"Windows for All Stupid Types" was renamed. During market research, they asked the target audience for a better name, and everybody raised their hands and yelled, "Me!"
SeaWorld in Orlando has implemented this idea. They have a second park (can't remember the name offhand) with limited visitors and virtually no lines. But the admission is more like 4 times as much.
I was at the Orlando SeaWorld last year, but we skipped Discovery Cove. (We were there for the Disney attractions. SeaWorld was an accident.)
A full price ticket to Seaworld is ~$50. I doubt anybody pays that much. We went with heavily discounted passes that we accidentally received from a fast food restaurant or something.
Discovery Cove is >$130 per day, plus $100 to swim with dolphins for 30 minutes. The dophin swim is limited to 8 visitors per session. The park is limited to 1000 visitors per day. The rest of the park is for swimming "in paradise" = very beautiful settings. Every ticket comes with 7 days at SeaWorld or Busch Gardens (which lowers the average ticket price for those parks.)
There are no lines at Discovery Cove, but there are no rides there. - SeaWorld had lines, definitely for the few good rides, but there were even difficulties getting seats at some of the shows. - Magic Kingdom had lines for everything. The rides had very long lines, most over 30 minutes. The line to buy water from a concession stand was usually about 5 deep.
--- That's what the economic realities are for a park like this. The higher price drives away much of the customer base, necessitating an even higher price.
There are two methods for determining the "best" price for an amusement park. 1. Maximize revenues. Multiply number of tickets sold at a given price by the price. Repeat for many prices. Choose the price that returns the highest total. - It would be very difficult to find a good estimate. Park pricing is almost as bad as airline pricing, for about the same reasons. They have a nonrenewable resource (time in the park) that can only be sold when people want it. Disney makes it harder to judge because normal tickets never expire, so if it is raining, just save the ticket for your next visit. [Our trip to SeaWorld means I still have one day left on a Disney ParkHopper. We really had not planned to go to SeaWorld.] Most people are on packages that halve the daily price. Season passes make the daily price almost $0, although they do expire.
2. Maximize the experience. Do the analysis from the first method, but then choose the highest price that covers expenses, including profit and risks such as it raining every day during the prime season. Each visitor would have a better experience. - Again this would be difficult to judge. Weekends and holidays would be even more popular because more of the park could be enjoyed in less time. Less people would require a week off before considering it a valid destination, but Saturday tickets might cost 10 times what a Tuesday ticket costs. This is completely impractical with current Disney policies.
I believe that all amusement parks have set their daily price around $50 and just hope people buy them. The price seems to be based on "Let's have the same price as everybody else" rather than "Let's do an economic analysis." I would be very interested in seeing if PixarLand (or any amusement park) was able to succeed with making the experience the top priority. How far from the "normal" price could they go before the experience loses to the cost? The normal American does not seem to be able to make the decision that $300 for a day of instant gratification is better than $50 for 7 hours of waiting to have 1 hour of fun.
Ancient Athens in the fourth century BC had a population of only around 60 thousand (less than 30 thousand if you only count those who were allowed to become educated) and yet the philosophy, science, mathematics, literature, and political thought that it produced overwhelmingly dwarfs (for instance) the suburbs of Atlanta, which contain many times more people with a much more widespread access to education and literacy.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert on Ancient Athens, so I welcome any insight on the following theory.
Did the incredible leaps in many disciplines come because the population was small? Or did they happen because there were a few great thinkers who impressed their students with enough different ideas that the ideas were expanded and elaborated in a dominant culture so the ideas survived and spread.
It seems that most of the thinkers in Ancient Athens were influenced by Socrates, who got his ideas from Archelaus, who learned from Anaxagoras. If these men had lived in Messenia, the world may have lost their ideas.
(Sorry if I sound like Ayn Rand, but I believe one great programmer is worth 20 mediocre programmers. The correlation would be that a few great thinkers have much greater influence than tons of mediocre thinkers.)
In Ancient Athens, "philosophy, science, mathematics, literature, and political thought" were very closely related subjects. Today each is considered a separate discipline. Scientists and mathematicians do not want to consider the philosophy or politics of their work. (American) Politicians are sometimes proud of their lack of knowledge about the sciences. Does the separation help because we focus more, or does it hurt because it is more difficult for ideas to transfer between disciplines? - Example: The horrors of "monoculture" were only noticed because the word "virus" is used by both biology and computer science. What other ideas from biology could advance the infant science of computers? People have started checking biology for ideas, but what about other sciences? Maybe tectonics has good ideas about integrating large masses of code.
--- Off-topic Anybody else notice the correlations between Ancient Athens and the U.S.? Both started well with a class system that encouraged slavery. Slavery was abolished. The main product (wheat for Athens; cotton/manufacturing for the US) was offshored, so they moved to a secondary but more profitable export (olive oil and wine; technology). Both were major economic centers for their time. Both were attacked by Persia, although the US has survived so far.
it'd cost you several hundred dollars to get in, everything would be stark white with accents of brushed steel and a few aqua bubbles. There would only be 3 rides, and they'd be the really old ones "ported" from Magic Mountain, and before you entered the park, there'd be a little tutorial demonstrating how powerful and intuitive everything is.
So you've been to Epcot?
The Innovation buildings are SO EXCITING. Their "future" of computer hardware is stuff most Slashdotters already have.
--- Given Steve Job's ability to create great usable interfaces, Pixarland may be the first themepark that would not require a map to find your way. It would keep the lines down to 10 minutes even on weekends. It might cost "several hundred dollars", but you would spend all the times on rides rather than waiting in line. At that price, your fast-food concessions can be buffet-style, eliminating the overhead of cashiers inside the park. The justification is that if you are eating, you are not making the lines for rides longer.
Would you pay twice the ticket price for the Magic Kingdom if the lines were half as long? You could see every attraction in fewer days so you could keep the trip shorter and save on hotel nights. And remove the boredom of standing on line for an hour for a 2-minute ride.
--- Pixarland will not happen soon. Since all the past and current movie releases were for Disney, Pixar will have to wait untill it has a few hits on its own. Then buy land. Design rides to fit the land and the movies. Build the rides. Hire people to run everything. Safety tests. Usability testing. Fix anything confusing. Repeat until anybody from 5 to 95 can understand the layout. Finally we mortals are allowed to enter.
I guess they need 5 great movies (at one movie per year) before even starting. Another 5 years to design, build and test the first 10 rides. (I am assuming one adult and one child per movie.) So Pixarland opens in 2015. The grand opening will do well, and adding a few rides each year to match the latest movies would keep people going back.
In case you had not heard, SuSE was bought by Novell. Novell is based in the US. This happened 6 months after Munich made their decision, so it is doubtful it was a factor. IBM is also part of the migration team, and they have always been US-based. It really does not matter where the companies are based. Most of the IT people working on the migration will be local anyway. No company can afford to import enough grunts to do a project of this size.
[I often travel for assignments, but I am always either the architect or troubleshooter. Most of the time-consuming work on any project is handled by locals.]
The big local-vs-foreign discussion is that paying for Microsoft software is a direct drain of money for no benefit. (You can post about how MS support is great, but they have posted more of my solutions than I have used their solutions. That might be different if my solutions saw their software as more than an obstacle to be overcome.)
--- SNAFU This article is just a basic project report. "We have issues, but they were anticipated in the budget, so we are still on schedule." If the project was not high-profile, even the media would recognize this is expected. The spin about how applications need to be ported is just filler so the article is more than 3 sentences.
I liked American Gods better when it was called The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul by Douglas Adams of the Hitchhiker's Guide fame. It was more cohesive, funnier, and kept my attention by keeping the story moving. American Gods seemed like a poorly written attempt to rewrite the story by adding some poorly written sex subtext. Of course, it also has American in the title, so it is more patriotic for us Americans. LDTTotS was written way back in 1988; Gaiman must feel that everybody would have forgotten it by now, since he did not even put it in the bibliography for AG
Douglas Adams died unexpectedly in May, 2001, so he could not complain when Neil released AG the next month. Anybody want to create a conspiracy theory about the timing of the Adams' unexpected heart-attack. Maybe the book writing business is cut-throat in the literal sense.
--- How can you go from Terry Pratchett to Neil Gaiman? Pratchett is more like Robert Asprin, Christopher Stasheff, Jody Lynn Nye, or anybody with a sense of humor.
Gaiman is more like required reading for high school: very slow moving with an ending that makes you wish you had quit in chapter 3 when you thought you had figured out the rest of the book, and you were correct. (My opinion is from American Gods. I think I have read another of Gaiman's books, but it was completely forgettable. At least AG made a bad impression.)
--- If you have not read American Gods, then read The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul to get the ideas without the boredom. If you have already read American Gods, then read The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul to see how well the story could have been told.
