"Gigster charges a flat fee, which the company is getting better at determining, so there is no incentive for developers to work more hours and run up charges"
I do not think their definition of software development matches what we do for a living. Seems to me the time spent matches the difficulty of the problem, not the greed of the developer. Unless, of course, you're reinventing code you already invented, in which case you can "estimate" precisely...
"It converts a client’s product proposal into a development plan, and helps Gigster’s army of remote developers plug in pre-made code blocks to efficiently build the app."
Surely if you're just hooking up pre-made code blocks, then you can do it yourself without paying the middleman. Either this is just another name for a consulting company, or their business model involves paying developers piecework rates. They don't seem to realize that if we want to develop for no pay we can do open source, and still use the product ourselves.
This totally makes sense, but not if you restrict it to photos. When you find an audio or video file online where information identifying the owner is missing, all you have to do made a "diligent" search for the original owner and it's yours for free to use, resell, or whatever. No more lawsuits! Everybody's happy!
>> You don't relinquish copyright ownership of code you wrote by incorporating GPL'd code into your application, you're just required to make your source available.
You're right. The company still keeps full copyright ownership of the proprietary code. What I should have said is that the company also loses control over millions of dollars worth of R&D that went into developing the rest of the application, and, by publishing it, loses any competitive advantage it may have had.
That, of course, is the intent of the GPL: Any application that uses GPL-licensed code must release all its secrets to the community. GPL believes that information wants to be free.
>>Don't like it? Sorry, that's what the author of the code you got for and investment of $0 decided upon when they chose to distribute what they wrote --and own.
Yes, of course. But the original question is whether it's good for business to subsidize OSS. My business would love to subsidize OSS projects and share the result with the world (2 weeks @ $100/hour = $7,000). We're happy giving the results of that work back to the community.
What my company can't afford to do is donate everything else as well (2 years x 5 people x $100/hour = more than you like). The whole point of running a software business is to make back the money you spent developing the software, plus a little more.
Many people that say, "information wants to be free" really mean that information should be free to them. If you really believe everything should be free, how about freeing up your credit card information? I'm sure lots of people would love to share with you.
The company I work for would love to subsidize open source development. We'd all love to use and extend existing projects instead of writing code from scratch. But recently I spent a couple of weeks writing a proprietary communications package when there's already perfectly good code on SourceForge.
Why? The OSS project uses the GPL. This means if the company donates two weeks of my time to subsidize this OSS project, it ends up losing ownership of the rest or our application. That would cost the company *a lot* more than wasting time rewriting existing code.
Whenever I start a new project I always look for existing solutions for my company to subsidize. LGPL, Apache, and the rest are fine, and that's why there's so much commercial support for those projects. It's just to damn bad there's so much GPL. Let's get the religion out of software development.
Some of those random 128-bit numbers are random 128 bit numbers like 20 22 93 19 66, 81 89 95 66 00. Even the crudest search shows the MPAA is broadcasting those top secret encryption keys all over the world - such as on their contact us web page - under the flimsy pretense that they're phone numbers. The true owners of those numbers should use DMCA takedown notices to shut down the MPAA's web sites. And their members' web sites. And their lawyers' web sites. And their offices. And demand they redact all those publications. And all that media. Oh, the humanity!
And the business cards. Won't someone think of the business cards?
Yes! Habayusa dropped the plaque on the surface of Itokawa. The names of some 880,000 people are micro-etched on aluminum foil on the target marker, which is the bright white spot you can see on the surface of the asteroid. "Highly specific technology for manufacturing microscopic semiconductor was applied for their names etched with so fine prints of alphabet of only 0.03 square millimeters." Try to read about it here. [machine translation] [beta]
It's a little soon to be using Dilithium. According to Memory Alpha,
"On Federation starships, the warp core usually consists of a matter/antimatter reaction assembly (MARA) utilizing deuterium and antideuterium reacting in a crystal matrix. Lithium crystals were used until sometime between 2265 and 2266 when they were replaced with dilithium crystals."
