Exactly. Look at the market fail-crater that is Facebook.
Oh, wait, that didn't happen. Success and failure have exactly nothing to do with quality of the software product. "Good enough for the suckers" is the order of the day and the practitioners of this approach rake in billions of dollars a year.
So, yeah. I'm not sure what definition of "fail" you're using, but clearly it has nothing to do with revenues, market, or social impact.
Yeah, I know... the First Sale Doctrine, as describe in TF Wikipedia Article, is pretty US-centric, but I have to assume it has some validity in other legal frameworks, even if not by that precise name. In this case (both noted in TFA and TF Wikipedia Article), the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled last July that "used" software licenses are legally resellable, so Valve seems to not have a legal reason to prohibit it.
Interesting. I don't recall hearing about the CJEU ruling, and I like to pay attention to events in the software rights arena. I guess I have to commend the EU for a sensible approach to digital rights in yet another issue.
The saving grace is that this was granted by the US PTO. As far as I can tell, it's not directly applicable in the land of all of those retailers, and I hope that maybe the UK IPO has the good sense to say "Fuck right off" to APL.
I used to work in shipbuilding. Systems integration is a BFD in shipbuilding, and you NEVER build prototypes. You can't prototype a $500M product, the first one is a production model. The going consensus in shipbuilding is that you always lose money on the first ship of a class, because there's simply too many things to figure out during the production phase. Numerous attempts have been made to resolve that, but it's simply too hard to account for everything. It seems like Boeing tried to follow this model, but you just have to take into account the teething problems in doing this, there's just no way about it.
You raise good points, all very true, but I'd argue that the shipbuilding model isn't appropriate for aircraft. Each ship is completely unique, even if built from identical plans. Each ship is, effectively, its own prototype, and the entire life-cycle model of a new ship is preloaded with prototype-like activities (fitting out, shakedown, eval, lots and lots of tech rep time aboard).
Airplanes? Not so much. They're much closer to consumer devices in overall engineering and production scope: essentially identical at the airframe and major systems level from article to article.
And frankly, Boeing knows better. The DoD aircraft acquisition model is chock full of prototyping (both exploratory and developmental) and the understanding that the first "production" models are almost prototypes (hence the program phase "Limited Rate Initial Production": "You will build, and we will field, a limited number of your whizzy new F-47 UberRaptor in Air Force Materiel Command flight test squadrons. And we will not turn on full rate production until these initial production aircraft have been exercised fully in flight testing; at the same time, we're going to develop the inital maintenance and operations training regime to support these aircraft in their final operational home. Once the system passes Operational Test and Evaluation at an initial operational assignment, we will turn on full production."
Yes. Defense acquisition processes are very bureaucratic, but at least they retain the understanding that you don't just slam right into full-rate production. A one-year in-house flight test program is almost certainly not enough, especially if you're doing so much subcontracting, and if there's significant technical novelty (like the higher use of all-electric systems with LiPo batteries).
And if they decide to sue you for taking their code?
If anyone decides to assert ownership, properly or otherwise, everyone without a valid counterclaim of ownership using the code without the newly-blessed "owner" will have difficulty defending themselves.
Sorry. You can't wish away intellectual property any more than you can abolish handguns or nukes. If you claim not to play the game, that just means you automatically lose when the game comes to play you.
I'm a systems engineer, which means that integration is pretty much the only reason my job exists... for projects (hardware/software/everything) which are too big to continuously integrate. Projects that are modularized by design, and very often subcontracted as well.
If the first time you're integrating your product is the first production run, you're too late. You should have had a prototype. You should treat the first production samples AS prototypes. (The wisdom of the "never buy the zero revision of anything" is in this.)
But, yeah, that's expensive. It's cheaper to assume that every subassembly will be perfectly built to perfect specifications, and that interfaces just magically happen, and that integration is just sticking the pieces together and turning a few screws.
Going forward, Mozilla will essentially be blocking all plugins except the very latest version of Flash. The company won't say why it is exempting Adobe's plugin, but it's most likely because users expect their videos to play automatically (and advertisers expect their ads to load automatically).
Emphasis mine.
"Follow the money." That's a reason I can understand.
Makes me glad I usually run with Adblock and NoScript.
Fair call. As probably the first popularized 2D cellular automaton, Life broke some ground. And the computerization of the ruleset (pretty much concurrently with the publication of the game in 1970) allowed a lot of research and exploration, and the whole study of cellular automata flourished.
Pretty much the spark that exploded Von Neumann's and Ulam's academic noodling in the 1950s. If we ever get self-replicating nanomachines, some of the credit would have to go to Conway.
I certainly hope so. Otherwise Slashdot is a repeat scofflaw and possibly one of the worst wire fraudstars on the net (applying the criteria of the Swartz case).