I reentered the computer world in 1995 as support. I had opportunities to double my salary by jumping to a management position at other support centers. Instead, I found a job that was halfway between support and administration with a different but high-income technology for the same pay I was receiving. I learned the technology and related software, gained much experience, and the next year I joined a consulting company. (I wanted to be loyal, but corporate policy was that raises had to be very small, and my manager strongly suggested I look outside the company for my own good.)
The double-my-support-salary point was very close to the limit for what a call center manager could make. I passed that point in 1998, and have been making about twice that starting in 1999. I could make much more if I was willing to work more than 1000 hours each year.
Now I play the other side of it. I know the technology, and pick up related technologies as needed. My resume is already too long. I am one of the top people in my niche, and am often the only choice for the projects I do.
I have set my rate very high for my niche. This weeds out companies that want me to hold a chair down. If a project is offered to me, I know that the company is serious about getting it done. I have only refused one project where they were willing to pay my rate.
--- Appendix The only project I turned down was a state agency that had already decided to use a mess of many technologies. Most of the technologies were being used for their weakest ability, completely ignoring what the technology was designed to do. I was to manage around 20 people who were the low-cost answer for each position. They even tried to haggle a 2% decrease in my pay. I would have made much money, but I did not feel the project could possibly succeed with the human and technical resources they were using. I do not want to ever miss a deadline, nevermind manage a failed project, so I turned them down. If I was allowed any input into the technology and how the system was designed, I could have done my usual "finished with extra features and well under the budget" work. I cannot understand why they would want to hire someone like me without getting input for the design.
When I was looking to spec systems a few months ago, I did not look at these much. - The Intel D845PEBT2 motherboard has the 845PE chipset. - The D865PERL motherboard has the 865PE chipset, but at least it supports the 800Mhz bus. Two of the four configurations support Firewire.
I require the Intel 875 chipset for a modern system. The only Intel motherboard using the 875 chipset is the D875PBZ, and it does not have Firewire. Intel does not have a "latest technology" motherboard that includes Firewire. I am still surprised Intel only has one motherboard demonstrating their latest and best chipset. But it is nice to know that Intel includes Firewire on some of their motherboards.
--- (I apologize for the poor grammar in the original post. I bumped the ENTER key while fixing the Subject. I expected a few flames about the grammar, but thankfully all the responses have been informative.)
Modern Mac has the old ROM stored on disk, Openfirmware, OS X, (S)ATA, CD/DVD-RW, USB, Firewire, PCI, AGP, RJ-45, Ethernet, DVI, PowerPC... note that the Mac has grown more in the direction of the PC than vice versa
I do not know Macs, so I may have missed something, but which of these started with the Wintel PC?
ROM/Open firmware - The news is that Wintels may do this soon, but I have yet to see motherboard without ROM BIOS.
OS X - Unix, not Wintel
SATA - From the harddrive manufacturers. The implementation for Wintel has the BIOS must faking one of the standard IDE positions so that MSWindows thinks it is running from "C:". This reduces the number of drives that can be used in a dual IDE/SATA PC, and encourages the consumer to find an OS that can fully use the hardware. This could not have been planned by MS.
CD/DVD-RW - Consumer technology coopted by the computer world.
USB - The Wintel answer to Firewire.
Firewire - Apple. It is so much an Apple technology that Intel refuses to incorporate it into their motherboards.
PCI, AGP - Hardware manufacturers, but they are the standards for Wintel. Be thankful that Apple has decided to follow the "standards" for commodity hardware.
RJ-45, Ethernet - Ethernet came from the mainframe/Unix world. It barely touched the Wintel world until the late 80s. The RJ45 plug was a quick prototype that accidentally made it into production. The engineers are still kicking themselves for designing a plug that is designed to catch on EVERYTHING.
DVI - I do not know who started this.
PowerPC - IBM. Was it first designed for Apple or Microsoft? Does anybody other than Apple and IBM use it?
Paperbacks are better for travelling. Smaller and lighter, they fit in the back of my belt or the sleeve of a jacket so people don't think I'm a nerd. Ten paperbacks is good for a week travelling while consulting. Three hardcovers weigh more and I know that I'll be flipping stations on the hotel TV by Wednesday.
Hardcovers look better in the library, and survive much better. With overstock stores like Atlantic Books, they cost less than paperbacks. The Ender series and Spider Robinson are about the only ones I am willing to pay full price. Reading in bed, the larger print and larger pages means you can prop the book up with pillows and still read with one hand. (No jokes please.)
Since I started almost exclusively buying hardcovers, the amount of books I read has started slipping. This may also have much to do with life changes. There is just so much to do that I can rarely read more than one book in a day. Also, reading Slashdot takes a bit of time that was previously dedicated to books.
The big problem with hardcovers is the space. I bought 3 more bookshelves recently, and do not have much room for more. The new shelves are already filled and there are a few hundred books that still do not have a home yet.
I agree about the QT licensing. When I wrote the first post, I was under the impression there was a charge for the QT runtime library. That has been corrected.
--- About GPL vs LGPL libraries: Both require changes to the library to be released as source if you distribute the changed binaries. If you use a GPL library, the application must also be GPL'd. If you use the LGPL, then the application can be proprietary. Both would encourage the library to be improved, but the LGPL does not require the new app to be Free.
Is it good to force the apps to be GPL because everybody will run out and slap the GPL on their software? Is it bad because companies will not use the library, so they waste effort reproducing it or money buying a different library? Neither improves the GPL'd library.
Long term (about a century?), all software will probably be GPL'd. The LGPL allows proprietary companies to use and improve the Free libraries. That allows Free Software to benefit from proprietary software companies while they still exist. The migration will take quite some time, and this allows it to be gradual rather than forcing a complete cutover.
--- The QPL seems to have identical terms to the GPL. What am I missing? Why didn't they just use the GPL? What happens if you write GPL software using QT? Do you need to include both licenses?
Thanks for the toolkit comparison. I hoped someone who used both recently would post a comparison. Of course, few people bother to use more than one API at a time if they can help it.
I was surprised by some of the responses. I defined what I knew about the licensing issues. I learned some of it was wrong. I also stated a preference for KDE. I have been using Gnome on RedHat for years, but I am stuck with MSWindows for my work. I finally tried KDE a few months ago, and realized I prefer it. That said, I really do not care which one wins. I just want Corporate America to decide soon so I know what I should study.
[Off-topic: Does anybody know how to make ANY version of Desktop Linux easy for editing text files? I usually just need to change some setting. I keep trying different programs, and they drive me crazy. After 10 minutes, I give up, open a terminal, and use vi.]
--- My father has a very large group of friends. I converted him to Mozilla a few years ago, and he converted more than a dozen people. I get calls that a friend of a friend of a friend of his likes it, but wonders how to do something. So Mozilla is spreading.
I set up his new PC to triple-boot Win98SE, RedHat9, and Slackware9. While he will use MSWindows as his main OS, he will eventually check out this "other stuff" just because it is there. I wanted him to have choices, so included RedHat because it is natively Gnome, and Slackware because it is natively KDE.
I have configured every option to make both distros feel as much like MSWindows as I could. The big one is the Shade vs Maximize for double-clicking the TitleBar. I used Shades a decade ago, but then MSWindows changed the rules, and I got the habit of expecting it to maximize. I know my father will expect that, since I taught it to him and I have watched him do it without thinking about it.
Please do not start a distro comparison. Those were the distros I had recent versions nearby when I was installing. My copy of Mandrake was old. My latest SuSE is a live CD. He will have a copy of that too, and will probably be burning copies to give to all his friends to try. (He likes to share.) He will probably use MSWindows to make the copies. It is worthwhile to me even if they only boot to Linux to play the games. The important part is to get people comfortable with any Desktop Linux, and this is one step in that direction.
Games that appeal to nerds are already being ported. To take over the desktop requires "The Sims" and children's games.
If your child must run MSWindows for Reader Rabbit and Barbie, then you are stuck with MSWindows on at least one computer. Unless you are a nerd, you will not want more than one OS in the house.
"The Sims" is "The #1 best selling game of all time" according to the website. I know people (mostly women) who have only played "The Sims" and versions of Solitaire. Spider Solitaire may be the killer app for WinXP, like Solitaire was for Win3.1. OK, maybe MSWord had something to do with it. But XP only has Spider, so it needs to be enough.
Make the women and children happy and the men will follow.
The good part is that neither "The Sims" nor any children's games require "massive amounts of time and money".
Have you tried writing commercial software for [KDE/QT]?
I answered in another post that I had not. My commercial apps are all for big business. Most of them use another (high-priced) platform.
This thread has generated more posts than any I have previously wrote. I finally read the licensing for QT. You have the 2 choices: - QPL, which has terms identical to the GPL. [Real question: are they mutually exclusive? Can I use QPL'd code in a GPL'd program or the reverse? Do I need to include both licenses with the source?]