So we still have a few years to work with plain old lithium tantalite. According to the original article,
"[heating or cooling] some crystals causes electrons to build up on one side, creating a charge difference over the body of the crystal. These are called pyroelectric crystals... Scientists inserted a small pyroelectric crystal (lithium tantalite) inside a chamber filled with hydrogen. Warming the crystal by about 100 degrees (from -30 F to 45F) produced a huge electrical field of about 100,000 volts across the small crystal.
"The tip of a metal wire was inserted near the crystal, which concentrated the charge to a single, powerful point. Remember, hydrogen nuclei have a positive charge, so they feel the force of an electric field, and this one packed quite a wallop! The huge electric field sent the nuclei careening away, smacking into other hydrogen nuclei on their way out. Instead of using intense heat or pressure to get nuclei close enough together to fuse, this new experiment used a very powerful electric field to slam atoms together."
No mention whether it uses beer and/or beer cans for fuel.
The rumours I choose to repeat are that Microsoft originally bought VPC as a marketing tool (all versions on a laptop), then the developers went nuts over it, then the trainers, then all of known space. Virtual Server is aimed directly at the NT 4.0 install base (not a rumour) as well as whatever's left of the Novell application market. And don't forget that the new Wintel CPUs have specific enhancements for virtualization, so we could see the performance hit drop to almost nothing. ALL YOUR OS ARE BELONG TO US.
So who wants Microsoft to support their Linux installation anyway? Linux has always run on Virtual PC. The only change is that now you'll have the option of paying Microsoft to support it. Assuming you have a mission-critical Linux application, it's hard to imagine a good reason to run it in an emulator box under Windows. It seems to me you'd be better off to run Linux on a Linux box, and interoperate with Windows servers when you need to. Unless you're porting Linux apps to Windows... in which case Microsoft already provides lots of support.
15 seconds of powered flight doesn't sound like a lot, but don't forget the Wright brothers' first powered flight was only 12 seconds. According to the press release, "The climb was very aggressive, accelerating forward at more than 3-g while pulling upward at more than 2.5-g. At motor shutdown, 15 seconds after ignition, SpaceShipOne was climbing at a 60-degree angle and flying near 1.2 Mach (930 mph).".
I'm too lazy to do the math, but at 2.5-g acceleration it'd take less than a minute to reach 330,000 feet. The engine has been test fired for at least 1 1/2 minutes; there's already very little air at 68,000 feet. Since they simply fall back into the atmosphere, reentry isn't much of a problem (and the feathered configuration avoids the instability problems the X-15 had).
All in all, I'd say they could have reached space the first time, but they're being cautious instead. Sure beats the "Just get it working, then we'll patch it until it's robust" approach.
Actually, I converted the X-Prize height to feet to match the numbers from the press release. Sure, metric makes more sense, but let's not forget the US is still unaccountably anti-metric (see: Mars Orbiter Lost Over Metric Conversion Error)
Slashdot Mirror
Atia, M, Hilal, A.R. (Allaa R.), Stellings, C. (Clive), Hartwell, E. (Eric), Toonstra, J. (Jason), Miners, W.B. (William B.), & Basir, O.A. (Otman A.). (2017). A Low-Cost Lane-Determination System Using GNSS/IMU Fusion and HMM-Based Multistage Map Matching. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. doi:10.1109/TITS.2017.2672541
I do not think their definition of software development matches what we do for a living. Seems to me the time spent matches the difficulty of the problem, not the greed of the developer. Unless, of course, you're reinventing code you already invented, in which case you can "estimate" precisely...
Surely if you're just hooking up pre-made code blocks, then you can do it yourself without paying the middleman. Either this is just another name for a consulting company, or their business model involves paying developers piecework rates. They don't seem to realize that if we want to develop for no pay we can do open source, and still use the product ourselves.
This totally makes sense, but not if you restrict it to photos. When you find an audio or video file online where information identifying the owner is missing, all you have to do made a "diligent" search for the original owner and it's yours for free to use, resell, or whatever. No more lawsuits! Everybody's happy!
You're right. The company still keeps full copyright ownership of the proprietary code. What I should have said is that the company also loses control over millions of dollars worth of R&D that went into developing the rest of the application, and, by publishing it, loses any competitive advantage it may have had.
