I guess I just don't understand how people can let their lives be manipulated by people or things that they dislike. Or by people that they like for that matter.
It's not about things you dislike, it's about things people you trust dislike. If I'm buying a new widget, and I don't know much about widgets, I may find that FooCorp makes very cheap widgets that have all of the requisite check boxes on their feature lists. If a friend, who is a widgetphile, tells me that FooCorp has very poor build quality, then I'll probably reconsider.
why aren't there more software developers that do the same thing? "Want me to add a feature to this program? Ask me. If enough people ask me I might do it for free. If it's something you really want, I may very well do it for a fair price."
Most open source developers will do this. If you want a feature, we'll quite happily give you a quote for implementing it. I usually work on a fixed price, so I estimate how long it will take, multiply that by my daily rate, and will do it for that amount. Even if projects don't advertise it, a mail to the list saying 'I want this feature, what will it cost' will usually get some replies...
Yup, I accepted that without checking, and on further reflection it appears that it's nonsense. Please consider the last paragraph of my post retracted.
Works fine in Safari. That said, if you press a key other than ijkl it does something random. I assumed wasd would work, and was very confused until I read the instructions. It's also single player, so you basically drive around until you hit your own wall - there's no way of winning. It's more a drawing program with a crappy UI than a game. Making it only 226 bytes of source isn't that impressive, it's basically:
Change direction if key is pressed
Test if pixel next in that direction is white, if so exit
If not, set it to white, set current location to that address
Repeat.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could write the same game in under 226 bytes of Z80 or 6502 assembly, so doing it in a high-level language seems much less impressive.
Re:Software that doesn't need new features
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Open Source Payday
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From people willing to invest based on the reputations of the authors. And this is gained by either releasing the first game for free, getting a sponsor based on the idea, or by working on a project run by someone else first.
Re:Software that doesn't need new features
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Open Source Payday
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· Score: 1
where's the money to develop a sequel?
From people who want to play the sequel, perhaps? If you enjoyed playing the first game, would you pay $10 towards the development of a sequel? If you're allowed to share the game with any of your friends, then this increases the number of people who might be similarly willing. This also reduces the risk for game developers: they don't invest a lot of money in developing a game and then find no one buys it, they pitch the game to people who will buy it and then get the money in advance if they will.
Ideally though maybe it's best that devices are required to blank the map when the car is traveling above a certain speed
Speed doesn't really correlate with distractions. Travelling at 30 miles per hour in a narrow road in a built-up area with pedestrians stepping out into the road requires a lot more concentration than cruising along at 70 on a straight motorway. Having the GPS display the map for the former but not for the latter wouldn't make sense. A better solution would be to remove driving licenses from people who stare at the map when they should be looking at the road - irrespective of whether the map is on a HUD, a mobile phone, or a piece of paper.
The amount that developers on a project make is not always limited by the amount that an associated foundation makes. For example, some of the work I did last year on FreeBSD was funded by the FreeBSD Foundation, but a lot of it was not. Some of it is funded by other companies. If a company wants a new feature in FreeBSD, then it's often easier for them to pay someone to add it (or hire people to work full time, as companies like Qualcomm and Yahoo do) than it is for them to go via the FreeBSD Foundation. In contrast, individuals who want to contribute something may only pay less than the cost of hiring a developer for an hour - it's not worth their while doing this as a separate contract, but the sum of those donations will be enough to get a few new features added. The FreeBSD Foundation typically gets something a little under half a million dollars in donations each year, but that's nowhere near all of the money that's made by people working on FreeBSD.
Re:Does the OS community really hate RH?
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Open Source Payday
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· Score: 1
I was going to post almost exactly this, but then I thought it would be interpreted as trolling. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who's had this experience. If any RedHat employees are reading this, please pay careful attention to the following:
A stable system means not changing the ABI. It does not mean refusing to ship bug fixes.
The problem is that it means that people will spend longer looking at the screen. Rather than glancing at it and seeing the layout instantly, they'll have to find the car on the screen, which may mean one or two seconds without their eyes on the road.
He doesn't mention the time period or what he's doing at the time. One bottle of wine by itself and I'll feel quite ill. One bottle drunk over a couple of hours along with a big meal is quite different. Something like new years eve last year where we started dinner at 6pm and finished it at around midnight involved more than two bottles per person, but that's only one bottle every 3 hours, so you don't end up horrendously drunk.