- Commercial license: $149 per developer. I have paid much more than $149 for development tools, so this is reasonable. If I have 10 developers on the project, is that $1490, or do I just need the licenses for the UI designers? Can the internal development be handled by teams using the open version, then recompiled by one developer who has a commercial license? This is a very minor concern for an established company, but thousands of dollars can impact a boot-strap start-up. - Trolltech's site says you must pay for every developer, and that the license can be transferred between developers only every six months and within the same organization. Is an organization a company or a division? Can MS transfer the license from a MSWindows developer to a MSOffice developer? (It is an example. I doubt MS would use QT, or would care about $149 if they did.)
I was happy to see that there are no charges for distributing applications for companies that bought the commercial license. That makes the call between QT and GTK+ much harder (and hurts my original post. This has been educational.)
Is it possible to write QT-compatible for-profit apps without paying Trolltech? Yes, the license is inexpensive, but is it required?
My question "Is QT so much better that all companies are willing to pay for QT for the next decade rather than assist GNU with improving GTK+?" is because I have not tried to write software with either toolkit. It was actually meant as a question, and I would like to read a good comparison from programmers that have used both QT and GTK+. Even if QT is fantastic compared to GTK+, I still wonder if it is worth being locked into the overhead.
I did read the link, including the paragraph you quoted. I assumed it was spin: "Oops, we need to pay Trolltech; let us see if we can get a discount if we will publicly announce we like their toolkit." There was no mention that Adobe put effort into comparing a variety of toolkits and Trolltech won. Just that Qt is an intuitive, powerful tool [that] simplified our task of developing... providing high-level tools that we could customize to meet our needs... The product is excellent, the support was outstanding and we are extremely pleased with our decision That sounds like marketing, not technical advice.
Another response mentions a long list of companies using QT for MSWindows programs. Trolltech has a good customer base. I cannot review their product, because I have not used it. The big question is whether the Desktop Linux community want to force all proprietary software companies to support Trolltech. If this happens, I want to buy their stock. (Yes they are private today, but as the next MS-type monopoly, they will grow.)
Yes, companies will decide to pay for QT if the advantage is great enough. If I can get a product to market much faster than using a competing toolkit, then it would be worth the money, but I might replace it later when speed of development for first-mover advantage does not matter. If the product will have better features, or be much easier to maintain because I used this toolkit, then it might be worth the constant drain. Please tell me if these advantages apply to QT.
Can I sell programs based on QT without giving Trolltech money?
I forgot the word "proprietary". Can I sell proprietary programs based on QT without giving money to Trolltech?
Free Software does not rule out monetary gain. I have yet to read about or develop my own software business model that uses FSS for profit. FSS may not rule out monetary GAIN, but it is great to decrease monetary LOSS.
I am a strong believer in FSS. I believe that it can remove the drain from paying software companies. I believe it gives control of the software to the company using it. I recommend it to my clients. Most software is used in-house, and FSS allows for software to be shared with other companies for the benefit of all without impacting the competition portion of business (other than for software companies.)
FSS is great for service organizations like IBM and RedHat. The software becomes a commodity, and the need for services increases. They will improve FSS in the process of satisfying customers.
But making software into a commodity is exactly the wrong direction for software development company. If your profits will be generated from selling software, then the price cannot be zero. This is why MS fears Linux: if the normal price for an OS is zero, they will find it difficult to charge for their version.
--- I got called a "SCO/MS shill". Wow. SCO is insane. And irrelevant. MS is dying. Many of my posts detail exactly how AND WHEN the fall will happen.
You can make money with Linux, or rather, you can save money by using Linux, and you can make money by selling support for Linux. The difference is semantics, but nobody thinks they can run a profitable company that sold Linux without for-profit support.
What if MSWindows had the toolkit choices that KDE currently has? You write a program. You have 2 choices: 1. Give your program away for free. (And watch MS bundle it with the next service pack.) Or 2. Give money to Microsoft for the priviledge of selling software to be used on their OS.
Those are the choices when using QT with KDE: 1. Give your program away for free under the GPL. 2. Give money to Trolltech for the priviledge of selling software to be used on KDE.
Microsoft realized that they needed to encourage development of software by making it free to distribute programs. They benefited because the more programs written for their OS, the more people bought their OS.
Trolltech does not own KDE. They do not make money for every copy of KDE used in the world. They must make their money by charging for the toolkit, or by charging for every copy of the toolkit that is not used for free software.
You would think Stallman would prefer this model since it encourages developers to release software under the GPL. But it is his GNU toolkit that allows software to be released under any license. He is a pragmatist, and understands that forcing the license issue just slows adoption of the Free OSes. (OK. Maybe not Stallman, but someone out there understands.) We need to allow Photoshop and The Sims to be ported to Linux under the same free toolkit license that they have with MSWindows, or they will not do the ports.
OK. I picked a REALLY bad example. Thanks for the link. (That was a really fast response. Do you work for Trolltech?)
At least I said "Adobe Photoshop", not just "Adobe". Your link is about "Adobe Photoshop Album", which is just a picture viewer with basic fixes.
Is QT so much better that all companies are willing to pay for QT for the next decade rather than assist GNU with improving GTK+?
Or was Adobe prototyping a new program they needed because every digital camera comes with one and they might lose marketshare, some developer used QT for the prototype, and it shipped before they got around to replacing the toolkit?
My point was that using QT severely limits your choice of licenses. Part of MSWindows' success was that developers never worried about paying to distribute their programs. Microsoft even provided free libraries for distribution. Gnome follows that pattern. I just installed GTK+ on a MSWindows PC without paying for it. Can I sell programs based on QT without giving Trolltech money? Is there a good business justification for giving Trolltech some of my profits?
Gnome uses GTK+ which is LGPL. Both FSS and proprietary software writers can use it without paying anybody.
KDE uses QT which is dual-licensed GPL and "pay us if you sell an application": - FSS developers MUST release their software as GPL. - Proprietary developers MUST pay.
As a software developer, you are better with Gnome or Microsoft than with QT. If all you release is GPL, then it does not matter. If all you ever want to use is GPL, then it does not matter. But if you want to see Adobe Photoshop on Linux, expect your stupid QT license issues to matter, because Photoshop will not be sold with QT.
--- I spent the last week switching between Gnome (RedHat) and KDE (Slackware and a little SuSE) about hourly. I like KDE slightly better AS A USER, but I would not write commercial software for it.
HP merged with Compaq. Gateway is buying EMachines. IBM can never decide if they want to stay in the PC market. Dell is still Dell, but wants to move into electronics.
[Yes, I am ignoring laptops. They can replace PCs, but are a very different business model.]
PC manufacturers have consolidated because the profit margins keep shrinking. If it were not for these awful contracts with Microsoft, every one of these vendors would be shipping a "free" OS to cut costs. Most people would not know the difference until their child's new game did not run.
It would be cheaper to write a few children's games than to pay the MS tax. Making a game unique and challenging are negatives when writing for children. They could invest in The Learning Company and insist the games are ported to Linux. The manufacturers could bundle the games for free, make it another marketing point, and still profit more than paying MS.
What else do you need? Every distro comes with email, multiple browsers, an office suite, a graphics program, a few movie players, and more games for adults than Windows. Make certain they can easily change the wallpaper. Get Maxis to port "The Sims". At that point, most of the population is covered.
I do want the boot process to be fixed. Single threaded booting means Linux is slower than Windows (for the boot. After that Linux wins easily.) Split the stuff required for the GUI from everything else. Get the drives mounted, X started, then hit them with the login screen. Make certain the firewall and network are running before the desktop finishes loading. The printers should be ready about then. Internet servers and everything else can finish up while the users are reading their email.
Linux is ready. The applications are there. We are just waiting for one of the large manufacturers to offer Linux as the default option so they can undersell the others.
Here is an excerpt from one of my posts in July about the best way for Microsoft to auction its divisions. New comments are in brackets.
Addition: Believing MS is completely myopic, I assume that Longhorn and XBox2 will be delayed as MS concentrates on cost-cutting. They have already started offshoring to India and reducing the headcount on the west coast. I expect the company to implode before Longhorn is supposed to be released.
--- - Windows and Office actually make money, and are the reason MS exists. [They will keep them together as long as possible since they define MS. I believe that the Office division will need to sell Linux versions to survive, and that could save the company, but they will wait until Windows has lost its monopoly, and by then it will be much too late.]
- Server SW would be a good choice, because it breaks even, but is too strategic to be sold first.
- Mobile software: Too much recent news about how Tablets and PocketPCs are strategic. [I have not heard much hype about this recently. Are they pulling back?]
