Not sure what the current "theatre experience" is like in the US - it's been a while since I've visited - but here in Australia things have changed a lot over the past few years:
1. Better, bigger, reclining seats = less people in a given size of cinema. I'd guess that my local multiplex now holds 1/2 the number of people it used to per cinema, in cinemas that are the same size as they've always been. Pretty sure this has led to less noise in the cinemas - with people no longer sitting where they can whisper/yell in each other's ears, there seems to be a tendency for people to shut up as soon as the movie starts playing. And leg room, my god the leg room... - there's no way I can even touch the row in front with my feet even if I try now, whereas I used to have my knees jammed up under my chin
2. Food has gone decidedly upmarket. Yep, it's still ridiculously expensive and I normally make a quick run by the supermarket for supplies rather than spending 2 weeks' salary on a drink
3. New release movies seem to have blanket screenings, while slightly older movies linger for longer than before but generally only for 1-2 screenings per day. At any time, there's probably 3-5 new movies showing in 20+ screenings per day at a single multiplex and maybe 10 other slightly older movies doing 1-2 screenings per day. That's a change from maybe 10 newish movies showing maybe ~10 screenings per day, and nothing else. Used to be that if you missed the start of a movie's screening time by a few weeks, you'd missed your chance to see it in a cinema; currently "Rogue One" is still showing daily and it's already on DVD/BlueRay
4. Used to be that every multiplex in a chain got all the same movies at the same time; now there seems to have been a demographic shift such that "old people" locations get more "old people movie" times, and inner city gets a lot more foreign films
I've got a vision of Julian Assange, gagged, strapped to a trolley a la Silence Of The Lambs, being wheeled out in front of the assembled party goers, with a sign around his neck "Go ahead, tell the truth"...
Agree completely. Find a FOSS project that uses the same technologies as you'd like to use in your 9-5 job, and get stuck in. It (generally) costs nothing more than your own time.
Given a choice between 2 programmers with similar skillsets and experience, I'd be inclined to go with the guy who's got FOSS coding experience in his background. The implication is that you're prepared to put your code out there for peer review (which takes some guts), and you're prepared to write code to scratch your own personal itches. Both of those demonstrate qualities in the people I'd want to work for me.
I'd absolutely push this line - copyright doesn't exist to benefit the owner of the copyright, but society overall.
As someone else has posted, the song "Happy Birthday to you" was originally copyrighted in 1935, and remains under copyright until 2030. I can't think of a single benefit to society in this.
I've got no problem at all with copyright being granted as an exclusive licence for a limited period; whoever makes to effort to produce good "stuff" should gain some benefit from it for a period of time. However, they shouldn't be able to skim copyrights for their entire life.
I think it's Cliff Richard who's upset that some of his songs from the early 1960s are about to come out of copyright, and he'll no longer be able to claim royalties; by any sane measure, surely he's derived enough from the last 40ish years of copyright for these works to now go into the public domain.
The alternate view says essentially that he should be able to derive income from this work for the remainder of his life; well, that's fine for him, but completely out of touch with the way society as a whole operates. I don't get paid for work that I did 20 years ago, regardless of how groundbreaking/creative/whatever it was, and nor does 99.9% of the population.
I don't see the problem with a blanket limit of 10-15 years on copyright. Anything older than that with any market value should become freely available, so it can benefit society as a whole.
A big plus of this approach is that, for e.g. books or music that are currently within copyright but out of print, there is no legal way of obtaining a new copy - even if I want to pay for it, the copyright owner won't sell it to me. If these works reverted into the public domain after 10-15 years, I could buy a copy from someone (anyone!), and the economy would get a little stimulus as a result. It's quite likely that businesses would spring up specifically to sell ex-copyright material to punters like myself; it's a win-win situation, and the supposedly aggrieved copyright owner has no cause for complaint because they weren't actually making it available for sale.
Finally, think back 100 years and imagine if today's long-term copyright laws applied then. Would we have had movie cinemas, television, computers, cars,... available as they are today? No, the world would be a very different place, and a much less enjoyable one. With our current copyright laws, that's the world we're setting up for our descendants to inherit in 100 years' time.
> Why keep us geeks ona retainer? Just sue Google, and it'll appear on Slashdot, then you'll get all the > free prior art guidance you need.
Try explaining to one of your non-geek acquaintances what procmail does, and why it's useful. About 4 hours into the explanation, it'll dawn on you that non-geeks won't ever be able to comprehend stuff in Slashdot - we speak/write in a language that isn't recognisable as English to 99% of people out there.
