"So, it's the "proprietaries" as I will not call them that only write bad code? Didn't he just suggest that his first attempt was poorly written. Or maybe he's arguing that it's continually poor no matter how many times it's re-written."
His argument, I think, is that with closed source, dozens of companies are all writing bad code to do the same thing, whereas with open source, that bad code only has to be written once... and then either the programmer soon gets so embarassed that they end up rewriting it properly, or someone else gets so disgusted that they do so.
He's writing in a space station that's pressurized and kept at around 20C. The 'space pen' was designed to work in a vacuum in a temperature range of something like -100C to +200C, as experienced on the lunar surface: try doing that with a $0.50 plastic ballpoint.
"I think in reality, a lot of OSS programmers are also professional programmers, but the stuff they do at home is much more interesting to them than what they're paid to do at work."
Exactly. At work I write device drivers, at home (when I'm not working on independent movies) I'm writing an open-source plugin for Orbiter which lets you fly Apollo lunar missions with an increasingly accurate emulation of the 1960s-tech onboard computers; I'd like to do a full emulation of the hardware, but I only have scans of the original MIT source and don't fancy typing in about 3000 pages of antique assembler, so I'm converting it into similar code in C++ instead.
Hmm, hunting through Microsoft documentation figuring out how Windows drivers are supposed to work, or trawling through Saturn V documentation figuring out how to fly one to the moon... I think you can guess which of those is more interesting:).
"No different than going into a store and taking candy."
Oh, and it's _totally_ different to going into a store and taking candy. If I go into a store and take candy then I have candy and the store no longer has candy. If a TV company broadcasts their show into my house, I tape it and then pass it on, then the TV company has the show, I have the show, and other people have the show.
Why am I so unsurprised that you don't understand this extremely basic and obvious difference? In the real world there is natural scarcity, which is why we prosecute thieves. In the digital world the movie and TV companies are determined to create scarcity where it doesn't exist... that is a far, far worse crime than someone recording a TV show and sending it to their friends.
They do have a choice: they can switch it off and find something better to do. Dead people and people with no money don't really have that choice, no matter how much they might dislike ads.
Indeed: it really does seem to me that Hollywood and the companies that make a ton of money off them are out to ensure that the technology required to make and distribute movies will be taken out of the reach of independents as much as possible. They're on a nice little earner thanks to copyright laws, and don't want some upstarts to get in the way... DRM is one of the best ways of doing that, by ensuring you need to pay $100,000 to buy a special DRM-free PC that will let you edit your own footage into your own movies.
They'll really hate it, though, when they discover they've pissed off their audience so much that the only people still watching are dead or on welfare; people with money to spend on their products are precisely the people who don't want to watch stupid ads.
"A few stars are paid a lot - the rest of the 'Team' are not."
I can only presume you don't know much about the movie industry. Hollywood is one of the most unproductive and wasteful industries on the planet (not to mention probably one of the most environmentally damaging)... and many, many people are paid far more than they're worth.
"do what they do yourself."
I do do what they do myself: that's why I know these things and you don't. Hollywood likes to create a big mystique around, but the majority is just BS: I have far more respect for someone like, say, Roger Corman than the latest manufactured 'star director'.
"Whether you like the situation or not these guys have a right to expect people to pay when their product is used."
Why?
"Without it, they will go out of business."
And I'll be just so sad when Hollywood has to stop making $200,000,000 crap. I don't think many other people will be either, after the comments I've heard about most of the recent Hollywood blockbusters.
1. Take TV. 2. Take baseball bat. 3. Apply bat to TV. 4. Repeat until bored.
Seriously, I haven't watched any significant amount of TV since, uh, well, I don't remember actually, but since sometime last century.
And you know what? After a few weeks you come to realise that it really doesn't matter... you get lots more time to do things that do matter, and the only disadvantage is that when your TV-addicted friends are discussing the exciting new events in the latest soap opera, you just stand there looking at them like a bunch of aliens with no lives. Admittedly there is the odd really good TV show that is worth watching, but if it's that good it will come out on DVD eventually anyway.
