Here's a simple alternative model: release a (possibly unfinished) demo for free and say that you will release the finished full game as a free download once you have raised a certain amount of capital. Allow people to pay any amount into an escrow account. If it reaches the required amount, then you finish the game and release it.
It's hard for indie developers to start the transition to this model, but imagine if Valve said 'if we raise $10m then we'll release our next game for free.' I bet there are a million gamers who would pay $10 to be able to download the next Valve game for free as soon as it is released. Once you have one game released like this, you can put a 'did you like this game? Why not contribute $10 towards our next one?' button in it and start raising funds. People who got the game for free are likely to want do this, so the second game you release like this is easier. You don't have to worry about piracy for two reasons. The first is that you've covered your costs plus profit before you publicly release the game. The second is that anyone giving a friend a copy of your game is helping to market your next one and release money for it.
It's not a straw man. A lot of people in the copyright debate claim that artist deserve to be paid for their art, simply because they created it, and claim that poor artists are evidence that current copyright enforcement is too weak. Artists do not deserve to be paid if they create art that no one likes. I agree that, if lots of people are downloading someone's work then this implies that lots of people do like it, and in that case they deserve to be paid (although the amount is still debatable), but this needs to be stated. The act of producing some creative work is not intrinsically valuable, it is only valuable if people want what is produced, and this often gets overlooked.
It's part of the recommended practice for HTTPS to HTTP because sites using HTTPS may put sensitive information (such as a session id) in the URL and you don't want this leaking. The browser does this, not Google - it simply omits the referrer header. DuckDuckGo has had an option to bounce via a redirect with a bland name if you visit an HTTPS site, and apparently Google will now do that too. This means that the site doesn't get your search string. Google may also put some other information in the URL (last time I typed anything into Google, the search URL was about 400 characters long, so I'm not sure what was in there) and if you care about your privacy then you may consider this to be a good thing. I turn it off because I'm not quite that paranoid, and because I find the slight delay as you go via the redirect to be more irritating than letting sites know what my search string was.
Some companies are paying people to astroturf. Some people with mod points are modbombing them. Astroturfing (And other forms of advertising or trolling) are most effective when they are mostly or even entirely true, just omitting the facts that don't support the desired conclusion. For example, pointing out the correlation between skin colour and conviction rate in the USA leads the reader to one conclusion, while pointing out the correlation between police search rate and skin colour or skin colour and economic class paints an almost inverted one. When presented with a post of the first category, you can either reply with one of the other points, or just moderate it as a troll. The second is easier and, if the poster persists in this behaviour, probably more deserved.
Not to any employer. If you've found a company that actually wants (and is willing to pay for) a proper solution, then I suggest that you do everything that you can to make sure you keep your job there. Most companies want a vaguely good-enough solution right now, and if it's a money sink in two years then, well, it will be someone else's responsibility by then...
Because the perception of value is also important. Most managers have very little idea of how much effort is involved in programming. If you are in a cubicle, then they can see how much of your time is spent doing something that looks like working. If you are at home, then they can only judge you by your results and they are not good at judging the value of your results. One solution is to ensure that junior management is capable of doing your job, so that they know how much time it should take. Another is for the company to simply stop caring about how hard it is and work out how much your output is worth to them and pay you appropriately. This works for me as a freelancer: I often work for people on other continents, so they have no way of checking how long things actually take me. If they pay me for a day's worth of work, then they're happy if the results they get are worth (to them) at least the amount that they paid me. If I actually did the work in 10 minutes in between Slashdot posts then they wouldn't actually care, unless someone else was willing and able to do the same work for them for less.
It frustrates and annoys me that you are being so dang pedantic about the issue
I made a cheap joke about your poor phrasing, the AC contradicted the (correct) assertion it contained, and then you chimed in trying to justify your inaccuracy. I would have let it go at the start with the first comment, or if you'd just said 'yes, it's an oversimplification' but you decided to jump straight into ultra-patronising mode with:
Voice-Family: Leo having a conversation with Sheldon [wikipedia.org] in an episode of "The Big Bang Theory".