- Games: Game software companies are always sold cheap, but MS has the XBox hardware. Sell the software to Atari (formerly Infogrames). The XBox could be sold to a company wanting to get into gaming like NVidia, a company that sells consoles like Sony, or a Linux distributor who will sell it as a PC replacement and wants the existing public awareness of the trademark. MS can start by selling older titles to Infogrames: quick cash and it does not look like MS is folding. [I have not read any news about their Game division recently; are they still releasing? Could we tell if they stopped new development of games?]
- Business software: Good choice. Say it was a mistake to upset other companies by having the GreatPlains purchase compete with MS's business partners. Good publicity, and a decent price. [I am waiting, but again have not heard much news. Did MS turn off its publicity department?]
- MSN: With AOL on the run, MSN could look like it will increase marketshare. The problem is that the M stands for Microsoft. They could announce that they believe subscription services are obsolete, but that would kill the price. A quiet deal with Earthlink would be the best. I'd say AOL, but AOL has enough problems. But can a deal like this be quiet with the FCC watching? More likely MS will move move equipment and people to Earthlink, while keeping the receivables moving through MS to satisfy the regulators. [Microsoft has already decided to stop promoting MSN.]
In early 2000, I consulted with a company that handles much of the B2B for the fashion industry. This functionality was discussed as part of a B2C add-on. They wanted it, and were trying to price it, but many factors made it difficult:
1. The audience was mostly female. Most men would not bother with the system. And women were less likely to be buying on the web. So the ROI was difficult to justify. (This and some of the following include sexual stereotypes. There is a reason they are sterotypes.)
2. Most women will lie about their body size. Could we automatically adjust the virtual bodies up one size? Yes, but that would upset the honest women. Would women be honest when their purchasing decisions depended on it? Since the system was not built, this was never answered.
3. Would women even enter all the information needed? Height, weight, waist, inseam, bust, shoulders, arm length, neck width, circumference of biceps and thighs. Think of all the measurements that a tailor makes. Now expect women to enter all that for each website that uses the system, and update it when their shape changes. (Very few people are the same size in January after the holiday eating as they are in September after Summer's outdoor activities.)
4. Would women be concerned that there is a complete record of how their body changes? My mentioning this was a little ahead of the times, as privacy concerns were not in your face then. But would you like a system that remembered every time you added a few pounds?
5. The model would need to show how clothes drape over the body form. We would need incredible horsepower to run the system. We already knew all the details of the fabrics as part of the B2B system that helped designers choose appropriate fabrics for their creations. That part was just programming, but 3D modeling is CPU-intensive. (I recommended hiring some game-engine programmers to optimize the system.)
6. How are the clothes shown? Do we offer choices for whether a blouse is tucked in, and how tightly? How many buttons are fastened? The width of a belt, and exactly where it is worn?
7. Could we show several products at the same time? This one had us baffled, especially if we were to combine products from several companies. The company hoped to set up a single website that the branded websites would pass buyers. I do not know if the fashion companies would have done this. The largest companies have a complete line, so would prefer to buy the technology for their own website.
--- The company sold software. I was recommending that the software be free, but that the company take a (very small) cut of each transaction. They were already discovering that people were using their free-but-limited version to not pay for the full-featured version, even if the customers had to type much of the information in the comments. The company asked me to make it impossible to use the free version for the main tasks that were in the full version. I recommended making the full version (their cash cow) free, but providing a central clearinghouse to handle the transactions. My recommendations were presented to the president of the company. The company was bought later that year and I have not heard from them since.
I just looked up the company that bought them, and they have several press releases this month about winning new customers for their "product lifecycle" software, so they are still active as software sellers, but they do not own the B2B fashion market as I recommended.
Would you get a job in a restaturant because you like to eat? Maybe, but it is better to get a job that uses your strengths. You may have become a fabulous cook because you like to eat. Did you become a fabulous programmer, graphics, sound, writer, or designer because of video games?
Having the skills does not mean that this is the best place to apply them. That fabulous cook may be able to profit from writing cookbooks or designing frozen dinners more than working in a restaurant. Good programmers probably make more money in the corporate world than as as game writers (and it is easier to find a job since there are more of them.) Graphics and sound skills may be used in other media. Writers are always needed, but there are always too many for any field, so work with what you know. Game designers are more limited, but if you have the skills to be great, you will probably be starting/joining a new company rather than trying to break into one of the gaming powerhouses. (You can join them when they buy your company.)
My second dozen programs were all games. (The first dozen were HelloWorld and exploring the capabilities of the language.) I became a really good programmer. I also had talent for streamlining business processes. I merged the two skills to become a "corporate technology consultant". I analyze businesses and I write software. I would love to be writing games, but I do not believe the income could compare to my current career. And the APIs for games are very different from what I typically use, so my experience would not give me much advantage if I tried to change careers. (Take the advice about how the game industry is hard. My cousin is a game designer for Maxis. I would not want to trade jobs.)
--- Today's news includes that Blizzard is hiring level designers. The page defines exactly what they expect from anybody thinking about applying. Yes it starts with Absolute Passion for playing and making computer games, but they expect experience or a demonstration of skills. Good luck
The Patent and Trademark Office does not use the word "internet". They have yet to buy a modern dictionary to discover the definition. All patent and trademark applications must use the phrase "global information system". (Or something like that, maybe it was "global communications system". I am not going to ask/pay my lawyers to improve a Slashdot post.)
This dates to the 1980s when the word internet was not used, so the lawyers decided to use a phrase that would cover all possibilities. It also means they are covered if the "internet" is replaced by something else. The "internet" is defined by TCP/IP, so if a new low-level protocol took over, then the name might be changed. I do not believe that could happen after 1995, but these are lawyers, and reality does not matter to them.
A side effect of this is that prior art for a "game scoring system running on a BBS" may not be enough for "game scoring system for a global information system". I would think the local bowling alley or international golf associations having a centralized list of high scorers would be enough prior art to have the patent declared void.
Anyway, according to the USPTO: There is no internet.
The "article" is asking for books that reproduce the simple learning environment from the late 70s/early 80s. Complaining that one of these environments has: a limited set of fonts, all ugly as sin, and tiny widgets seems off-topic, as our original BASIC environment: - had ONE font, - was text-based, so it could not even strive to be "ugly" - had NO widgets. You were required to build everything from scratch.
I work with programmers who are not even a decade younger than me, but they did not start with computers until college. They have never built a program that was not on a "platform" that provided the GUI and access to all hardware such as memory. They have never had to PEEK and POKE, so have no clue about how memory really works. They will write (and debug) 60 lines of VB rather than one line of OS commands, because they have never worked at a CLI. I wrote a 3 line batch file that replaced a 400 line program they were having difficulty getting to work.
I am not saying that using IDEs is bad. We can do so much more working within a platform than we imagined in the early 80s, but the knowledge required before becoming productive is much higher.
We had a discussion about this a few months ago, but it is off my Info page so I could not find the posts. (I really wish I could find some of them, but the Info page only shows the latest 24 posts, and search is not very useful for limiting to one user.) Programmers today did not progress from CLI to OOP. They start with the current GUI and have little understanding of what the computer does.
In the late 80s/early 90s, people were learning about programming in college because it was the "good" career path. But they were "studying", not "hacking".
In the mid-90s, many people entered the IT world using HTML as the "programming" language. Then they copy/pasted JavaScript. Some of them took the time to learn how to write their own. A few of those branched into other languages, and they may have more of the hacker attitude because they were forced to figure out how things worked. But they still learned assuming the platform was there.
Today, BASIC is long gone, and HTML is not enough to get started. Colleges are teaching Java to the studying students, but Java really protects programmers from memory allocation. The scripting languages are great for administrators, but do not push you to learn more traditional programming.
I think the computer revolution has stalled because there is no easy entry point. One great programmer can outproduce a hundred regular programmers. Becoming a great programmer requires understanding how software relates to the hardware. Are there any great programmers who started with computers after 1990? Is it even possible to learn enough on today's platforms?
Most people shop for food once a week. Notifying them at the cash register may be faster than mailing them anything.
But in my case, it would also be dead wrong. Not only do I shop more irregularly than that, but I have no loyalty to the stores where I shop: I tend to go to one in particular more than the others, but in a 2-month period I may shop at 3-4 supermarkets.
I shop for food even less regularly: 7 times last year at 3 different stores. I eat out most of the time, and really stock up when I get around to shopping. So my suggestion would not help myself.
the odds that the person who bought the beef ate it long before the recall was announced seem rather high.
Which is why I thought snailmail was a terrible method for notifying customers about a food recall. The stores could call the phone number, but how many people put ANY real information on an application for a Shopper's Card. I do not have one, and refuse to shop at places that will not scan a store card so I get the discounts. (It is the principle, not the money.)
I am actively involved with making the supermarket Shopper cards more functional, which is ironic because nobody on our team uses them.
Your posting was both humorous and insightful. Thank you. Alas, nobody with points noticed it. Maybe I should have used some bold formatting?