You got moderated flamebait, but that seems to be a placeholder because there is no moderation option for 'just plain wrong'. You categorically can make money from open source software - I do. The difference is that you make money from writing it, not from copying it. If you write something that ever gets to the state of being feature-complete and bug free (and comes with a free unicorn) then you probably can't make any money from it, but why should you? It doesn't need improving in any way, so what would you do to justify the money? Until then, there are people who need specific bugs fixed and people who need specific features added, and they'll pay someone to do this. That person may not be the original author - one of the reasons why open source software is often cheaper is that there is competition - but someone will make money from adding those features and fixing those bugs. In a large project, that will be a lot of people.
Why should Open Source software development be any different?
Wrong question. The correct question is why should software development be any different? Back in the day, putting software on disks, boxing it up and distributing it was a large part of the cost of development. Now, with the Internet, distributing software is basically free. Writing software, however, still takes time, which means it takes money (even if it's just opportunity cost). In fact, given the increase in complexity of software, it often costs a lot more than it used to.
So does it make sense to do the expensive bit (creating the software) for free and then try to charge for the trivial bit (copying the software)? Absolutely not! It would be like your electrician putting in the socket for free and then charging you a small fee every time you turned it on or off.
I write quite a lot of open source software. Some of it I write because I want to use it. Some of it I write because I'm paid. The people who pay me are almost always people who want to use the software. It's usually much cheaper for them to pay me to add a few features to an existing project than to pay a team of people to recreate it. I get paid to write it, so I'm happy. They get the software that they want to use and don't have to worry about EULAs, license audits, or hidden costs when they scale up their business, so they're happy. The only people who are unhappy are the ones trying to cling to a business model that doesn't make any sense.
You can't predict everything, but you can predict some things. Before the Internet, people could look at networks and think that it would be possible to replace mail order shops and newspapers with a network connection, for example. It's a small leap to go from board games to imagining a machine that could sit in your living room and let you play any board game you wanted on a screen. It's a bigger leap to go from that to the kinds of computer game we have available today.
There are some very obvious applications for room-temperature superconductors, if they could be made cheap enough. The most obvious is long power lines. For example, a moderate sized solar power plant in the middle of the Sahara desert could provide Europe with most of the power that it needs quite easily, but the transmission losses make it unfeasible. With a superconducting power line, it would be just as cheap as local solar power. Taking this a step further, you could have a power ring going all around the world so that there would always be sun shining somewhere and feeding in power. This would cause quite massive changes to the economics of power generation and distribution.
Another obvious place is in transportation. Maglev trains can run very efficiently now, but with room temperature superconductors the cost of building the track would be much lower (you could use electromagnets that would permanently keep their charge and wouldn't require cooling).
Basically, anything that uses magnets or relies on power distribution would suddenly become massively more efficient. More importantly, perhaps, a lot of things that currently use ball bearings and other anti-friction devices could be modified to use electromagnets instead.
It's also worth remembering that superconductors are not just free of electrical resistance, they also have a constant temperature along their lengths. This would make them perfect for anything involving heat redistribution, if they could maintain their superconducting property up to around 350-400 Kelvin. For example, you could easily make a small fanless computer if you could cote the whole of the outside in a layer of superconductor with a pad touching the top of the CPU - the entire case would be a heat sink, and the CPU would never get hotter than the case. House heating systems would be similarly simplified. Rather than having a boiler that heated water and then pumped it through radiators, your radiators could just be coated in a superconducting material with superconducting wires leading into the boiler. As you heated up the end in the boiler, you'd heat up all of the radiators. More efficient and also simpler to build. Not to mention being easier to extend - you could add another radiator by just running a wire from an existing one...
The yields for he high resolution displays never got high enough for them to be worthwhile. My Nokia 770 had the same DPI, but on a 4" screen. TFTs have the same issues as other solid-state devices: defects happen in random places and so the bigger they get the higher the probability of a defect meaning you can't sell it. If you're making a big panel and one a sixteenth the size, then a single defect means a complete loss for the big panel or a 15/16 yield for the smaller ones (or a 3/4 yield if you're really unlucky and it happens in a corner between 4, but you typically have small borders to reduce the likelihood of this). We're starting to see high DPI screens become common in portable devices now. I wouldn't be surprised if something like the T220 came back once the manufacturing improves. The problem with it was that, beyond being a good tech demo, it wasn't really a marketable product. Very few people are willing to pay 10-100 times as much for a monitor to get four times as many pixels. Until you can make them cheap enough that you can ramp up the economies of scale, they're not a good product.