And then, of course, you feel the need to respond with this:
I think it would do you well to think about why it is that you annoy a lot of people [slashdot.org].
A link to my foes page? Seriously? As evidence that I annoy 'a lot of people'? Try clicking on some of those names sometime and checking their posting history: most of them are persistent trolls that I've called out, like first-post-troll '(1337) God' or guy-who-posts-stories-about-having-sex-with-children 'Oliver Newland'. And, since we're being childish, let's look at some other pages like my fans page, which I haven't looked at for a couple of years, and now seems to contain almost 20 times as many entries as my freaks page.
Seems like a pretty good ratio to me. If you're not offending anyone at all, then you're probably not saying anything of value, and I'm pretty happy with most of the people on my freaks page. Not saying much of interest to anyone, by the way, seems to be a description of you that it appears only two people would disagree with...
And if those sites are located in China? Do you then start blocking them at the border?
If you want to eliminate piracy, then structure the laws to encourage payment for creation, not copying, of works. The software industry has been 90% like this forever (90% of software developers are paid directly to write bespoke software, not paid in revenue selling copies of software) and open source is gradually encroaching on the remaining 10% (people get paid to add features to open source projects that extend it to meet a user's requirements). The entertainment industry, however, is showing no sign of making this transition, even though there is no long-term future for the pay-for-copies model: it simply will not work as the cost of producing copies drops to zero.
No they don't. At least, not automatically. I've written a big chunk of open source software. Some of it I got paid for, because people found it valuable and paid me to write it. Some of it I did with no expectation of payment, and was not paid for. The work I was not paid for was often harder than the work that I did get paid for, but I don't intrinsically deserve to be paid for it just because it was work. If I dig a hole and then fill it in again, I don't deserve to be compensated, even though I've just done a big chunk of work, but if someone wants to burry something at the bottom of the hole then they would have an incentive to pay me to ensure that the hole is dug.
People who create things that other people consider valuable should be fairly compensated. That is not quite the same thing.
No, Unbound and NSD do not have HTTP servers. Come on. I was just trying to explain a complicated concept in a half sentence; it's called an analogy.
You realise that this is Slashdot, right? I.e. your audience is fairly technical people, not folks who don't know the difference between the web and the Internet. More specifically, this is an article about BIND, on Slashdot, meaning anyone reading your post is likely to have at least a basic understanding of what DNS is and (at least a vague idea of) how it works. You could have explained the same thing, without talking nonsense about web pages, in any of these ways, depending on how much detail you wanted to give:
One (NSD) acts as an authoritative DNS server the other (Unbound) as a DNS cache.
One (NSD) serves your DNS records to others, the other (Unbound) caches DNS lookups for your network.
One (NSD) publishes host names, the other (Unbound) looks up addresses on behalf of clients and caches them.
See? You don't have to talk complete nonsense when you simplify things, you just have to explain what you actually mean, in simple terms. Explanations like yours given to people who don't know much about computers are why we end up with people creating a 'GUI interface using visual basic to track the killers IP address' in CSI.
I did. A DNS server / resolver has nothing to do with putting web pages online or for finding them. A DNS server puts your computer in a global human-readable namespace. A DNS resolver finds computers.
In the first invasion of Iraq that the US participated in, they were greeted in the streets as liberators. They then marched almost all of the way to the capital, before turning around and going home. The people who greeted them on the streets then had a long chat with Saddam's security forces. It's not hard to understand why they were a little reluctant the second time around...
Dresden was carpet bombed and more civilians were killed than in either nuclear attack, yet the population was not demoralised by it. The Japanese were stunned by the nuclear bombing because it was a massive amount of damage done by a single plane and the US propaganda made it seem that there was a fleet of nuclear-armed aircraft ready to take off and completely destroy all life in Japan. Even if the USA had had that capability, the result would have been making a large area near Japan (probably including big chunks of of Australia and China) uninhabitable due to clouds of fallout being blown by the wind.