There's a *huge* impedance mismatch between IT people and legal people - that's why Groklaw is so popular, because it goes a long way to removing that mismatch. Oh, and feel free to try explaining the term "impedance mismatch" (and why we use the term) to your non-geek buds as well!
Absolutely - Procmail covers so many bases in terms of "automated stuff that can be done with email" that it's hard to see how it wouldn't be prior art for just about any patent issues in this area.
On a broader topic, I can see the day when law firms engaged to provide legal defences against software patent claims start to employ older geeks specifically to identify prior art solutions. It's gotta be cheaper to keep a bunch of us around on some sort of "professional retainer" basis than to engage paralegals to trawl through old patent documents (and I'd "Procmail" probably wouldn't come up in a patent document search anyway) - many of us who've been around for a while would've thought "Procmail" before we'd finished reading this summary.
"The six data centers currently take up over 8 million square feet, or the size of nearly 140 football fields."
I suppose when the US finally goes metric, they'll have to deal with units of area such as "millifields", "centifields" and "kilofields". In time, the measure will have to formalised e.g. "the distance a 100kg, 190cm man is able to kick a leather-encased rubber bladder...".
Or maybe the current generation of writers that thinks "140 football fields" is a meaningful substitute for "a really big chunk of space" will have died off by then.
I'm with the parent in terms of when to choose what...
For anything "small" (and you can put your own definition to that) and Web-based, SQLite is my first choice. Works well, solid, runs on any platform, and there's only a single file to worry about when it comes time to backup/restore so development version control is a non-issue. In particular, I'd suggest that SQLite would be a fine choice for just about any small-scale DB-backed Web site out there (again, choosing your own definition for the word "small").
For bigger stuff, I'd choose Postgres over MySQL, but that's more a personal preference than anything else at this point. There's pros and cons to both - coming from an Oracle background, I find the mentality behind Postgres easier to work with, but I'll happily work with MySQL when the situation requires it.
Oracle, DB2, MS-SQL - you've got to use them when the situation demands it. They all work great, scale well and have excellent support, but you pay for it. I wouldn't even think about using them with a startup, but many big corps won't consider anything else.
> 1. If you're a geek, try to wrap your head around Asterisk - I'd have to think either it would have that > functionality built in, and if not - wouldn't be too hard to tell it to pass whitelisted #s, but dump everything > else to voicemail....
Absolutely - I'm putting in an Asterisk box progressively over the last few nights to do all this and more. The rules aren't absolutely fixed in my head yet, but will be something like: - voicemail for everyone in the house; if someone calls, they can choose who they leave a message for - no calls after 10pm, unless it's from a whitelisted number (i.e. parents, friends) - no calls between 7pm-8:30pm, unless it's from a whitelisted number - *all* calls from numbers without caller ID go direct to voicemail (i.e. phone doesn't even ring), regardless of when the call comes in
Asterisk basically gives you full-on routing capability for your incoming and outgoing calls. You can define rules based on caller ID, time of day,... - pretty much any "property" of either incoming or outgoing calls.
> But as a small developer, he's pretty screwed anyway...
> If his product becomes popular, it's likely to get cloned either by a larger company selling a commercial version, or by a group of > enthusiasts making a free version. Either way, he has no control over the situation and the clones will ultimately take over > because they have more developers and in the case of the commercial company, greater marketting clout.
Come on - it's quite possible to make a popular product and derive a quite nice income from it, without attracting the attention of cloners and large companies.
Big Co are only interested if they're going to make mega millions out of it - if you're making a few hundred thousand a year, you won't even show up on their radar. There's an awful lot of software out there that falls into that category.
If you're selling to a tight niche of customers, then only people in and around that niche are likely to even be aware that your product exists, never mind want to clone it themselves. If you're building software for e.g. dentists, while a few dentists may want to add new shiny features to your product, it's highly likely that they'd want YOU to do it for them, rather than track down some software developer, pay him to clone your software and add their desired features to it. Conversely, while a random software developer might come across your software and think he can clone & extend it, he then also has to create a means of distributing his software (no, dentists won't downloaded their critical software from SourceForge), building relationships with an existing base of dentists, then providing support to those dentists (with all the associated issues of dealing with non-IT literate users).