I'd switch to video editing on Linux in an instant if Avid ported their software to it (probably not too hard now they're running on MacOS X). It could hardly be worse than XP.
One problem, though, is often that the software is way overpriced for what it does. Many shareware authors want $30-50 for something pretty basic that I could probably write in a couple of days and give away for free... I might well pay $5 for that, but I'm not going to pay $50.
Another problem, historically, but less so now with things like Paypal, is that payment has been far too much of a pain, particularly if they're in a foreign country. Send a US dollar check for $35 that's going to cost me another $30 in bank charges in the UK? Sorry, but no.
Another problem is the trend in recent years of releasing crippleware rather than time-limited but fully-functional versions. I downloaded a couple of shareware programs over the weekend, either of which I might have paid for if they'd proven useful, but both had been cripppled so that without registering they couldn't actually do what I wanted them for: do they really think I'm going to give them money if I can't actually try out the software first? All they did was waste my time downloading, installing and uninstalling.
"Making TV/Movies is an extremely expensive thing to do"
Which is a circular argument: it's expensive because people are paid a lot, and because people overpay for equipment that, in reality, adds only a limited amount to the viewers' experience (like, say, if they were shooting 'Friends' on HDTV when they could use mini-DV).
TV and movies could be made for far less money, but they can afford to spend $200,000,000 on a crappy movie because they know that their monopoly position will allow them to get that money back, even if it means ripping off their customers by blanketing the nation with a huge advertising campaign claiming it's the best movie ever, even though they know it's utter crap that they'd cross the road to avoid. I, for one, am tired of paying $15 for a movie ticket and discovering that it's overhyped crap.
In the end, movies cost a lot because they cost a lot; and because they have a government-mandated monopoly on distribution. No-one really _needs_ a $200,000,000 movie the same way they need food to eat, yet the US government offers the movie industry far more perks than it offers to actual, vital industries that people rely on every day. It's time that situation was brought to an end.
"your photo would btw have the same amount of credibility(? right word?) as your hand written scrawl."
And the same credibility as that file on your floppy disk which you _claim_ was an email from Bill Gates. A jury of idiots might be convinced, but anyone can write an 'email' in Notepad and stick Gates' name in the header.
The amusing thing is that this could actually have the opposite effect to the one intended, by making it harder for PHBs to deny they sent a particular email, since faking DRM-ed Outlook mailboxes is likely to be rather harder than faking a text file.
AFAIR it flew on full afterburners the whole time it was supersonic, and that really guzzles up the fuel: certainly fuel cost was one of the reasons the USAF gave for shutting down the Blackbird flights, though I'm sure it wasn't their real reason for doing so.
"Things like shockwaves coming off the nose and entering the engine intakes, causing rather unsettling engine "unstarts" or something like that."
Yes, I believe they fitted a system to detect unstarts and automatically restart them after a few underpants-threatening scares on the early supersonic flights.
"You have a similar situation with the SR-71. It's still probably the one of the most amazing and fastest planes ever built, but it required a support staff similar to that of an aircraft carrier."
Once the USAF took it over. While it was a CIA/Lockheed plane I believe the ground support crew consisted of about half a dozen people, and they were more reliable too.
The SR-71 was highly inefficient fuel-wise (AFAIR it burnt about $100k of fuel every hour at Mach 3, making Concorde look cheap), but it wasn't hard to support provided it was run by an organisation that was determined to keep support staff small and efficient, rather than a huge bureaucracy that had to find jobs for everyone even if they weren't needed.
"Although the Concorde has a reputation for being noisy at low altitudes, particularly on takeoff, it only makes sonic booms passing through Mach 1 when accellerating or decelerating."