I used one, and while they looked great I won't be shedding too many tears. For one thing, it used two single-link DVI connectors, so it looked like a multi-monitor configuration to the computer, meaning you needed something like Xinerama to make it work properly, and often things like OpenGL applications would decide that full screen meant half of the monitor. It also cost over $10K, putting it well out of the price range of most people.
I don't have to "log in" using a cellphone, they just bill random people for the minutes I use
The authentication that the phone does with the network is irrelevant to this - it just identifies the phone / SIM, it does not identify the user (modulo laws requiring a name and address when you buy a pre-pay SIM). There's a difference between the user logging in and the terminal logging in.
I've not played Minecraft (it looks like the sort of game that would end up being a massive time sink), but my understanding is that the server is running large 3D cellular automata even with no players. In contrast, TF2 servers don't really do much beyond sending small sets of coordinate data between clients.
If they put up a website and allow you to comment there, you still have to agree to a third pary's terms of service (your ISP) to participate
No, you have to agree to an ISP's terms of service. You can go to your local library and use their connection. You can use a smartphone, or you can use a wired ISP at home. If you've got a job, you can probably use your work network connection. You have lots of choices.
This is very different from Facebook, where you have to provide personal information to a company that exists for the sole purpose of selling personal information and you have no alternatives.
This is not nitpicking about virtually meaningless ideals, this is a vital question in a modern democracy: does it exist solely at the whim of private entities? If a single company is granted the power to censor communication between the electorate and their representatives, then you don't have democracy. Complaining about it now, when it's just a single use, is much better than waiting until Congress decides that all communication with voters should go via Facebook.
It also makes your information incredibly valuable. I've said this before, but it is worth repeating:
Most elections are decided by the 10% who change their vote between elections. You typically have a large group that will vote for their favourite party whatever happens, and then a few swing voters. Political parties spend a lot of time and effort trying to work out who these people are, what the important issues are to them, and persuading them to change their vote. If you fill in this information, Facebook knows that TSA-related issues are important to you. It can already fairly accurately correlate your broad political opinions from other information. You're providing them with information that they can sell to political parties for quite a lot of money.
I'm also in the under-30 demographic for a couple more months, and I also don't have a Facebook account. Most of my friends did 2-3 years ago, but a lot of them now either closed their accounts or stopped using them. I don't know of any who have stopped checking their email in the same period. People drift on and off instant messaging - I've recently shut down my AIM / ICQ Jabber transport because all of my contacts there now also have an XMPP account (most via Google).
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I just don't understand how people can let their lives be manipulated by people or things that they dislike. Or by people that they like for that matter.
It's not about things you dislike, it's about things people you trust dislike. If I'm buying a new widget, and I don't know much about widgets, I may find that FooCorp makes very cheap widgets that have all of the requisite check boxes on their feature lists. If a friend, who is a widgetphile, tells me that FooCorp has very poor build quality, then I'll probably reconsider.
why aren't there more software developers that do the same thing? "Want me to add a feature to this program? Ask me. If enough people ask me I might do it for free. If it's something you really want, I may very well do it for a fair price."
Most open source developers will do this. If you want a feature, we'll quite happily give you a quote for implementing it. I usually work on a fixed price, so I estimate how long it will take, multiply that by my daily rate, and will do it for that amount. Even if projects don't advertise it, a mail to the list saying 'I want this feature, what will it cost' will usually get some replies...
Yup, I accepted that without checking, and on further reflection it appears that it's nonsense. Please consider the last paragraph of my post retracted.
a Space Nutter like Raven here
Wow, you really haven't read any of my posts in space related stories, have you...
The arrow keys that it uses are ijkl. Any other key will make it go in a random direction.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could write the same game in under 226 bytes of Z80 or 6502 assembly, so doing it in a high-level language seems much less impressive.
From people willing to invest based on the reputations of the authors. And this is gained by either releasing the first game for free, getting a sponsor based on the idea, or by working on a project run by someone else first.
where's the money to develop a sequel?
From people who want to play the sequel, perhaps? If you enjoyed playing the first game, would you pay $10 towards the development of a sequel? If you're allowed to share the game with any of your friends, then this increases the number of people who might be similarly willing. This also reduces the risk for game developers: they don't invest a lot of money in developing a game and then find no one buys it, they pitch the game to people who will buy it and then get the money in advance if they will.
Ideally though maybe it's best that devices are required to blank the map when the car is traveling above a certain speed
Speed doesn't really correlate with distractions. Travelling at 30 miles per hour in a narrow road in a built-up area with pedestrians stepping out into the road requires a lot more concentration than cruising along at 70 on a straight motorway. Having the GPS display the map for the former but not for the latter wouldn't make sense. A better solution would be to remove driving licenses from people who stare at the map when they should be looking at the road - irrespective of whether the map is on a HUD, a mobile phone, or a piece of paper.
