic pipes? Most of them got sold off at a huge loss. Who made bucks beaucoup off of VoIP? It's heavily used, even when you don't know it, but that's the point - it became a commodity and you never even know you're using it. This is probably going to suffer the same problem - it requires an end-user actually pay some attention, install new hardware (not that it's a big deal, but it is for most people) and for an increase that they currently won't care about. It's a bigger win for the trunks, but I bet early adopters will wind up with more arrows in their backs.
... very few will (switch services). Why? Because of the hit they will take from "ducking out early" on the contract or a hit on credit for giving the old providers the finger.
That's an amazingly shallow view. I'm a Dish subscriber with options because my cable company has an offer to pay for any penalties incurred. And yet I won't switch from Dish; my knee doesn't jerk just because a channel went missing for two days.Maybe it's a maturity thing, but consider beyond just that you lost your network TV for a day.
Dish fought what I consider the "good fight" and I support them for that.
I can/do get channels nobody else offers that appeal to me (mostly international)
More importantly, Dish picture quality is much better than cable or DirecTV in my area.
That second one is a really big difference where I live. Both DirecTV and Millenium Digital Media images look flat and soul-less. Dish images of the same shows (and yes, we had both cable and Dish in January so this is relatively recent data) look much more vivid and saturated. Much better.
Dish Network isn't for everyone. Nothing is. And if their only value to you is your MTV, perhaps you would be better off elsewhere. (Certainly lowering the image and sound quality of MTV could only help anyhow.) But the big value of Dish to me is some non-Viacom stations and the great image quality, so I'm stuck with them because they give me what I want. Maybe, just maybe, that's why most subscribers will stick with them rather than crying their way to DirecTV.
Perhaps but I suspect the sticking point wasn't whether Dish would carry NickToons but rather how much they would pay and which package it would go into. Offered it gratis, you bet Dish would've carried it.
That's what this was about, control. Not content, just control. That's what everything's about.
I sent Charlie such an email about eight hours ago, telling him that I'm supportive of Dish and giving him enough info to verify I'm a current subscriber. Go Dish!
I'm a dish subscriber, but not apparently a Viacom viewer as I hadn't noticed the banners. We (my wife and I) are very supportive of Dish in this, and so should be other Slashdotters, because it's very much along our standard philosophy.
Viacom was trying to dictate that unrelated products must be bundled together... sounds like a large Redmond-based company's approach to PC makers until a few years ago, no?
Viacom is trying to charge significantly over normal rates for their product, and holding hostage otherwise-free product (i.e. over-the-air product.) Sounds like a shrinking Utah company's policies, no?
Sounds unimportant? Then riddle me this... why should users have to pay for BET, NickToons and Spike? Which demographic watches all three of those?
Okay, maybe some. Same people who want Outlook with their Excel with their OS. So do you support using a near-monopoly to blackmail your customers into buying additional product they don't want, or are you a true Slashdotter?
All you folks paying for some sort of Dish based access feel like cattle now?
Do you think Dish will compensate their customer base? Do they even care about their customer base?
As a Dish subscriber, I fully support Dish in this. One sign how much is this: I haven't seen those banners. I apparently don't watch Viacom stations. And I chose Dish because they offered a package I do want at a price that, for the stations I care about (of which MTV is not one), I saved about $25/month over DirecTV.
So are they gonna compensate us? Been doing it every day, baby. Been doing it every day.
Now who's gonna compensate us for flashing that old saggy breast on the SuperBowl?
Spelling in that period was very fluid. Have a look at how many different ways Shakespeare spelt his own name!
Ah, but you're assuming it was Shakespeare who wrote Shakespeare. There's still debate about that.
For the time, Chaucer was remarkable. The goal of language is communication, and he accomplished it with remarkably rudimentary tools. Rather like building an operating system out of wood.
1: Scanning your palm turns you from a human being with feelings, rights, privelages, and the whole 9 yards into data on a computer. Don't believe me?
No more than timecards or even paychecks do. You should, as a matter of principle, refuse to cash your paycheck because it serves as an unholy trilateral collusion to reduce you to a vector of numbers: Your employee number, paygrade and hours at the employer, your incremental and net worth plus I.D. at the bank and your social security number and total taxes at the government.