Uh, no, it makes sonic booms any time it's travelling faster than Mach 1. However, the damage claims are probably bogus.
"One wonders why law enforcement isn't looking into piracy more and the RIAA has to defend itself."
Because the cops have better things to do than arrest 12-year-olds for downloading the latest Britney Spears album. Cops don't enforce stupid laws unless they're forced to, because it makes them look stupid and undermines what little respect the public still has for them.
Not to mention that I'm sure plenty of younger cops themselves go home and download music from P2P services, just as they break the speed limit when they're desperate for a donut fix.
"who needs a 300GB hard disks except for pr0n c0lLeCt0R5, warez d00ds and RAID junkies?"
Video editors: I have 470GB in my editing PC and, currently, about 350GB used. Stick a couple of feature-length DV projects on your PC and that 300GB is gone.
Also, given that the average game is going to require 10GB before too long (and the average Microsoft app probably even more:)), normal users will probably be wanting at least a 250-300GB system drive in their new PC in a couple of years from now.
Now, that's not a big problem if you're in an Apollo-style capsule with three chutes because if one fails then you can land safely with two (AFAIR one Apollo landing did just that). Even if two fail you have a fair chance of surviving, and a failure of all three is unlikely unless you have a more fundamental problem with the capsule (e.g. overheating during a bad re-entry).
But if you're relying on just one steerable chute to land you, you have two choices:
1. Accept that if it fails you die, and try to make it as reliable as possible.
2. Install normal parachutes as a reserve. Ooops, now you have the mass of a normal parachute landing system _and_ your steerable chute. That means you've just lost an awful lot of payload capacity.
Slashdot Mirror
"So, it's the "proprietaries" as I will not call them that only write bad code? Didn't he just suggest that his first attempt was poorly written. Or maybe he's arguing that it's continually poor no matter how many times it's re-written."
His argument, I think, is that with closed source, dozens of companies are all writing bad code to do the same thing, whereas with open source, that bad code only has to be written once... and then either the programmer soon gets so embarassed that they end up rewriting it properly, or someone else gets so disgusted that they do so.
He's writing in a space station that's pressurized and kept at around 20C. The 'space pen' was designed to work in a vacuum in a temperature range of something like -100C to +200C, as experienced on the lunar surface: try doing that with a $0.50 plastic ballpoint.
"I think in reality, a lot of OSS programmers are also professional programmers, but the stuff they do at home is much more interesting to them than what they're paid to do at work."
:).
Exactly. At work I write device drivers, at home (when I'm not working on independent movies) I'm writing an open-source plugin for Orbiter which lets you fly Apollo lunar missions with an increasingly accurate emulation of the 1960s-tech onboard computers; I'd like to do a full emulation of the hardware, but I only have scans of the original MIT source and don't fancy typing in about 3000 pages of antique assembler, so I'm converting it into similar code in C++ instead.
Hmm, hunting through Microsoft documentation figuring out how Windows drivers are supposed to work, or trawling through Saturn V documentation figuring out how to fly one to the moon... I think you can guess which of those is more interesting
"No different than going into a store and taking candy."
Oh, and it's _totally_ different to going into a store and taking candy. If I go into a store and take candy then I have candy and the store no longer has candy. If a TV company broadcasts their show into my house, I tape it and then pass it on, then the TV company has the show, I have the show, and other people have the show.
Why am I so unsurprised that you don't understand this extremely basic and obvious difference? In the real world there is natural scarcity, which is why we prosecute thieves. In the digital world the movie and TV companies are determined to create scarcity where it doesn't exist... that is a far, far worse crime than someone recording a TV show and sending it to their friends.
"Then you are a thief."
Now you're going to explain how taking a copy of something that someone sends to you without even asking is "theft", right?
They do have a choice: they can switch it off and find something better to do. Dead people and people with no money don't really have that choice, no matter how much they might dislike ads.