The amount that developers on a project make is not always limited by the amount that an associated foundation makes. For example, some of the work I did last year on FreeBSD was funded by the FreeBSD Foundation, but a lot of it was not. Some of it is funded by other companies. If a company wants a new feature in FreeBSD, then it's often easier for them to pay someone to add it (or hire people to work full time, as companies like Qualcomm and Yahoo do) than it is for them to go via the FreeBSD Foundation. In contrast, individuals who want to contribute something may only pay less than the cost of hiring a developer for an hour - it's not worth their while doing this as a separate contract, but the sum of those donations will be enough to get a few new features added. The FreeBSD Foundation typically gets something a little under half a million dollars in donations each year, but that's nowhere near all of the money that's made by people working on FreeBSD.
I was going to post almost exactly this, but then I thought it would be interpreted as trolling. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who's had this experience. If any RedHat employees are reading this, please pay careful attention to the following:
A stable system means not changing the ABI. It does not mean refusing to ship bug fixes.
The problem is that it means that people will spend longer looking at the screen. Rather than glancing at it and seeing the layout instantly, they'll have to find the car on the screen, which may mean one or two seconds without their eyes on the road.
He doesn't mention the time period or what he's doing at the time. One bottle of wine by itself and I'll feel quite ill. One bottle drunk over a couple of hours along with a big meal is quite different. Something like new years eve last year where we started dinner at 6pm and finished it at around midnight involved more than two bottles per person, but that's only one bottle every 3 hours, so you don't end up horrendously drunk.
You got moderated flamebait, but that seems to be a placeholder because there is no moderation option for 'just plain wrong'. You categorically can make money from open source software - I do. The difference is that you make money from writing it, not from copying it. If you write something that ever gets to the state of being feature-complete and bug free (and comes with a free unicorn) then you probably can't make any money from it, but why should you? It doesn't need improving in any way, so what would you do to justify the money? Until then, there are people who need specific bugs fixed and people who need specific features added, and they'll pay someone to do this. That person may not be the original author - one of the reasons why open source software is often cheaper is that there is competition - but someone will make money from adding those features and fixing those bugs. In a large project, that will be a lot of people.
Why should Open Source software development be any different?
Wrong question. The correct question is why should software development be any different? Back in the day, putting software on disks, boxing it up and distributing it was a large part of the cost of development. Now, with the Internet, distributing software is basically free. Writing software, however, still takes time, which means it takes money (even if it's just opportunity cost). In fact, given the increase in complexity of software, it often costs a lot more than it used to.
So does it make sense to do the expensive bit (creating the software) for free and then try to charge for the trivial bit (copying the software)? Absolutely not! It would be like your electrician putting in the socket for free and then charging you a small fee every time you turned it on or off.
I write quite a lot of open source software. Some of it I write because I want to use it. Some of it I write because I'm paid. The people who pay me are almost always people who want to use the software. It's usually much cheaper for them to pay me to add a few features to an existing project than to pay a team of people to recreate it. I get paid to write it, so I'm happy. They get the software that they want to use and don't have to worry about EULAs, license audits, or hidden costs when they scale up their business, so they're happy. The only people who are unhappy are the ones trying to cling to a business model that doesn't make any sense.
You can't predict everything, but you can predict some things. Before the Internet, people could look at networks and think that it would be possible to replace mail order shops and newspapers with a network connection, for example. It's a small leap to go from board games to imagining a machine that could sit in your living room and let you play any board game you wanted on a screen. It's a bigger leap to go from that to the kinds of computer game we have available today.
There are some very obvious applications for room-temperature superconductors, if they could be made cheap enough. The most obvious is long power lines. For example, a moderate sized solar power plant in the middle of the Sahara desert could provide Europe with most of the power that it needs quite easily, but the transmission losses make it unfeasible. With a superconducting power line, it would be just as cheap as local solar power. Taking this a step further, you could have a power ring going all around the world so that there would always be sun shining somewhere and feeding in power. This would cause quite massive changes to the economics of power generation and distribution.
Another obvious place is in transportation. Maglev trains can run very efficiently now, but with room temperature superconductors the cost of building the track would be much lower (you could use electromagnets that would permanently keep their charge and wouldn't require cooling).