I've got a mate who runs a garbage collection business. Many years ago, he paid a student to create software to allow him to manage his business - sort of a highly-customised piece of accounting software. He still uses that software, still engages that ex-student (now working in IT) to support & extend it, and is extremely happy with it. Shock, horror - it runs on MS Access. He's very happy with the software, and the guy who wrote it has both made a nice side income from it and sold it to a bunch of other garbos - I wouldn't be surprised if he's collectively made a tidy sum from it over a period of several years. Nobody's gonna clone this software, and no big company's gonna be interested in it either.
My OpenBSD firewall box is several years old now (version 3.x), just keeps working and probably will until the 8yo hardware finally dies. Although I'm interested in the features in 4.1, and congratulate the developers on what'll doubtless be another good release, ultimately I'll probably stick with my existing setup. I *love* OpenBSD, for precisely one reason; it does what it's supposed to, and in my experience it *never* fails. However, I'm very unlikely to upgrade to any new version; why change something that works perfectly?
For those of you using OpenBSD, how many of you are in a similar situation?
> I read these stories about ODF and OOXML all the time, but I've never understood *why* these > XML-based formats are so smiled upon. An open standard is great, but does XML really do the > job we want here?
As I understand it, the big advantage of using XML in ODF (don't know about OOXML) is that you can extract the actual content of your document as XML, change it, resave it and it all renders properly (this assumes that your styles etc. are set up correctly).
For example, in theory I should be able to create an empty document that just contains all my style info, insert *all* the content with appropriate pointers to the styles I want to use, save it, and then someone else can come along, open my document and read my content in their program of choice. If my raw content is XML (as is increasingly the case these days), I can fairly easily automate converting it to ODF format (just as I've been able to easily convert it to HTML, PDF and a bunch of other formats for a while now). ODF then becomes a simple "container" that anyone anywhere can use without needing any proprietary tools to do so.
I can then save my content as strict XML, then render it in whatever format the user requires. If they've got Acrobat, I'll give them a PDF file; if they've got OpenOffice or AbiWord, I'll give them an ODF doc; if they've got a Web browser, I'll give them HTML. *This* is the big plus of open document formats in general; the actual format of the document essentially becomes unimportant, since anyone who wants to look at it can do so in their tool of choice. If one tool is crappy, or becomes unavailable, or doesn't support e.g. Swahili, no problem - just find a different tool.
In terms of whether XML is the optimal format for this type of data in the first place, it's probably a good fit for almost all cases, as distinct from being a really great fit for only a few cases. Depending on how you define "better", it's not hard to come up with a better format for a book than: <title>My document</title> <subtitle>Written by me</subtitle> <chapter>First chapter</chapter> <chaptertext>The quick brown fox...</chaptertext>
However, XML is here now, works well enough, is insufficiently bad to try to replace it with something else (assuming that "something else" is actually better than XML), and a lot of tools and libraries (both free and commercial) exist that make working with it pretty straightforward.
I'd go along with your approach, but my (limited) experience with laundromats is that my clothes emerge with "Mystery Hair Syndrome".
I know pretty much what all of my various hair types look like, and I know what the various hair types of my SO look like; it's those I can't place that make me stay away from laundromats.
I think the OP is saying that the browser/HTML combination is too big and clunky to cope with "Web 3.0", and I'd agree with that.
If you look at what Laszlo is doing with Flash, there's conceivably a large-scale future for Flash beyond dinky ads. I know Flash does useful stuff, but it's *still* used far and away for really annoying advertising, and it's really capable of a whole lot more. Unfortunately, the focus with Flash has always been on (um) flashiness and glitz over all else, and the Flash Enterprise products really haven't done much to change the perception that that's all it's good for. Laszlo really has some interesting stuff going on; the question is whether it'll reach critical mass, or something better (in capabilities, or marketing terms) comes along. A big plus of Flash as a platform is that it runs just about everywhere that a browser can run now, but it's potentially much more capable as a UI.
Mozilla's XUL adds a whole lot of useful stuff to the browser's UI capabilities. Although it doesn't seem to have caught on to any real extent, I'd like to think that today's HTML-driven sites could eventually morph into XUL (or something equally capable) in the future. If not, and HTML stays largely as it is in terms of capabilities, I can't see it being the presentation protocol of choice - it simply isn't powerful enough.
Finally, SOAP (or something equivalent) is needed to tie good looking user interfaces with backend systems. Good old stateless HTTP is well past its use-by date - although it's done a lot, there's only so much you can do with it. A fullblown RPC mechanism is going to be required to deliver Web 3.0.