Prove to us that you are a man of principle: Show us your years of uncashed paychecks. Don't let The Man take advantage of you anymore!
The site is/.'ed so I can't be sure it's the same but there was an article throughout the newsrags (NYTimes, LA Times, etc) this past week on a guy who lit his entire apartment soley by LEDs. The hardware cost him $50K. Too much really. To spend that kind of dough, there's gotta be some additional win. But you'll get a lot farther with a woman, for example, by spending that same amount on a nice car you pick her up in and a few nice dinners than on unfamiliar lighting she finds intimidating.
Off topic, but I gave a bunch of these really cool LED flashlights for Christmas: http://www.techass.com The Elite is really nice and very bright.
Normal part of contracts
on
Source Code Escrow
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've developed and sold several products where I or my company have licensed them to a corporation. Each time the source code and environment had to be held in escrow with certain release conditions.
The most common was if I were to be out-of-commision or unreachable (at my choice of contact mechanisms) for more than two weeks.
The conditions and location have been generally very open to negotiation. For example, I added certain clauses and contact mechanisms to the standard software one, but I also removed some other restrictions because I didn't feel they were needed. As long as the contingency is covered, everybody is happy. It was a bit scary the first time for me, because I'm entrusting my leverage (excluding my skill and domain knowledge, which actually is the far greater leverage) to faceless lawyers, but I now rely on escrow as an advantage. It sooths the fears of the corporates.
Some of these threads pointing out that choice is essential or that "some" people find KDE more usable completely miss the point and are why Linux can't make progress on the Desktop.
Windows gives no choice. Windows rules the desktop. Windows ME/XP is (pick one: more | less) usable than the Windows 9X interface, but both succeeded.
IMHO, if more distributions picked a single UI and went with it, patching in the most annoying gaps, the biggest problem with Linux would quickly be solved. The idea that multiple choices with fewer developers is somehow superior to fewer choices better done seems disingenous at best.
I prefer KDE myself, but what I'd really like is for one to win and get most of the wrinkles ironed out. Either one. Because I don't have to worry about the UI choices in Windows, Mac, java apps, Palm apps or even PPC.
Having been on both the hardware and software side of the business, the reason the hardware side goes through so many certifications and steps is purely financial. Building the board the first time is not just the same amount of logic but also checks for interference, electrocution, MTBF and usability. All this takes additional time and investment. If you produce a bunch and stuff goes wrong, fixing it is costly but you can also hurt people. Even liability insurance is more expensive because an inert CD just can't do much damage, but a loose wire can kill.
Every step of hardware is carefully vetted because mistakes (and even success) are so expensive. That, in my opinion, was the huge benefit of computers: they can adapt to your needs by loading cheap software.
I've bought lots of electronics recently including a new Sony RS430G desktop, a 19" ViewSonic LCD, a UX50, lots of stuff. Price shopped most of it. Most stores including CompUSA, BestBuy, even J&R Music World had them at the same price as Sony or ViewSonic do. I was also looking at an H.P. desktop, similar range ($1500 do-it-all box), and it too wasn't discounted anywhere.
They're probably moving back to MSRP as a real price because they can. But this might not mean you're getting a bad deal. I couldn't have built nearly as good a system as the RS430G for that price. (The HP is another matter; I'm convinced after owning several of their printers that any HP driver software is pure unadulterated evil.) So it might be not that we're getting shafted but that even the lowliest of consumers are benefitting from the Information Revolution and getting decent prices across the board.
In the latest news from Redmond, Microsoft is going to charge a license fee for any software product that randomly crashes without saving the work of the user and any process that requires more than three restarts to start it at all. While not specifically patented, Microsoft legal representatives point out that these traits are "inextricably linked and identified with Microsoft products, and therefore have the standing of trademarks and/or copyrights."
In related news, BMW announced they have licenced from Microsoft the "Blue Screen of Death" for their 7-Series with i-Drive.
I'm as platform-agnostic as they come. My last gig, which I left just a few weeks ago, I was architecting and implementing embedded Linux for medical devices. Currently I'm working on FreeBSD. Much of my career is on Windows and this is being typed in Opera. My SourceForge projects are in wxWindows C++ and in Java, my recent hobby programming on Atmel processors for automation and on the Palm-OS. I don't have an axe to grind. And I agree with what he wrote.