Do they give you the unlock code, or are you forced to be roaming costs?
Do you really have to ask? If they give you the unlock code, they're providing the first tool in walking away from their service. (After that is the early-termination fee, but if you're the mobile company, why settle for one manacle (anti-termination contract language) when you can have two? (contract plus technical measures restricting carrier portability))
Whereas in the second case, not only are you still safely chained to the carrier you contracted with, but you'll dance to their tune and pay their roaming charges, and YOU'LL LIKE IT!
Or, more likely, buy a PAYG phone at the airport and use that. But then your own carrier is still getting your $xx per month, and you're not using any of their bandwidth. Free money!
Well, I hope you're not trusting management in this. As pointed out upthread, "good enough" is also "lower-cost" and "quicker". Checking off a feature in the development schedule for 0 cost and 0 time practically makes project managers orgasm, so don't expect much support for your "handcrafted desktop UI" (at the cost of at least 40 hours of effort and a week on the schedule).
In this way, "good enough" is the conspiracy between overworked developer and the overreaching manager.
There might be that. Or there might be laziness. "OK, got the UI working for compact touchscreen devices. Now to design a completely different UI for a non-touchscreen large-format device with mouse and keyboard. Screw it. I'll just upscale the first UI. It'll work fine, and I just want to check this off and maybe go home on time for a change."
In a developer, laziness is next to godliness, in that it's simply another synonym for "efficient". The fact that a tablet UI is kinda yucky on a desktop system doesn't take away from the fact that it basically works. "Good enough".
I'm sure it was just Admiral Akbar whispering in your ear.
Self-professed hackers hacking for America will be put onto a watch list and hauled in for questioning any time anything untoward happens in the United Internet of America. Especially in the parts claimed by the corporate citizens of that great state.
Slashdot Mirror
I see what you did there.
I would have preferred a pizza analogy, but whatever.
Yeah. I noticed that too.
Dirty little disclaimers like that are proof of who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Exactly. Look at the market fail-crater that is Facebook.
Oh, wait, that didn't happen. Success and failure have exactly nothing to do with quality of the software product. "Good enough for the suckers" is the order of the day and the practitioners of this approach rake in billions of dollars a year.
So, yeah. I'm not sure what definition of "fail" you're using, but clearly it has nothing to do with revenues, market, or social impact.
And so, according to Valve, is "first sale".
Yeah, I know... the First Sale Doctrine, as describe in TF Wikipedia Article, is pretty US-centric, but I have to assume it has some validity in other legal frameworks, even if not by that precise name. In this case (both noted in TFA and TF Wikipedia Article), the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled last July that "used" software licenses are legally resellable, so Valve seems to not have a legal reason to prohibit it.
Interesting. I don't recall hearing about the CJEU ruling, and I like to pay attention to events in the software rights arena. I guess I have to commend the EU for a sensible approach to digital rights in yet another issue.
The saving grace is that this was granted by the US PTO. As far as I can tell, it's not directly applicable in the land of all of those retailers, and I hope that maybe the UK IPO has the good sense to say "Fuck right off" to APL.
Well, I can hope, can't I?
Fair point. 15 seconds on 4chan would disabuse anyone of the notion that the "good of humanity" has any damn thing to do with the internet.
I used to work in shipbuilding. Systems integration is a BFD in shipbuilding, and you NEVER build prototypes. You can't prototype a $500M product, the first one is a production model. The going consensus in shipbuilding is that you always lose money on the first ship of a class, because there's simply too many things to figure out during the production phase. Numerous attempts have been made to resolve that, but it's simply too hard to account for everything. It seems like Boeing tried to follow this model, but you just have to take into account the teething problems in doing this, there's just no way about it.
You raise good points, all very true, but I'd argue that the shipbuilding model isn't appropriate for aircraft. Each ship is completely unique, even if built from identical plans. Each ship is, effectively, its own prototype, and the entire life-cycle model of a new ship is preloaded with prototype-like activities (fitting out, shakedown, eval, lots and lots of tech rep time aboard).
Airplanes? Not so much. They're much closer to consumer devices in overall engineering and production scope: essentially identical at the airframe and major systems level from article to article.
And frankly, Boeing knows better. The DoD aircraft acquisition model is chock full of prototyping (both exploratory and developmental) and the understanding that the first "production" models are almost prototypes (hence the program phase "Limited Rate Initial Production": "You will build, and we will field, a limited number of your whizzy new F-47 UberRaptor in Air Force Materiel Command flight test squadrons. And we will not turn on full rate production until these initial production aircraft have been exercised fully in flight testing; at the same time, we're going to develop the inital maintenance and operations training regime to support these aircraft in their final operational home. Once the system passes Operational Test and Evaluation at an initial operational assignment, we will turn on full production."