The OnLine Guitar Archive (OLGA) is a great resource for getting melodies and chord arrangements for zillions of songs. Although I play guitar, I find it very valuable for keyboard as well, and I suspect you would for violin.
Also check out Audacity (audio editor) - runs on Windows, Linux and Mac
Thanks for the offer, but it's one of those things that I know I'll find a good use for some day. I don't have that use right now, but I *know* it's gonna appear.
Just like those old 386 PCs in the back room...;->
I've got a Sharp Zaurus, but it sits unused because of the terrible battery life. While the fact that it runs Linux makes it highly configurable and theoretically a good fit for just about any purpose, the battery life makes it just about useless as a PDA.
As an indicator that there is a target market here, I recently bought 2 X-Boxes, but no games. I've got no intention of buying any games either.
My *sole* reason for buying them is to convert them to X-Box Media Centre players. I've got all our music CDs ripped and stored on a file server, along with my (bought) DVDs and TV recorded with Myth TV. After getting the X-Boxes chipped and attached to wireless bridges, I can play all this content through any TV in the house, without running wires around.
Although it was a big disappointment for the kids ("Where are the games????", "Feel free to buy them yourselves!"), my SO *loves* it. She can pick the music she wants to listen to when she's e.g. on the treadmill, and all the CDs are now in storage; she can watch "her" TV shows (from Myth, after they've been run through nuv2avi) whenever she wants, on any TV in the house. The X-Box Media Centre interface is via the DVD remote, which has a minimal set of buttons that need no explanation. From power on, it takes ~30 seconds to access any DVD, TV show or songs we have, which is at least as fast as finding the physical media, loading it into a player, and navigating through menus. The X-Boxes themselves are pretty easy on the eye, and small enough to hide out of the way. Even the Media Centre screensavers are pretty cool.
X-Box Media Centre has a really good interface, and original X-Boxes are a whole lot cheaper than dedicated media players as well as a whole lot more flexible. Who knows, we might even play games on them one day!
1. For *everyone* who wants you to fix their PC, push Linux. Hard. My kids use Linux for all their IM, surfing, homework, downloading etc., and I'd devote 10% of the time maintaining their PC compared to when they used Windows. 2. If they insist on Windows, consider whether you want come back again in 6 months when "your fix didn't work". Think hard about this; it's as predictable as the sun rising tomorrow... 3. Ignore all requests except from family members. "Sorry, I don't do my 9-5 job at home" will suffice for some, for others maybe "I'll do that if you'll do X for me for free", where X is the job the other person does for a living (e.g. "do my accounts", "fix my car", "wash my windows".) People tend to forget that you get paid e.g. $30+ per hour for doing this sort of work, and that it's only reasonable if they offer something of similar value in exchange 4. Imaging software (e.g. Ghost, g4u) is your friend; take an image of their PC after it's built, then just restore over it next time they have a problem. Make sure their data files are held on a different partition first, though... 5. Never, ever, EVER think "I'll just do it this one time". I'm sure crack addicts start out with exactly that thought in mind, and look where it gets them! 6. While you might not be able to avoid doing it for family members, you probably can get away with not giving them admin rights. Do that if you possibly can; it won't necessarily save you, but it will lengthen the time before you get called back (see point 2). Unless of course you're doing it for Mum and she's going to cook you a good meal, wash all your clothes, clean up your apartment, throw out the mouldy food in the pantry,...
I _hate_ fixing other people's PCs, even though I've spent a large chunk of this weekend working on my own.
Screened content? Check Parents notified? Check Oooh, no email? Check
Yep, hits all my buttons.
Unfortunately, I'm a parent, with teenagers. I'd have as much success leading them to this site as I have getting them to tidy their rooms, speak respectfully to their elders and cook dinner occasionally.
My partner and I are at the point where we can see retirement in the next several years. At that point, neither of us want to keep living in a house in the suburbs, so we're talking about where we want to spend the rest of our lives.
*If* we move overseas, which is maybe a 20-30% chance, then I'd lean strongly towards an OSS-friendly country. I'd like to think I can spend a sizeable chunk of my retirement time writing and/or improving FOSS, because I've done OK out of using it and would like to give more back than I have to date. If doing that means I have to worry about infringing patents etc., then I'll give serious thought to what I'll have to do to remove that concern, and if we're already planning on moving countries anyway, finding a non-software-patent regime starts to become a significant factor.