Where did he go too far? He didn't say Linux zealots would blow up buildings, but it's not a stretch to believe some would, for example, ferret out non-open-source and publish it on a warez site. Or write an attack to crash Exchange servers or IIS servers. Or tunnel into Verisign to extract revenge for their hijacking of the way DNS works on failure. At that point the word "terrorist" is only one of perspective.
If you're the victim, if your company does good deeds and you believe in it... say you coordinate finding low prices on medicine for income-restricted seniors... and your company is brought down by a Linux zealot's "crash IIS" worm, you won't think of the zealot as a "freedom fighter." You'll feel sandbagged and attacked. Same thing if you wrote the technology licensed by, say, OmniMegaCorp... you invested years of your life on this in a typical.com model, and get the payoff with a licensing deal... but it comes out on Windows and a disgruntled Linux zealot steals the source (perhaps an inside job) and warezes it and your competition comes to market a year faster with a competitive product than otherwise, again you won't see that as freedom for the code.
I evangelize Linux. And Palm. But that's different from the harsh or militaristic "with us or against us" attitude some posters use. And it really is just a tiny number, but it will only take one high-profile zealot to do the movement enormous harm.
Forgive me if this is already covered, but I don't see it above. A press release of $50 million funding doesn't actually mean a check for $50 million has been delivered. My CTO years were very enlightening this way... here's what it probably really means...
The VC inked a deal with SCO to provide some small amount up-front (e.g. $1 million) at a certain discount off the current share price such as 15%. They probably commit to investing more later, such as monthly, at the same rate PROVIDED certain goals are met by SCO. And the total of the committed amount might be about 25% of the total in the press-release (e.g. $12.5 million.)
They get the rest of the way up by virtual of options usually. The VC gets options after a year to pay 50% more than their initial price-per-share for the same number as they bought discounted. This is zero-risk for the V.C.; they don't HAVE to do it. They'll only do it if the share price has gone up more than that 50%. And they probably get another option for the same number of shares at double the initial price.
I'm not saying the SCO deal is this format specifically, but it's completely normal. SCO would announce the total dollar amount because it sounds more impressive, more like a strong sign of faith. The VC doesn't eat through their available cash because they do it in small amounts spread over time, and 75% or so is discretionary EVEN IF SCO makes all their goals.
Slashdot Mirror
Open Source scratches an itch. I write it to solve a problem. For example, talking about digital cameras, I wrote and open source'd Picture Pager, a Gallery Creator for digital images. Have been involved in and lead several others too. So I know where-of I speak with OpenSource and open-ness in general.
My closed Canon does everything I want it to, out of the box. It has been reliable, the RAW format has given me lots of flexibility, I can manipulate any features I care to either using the camera interface or afterwards with an EXIF or image editor. And if I didn't like it, there are ten other brands that are true competitors, with multiple models per. So I have no itches. The camera being "closed" is not causing any problems, and by providing them some ROI giving the vendors cause to invest, it has solved problems.
Why solve a non-problem?
But CRTs will use less power than Plasmas. A lot less. And how much radiation are you getting from your television at a normal viewing distance? Remember radiation drops off exponentially with distance.
Two things aren't shocking here. First is the typical slashdot response of, "Oh, they were idiots, they used idiots, obviously it's their fault." Which isn't really very helpful; most people are, by slashdot standards, idiots. The goal of modern commercial software is to lower the bar such that idiots can use it safely. (That's distinct from the goal of so much open-source software, of providing more power to the gurus while scaring away women and children, to build up the developer's technical cred.)
The other thing that isn't shocking is that Windows is perceived, by some, as being lower cost and more reliable. And again, slashdotters will argue the moon away that it ain't so. And, again, for non-idiots in their lexicon, they're correct. But on average, they're wrong.
Years ago I build a pretty powerful product, cross-platform. Runs on BSD, Linux and Windows, using Sybase, SQL Server or MySQL. All but one sale over the years was Windows. Why? Because that's what the businesses use. Lower training costs. When things go wrong, they're fixable via GUI. Don't need to find a guru, any convenient semi-geek can do the job.