That, of course, is the intent of the GPL: Any application that uses GPL-licensed code must release all its secrets to the community. GPL believes that information wants to be free.
>>Don't like it? Sorry, that's what the author of the code you got for and investment of $0 decided upon when they chose to distribute what they wrote --and own.
Yes, of course. But the original question is whether it's good for business to subsidize OSS. My business would love to subsidize OSS projects and share the result with the world (2 weeks @ $100/hour = $7,000). We're happy giving the results of that work back to the community.
What my company can't afford to do is donate everything else as well (2 years x 5 people x $100/hour = more than you like). The whole point of running a software business is to make back the money you spent developing the software, plus a little more.
Many people that say, "information wants to be free" really mean that information should be free to them. If you really believe everything should be free, how about freeing up your credit card information? I'm sure lots of people would love to share with you.
The company I work for would love to subsidize open source development. We'd all love to use and extend existing projects instead of writing code from scratch. But recently I spent a couple of weeks writing a proprietary communications package when there's already perfectly good code on SourceForge.
Why? The OSS project uses the GPL. This means if the company donates two weeks of my time to subsidize this OSS project, it ends up losing ownership of the rest or our application. That would cost the company *a lot* more than wasting time rewriting existing code.
Whenever I start a new project I always look for existing solutions for my company to subsidize. LGPL, Apache, and the rest are fine, and that's why there's so much commercial support for those projects. It's just to damn bad there's so much GPL. Let's get the religion out of software development.
Buffer overflow. Looks like you're about to get pwned. Yeah!!!
Some of those random 128-bit numbers are random 128 bit numbers like 20 22 93 19 66, 81 89 95 66 00. Even the crudest search shows the MPAA is broadcasting those top secret encryption keys all over the world - such as on their contact us web page - under the flimsy pretense that they're phone numbers. The true owners of those numbers should use DMCA takedown notices to shut down the MPAA's web sites. And their members' web sites. And their lawyers' web sites. And their offices. And demand they redact all those publications. And all that media. Oh, the humanity! And the business cards. Won't someone think of the business cards?
Yes! Habayusa dropped the plaque on the surface of Itokawa. The names of some 880,000 people are micro-etched on aluminum foil on the target marker, which is the bright white spot you can see on the surface of the asteroid. "Highly specific technology for manufacturing microscopic semiconductor was applied for their names etched with so fine prints of alphabet of only 0.03 square millimeters." Try to read about it here. [machine translation] [beta]
The rumours I choose to repeat are that Microsoft originally bought VPC as a marketing tool (all versions on a laptop), then the developers went nuts over it, then the trainers, then all of known space. Virtual Server is aimed directly at the NT 4.0 install base (not a rumour) as well as whatever's left of the Novell application market. And don't forget that the new Wintel CPUs have specific enhancements for virtualization, so we could see the performance hit drop to almost nothing. ALL YOUR OS ARE BELONG TO US.
So who wants Microsoft to support their Linux installation anyway? Linux has always run on Virtual PC. The only change is that now you'll have the option of paying Microsoft to support it. Assuming you have a mission-critical Linux application, it's hard to imagine a good reason to run it in an emulator box under Windows. It seems to me you'd be better off to run Linux on a Linux box, and interoperate with Windows servers when you need to. Unless you're porting Linux apps to Windows ... in which case Microsoft already provides lots of support.
I'm too lazy to do the math, but at 2.5-g acceleration it'd take less than a minute to reach 330,000 feet. The engine has been test fired for at least 1 1/2 minutes; there's already very little air at 68,000 feet. Since they simply fall back into the atmosphere, reentry isn't much of a problem (and the feathered configuration avoids the instability problems the X-15 had).
All in all, I'd say they could have reached space the first time, but they're being cautious instead. Sure beats the "Just get it working, then we'll patch it until it's robust" approach.
Actually, I converted the X-Prize height to feet to match the numbers from the press release. Sure, metric makes more sense, but let's not forget the US is still unaccountably anti-metric (see: Mars Orbiter Lost Over Metric Conversion Error)
Change the question slightly and you're guaranteed a unanimous answer!