No, the manager's job is to make sure that the company's objective's are achieved on time and in budget. If an employee's overall productivity is higher if he or she takes periodic breaks to play Angry Birds or post on Slashdot rather than working solidly all of the time in the office, then only a bad manager would insist on removing the 'distractions'. Most people work best if they take short breaks quite frequently.
I'm pretty sure that you are replying to a troll though. The 'company's bandwidth streaming music' bit was a bit of a giveaway - streaming Internet radio uses very little bandwidth and lots of people work better with music in the background.
In BitTorrent, you download a.torrent file that contains checksums allowing you to validate the segments. Where do you get the equivalent in this system? Who is responsible for deciding whether a particular name to IP mapping in the system is authoritative?
Creating a distributed read-only key-value store is not an especially difficult system, the difficult bit is defining authority.
Unbound and NSD are a suite of DNS servers from the same people One (NSD) puts your web page on the Internet; the other (Unbound) looks for web pages on the Internet
I thought bind was bloated, but unbound includes an HTTP server and client as well? That brings bloat to a whole new level. Is it based on EMACS?
A few people have done it. It hasn't caught on, because it's a stupid idea.
Peer to peer name resolution is pretty easy, the problem is authority. DNS doesn't just give an arbitrary mapping from names to IP addresses, it gives a mapping that the whole world agrees on. That is the bit that is hard to do. With DNS, this is simple. Each tier is authoritative for each subdomain. In a p2p system, who is responsible for allocating foo.bar (or slashdot.org)? With DNSSEC, it's actually quite easy to add a p2p layer on top of DVD for resolution - DNS caches could easily discover each other and send queries to each other before checking the authoritative server.
Bullshit. When OS X first came out, it only ran on PowerPC. It came with OpenFirmware, and which provided a graphical multiboot bootloader. When it was ported to Intel, Boot Camp was a separate download, now it's integrated.
I never planned on buying Windows 8, but I was interested in some of the hardware designed for Windows 8, because it is likely to be a bit more standardised in terms of core hardware than the wide range of generic ARM stuff, so it would be more interesting for running other operating systems. If hardware makers disable the ability to run other operating systems, that makes their devices less interesting to me. Fortunately, there will almost certainly be 100 chinese ODMs who don't bother to lock down their products for every big brand maker that does.
OS X doesn't stop you installing other operating systems. OS X even comes with a tool that will resize your existing partition, provide space for another OS, and Apple computers have a graphical boot menu out of the box for selecting the OS to boot.
I'm not sure about iOS devices. The older iPods didn't actively stop you from installing other operating systems (they just didn't support it, which is fair enough). If the new iPods / iPhones do lock the bootloader and prevent you from installing something else, then that would be something worth complaining about, although there are enough other reasons for wanting to avoid Apple's locked-down consumer product lines that it's probably quite low on the list.
The whole point in the transition is that you do not know ahead of time whether a host is IPv4 or IPv6. By not fixing ping and something does does not work you 'ping' it and the result you get is totally out of step with the way the rest of the operating system and your apps work.
Except that ping is not an app, it is a diagnostic tool. If you're in a dual-stack situation, you want to know whether a host is reachable over IPv4 or over IPv6 independently. You could do this with a -4 and -6 flag to ping, but then you'd need to type two more characters for the v6 version and three more for the v4 version.
Prices for tomorrow are always expensive, but if you book in advance it goes down a lot. Edit that for two weeks from now and the cheapest fare is £88.50 - still not cheap, but less than the price of 70 litres of petrol, so probably not much cheaper to drive. Swansea to London return cost me £50 and speed is the irritating part - the train averages about 60 miles per hour. It takes 3 hours to go from Swansea to London, but only 2 hours to go from London to Brussels, which is a little bit further. Fixing this wouldn't require new rails, it would just require them being repaired so that the Intercity trains that they were originally built for (which can travel at 125 miles per hour) can operate at their maximum speed safely. At that speed it would only be about an hour and a half, which makes doing the round trip in a single day feasible.
They don't have to nationalise it, just impose caps on fares and mandate track improvements (you know, the ones the taxpayer spends a few hundred million pounds on every few years) actually be completed. Then, if the companies do go bust and no one will buy them, I suppose they could be nationalised...