Indeed: it really does seem to me that Hollywood and the companies that make a ton of money off them are out to ensure that the technology required to make and distribute movies will be taken out of the reach of independents as much as possible. They're on a nice little earner thanks to copyright laws, and don't want some upstarts to get in the way... DRM is one of the best ways of doing that, by ensuring you need to pay $100,000 to buy a special DRM-free PC that will let you edit your own footage into your own movies.
They'll really hate it, though, when they discover they've pissed off their audience so much that the only people still watching are dead or on welfare; people with money to spend on their products are precisely the people who don't want to watch stupid ads.
"A few stars are paid a lot - the rest of the 'Team' are not."
I can only presume you don't know much about the movie industry. Hollywood is one of the most unproductive and wasteful industries on the planet (not to mention probably one of the most environmentally damaging)... and many, many people are paid far more than they're worth.
"do what they do yourself."
I do do what they do myself: that's why I know these things and you don't. Hollywood likes to create a big mystique around, but the majority is just BS: I have far more respect for someone like, say, Roger Corman than the latest manufactured 'star director'.
"Whether you like the situation or not these guys have a right to expect people to pay when their product is used."
Why?
"Without it, they will go out of business."
And I'll be just so sad when Hollywood has to stop making $200,000,000 crap. I don't think many other people will be either, after the comments I've heard about most of the recent Hollywood blockbusters.
1. Take TV.
2. Take baseball bat.
3. Apply bat to TV.
4. Repeat until bored.
Seriously, I haven't watched any significant amount of TV since, uh, well, I don't remember actually, but since sometime last century.
And you know what? After a few weeks you come to realise that it really doesn't matter... you get lots more time to do things that do matter, and the only disadvantage is that when your TV-addicted friends are discussing the exciting new events in the latest soap opera, you just stand there looking at them like a bunch of aliens with no lives. Admittedly there is the odd really good TV show that is worth watching, but if it's that good it will come out on DVD eventually anyway.
I'd switch to video editing on Linux in an instant if Avid ported their software to it (probably not too hard now they're running on MacOS X). It could hardly be worse than XP.
One problem, though, is often that the software is way overpriced for what it does. Many shareware authors want $30-50 for something pretty basic that I could probably write in a couple of days and give away for free... I might well pay $5 for that, but I'm not going to pay $50.
Another problem, historically, but less so now with things like Paypal, is that payment has been far too much of a pain, particularly if they're in a foreign country. Send a US dollar check for $35 that's going to cost me another $30 in bank charges in the UK? Sorry, but no.
Another problem is the trend in recent years of releasing crippleware rather than time-limited but fully-functional versions. I downloaded a couple of shareware programs over the weekend, either of which I might have paid for if they'd proven useful, but both had been cripppled so that without registering they couldn't actually do what I wanted them for: do they really think I'm going to give them money if I can't actually try out the software first? All they did was waste my time downloading, installing and uninstalling.
"Making TV/Movies is an extremely expensive thing to do"
Which is a circular argument: it's expensive because people are paid a lot, and because people overpay for equipment that, in reality, adds only a limited amount to the viewers' experience (like, say, if they were shooting 'Friends' on HDTV when they could use mini-DV).
TV and movies could be made for far less money, but they can afford to spend $200,000,000 on a crappy movie because they know that their monopoly position will allow them to get that money back, even if it means ripping off their customers by blanketing the nation with a huge advertising campaign claiming it's the best movie ever, even though they know it's utter crap that they'd cross the road to avoid. I, for one, am tired of paying $15 for a movie ticket and discovering that it's overhyped crap.
In the end, movies cost a lot because they cost a lot; and because they have a government-mandated monopoly on distribution. No-one really _needs_ a $200,000,000 movie the same way they need food to eat, yet the US government offers the movie industry far more perks than it offers to actual, vital industries that people rely on every day. It's time that situation was brought to an end.
PHB solution: force all users to wear blindfolds while in the office so they can't read the mail they've copied.