Yes. Defense acquisition processes are very bureaucratic, but at least they retain the understanding that you don't just slam right into full-rate production. A one-year in-house flight test program is almost certainly not enough, especially if you're doing so much subcontracting, and if there's significant technical novelty (like the higher use of all-electric systems with LiPo batteries).
And if they decide to sue you for taking their code?
If anyone decides to assert ownership, properly or otherwise, everyone without a valid counterclaim of ownership using the code without the newly-blessed "owner" will have difficulty defending themselves.
Sorry. You can't wish away intellectual property any more than you can abolish handguns or nukes. If you claim not to play the game, that just means you automatically lose when the game comes to play you.
This.
I'm a systems engineer, which means that integration is pretty much the only reason my job exists... for projects (hardware/software/everything) which are too big to continuously integrate. Projects that are modularized by design, and very often subcontracted as well.
If the first time you're integrating your product is the first production run, you're too late. You should have had a prototype. You should treat the first production samples AS prototypes. (The wisdom of the "never buy the zero revision of anything" is in this.)
But, yeah, that's expensive. It's cheaper to assume that every subassembly will be perfectly built to perfect specifications, and that interfaces just magically happen, and that integration is just sticking the pieces together and turning a few screws.
Well, if your assertion is that "people are a problem", you're not the first to make that observation..
It's a little-considered fact that 100% of insider crime is committed by insiders.
Short of extincting the human race, I don't see a good solution. Maybe we should not fixate on the insolubles?
You're right. I'm emphasizing speculation. Credible speculation, IMHO. And probably in the honest opinion of anyone who's paying any attention.
Maybe I'm too cynical. More likely, you're not cynical enough.
The government is not some foreign entity, it is us.
Dammit, what were you doing up there in a military helicopter scaring the folks and pretending to shoot up imaginary bad guys on a crowded highway?
Cripes. We The People can be so damn careless sometimes.
DRM is a non-issue for consoles like water is a non-issue for fish.
I found it Reading the Fucking Article:
Emphasis mine.
"Follow the money." That's a reason I can understand.
Makes me glad I usually run with Adblock and NoScript.
Fair call. As probably the first popularized 2D cellular automaton, Life broke some ground. And the computerization of the ruleset (pretty much concurrently with the publication of the game in 1970) allowed a lot of research and exploration, and the whole study of cellular automata flourished.
Pretty much the spark that exploded Von Neumann's and Ulam's academic noodling in the 1950s. If we ever get self-replicating nanomachines, some of the credit would have to go to Conway.
I certainly hope so. Otherwise Slashdot is a repeat scofflaw and possibly one of the worst wire fraudstars on the net (applying the criteria of the Swartz case).
I like those apologies that boil down to "I'm sorry you're a stupid boogerhead." I'm glad Lego got to do one of those.
I bet most people in the Austrian Turkish community are embarrassed as fuck to be associated with the specific whinging ass-rags..
FTFY. I hope.
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
that it was the cold water.
Do they give you the unlock code, or are you forced to be roaming costs?
Do you really have to ask? If they give you the unlock code, they're providing the first tool in walking away from their service. (After that is the early-termination fee, but if you're the mobile company, why settle for one manacle (anti-termination contract language) when you can have two? (contract plus technical measures restricting carrier portability))
Whereas in the second case, not only are you still safely chained to the carrier you contracted with, but you'll dance to their tune and pay their roaming charges, and YOU'LL LIKE IT!
Or, more likely, buy a PAYG phone at the airport and use that. But then your own carrier is still getting your $xx per month, and you're not using any of their bandwidth. Free money!
Well, I hope you're not trusting management in this. As pointed out upthread, "good enough" is also "lower-cost" and "quicker". Checking off a feature in the development schedule for 0 cost and 0 time practically makes project managers orgasm, so don't expect much support for your "handcrafted desktop UI" (at the cost of at least 40 hours of effort and a week on the schedule).
In this way, "good enough" is the conspiracy between overworked developer and the overreaching manager.
There might be that. Or there might be laziness. "OK, got the UI working for compact touchscreen devices. Now to design a completely different UI for a non-touchscreen large-format device with mouse and keyboard. Screw it. I'll just upscale the first UI. It'll work fine, and I just want to check this off and maybe go home on time for a change."
In a developer, laziness is next to godliness, in that it's simply another synonym for "efficient". The fact that a tablet UI is kinda yucky on a desktop system doesn't take away from the fact that it basically works. "Good enough".
"It's people. WD Green is made out of people."
If anyone from Western Digital or MGM/UA is listening, it's PARODY. Thank you.
I'm sure it was just Admiral Akbar whispering in your ear.
Self-professed hackers hacking for America will be put onto a watch list and hauled in for questioning any time anything untoward happens in the United Internet of America. Especially in the parts claimed by the corporate citizens of that great state.