Slashdot Mirror
"Windows for All Stupid Types" was renamed. During market research, they asked the target audience for a better name, and everybody raised their hands and yelled, "Me!"
SeaWorld in Orlando has implemented this idea. They have a second park (can't remember the name offhand) with limited visitors and virtually no lines. But the admission is more like 4 times as much.
I was at the Orlando SeaWorld last year, but we skipped Discovery Cove. (We were there for the Disney attractions. SeaWorld was an accident.)
A full price ticket to Seaworld is ~$50. I doubt anybody pays that much. We went with heavily discounted passes that we accidentally received from a fast food restaurant or something.
Discovery Cove is >$130 per day, plus $100 to swim with dolphins for 30 minutes. The dophin swim is limited to 8 visitors per session. The park is limited to 1000 visitors per day. The rest of the park is for swimming "in paradise" = very beautiful settings. Every ticket comes with 7 days at SeaWorld or Busch Gardens (which lowers the average ticket price for those parks.)
There are no lines at Discovery Cove, but there are no rides there.
- SeaWorld had lines, definitely for the few good rides, but there were even difficulties getting seats at some of the shows.
- Magic Kingdom had lines for everything. The rides had very long lines, most over 30 minutes. The line to buy water from a concession stand was usually about 5 deep.
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That's what the economic realities are for a park like this. The higher price drives away much of the customer base, necessitating an even higher price.
There are two methods for determining the "best" price for an amusement park.
1. Maximize revenues. Multiply number of tickets sold at a given price by the price. Repeat for many prices. Choose the price that returns the highest total.
- It would be very difficult to find a good estimate. Park pricing is almost as bad as airline pricing, for about the same reasons. They have a nonrenewable resource (time in the park) that can only be sold when people want it. Disney makes it harder to judge because normal tickets never expire, so if it is raining, just save the ticket for your next visit. [Our trip to SeaWorld means I still have one day left on a Disney ParkHopper. We really had not planned to go to SeaWorld.] Most people are on packages that halve the daily price. Season passes make the daily price almost $0, although they do expire.
2. Maximize the experience. Do the analysis from the first method, but then choose the highest price that covers expenses, including profit and risks such as it raining every day during the prime season. Each visitor would have a better experience.
- Again this would be difficult to judge. Weekends and holidays would be even more popular because more of the park could be enjoyed in less time. Less people would require a week off before considering it a valid destination, but Saturday tickets might cost 10 times what a Tuesday ticket costs. This is completely impractical with current Disney policies.
I believe that all amusement parks have set their daily price around $50 and just hope people buy them. The price seems to be based on "Let's have the same price as everybody else" rather than "Let's do an economic analysis." I would be very interested in seeing if PixarLand (or any amusement park) was able to succeed with making the experience the top priority. How far from the "normal" price could they go before the experience loses to the cost? The normal American does not seem to be able to make the decision that $300 for a day of instant gratification is better than $50 for 7 hours of waiting to have 1 hour of fun.
Ancient Athens in the fourth century BC had a population of only around 60 thousand (less than 30 thousand if you only count those who were allowed to become educated) and yet the philosophy, science, mathematics, literature, and political thought that it produced overwhelmingly dwarfs (for instance) the suburbs of Atlanta, which contain many times more people with a much more widespread access to education and literacy.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert on Ancient Athens, so I welcome any insight on the following theory.
Did the incredible leaps in many disciplines come because the population was small? Or did they happen because there were a few great thinkers who impressed their students with enough different ideas that the ideas were expanded and elaborated in a dominant culture so the ideas survived and spread.
It seems that most of the thinkers in Ancient Athens were influenced by Socrates, who got his ideas from Archelaus, who learned from Anaxagoras. If these men had lived in Messenia, the world may have lost their ideas.
(Sorry if I sound like Ayn Rand, but I believe one great programmer is worth 20 mediocre programmers. The correlation would be that a few great thinkers have much greater influence than tons of mediocre thinkers.)
In Ancient Athens, "philosophy, science, mathematics, literature, and political thought" were very closely related subjects. Today each is considered a separate discipline. Scientists and mathematicians do not want to consider the philosophy or politics of their work. (American) Politicians are sometimes proud of their lack of knowledge about the sciences. Does the separation help because we focus more, or does it hurt because it is more difficult for ideas to transfer between disciplines?
- Example: The horrors of "monoculture" were only noticed because the word "virus" is used by both biology and computer science. What other ideas from biology could advance the infant science of computers? People have started checking biology for ideas, but what about other sciences? Maybe tectonics has good ideas about integrating large masses of code.
--- Off-topic
Anybody else notice the correlations between Ancient Athens and the U.S.? Both started well with a class system that encouraged slavery. Slavery was abolished. The main product (wheat for Athens; cotton/manufacturing for the US) was offshored, so they moved to a secondary but more profitable export (olive oil and wine; technology). Both were major economic centers for their time. Both were attacked by Persia, although the US has survived so far.
it'd cost you several hundred dollars to get in, everything would be stark white with accents of brushed steel and a few aqua bubbles. There would only be 3 rides, and they'd be the really old ones "ported" from Magic Mountain, and before you entered the park, there'd be a little tutorial demonstrating how powerful and intuitive everything is.
So you've been to Epcot?
The Innovation buildings are SO EXCITING. Their "future" of computer hardware is stuff most Slashdotters already have.
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Given Steve Job's ability to create great usable interfaces, Pixarland may be the first themepark that would not require a map to find your way. It would keep the lines down to 10 minutes even on weekends. It might cost "several hundred dollars", but you would spend all the times on rides rather than waiting in line. At that price, your fast-food concessions can be buffet-style, eliminating the overhead of cashiers inside the park. The justification is that if you are eating, you are not making the lines for rides longer.
Would you pay twice the ticket price for the Magic Kingdom if the lines were half as long? You could see every attraction in fewer days so you could keep the trip shorter and save on hotel nights. And remove the boredom of standing on line for an hour for a 2-minute ride.
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Pixarland will not happen soon. Since all the past and current movie releases were for Disney, Pixar will have to wait untill it has a few hits on its own. Then buy land. Design rides to fit the land and the movies. Build the rides. Hire people to run everything. Safety tests. Usability testing. Fix anything confusing. Repeat until anybody from 5 to 95 can understand the layout. Finally we mortals are allowed to enter.
I guess they need 5 great movies (at one movie per year) before even starting. Another 5 years to design, build and test the first 10 rides. (I am assuming one adult and one child per movie.) So Pixarland opens in 2015. The grand opening will do well, and adding a few rides each year to match the latest movies would keep people going back.
In case you had not heard, SuSE was bought by Novell. Novell is based in the US. This happened 6 months after Munich made their decision, so it is doubtful it was a factor. IBM is also part of the migration team, and they have always been US-based. It really does not matter where the companies are based. Most of the IT people working on the migration will be local anyway. No company can afford to import enough grunts to do a project of this size.
[I often travel for assignments, but I am always either the architect or troubleshooter. Most of the time-consuming work on any project is handled by locals.]
The big local-vs-foreign discussion is that paying for Microsoft software is a direct drain of money for no benefit. (You can post about how MS support is great, but they have posted more of my solutions than I have used their solutions. That might be different if my solutions saw their software as more than an obstacle to be overcome.)
--- SNAFU
This article is just a basic project report. "We have issues, but they were anticipated in the budget, so we are still on schedule." If the project was not high-profile, even the media would recognize this is expected. The spin about how applications need to be ported is just filler so the article is more than 3 sentences.
I liked American Gods better when it was called The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul by Douglas Adams of the Hitchhiker's Guide fame. It was more cohesive, funnier, and kept my attention by keeping the story moving. American Gods seemed like a poorly written attempt to rewrite the story by adding some poorly written sex subtext. Of course, it also has American in the title, so it is more patriotic for us Americans. LDTTotS was written way back in 1988; Gaiman must feel that everybody would have forgotten it by now, since he did not even put it in the bibliography for AG
Douglas Adams died unexpectedly in May, 2001, so he could not complain when Neil released AG the next month. Anybody want to create a conspiracy theory about the timing of the Adams' unexpected heart-attack. Maybe the book writing business is cut-throat in the literal sense.
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How can you go from Terry Pratchett to Neil Gaiman? Pratchett is more like Robert Asprin, Christopher Stasheff, Jody Lynn Nye, or anybody with a sense of humor.
Gaiman is more like required reading for high school: very slow moving with an ending that makes you wish you had quit in chapter 3 when you thought you had figured out the rest of the book, and you were correct. (My opinion is from American Gods. I think I have read another of Gaiman's books, but it was completely forgettable. At least AG made a bad impression.)
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If you have not read American Gods, then read The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul to get the ideas without the boredom. If you have already read American Gods, then read The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul to see how well the story could have been told.
I have played both sides of this equation.