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a simple alternative model: release a (possibly unfinished) demo for free and say that you will release the finished full game as a free download once you have raised a certain amount of capital. Allow people to pay any amount into an escrow account. If it reaches the required amount, then you finish the game and release it.
It's hard for indie developers to start the transition to this model, but imagine if Valve said 'if we raise $10m then we'll release our next game for free.' I bet there are a million gamers who would pay $10 to be able to download the next Valve game for free as soon as it is released. Once you have one game released like this, you can put a 'did you like this game? Why not contribute $10 towards our next one?' button in it and start raising funds. People who got the game for free are likely to want do this, so the second game you release like this is easier. You don't have to worry about piracy for two reasons. The first is that you've covered your costs plus profit before you publicly release the game. The second is that anyone giving a friend a copy of your game is helping to market your next one and release money for it.
It's not a straw man. A lot of people in the copyright debate claim that artist deserve to be paid for their art, simply because they created it, and claim that poor artists are evidence that current copyright enforcement is too weak. Artists do not deserve to be paid if they create art that no one likes. I agree that, if lots of people are downloading someone's work then this implies that lots of people do like it, and in that case they deserve to be paid (although the amount is still debatable), but this needs to be stated. The act of producing some creative work is not intrinsically valuable, it is only valuable if people want what is produced, and this often gets overlooked.
It's part of the recommended practice for HTTPS to HTTP because sites using HTTPS may put sensitive information (such as a session id) in the URL and you don't want this leaking. The browser does this, not Google - it simply omits the referrer header. DuckDuckGo has had an option to bounce via a redirect with a bland name if you visit an HTTPS site, and apparently Google will now do that too. This means that the site doesn't get your search string. Google may also put some other information in the URL (last time I typed anything into Google, the search URL was about 400 characters long, so I'm not sure what was in there) and if you care about your privacy then you may consider this to be a good thing. I turn it off because I'm not quite that paranoid, and because I find the slight delay as you go via the redirect to be more irritating than letting sites know what my search string was.
Some companies are paying people to astroturf. Some people with mod points are modbombing them. Astroturfing (And other forms of advertising or trolling) are most effective when they are mostly or even entirely true, just omitting the facts that don't support the desired conclusion. For example, pointing out the correlation between skin colour and conviction rate in the USA leads the reader to one conclusion, while pointing out the correlation between police search rate and skin colour or skin colour and economic class paints an almost inverted one. When presented with a post of the first category, you can either reply with one of the other points, or just moderate it as a troll. The second is easier and, if the poster persists in this behaviour, probably more deserved.
Not to any employer. If you've found a company that actually wants (and is willing to pay for) a proper solution, then I suggest that you do everything that you can to make sure you keep your job there. Most companies want a vaguely good-enough solution right now, and if it's a money sink in two years then, well, it will be someone else's responsibility by then...
Because the perception of value is also important. Most managers have very little idea of how much effort is involved in programming. If you are in a cubicle, then they can see how much of your time is spent doing something that looks like working. If you are at home, then they can only judge you by your results and they are not good at judging the value of your results. One solution is to ensure that junior management is capable of doing your job, so that they know how much time it should take. Another is for the company to simply stop caring about how hard it is and work out how much your output is worth to them and pay you appropriately. This works for me as a freelancer: I often work for people on other continents, so they have no way of checking how long things actually take me. If they pay me for a day's worth of work, then they're happy if the results they get are worth (to them) at least the amount that they paid me. If I actually did the work in 10 minutes in between Slashdot posts then they wouldn't actually care, unless someone else was willing and able to do the same work for them for less.
If ever a post deserved a +5 Troll moderation, it was this one. It starts off so reasonably, and then... well, hopefully you didn't read to the end.
It frustrates and annoys me that you are being so dang pedantic about the issue
I made a cheap joke about your poor phrasing, the AC contradicted the (correct) assertion it contained, and then you chimed in trying to justify your inaccuracy. I would have let it go at the start with the first comment, or if you'd just said 'yes, it's an oversimplification' but you decided to jump straight into ultra-patronising mode with:
Voice-Family: Leo having a conversation with Sheldon [wikipedia.org] in an episode of "The Big Bang Theory".