"your photo would btw have the same amount of credibility(? right word?) as your hand written scrawl."
And the same credibility as that file on your floppy disk which you _claim_ was an email from Bill Gates. A jury of idiots might be convinced, but anyone can write an 'email' in Notepad and stick Gates' name in the header.
The amusing thing is that this could actually have the opposite effect to the one intended, by making it harder for PHBs to deny they sent a particular email, since faking DRM-ed Outlook mailboxes is likely to be rather harder than faking a text file.
You forget, it's the PHBs who are the paying customers, not the users. PHBs will love this kind of thing, even if the actual users hate it.
"They're rather small up close..."
:). The cabin is pretty narrow, for obvious reasons.
They're even smaller inside
AFAIR it flew on full afterburners the whole time it was supersonic, and that really guzzles up the fuel: certainly fuel cost was one of the reasons the USAF gave for shutting down the Blackbird flights, though I'm sure it wasn't their real reason for doing so.
"Things like shockwaves coming off the nose and entering the engine intakes, causing rather unsettling engine "unstarts" or something like that."
Yes, I believe they fitted a system to detect unstarts and automatically restart them after a few underpants-threatening scares on the early supersonic flights.
True, in a sense I guess you could include a significant portion of Lockheed's employees as 'support staff' :).
"You have a similar situation with the SR-71. It's still probably the one of the most amazing and fastest planes ever built, but it required a support staff similar to that of an aircraft carrier."
Once the USAF took it over. While it was a CIA/Lockheed plane I believe the ground support crew consisted of about half a dozen people, and they were more reliable too.
The SR-71 was highly inefficient fuel-wise (AFAIR it burnt about $100k of fuel every hour at Mach 3, making Concorde look cheap), but it wasn't hard to support provided it was run by an organisation that was determined to keep support staff small and efficient, rather than a huge bureaucracy that had to find jobs for everyone even if they weren't needed.
"Although the Concorde has a reputation for being noisy at low altitudes, particularly on takeoff, it only makes sonic booms passing through Mach 1 when accellerating or decelerating."
Uh, no, it makes sonic booms any time it's travelling faster than Mach 1. However, the damage claims are probably bogus.
"One wonders why law enforcement isn't looking into piracy more and the RIAA has to defend itself."
Because the cops have better things to do than arrest 12-year-olds for downloading the latest Britney Spears album. Cops don't enforce stupid laws unless they're forced to, because it makes them look stupid and undermines what little respect the public still has for them.
Not to mention that I'm sure plenty of younger cops themselves go home and download music from P2P services, just as they break the speed limit when they're desperate for a donut fix.
"who needs a 300GB hard disks except for pr0n c0lLeCt0R5, warez d00ds and RAID junkies?"
:)), normal users will probably be wanting at least a 250-300GB system drive in their new PC in a couple of years from now.
Video editors: I have 470GB in my editing PC and, currently, about 350GB used. Stick a couple of feature-length DV projects on your PC and that 300GB is gone.
Also, given that the average game is going to require 10GB before too long (and the average Microsoft app probably even more
The problem with parachutes is... they fail.
Now, that's not a big problem if you're in an Apollo-style capsule with three chutes because if one fails then you can land safely with two (AFAIR one Apollo landing did just that). Even if two fail you have a fair chance of surviving, and a failure of all three is unlikely unless you have a more fundamental problem with the capsule (e.g. overheating during a bad re-entry).
But if you're relying on just one steerable chute to land you, you have two choices:
1. Accept that if it fails you die, and try to make it as reliable as possible.
2. Install normal parachutes as a reserve. Ooops, now you have the mass of a normal parachute landing system _and_ your steerable chute. That means you've just lost an awful lot of payload capacity.
Neither are really a good choice.
Bah, in the grand tradition of ST:TNG's treatment of the bad guys from the original series, they'll be bringing in the Gay Daleks :).