I reentered the computer world in 1995 as support. I had opportunities to double my salary by jumping to a management position at other support centers. Instead, I found a job that was halfway between support and administration with a different but high-income technology for the same pay I was receiving. I learned the technology and related software, gained much experience, and the next year I joined a consulting company. (I wanted to be loyal, but corporate policy was that raises had to be very small, and my manager strongly suggested I look outside the company for my own good.)
The double-my-support-salary point was very close to the limit for what a call center manager could make. I passed that point in 1998, and have been making about twice that starting in 1999. I could make much more if I was willing to work more than 1000 hours each year.
Now I play the other side of it. I know the technology, and pick up related technologies as needed. My resume is already too long. I am one of the top people in my niche, and am often the only choice for the projects I do.
I have set my rate very high for my niche. This weeds out companies that want me to hold a chair down. If a project is offered to me, I know that the company is serious about getting it done. I have only refused one project where they were willing to pay my rate.
--- Appendix
The only project I turned down was a state agency that had already decided to use a mess of many technologies. Most of the technologies were being used for their weakest ability, completely ignoring what the technology was designed to do. I was to manage around 20 people who were the low-cost answer for each position. They even tried to haggle a 2% decrease in my pay. I would have made much money, but I did not feel the project could possibly succeed with the human and technical resources they were using. I do not want to ever miss a deadline, nevermind manage a failed project, so I turned them down. If I was allowed any input into the technology and how the system was designed, I could have done my usual "finished with extra features and well under the budget" work. I cannot understand why they would want to hire someone like me without getting input for the design.
Thank you.
When I was looking to spec systems a few months ago, I did not look at these much.
- The Intel D845PEBT2 motherboard has the 845PE chipset.
- The D865PERL motherboard has the 865PE chipset, but at least it supports the 800Mhz bus. Two of the four configurations support Firewire.
I require the Intel 875 chipset for a modern system. The only Intel motherboard using the 875 chipset is the D875PBZ, and it does not have Firewire. Intel does not have a "latest technology" motherboard that includes Firewire. I am still surprised Intel only has one motherboard demonstrating their latest and best chipset. But it is nice to know that Intel includes Firewire on some of their motherboards.
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(I apologize for the poor grammar in the original post. I bumped the ENTER key while fixing the Subject. I expected a few flames about the grammar, but thankfully all the responses have been informative.)
Modern Mac has the old ROM stored on disk, Openfirmware, OS X, (S)ATA, CD/DVD-RW, USB, Firewire, PCI, AGP, RJ-45, Ethernet, DVI, PowerPC... note that the Mac has grown more in the direction of the PC than vice versa
I do not know Macs, so I may have missed something, but which of these started with the Wintel PC?
ROM/Open firmware - The news is that Wintels may do this soon, but I have yet to see motherboard without ROM BIOS.
OS X - Unix, not Wintel
SATA - From the harddrive manufacturers. The implementation for Wintel has the BIOS must faking one of the standard IDE positions so that MSWindows thinks it is running from "C:". This reduces the number of drives that can be used in a dual IDE/SATA PC, and encourages the consumer to find an OS that can fully use the hardware. This could not have been planned by MS.
CD/DVD-RW - Consumer technology coopted by the computer world.
USB - The Wintel answer to Firewire.
Firewire - Apple. It is so much an Apple technology that Intel refuses to incorporate it into their motherboards.
PCI, AGP - Hardware manufacturers, but they are the standards for Wintel. Be thankful that Apple has decided to follow the "standards" for commodity hardware.
RJ-45, Ethernet - Ethernet came from the mainframe/Unix world. It barely touched the Wintel world until the late 80s. The RJ45 plug was a quick prototype that accidentally made it into production. The engineers are still kicking themselves for designing a plug that is designed to catch on EVERYTHING.
DVI - I do not know who started this.
PowerPC - IBM. Was it first designed for Apple or Microsoft? Does anybody other than Apple and IBM use it?
Paperbacks are better for travelling. Smaller and lighter, they fit in the back of my belt or the sleeve of a jacket so people don't think I'm a nerd. Ten paperbacks is good for a week travelling while consulting. Three hardcovers weigh more and I know that I'll be flipping stations on the hotel TV by Wednesday.
Hardcovers look better in the library, and survive much better. With overstock stores like Atlantic Books, they cost less than paperbacks. The Ender series and Spider Robinson are about the only ones I am willing to pay full price. Reading in bed, the larger print and larger pages means you can prop the book up with pillows and still read with one hand. (No jokes please.)
Since I started almost exclusively buying hardcovers, the amount of books I read has started slipping. This may also have much to do with life changes. There is just so much to do that I can rarely read more than one book in a day. Also, reading Slashdot takes a bit of time that was previously dedicated to books.
The big problem with hardcovers is the space. I bought 3 more bookshelves recently, and do not have much room for more. The new shelves are already filled and there are a few hundred books that still do not have a home yet.
I agree about the QT licensing. When I wrote the first post, I was under the impression there was a charge for the QT runtime library. That has been corrected.
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About GPL vs LGPL libraries:
Both require changes to the library to be released as source if you distribute the changed binaries. If you use a GPL library, the application must also be GPL'd. If you use the LGPL, then the application can be proprietary. Both would encourage the library to be improved, but the LGPL does not require the new app to be Free.
Is it good to force the apps to be GPL because everybody will run out and slap the GPL on their software? Is it bad because companies will not use the library, so they waste effort reproducing it or money buying a different library? Neither improves the GPL'd library.
Long term (about a century?), all software will probably be GPL'd. The LGPL allows proprietary companies to use and improve the Free libraries. That allows Free Software to benefit from proprietary software companies while they still exist. The migration will take quite some time, and this allows it to be gradual rather than forcing a complete cutover.
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The QPL seems to have identical terms to the GPL. What am I missing? Why didn't they just use the GPL? What happens if you write GPL software using QT? Do you need to include both licenses?
Thanks for the toolkit comparison. I hoped someone who used both recently would post a comparison. Of course, few people bother to use more than one API at a time if they can help it.
I was surprised by some of the responses. I defined what I knew about the licensing issues. I learned some of it was wrong. I also stated a preference for KDE. I have been using Gnome on RedHat for years, but I am stuck with MSWindows for my work. I finally tried KDE a few months ago, and realized I prefer it. That said, I really do not care which one wins. I just want Corporate America to decide soon so I know what I should study.
[Off-topic: Does anybody know how to make ANY version of Desktop Linux easy for editing text files? I usually just need to change some setting. I keep trying different programs, and they drive me crazy. After 10 minutes, I give up, open a terminal, and use vi.]
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My father has a very large group of friends. I converted him to Mozilla a few years ago, and he converted more than a dozen people. I get calls that a friend of a friend of a friend of his likes it, but wonders how to do something. So Mozilla is spreading.
I set up his new PC to triple-boot Win98SE, RedHat9, and Slackware9. While he will use MSWindows as his main OS, he will eventually check out this "other stuff" just because it is there. I wanted him to have choices, so included RedHat because it is natively Gnome, and Slackware because it is natively KDE.
I have configured every option to make both distros feel as much like MSWindows as I could. The big one is the Shade vs Maximize for double-clicking the TitleBar. I used Shades a decade ago, but then MSWindows changed the rules, and I got the habit of expecting it to maximize. I know my father will expect that, since I taught it to him and I have watched him do it without thinking about it.
Please do not start a distro comparison. Those were the distros I had recent versions nearby when I was installing. My copy of Mandrake was old. My latest SuSE is a live CD. He will have a copy of that too, and will probably be burning copies to give to all his friends to try. (He likes to share.) He will probably use MSWindows to make the copies. It is worthwhile to me even if they only boot to Linux to play the games. The important part is to get people comfortable with any Desktop Linux, and this is one step in that direction.
Games that appeal to nerds are already being ported. To take over the desktop requires "The Sims" and children's games.
If your child must run MSWindows for Reader Rabbit and Barbie, then you are stuck with MSWindows on at least one computer. Unless you are a nerd, you will not want more than one OS in the house.
"The Sims" is "The #1 best selling game of all time" according to the website. I know people (mostly women) who have only played "The Sims" and versions of Solitaire. Spider Solitaire may be the killer app for WinXP, like Solitaire was for Win3.1. OK, maybe MSWord had something to do with it. But XP only has Spider, so it needs to be enough.
Make the women and children happy and the men will follow.
The good part is that neither "The Sims" nor any children's games require "massive amounts of time and money".
Have you tried writing commercial software for [KDE/QT]?
I answered in another post that I had not. My commercial apps are all for big business. Most of them use another (high-priced) platform.
This thread has generated more posts than any I have previously wrote. I finally read the licensing for QT. You have the 2 choices:
- QPL, which has terms identical to the GPL. [Real question: are they mutually exclusive? Can I use QPL'd code in a GPL'd program or the reverse? Do I need to include both licenses with the source?]