And then, of course, you feel the need to respond with this:
I think it would do you well to think about why it is that you annoy a lot of people [slashdot.org].
A link to my foes page? Seriously? As evidence that I annoy 'a lot of people'? Try clicking on some of those names sometime and checking their posting history: most of them are persistent trolls that I've called out, like first-post-troll '(1337) God' or guy-who-posts-stories-about-having-sex-with-children 'Oliver Newland'. And, since we're being childish, let's look at some other pages like my fans page, which I haven't looked at for a couple of years, and now seems to contain almost 20 times as many entries as my freaks page.
Seems like a pretty good ratio to me. If you're not offending anyone at all, then you're probably not saying anything of value, and I'm pretty happy with most of the people on my freaks page. Not saying much of interest to anyone, by the way, seems to be a description of you that it appears only two people would disagree with...
And if those sites are located in China? Do you then start blocking them at the border?
If you want to eliminate piracy, then structure the laws to encourage payment for creation, not copying, of works. The software industry has been 90% like this forever (90% of software developers are paid directly to write bespoke software, not paid in revenue selling copies of software) and open source is gradually encroaching on the remaining 10% (people get paid to add features to open source projects that extend it to meet a user's requirements). The entertainment industry, however, is showing no sign of making this transition, even though there is no long-term future for the pay-for-copies model: it simply will not work as the cost of producing copies drops to zero.
People deserve to get paid for their work
No they don't. At least, not automatically. I've written a big chunk of open source software. Some of it I got paid for, because people found it valuable and paid me to write it. Some of it I did with no expectation of payment, and was not paid for. The work I was not paid for was often harder than the work that I did get paid for, but I don't intrinsically deserve to be paid for it just because it was work. If I dig a hole and then fill it in again, I don't deserve to be compensated, even though I've just done a big chunk of work, but if someone wants to burry something at the bottom of the hole then they would have an incentive to pay me to ensure that the hole is dug.
People who create things that other people consider valuable should be fairly compensated. That is not quite the same thing.
No, Unbound and NSD do not have HTTP servers. Come on. I was just trying to explain a complicated concept in a half sentence; it's called an analogy.
You realise that this is Slashdot, right? I.e. your audience is fairly technical people, not folks who don't know the difference between the web and the Internet. More specifically, this is an article about BIND, on Slashdot, meaning anyone reading your post is likely to have at least a basic understanding of what DNS is and (at least a vague idea of) how it works. You could have explained the same thing, without talking nonsense about web pages, in any of these ways, depending on how much detail you wanted to give:
See? You don't have to talk complete nonsense when you simplify things, you just have to explain what you actually mean, in simple terms. Explanations like yours given to people who don't know much about computers are why we end up with people creating a 'GUI interface using visual basic to track the killers IP address' in CSI.
I did. A DNS server / resolver has nothing to do with putting web pages online or for finding them. A DNS server puts your computer in a global human-readable namespace. A DNS resolver finds computers.
Good idea. History has shown us that people who are afraid always act completely rationally and cooperate with the person that they are afraid of...
In the first invasion of Iraq that the US participated in, they were greeted in the streets as liberators. They then marched almost all of the way to the capital, before turning around and going home. The people who greeted them on the streets then had a long chat with Saddam's security forces. It's not hard to understand why they were a little reluctant the second time around...
Dresden was carpet bombed and more civilians were killed than in either nuclear attack, yet the population was not demoralised by it. The Japanese were stunned by the nuclear bombing because it was a massive amount of damage done by a single plane and the US propaganda made it seem that there was a fleet of nuclear-armed aircraft ready to take off and completely destroy all life in Japan. Even if the USA had had that capability, the result would have been making a large area near Japan (probably including big chunks of of Australia and China) uninhabitable due to clouds of fallout being blown by the wind.
No, the manager's job is to make sure that the company's objective's are achieved on time and in budget. If an employee's overall productivity is higher if he or she takes periodic breaks to play Angry Birds or post on Slashdot rather than working solidly all of the time in the office, then only a bad manager would insist on removing the 'distractions'. Most people work best if they take short breaks quite frequently.