I've been very annoyed by this. I really expected BSD and Linux to take off. But corporates lack sufficient geekpower, on average, to use Linux. And that is the reality that too few geeks are willing to cater to. And I say this as someone who has, in the last year, done hardcore commercial development on all three platforms.
I just checked; the negative reviews are still there.
Amazon has an odd sorting scheme, but if you click "view all reviews", you can then further sort by rating or by usefulness. Do the latter. Look for most useful... all are voted useful but one or two stars, mentioning the website bullying. Then click for least useful... those are the five-star ones focusing on the story BEFORE the bullying came out.
You just have to RTF screen.
So just imagine, in a year or so... Microsoft whitelists some spammers. Then Microsoft developes Outlook enhancements to block MSN-enabled spammers, for a minor upgrade cost. Then Microsoft MSN finds a way around this, for their premium spammers for an extra fee. Then there's always Microsoft, who promptly developes new Windows and Outlook work-arounds necessarily to close the viral windows enabling the premium ones... for a minor fee to the users.
But, ironically, I don't believe they do this on purpose. It's more like virus writers vs Norton Anti-Virus or a game of chess, with two entirely different sides that just coincidentally are under the same corporate umbrella.
But there's a huge benefit to this tech-race. More digital cameras. People with them, use them a lot more than they did with film. No cost to take, no cost to view, low cost to print or mail. I wrote an open-source project to make building galleries free-and-easy (primarily for my family initially, see it at Picture Pager on SourceForge) and that too is a benefit of digitals... they gain from the open source world.
So the only downside of 8MP cameras is that they're the Ferraris or Porsches of consumer-land. They push the technology, in a few years us mere mortals will benefit, but serious drivers and photographers benefit, at least slightly, now while bearing the hefty early-adopter price.
But if I look at those that aren't suffering much right now, those doing well, I see that most of the successful U.S. deveopers and shops also specify things out. But, because we don't live and die by the regulation (those being cradle-to-grave parts of much of the world), we can also be more flexible more quickly. And we can prototype from the seat of our pants quickly.
A down side of "flexibility" though is that we often get called "not team players" if we don't instantly cow to the calls from sales and marketing every time a new feature idea pops up. One of my co-workers calls this "chasing butterflies", the lack of focus that results in never finishing anything. That's the downside that leads to bugs and slow development... and failed companies. But many more successful companies, including most of the ones I've been at, have actual product life cycles. There really are two tiers or classes of development companies that way.
The question is, why are there so many undisciplined shops? I think the answer is the easy money of the past. Suddenly we (developers) weren't being managed by engineers and developers, but rather by CFOs, shareholders and sales people. As the crunch continues, I suspect corporate Darwinism will continue and we'll scale back to more methodical practices again.
And isn't that a Microsoft trait? It's not a bug, it's an undocumented feature!
I wonder if this is a solution in search of a problem. Most E-Book readers probably already have PDAs and aren't real likely to carry an additional device. That's why convergence is always such a draw - we believe in fewer, not more, discrete devices. Meanwhile, slow adopters are still reading dead trees.
So what happened? Did Sony, who makes wonderful Clie PDAs (Palm-based), simply have a screen technology in need of a device and build a device to match and now are searching for a matching problem?
Yeah, they've shown that they can get much more bandwidth out of our wires. The bounds of Moores Law and related "theoretical limits" fall every few years. But the problem with this particular solution is that we have a huge entrenched market and severe commodity pressure on broadband already.
Maybe a new killer app will come along, but what companies are STILL rich from laying the old copper or even optic pipes? Most of them got sold off at a huge loss. Who made bucks beaucoup off of VoIP? It's heavily used, even when you don't know it, but that's the point - it became a commodity and you never even know you're using it.
This is probably going to suffer the same problem - it requires an end-user actually pay some attention, install new hardware (not that it's a big deal, but it is for most people) and for an increase that they currently won't care about. It's a bigger win for the trunks, but I bet early adopters will wind up with more arrows in their backs.
- Dish fought what I consider the "good fight" and I support them for that.
- I can/do get channels nobody else offers that appeal to me (mostly international)
- More importantly, Dish picture quality is much better than cable or DirecTV in my area.