- Commercial license: $149 per developer. I have paid much more than $149 for development tools, so this is reasonable. If I have 10 developers on the project, is that $1490, or do I just need the licenses for the UI designers? Can the internal development be handled by teams using the open version, then recompiled by one developer who has a commercial license? This is a very minor concern for an established company, but thousands of dollars can impact a boot-strap start-up.
- Trolltech's site says you must pay for every developer, and that the license can be transferred between developers only every six months and within the same organization. Is an organization a company or a division? Can MS transfer the license from a MSWindows developer to a MSOffice developer? (It is an example. I doubt MS would use QT, or would care about $149 if they did.)
I was happy to see that there are no charges for distributing applications for companies that bought the commercial license. That makes the call between QT and GTK+ much harder (and hurts my original post. This has been educational.)
Is it possible to write QT-compatible for-profit apps without paying Trolltech? Yes, the license is inexpensive, but is it required?
My question "Is QT so much better that all companies are willing to pay for QT for the next decade rather than assist GNU with improving GTK+?" is because I have not tried to write software with either toolkit. It was actually meant as a question, and I would like to read a good comparison from programmers that have used both QT and GTK+. Even if QT is fantastic compared to GTK+, I still wonder if it is worth being locked into the overhead.
... providing high-level tools that we could customize to meet our needs... The product is excellent, the support was outstanding and we are extremely pleased with our decision That sounds like marketing, not technical advice.
I did read the link, including the paragraph you quoted. I assumed it was spin: "Oops, we need to pay Trolltech; let us see if we can get a discount if we will publicly announce we like their toolkit." There was no mention that Adobe put effort into comparing a variety of toolkits and Trolltech won. Just that Qt is an intuitive, powerful tool [that] simplified our task of developing
Another response mentions a long list of companies using QT for MSWindows programs. Trolltech has a good customer base. I cannot review their product, because I have not used it. The big question is whether the Desktop Linux community want to force all proprietary software companies to support Trolltech. If this happens, I want to buy their stock. (Yes they are private today, but as the next MS-type monopoly, they will grow.)
Yes, companies will decide to pay for QT if the advantage is great enough. If I can get a product to market much faster than using a competing toolkit, then it would be worth the money, but I might replace it later when speed of development for first-mover advantage does not matter. If the product will have better features, or be much easier to maintain because I used this toolkit, then it might be worth the constant drain. Please tell me if these advantages apply to QT.
Can I sell programs based on QT without giving Trolltech money?
I forgot the word "proprietary". Can I sell proprietary programs based on QT without giving money to Trolltech?
Free Software does not rule out monetary gain.
I have yet to read about or develop my own software business model that uses FSS for profit. FSS may not rule out monetary GAIN, but it is great to decrease monetary LOSS.
I am a strong believer in FSS. I believe that it can remove the drain from paying software companies. I believe it gives control of the software to the company using it. I recommend it to my clients. Most software is used in-house, and FSS allows for software to be shared with other companies for the benefit of all without impacting the competition portion of business (other than for software companies.)
FSS is great for service organizations like IBM and RedHat. The software becomes a commodity, and the need for services increases. They will improve FSS in the process of satisfying customers.
But making software into a commodity is exactly the wrong direction for software development company. If your profits will be generated from selling software, then the price cannot be zero. This is why MS fears Linux: if the normal price for an OS is zero, they will find it difficult to charge for their version.
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I got called a "SCO/MS shill". Wow.
SCO is insane. And irrelevant.
MS is dying. Many of my posts detail exactly how AND WHEN the fall will happen.
You can make money with Linux, or rather, you can save money by using Linux, and you can make money by selling support for Linux. The difference is semantics, but nobody thinks they can run a profitable company that sold Linux without for-profit support.
What if MSWindows had the toolkit choices that KDE currently has? You write a program. You have 2 choices:
1. Give your program away for free. (And watch MS bundle it with the next service pack.) Or
2. Give money to Microsoft for the priviledge of selling software to be used on their OS.
Those are the choices when using QT with KDE:
1. Give your program away for free under the GPL.
2. Give money to Trolltech for the priviledge of selling software to be used on KDE.
Microsoft realized that they needed to encourage development of software by making it free to distribute programs. They benefited because the more programs written for their OS, the more people bought their OS.
Trolltech does not own KDE. They do not make money for every copy of KDE used in the world. They must make their money by charging for the toolkit, or by charging for every copy of the toolkit that is not used for free software.
You would think Stallman would prefer this model since it encourages developers to release software under the GPL. But it is his GNU toolkit that allows software to be released under any license. He is a pragmatist, and understands that forcing the license issue just slows adoption of the Free OSes. (OK. Maybe not Stallman, but someone out there understands.) We need to allow Photoshop and The Sims to be ported to Linux under the same free toolkit license that they have with MSWindows, or they will not do the ports.
OK. I picked a REALLY bad example. Thanks for the link. (That was a really fast response. Do you work for Trolltech?)
At least I said "Adobe Photoshop", not just "Adobe". Your link is about "Adobe Photoshop Album", which is just a picture viewer with basic fixes.
Is QT so much better that all companies are willing to pay for QT for the next decade rather than assist GNU with improving GTK+?
Or was Adobe prototyping a new program they needed because every digital camera comes with one and they might lose marketshare, some developer used QT for the prototype, and it shipped before they got around to replacing the toolkit?
My point was that using QT severely limits your choice of licenses. Part of MSWindows' success was that developers never worried about paying to distribute their programs. Microsoft even provided free libraries for distribution. Gnome follows that pattern. I just installed GTK+ on a MSWindows PC without paying for it. Can I sell programs based on QT without giving Trolltech money? Is there a good business justification for giving Trolltech some of my profits?
Nobody summarized them this time, so...
Gnome uses GTK+ which is LGPL. Both FSS and proprietary software writers can use it without paying anybody.
KDE uses QT which is dual-licensed GPL and "pay us if you sell an application":
- FSS developers MUST release their software as GPL.
- Proprietary developers MUST pay.
As a software developer, you are better with Gnome or Microsoft than with QT. If all you release is GPL, then it does not matter. If all you ever want to use is GPL, then it does not matter. But if you want to see Adobe Photoshop on Linux, expect your stupid QT license issues to matter, because Photoshop will not be sold with QT.
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I spent the last week switching between Gnome (RedHat) and KDE (Slackware and a little SuSE) about hourly. I like KDE slightly better AS A USER, but I would not write commercial software for it.
HP merged with Compaq.
Gateway is buying EMachines.
IBM can never decide if they want to stay in the PC market.
Dell is still Dell, but wants to move into electronics.
[Yes, I am ignoring laptops. They can replace PCs, but are a very different business model.]
PC manufacturers have consolidated because the profit margins keep shrinking. If it were not for these awful contracts with Microsoft, every one of these vendors would be shipping a "free" OS to cut costs. Most people would not know the difference until their child's new game did not run.
It would be cheaper to write a few children's games than to pay the MS tax. Making a game unique and challenging are negatives when writing for children. They could invest in The Learning Company and insist the games are ported to Linux. The manufacturers could bundle the games for free, make it another marketing point, and still profit more than paying MS.
What else do you need? Every distro comes with email, multiple browsers, an office suite, a graphics program, a few movie players, and more games for adults than Windows. Make certain they can easily change the wallpaper. Get Maxis to port "The Sims". At that point, most of the population is covered.
I do want the boot process to be fixed. Single threaded booting means Linux is slower than Windows (for the boot. After that Linux wins easily.) Split the stuff required for the GUI from everything else. Get the drives mounted, X started, then hit them with the login screen. Make certain the firewall and network are running before the desktop finishes loading. The printers should be ready about then. Internet servers and everything else can finish up while the users are reading their email.
Linux is ready. The applications are there. We are just waiting for one of the large manufacturers to offer Linux as the default option so they can undersell the others.
Here is an excerpt from one of my posts in July about the best way for Microsoft to auction its divisions. New comments are in brackets.
Addition: Believing MS is completely myopic, I assume that Longhorn and XBox2 will be delayed as MS concentrates on cost-cutting. They have already started offshoring to India and reducing the headcount on the west coast. I expect the company to implode before Longhorn is supposed to be released.
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- Windows and Office actually make money, and are the reason MS exists.
[They will keep them together as long as possible since they define MS. I believe that the Office division will need to sell Linux versions to survive, and that could save the company, but they will wait until Windows has lost its monopoly, and by then it will be much too late.]
- Server SW would be a good choice, because it breaks even, but is too strategic to be sold first.
- Mobile software: Too much recent news about how Tablets and PocketPCs are strategic.
[I have not heard much hype about this recently. Are they pulling back?]