Basically, anything that uses magnets or relies on power distribution would suddenly become massively more efficient. More importantly, perhaps, a lot of things that currently use ball bearings and other anti-friction devices could be modified to use electromagnets instead.
It's also worth remembering that superconductors are not just free of electrical resistance, they also have a constant temperature along their lengths. This would make them perfect for anything involving heat redistribution, if they could maintain their superconducting property up to around 350-400 Kelvin. For example, you could easily make a small fanless computer if you could cote the whole of the outside in a layer of superconductor with a pad touching the top of the CPU - the entire case would be a heat sink, and the CPU would never get hotter than the case. House heating systems would be similarly simplified. Rather than having a boiler that heated water and then pumped it through radiators, your radiators could just be coated in a superconducting material with superconducting wires leading into the boiler. As you heated up the end in the boiler, you'd heat up all of the radiators. More efficient and also simpler to build. Not to mention being easier to extend - you could add another radiator by just running a wire from an existing one...
The yields for he high resolution displays never got high enough for them to be worthwhile. My Nokia 770 had the same DPI, but on a 4" screen. TFTs have the same issues as other solid-state devices: defects happen in random places and so the bigger they get the higher the probability of a defect meaning you can't sell it. If you're making a big panel and one a sixteenth the size, then a single defect means a complete loss for the big panel or a 15/16 yield for the smaller ones (or a 3/4 yield if you're really unlucky and it happens in a corner between 4, but you typically have small borders to reduce the likelihood of this). We're starting to see high DPI screens become common in portable devices now. I wouldn't be surprised if something like the T220 came back once the manufacturing improves. The problem with it was that, beyond being a good tech demo, it wasn't really a marketable product. Very few people are willing to pay 10-100 times as much for a monitor to get four times as many pixels. Until you can make them cheap enough that you can ramp up the economies of scale, they're not a good product.
I used one, and while they looked great I won't be shedding too many tears. For one thing, it used two single-link DVI connectors, so it looked like a multi-monitor configuration to the computer, meaning you needed something like Xinerama to make it work properly, and often things like OpenGL applications would decide that full screen meant half of the monitor. It also cost over $10K, putting it well out of the price range of most people.
I'm pretty sure G'Kar demonstrated putting ones face in a book long before Facebook came along. The results were quite similar...
I don't have to "log in" using a cellphone, they just bill random people for the minutes I use
The authentication that the phone does with the network is irrelevant to this - it just identifies the phone / SIM, it does not identify the user (modulo laws requiring a name and address when you buy a pre-pay SIM). There's a difference between the user logging in and the terminal logging in.
I've not played Minecraft (it looks like the sort of game that would end up being a massive time sink), but my understanding is that the server is running large 3D cellular automata even with no players. In contrast, TF2 servers don't really do much beyond sending small sets of coordinate data between clients.
If they put up a website and allow you to comment there, you still have to agree to a third pary's terms of service (your ISP) to participate
No, you have to agree to an ISP's terms of service. You can go to your local library and use their connection. You can use a smartphone, or you can use a wired ISP at home. If you've got a job, you can probably use your work network connection. You have lots of choices.
This is very different from Facebook, where you have to provide personal information to a company that exists for the sole purpose of selling personal information and you have no alternatives.
This is not nitpicking about virtually meaningless ideals, this is a vital question in a modern democracy: does it exist solely at the whim of private entities? If a single company is granted the power to censor communication between the electorate and their representatives, then you don't have democracy. Complaining about it now, when it's just a single use, is much better than waiting until Congress decides that all communication with voters should go via Facebook.
It also makes your information incredibly valuable. I've said this before, but it is worth repeating:
Most elections are decided by the 10% who change their vote between elections. You typically have a large group that will vote for their favourite party whatever happens, and then a few swing voters. Political parties spend a lot of time and effort trying to work out who these people are, what the important issues are to them, and persuading them to change their vote. If you fill in this information, Facebook knows that TSA-related issues are important to you. It can already fairly accurately correlate your broad political opinions from other information. You're providing them with information that they can sell to political parties for quite a lot of money.
Why would you have a problem if you could ONLY vote at Walmart?
I wouldn't, however I would have a problem if you only got your ballot paper by showing your Walmart loyalty card, which is a closer analogy.
I'm also in the under-30 demographic for a couple more months, and I also don't have a Facebook account. Most of my friends did 2-3 years ago, but a lot of them now either closed their accounts or stopped using them. I don't know of any who have stopped checking their email in the same period. People drift on and off instant messaging - I've recently shut down my AIM / ICQ Jabber transport because all of my contacts there now also have an XMPP account (most via Google).