That second one is a really big difference where I live. Both DirecTV and Millenium Digital Media images look flat and soul-less. Dish images of the same shows (and yes, we had both cable and Dish in January so this is relatively recent data) look much more vivid and saturated. Much better.Dish Network isn't for everyone. Nothing is. And if their only value to you is your MTV, perhaps you would be better off elsewhere. (Certainly lowering the image and sound quality of MTV could only help anyhow.) But the big value of Dish to me is some non-Viacom stations and the great image quality, so I'm stuck with them because they give me what I want. Maybe, just maybe, that's why most subscribers will stick with them rather than crying their way to DirecTV.
That's what this was about, control. Not content, just control. That's what everything's about.
I sent Charlie such an email about eight hours ago, telling him that I'm supportive of Dish and giving him enough info to verify I'm a current subscriber. Go Dish!
I'm a dish subscriber, but not apparently a Viacom viewer as I hadn't noticed the banners. We (my wife and I) are very supportive of Dish in this, and so should be other Slashdotters, because it's very much along our standard philosophy.
Viacom was trying to dictate that unrelated products must be bundled together... sounds like a large Redmond-based company's approach to PC makers until a few years ago, no?
Viacom is trying to charge significantly over normal rates for their product, and holding hostage otherwise-free product (i.e. over-the-air product.) Sounds like a shrinking Utah company's policies, no?
Sounds unimportant? Then riddle me this... why should users have to pay for BET, NickToons and Spike? Which demographic watches all three of those?
Okay, maybe some. Same people who want Outlook with their Excel with their OS. So do you support using a near-monopoly to blackmail your customers into buying additional product they don't want, or are you a true Slashdotter?
So are they gonna compensate us? Been doing it every day, baby. Been doing it every day.
Now who's gonna compensate us for flashing that old saggy breast on the SuperBowl?
For the time, Chaucer was remarkable. The goal of language is communication, and he accomplished it with remarkably rudimentary tools. Rather like building an operating system out of wood.
Prove to us that you are a man of principle: Show us your years of uncashed paychecks. Don't let The Man take advantage of you anymore!
The site is /.'ed so I can't be sure it's the same but there was an article throughout the newsrags (NYTimes, LA Times, etc) this past week on a guy who lit his entire apartment soley by LEDs. The hardware cost him $50K. Too much really. To spend that kind of dough, there's gotta be some additional win. But you'll get a lot farther with a woman, for example, by spending that same amount on a nice car you pick her up in and a few nice dinners than on unfamiliar lighting she finds intimidating.
Off topic, but I gave a bunch of these really cool LED flashlights for Christmas: http://www.techass.com The Elite is really nice and very bright.
I've developed and sold several products where I or my company have licensed them to a corporation. Each time the source code and environment had to be held in escrow with certain release conditions.
The most common was if I were to be out-of-commision or unreachable (at my choice of contact mechanisms) for more than two weeks.
The conditions and location have been generally very open to negotiation. For example, I added certain clauses and contact mechanisms to the standard software one, but I also removed some other restrictions because I didn't feel they were needed. As long as the contingency is covered, everybody is happy. It was a bit scary the first time for me, because I'm entrusting my leverage (excluding my skill and domain knowledge, which actually is the far greater leverage) to faceless lawyers, but I now rely on escrow as an advantage. It sooths the fears of the corporates.
Windows gives no choice. Windows rules the desktop. Windows ME/XP is (pick one: more | less) usable than the Windows 9X interface, but both succeeded.
IMHO, if more distributions picked a single UI and went with it, patching in the most annoying gaps, the biggest problem with Linux would quickly be solved. The idea that multiple choices with fewer developers is somehow superior to fewer choices better done seems disingenous at best.
I prefer KDE myself, but what I'd really like is for one to win and get most of the wrinkles ironed out. Either one. Because I don't have to worry about the UI choices in Windows, Mac, java apps, Palm apps or even PPC.
Having been on both the hardware and software side of the business, the reason the hardware side goes through so many certifications and steps is purely financial. Building the board the first time is not just the same amount of logic but also checks for interference, electrocution, MTBF and usability. All this takes additional time and investment. If you produce a bunch and stuff goes wrong, fixing it is costly but you can also hurt people. Even liability insurance is more expensive because an inert CD just can't do much damage, but a loose wire can kill.