- Games: Game software companies are always sold cheap, but MS has the XBox hardware. Sell the software to Atari (formerly Infogrames). The XBox could be sold to a company wanting to get into gaming like NVidia, a company that sells consoles like Sony, or a Linux distributor who will sell it as a PC replacement and wants the existing public awareness of the trademark. MS can start by selling older titles to Infogrames: quick cash and it does not look like MS is folding.
[I have not read any news about their Game division recently; are they still releasing? Could we tell if they stopped new development of games?]
- Business software: Good choice. Say it was a mistake to upset other companies by having the GreatPlains purchase compete with MS's business partners. Good publicity, and a decent price.
[I am waiting, but again have not heard much news. Did MS turn off its publicity department?]
- MSN: With AOL on the run, MSN could look like it will increase marketshare. The problem is that the M stands for Microsoft. They could announce that they believe subscription services are obsolete, but that would kill the price. A quiet deal with Earthlink would be the best. I'd say AOL, but AOL has enough problems. But can a deal like this be quiet with the FCC watching? More likely MS will move move equipment and people to Earthlink, while keeping the receivables moving through MS to satisfy the regulators.
[Microsoft has already decided to stop promoting MSN.]
In early 2000, I consulted with a company that handles much of the B2B for the fashion industry. This functionality was discussed as part of a B2C add-on. They wanted it, and were trying to price it, but many factors made it difficult:
1. The audience was mostly female. Most men would not bother with the system. And women were less likely to be buying on the web. So the ROI was difficult to justify. (This and some of the following include sexual stereotypes. There is a reason they are sterotypes.)
2. Most women will lie about their body size. Could we automatically adjust the virtual bodies up one size? Yes, but that would upset the honest women. Would women be honest when their purchasing decisions depended on it? Since the system was not built, this was never answered.
3. Would women even enter all the information needed? Height, weight, waist, inseam, bust, shoulders, arm length, neck width, circumference of biceps and thighs. Think of all the measurements that a tailor makes. Now expect women to enter all that for each website that uses the system, and update it when their shape changes. (Very few people are the same size in January after the holiday eating as they are in September after Summer's outdoor activities.)
4. Would women be concerned that there is a complete record of how their body changes? My mentioning this was a little ahead of the times, as privacy concerns were not in your face then. But would you like a system that remembered every time you added a few pounds?
5. The model would need to show how clothes drape over the body form. We would need incredible horsepower to run the system. We already knew all the details of the fabrics as part of the B2B system that helped designers choose appropriate fabrics for their creations. That part was just programming, but 3D modeling is CPU-intensive. (I recommended hiring some game-engine programmers to optimize the system.)
6. How are the clothes shown? Do we offer choices for whether a blouse is tucked in, and how tightly? How many buttons are fastened? The width of a belt, and exactly where it is worn?
7. Could we show several products at the same time? This one had us baffled, especially if we were to combine products from several companies. The company hoped to set up a single website that the branded websites would pass buyers. I do not know if the fashion companies would have done this. The largest companies have a complete line, so would prefer to buy the technology for their own website.
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The company sold software. I was recommending that the software be free, but that the company take a (very small) cut of each transaction. They were already discovering that people were using their free-but-limited version to not pay for the full-featured version, even if the customers had to type much of the information in the comments. The company asked me to make it impossible to use the free version for the main tasks that were in the full version. I recommended making the full version (their cash cow) free, but providing a central clearinghouse to handle the transactions. My recommendations were presented to the president of the company. The company was bought later that year and I have not heard from them since.
I just looked up the company that bought them, and they have several press releases this month about winning new customers for their "product lifecycle" software, so they are still active as software sellers, but they do not own the B2B fashion market as I recommended.
Would you get a job in a restaturant because you like to eat? Maybe, but it is better to get a job that uses your strengths. You may have become a fabulous cook because you like to eat. Did you become a fabulous programmer, graphics, sound, writer, or designer because of video games?
Having the skills does not mean that this is the best place to apply them. That fabulous cook may be able to profit from writing cookbooks or designing frozen dinners more than working in a restaurant. Good programmers probably make more money in the corporate world than as as game writers (and it is easier to find a job since there are more of them.) Graphics and sound skills may be used in other media. Writers are always needed, but there are always too many for any field, so work with what you know. Game designers are more limited, but if you have the skills to be great, you will probably be starting/joining a new company rather than trying to break into one of the gaming powerhouses. (You can join them when they buy your company.)
My second dozen programs were all games. (The first dozen were HelloWorld and exploring the capabilities of the language.) I became a really good programmer. I also had talent for streamlining business processes. I merged the two skills to become a "corporate technology consultant". I analyze businesses and I write software. I would love to be writing games, but I do not believe the income could compare to my current career. And the APIs for games are very different from what I typically use, so my experience would not give me much advantage if I tried to change careers. (Take the advice about how the game industry is hard. My cousin is a game designer for Maxis. I would not want to trade jobs.)
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Today's news includes that Blizzard is hiring level designers. The page defines exactly what they expect from anybody thinking about applying. Yes it starts with Absolute Passion for playing and making computer games, but they expect experience or a demonstration of skills. Good luck
The Patent and Trademark Office does not use the word "internet". They have yet to buy a modern dictionary to discover the definition. All patent and trademark applications must use the phrase "global information system". (Or something like that, maybe it was "global communications system". I am not going to ask/pay my lawyers to improve a Slashdot post.)
This dates to the 1980s when the word internet was not used, so the lawyers decided to use a phrase that would cover all possibilities. It also means they are covered if the "internet" is replaced by something else. The "internet" is defined by TCP/IP, so if a new low-level protocol took over, then the name might be changed. I do not believe that could happen after 1995, but these are lawyers, and reality does not matter to them.
A side effect of this is that prior art for a "game scoring system running on a BBS" may not be enough for "game scoring system for a global information system". I would think the local bowling alley or international golf associations having a centralized list of high scorers would be enough prior art to have the patent declared void.
Anyway, according to the USPTO:
There is no internet.
The "article" is asking for books that reproduce the simple learning environment from the late 70s/early 80s. Complaining that one of these environments has:
a limited set of fonts, all ugly as sin, and tiny widgets
seems off-topic, as our original BASIC environment:
- had ONE font,
- was text-based, so it could not even strive to be "ugly"
- had NO widgets. You were required to build everything from scratch.
I work with programmers who are not even a decade younger than me, but they did not start with computers until college. They have never built a program that was not on a "platform" that provided the GUI and access to all hardware such as memory. They have never had to PEEK and POKE, so have no clue about how memory really works. They will write (and debug) 60 lines of VB rather than one line of OS commands, because they have never worked at a CLI. I wrote a 3 line batch file that replaced a 400 line program they were having difficulty getting to work.
I am not saying that using IDEs is bad. We can do so much more working within a platform than we imagined in the early 80s, but the knowledge required before becoming productive is much higher.
We had a discussion about this a few months ago, but it is off my Info page so I could not find the posts. (I really wish I could find some of them, but the Info page only shows the latest 24 posts, and search is not very useful for limiting to one user.) Programmers today did not progress from CLI to OOP. They start with the current GUI and have little understanding of what the computer does.
In the late 80s/early 90s, people were learning about programming in college because it was the "good" career path. But they were "studying", not "hacking".
In the mid-90s, many people entered the IT world using HTML as the "programming" language. Then they copy/pasted JavaScript. Some of them took the time to learn how to write their own. A few of those branched into other languages, and they may have more of the hacker attitude because they were forced to figure out how things worked. But they still learned assuming the platform was there.
Today, BASIC is long gone, and HTML is not enough to get started. Colleges are teaching Java to the studying students, but Java really protects programmers from memory allocation. The scripting languages are great for administrators, but do not push you to learn more traditional programming.
I think the computer revolution has stalled because there is no easy entry point. One great programmer can outproduce a hundred regular programmers. Becoming a great programmer requires understanding how software relates to the hardware. Are there any great programmers who started with computers after 1990? Is it even possible to learn enough on today's platforms?
Most people shop for food once a week. Notifying them at the cash register may be faster than mailing them anything.
But in my case, it would also be dead wrong. Not only do I shop more irregularly than that, but I have no loyalty to the stores where I shop: I tend to go to one in particular more than the others, but in a 2-month period I may shop at 3-4 supermarkets.
I shop for food even less regularly: 7 times last year at 3 different stores. I eat out most of the time, and really stock up when I get around to shopping. So my suggestion would not help myself.
the odds that the person who bought the beef ate it long before the recall was announced seem rather high.
Which is why I thought snailmail was a terrible method for notifying customers about a food recall. The stores could call the phone number, but how many people put ANY real information on an application for a Shopper's Card. I do not have one, and refuse to shop at places that will not scan a store card so I get the discounts. (It is the principle, not the money.)
I am actively involved with making the supermarket Shopper cards more functional, which is ironic because nobody on our team uses them.
Your posting was both humorous and insightful.
Thank you. Alas, nobody with points noticed it. Maybe I should have used some bold formatting?