I'm pretty sure that you are replying to a troll though. The 'company's bandwidth streaming music' bit was a bit of a giveaway - streaming Internet radio uses very little bandwidth and lots of people work better with music in the background.
In BitTorrent, you download a .torrent file that contains checksums allowing you to validate the segments. Where do you get the equivalent in this system? Who is responsible for deciding whether a particular name to IP mapping in the system is authoritative?
Creating a distributed read-only key-value store is not an especially difficult system, the difficult bit is defining authority.
Unbound and NSD are a suite of DNS servers from the same people One (NSD) puts your web page on the Internet; the other (Unbound) looks for web pages on the Internet
I thought bind was bloated, but unbound includes an HTTP server and client as well? That brings bloat to a whole new level. Is it based on EMACS?
A few people have done it. It hasn't caught on, because it's a stupid idea.
Peer to peer name resolution is pretty easy, the problem is authority. DNS doesn't just give an arbitrary mapping from names to IP addresses, it gives a mapping that the whole world agrees on. That is the bit that is hard to do. With DNS, this is simple. Each tier is authoritative for each subdomain. In a p2p system, who is responsible for allocating foo.bar (or slashdot.org)? With DNSSEC, it's actually quite easy to add a p2p layer on top of DVD for resolution - DNS caches could easily discover each other and send queries to each other before checking the authoritative server.
Bullshit. When OS X first came out, it only ran on PowerPC. It came with OpenFirmware, and which provided a graphical multiboot bootloader. When it was ported to Intel, Boot Camp was a separate download, now it's integrated.
I never planned on buying Windows 8, but I was interested in some of the hardware designed for Windows 8, because it is likely to be a bit more standardised in terms of core hardware than the wide range of generic ARM stuff, so it would be more interesting for running other operating systems. If hardware makers disable the ability to run other operating systems, that makes their devices less interesting to me. Fortunately, there will almost certainly be 100 chinese ODMs who don't bother to lock down their products for every big brand maker that does.
OS X doesn't stop you installing other operating systems. OS X even comes with a tool that will resize your existing partition, provide space for another OS, and Apple computers have a graphical boot menu out of the box for selecting the OS to boot.
I'm not sure about iOS devices. The older iPods didn't actively stop you from installing other operating systems (they just didn't support it, which is fair enough). If the new iPods / iPhones do lock the bootloader and prevent you from installing something else, then that would be something worth complaining about, although there are enough other reasons for wanting to avoid Apple's locked-down consumer product lines that it's probably quite low on the list.
The whole point in the transition is that you do not know ahead of time whether a host is IPv4 or IPv6. By not fixing ping and something does does not work you 'ping' it and the result you get is totally out of step with the way the rest of the operating system and your apps work.
Except that ping is not an app, it is a diagnostic tool. If you're in a dual-stack situation, you want to know whether a host is reachable over IPv4 or over IPv6 independently. You could do this with a -4 and -6 flag to ping, but then you'd need to type two more characters for the v6 version and three more for the v4 version.
Prices for tomorrow are always expensive, but if you book in advance it goes down a lot. Edit that for two weeks from now and the cheapest fare is £88.50 - still not cheap, but less than the price of 70 litres of petrol, so probably not much cheaper to drive. Swansea to London return cost me £50 and speed is the irritating part - the train averages about 60 miles per hour. It takes 3 hours to go from Swansea to London, but only 2 hours to go from London to Brussels, which is a little bit further. Fixing this wouldn't require new rails, it would just require them being repaired so that the Intercity trains that they were originally built for (which can travel at 125 miles per hour) can operate at their maximum speed safely. At that speed it would only be about an hour and a half, which makes doing the round trip in a single day feasible.
They don't have to nationalise it, just impose caps on fares and mandate track improvements (you know, the ones the taxpayer spends a few hundred million pounds on every few years) actually be completed. Then, if the companies do go bust and no one will buy them, I suppose they could be nationalised...