Every step of hardware is carefully vetted because mistakes (and even success) are so expensive. That, in my opinion, was the huge benefit of computers: they can adapt to your needs by loading cheap software.
I've bought lots of electronics recently including a new Sony RS430G desktop, a 19" ViewSonic LCD, a UX50, lots of stuff. Price shopped most of it. Most stores including CompUSA, BestBuy, even J&R Music World had them at the same price as Sony or ViewSonic do. I was also looking at an H.P. desktop, similar range ($1500 do-it-all box), and it too wasn't discounted anywhere.
They're probably moving back to MSRP as a real price because they can. But this might not mean you're getting a bad deal. I couldn't have built nearly as good a system as the RS430G for that price. (The HP is another matter; I'm convinced after owning several of their printers that any HP driver software is pure unadulterated evil.) So it might be not that we're getting shafted but that even the lowliest of consumers are benefitting from the Information Revolution and getting decent prices across the board.
In the latest news from Redmond, Microsoft is going to charge a license fee for any software product that randomly crashes without saving the work of the user and any process that requires more than three restarts to start it at all. While not specifically patented, Microsoft legal representatives point out that these traits are "inextricably linked and identified with Microsoft products, and therefore have the standing of trademarks and/or copyrights." In related news, BMW announced they have licenced from Microsoft the "Blue Screen of Death" for their 7-Series with i-Drive.
I'm as platform-agnostic as they come. My last gig, which I left just a few weeks ago, I was architecting and implementing embedded Linux for medical devices. Currently I'm working on FreeBSD. Much of my career is on Windows and this is being typed in Opera. My SourceForge projects are in wxWindows C++ and in Java, my recent hobby programming on Atmel processors for automation and on the Palm-OS. I don't have an axe to grind. And I agree with what he wrote.
.com model, and get the payoff with a licensing deal... but it comes out on Windows and a disgruntled Linux zealot steals the source (perhaps an inside job) and warezes it and your competition comes to market a year faster with a competitive product than otherwise, again you won't see that as freedom for the code.
Where did he go too far? He didn't say Linux zealots would blow up buildings, but it's not a stretch to believe some would, for example, ferret out non-open-source and publish it on a warez site. Or write an attack to crash Exchange servers or IIS servers. Or tunnel into Verisign to extract revenge for their hijacking of the way DNS works on failure. At that point the word "terrorist" is only one of perspective.
If you're the victim, if your company does good deeds and you believe in it... say you coordinate finding low prices on medicine for income-restricted seniors... and your company is brought down by a Linux zealot's "crash IIS" worm, you won't think of the zealot as a "freedom fighter." You'll feel sandbagged and attacked. Same thing if you wrote the technology licensed by, say, OmniMegaCorp... you invested years of your life on this in a typical
I evangelize Linux. And Palm. But that's different from the harsh or militaristic "with us or against us" attitude some posters use. And it really is just a tiny number, but it will only take one high-profile zealot to do the movement enormous harm.
Forgive me if this is already covered, but I don't see it above. A press release of $50 million funding doesn't actually mean a check for $50 million has been delivered. My CTO years were very enlightening this way... here's what it probably really means...
The VC inked a deal with SCO to provide some small amount up-front (e.g. $1 million) at a certain discount off the current share price such as 15%. They probably commit to investing more later, such as monthly, at the same rate PROVIDED certain goals are met by SCO. And the total of the committed amount might be about 25% of the total in the press-release (e.g. $12.5 million.)
They get the rest of the way up by virtual of options usually. The VC gets options after a year to pay 50% more than their initial price-per-share for the same number as they bought discounted. This is zero-risk for the V.C.; they don't HAVE to do it. They'll only do it if the share price has gone up more than that 50%. And they probably get another option for the same number of shares at double the initial price.
I'm not saying the SCO deal is this format specifically, but it's completely normal. SCO would announce the total dollar amount because it sounds more impressive, more like a strong sign of faith. The VC doesn't eat through their available cash because they do it in small amounts spread over time, and 75% or so is discretionary EVEN IF SCO makes all their goals.