For what it's worth, quite a few of my work buddies are thinking along similar lines. It's conceivable that this could result in a noticeable brain drain of still-highly-productive IT staff in their 40s-50s-60s over the next several years, and that might start to have a financial impact down the track. Even us taking our retirement dollars out of the country and spending them elsewhere would make a dent in local economies.
I currently rely on my Treo and Yahoo Calendar for my calendaring needs - I enter stuff on the Treo, and my SO and friends can read and/or update my Yahoo Calendar.
I use a very old copy of Outlook as an intermediary to keep them in sync - Treo syncs with Outlook, which then syncs with Yahoo. I never use Outlook for anything other than this purpose, but it's particularly well suited to this task - like it or not, just about everything can sync with Outlook.
I'll be checking out calendar.google.com, now that I've played around with it a bit. It can sync with Outlook (albeit in a clunky manner, at the moment), so it should be fine for me if I decide to go ahead with it. No harm in running Treo+Yahoo+Google, if Outlook is the pipe between all three.
For those of you who *could* use Outlook to solve your problems, but you hate the product or Microsoft, give this approach some thought.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure what the current "theatre experience" is like in the US - it's been a while since I've visited - but here in Australia things have changed a lot over the past few years:
1. Better, bigger, reclining seats = less people in a given size of cinema. I'd guess that my local multiplex now holds 1/2 the number of people it used to per cinema, in cinemas that are the same size as they've always been. Pretty sure this has led to less noise in the cinemas - with people no longer sitting where they can whisper/yell in each other's ears, there seems to be a tendency for people to shut up as soon as the movie starts playing. And leg room, my god the leg room... - there's no way I can even touch the row in front with my feet even if I try now, whereas I used to have my knees jammed up under my chin
2. Food has gone decidedly upmarket. Yep, it's still ridiculously expensive and I normally make a quick run by the supermarket for supplies rather than spending 2 weeks' salary on a drink
3. New release movies seem to have blanket screenings, while slightly older movies linger for longer than before but generally only for 1-2 screenings per day. At any time, there's probably 3-5 new movies showing in 20+ screenings per day at a single multiplex and maybe 10 other slightly older movies doing 1-2 screenings per day. That's a change from maybe 10 newish movies showing maybe ~10 screenings per day, and nothing else. Used to be that if you missed the start of a movie's screening time by a few weeks, you'd missed your chance to see it in a cinema; currently "Rogue One" is still showing daily and it's already on DVD/BlueRay
4. Used to be that every multiplex in a chain got all the same movies at the same time; now there seems to have been a demographic shift such that "old people" locations get more "old people movie" times, and inner city gets a lot more foreign films
I've got a vision of Julian Assange, gagged, strapped to a trolley a la Silence Of The Lambs, being wheeled out in front of the assembled party goers, with a sign around his neck "Go ahead, tell the truth"...
Agree completely. Find a FOSS project that uses the same technologies as you'd like to use in your 9-5 job, and get stuck in. It (generally) costs nothing more than your own time.
Given a choice between 2 programmers with similar skillsets and experience, I'd be inclined to go with the guy who's got FOSS coding experience in his background. The implication is that you're prepared to put your code out there for peer review (which takes some guts), and you're prepared to write code to scratch your own personal itches. Both of those demonstrate qualities in the people I'd want to work for me.
I'd absolutely push this line - copyright doesn't exist to benefit the owner of the copyright, but society overall.
... available as they are today? No, the world would be a very different place, and a much less enjoyable one. With our current copyright laws, that's the world we're setting up for our descendants to inherit in 100 years' time.
As someone else has posted, the song "Happy Birthday to you" was originally copyrighted in 1935, and remains under copyright until 2030. I can't think of a single benefit to society in this.
I've got no problem at all with copyright being granted as an exclusive licence for a limited period; whoever makes to effort to produce good "stuff" should gain some benefit from it for a period of time. However, they shouldn't be able to skim copyrights for their entire life.
I think it's Cliff Richard who's upset that some of his songs from the early 1960s are about to come out of copyright, and he'll no longer be able to claim royalties; by any sane measure, surely he's derived enough from the last 40ish years of copyright for these works to now go into the public domain.
The alternate view says essentially that he should be able to derive income from this work for the remainder of his life; well, that's fine for him, but completely out of touch with the way society as a whole operates. I don't get paid for work that I did 20 years ago, regardless of how groundbreaking/creative/whatever it was, and nor does 99.9% of the population.
I don't see the problem with a blanket limit of 10-15 years on copyright. Anything older than that with any market value should become freely available, so it can benefit society as a whole.
A big plus of this approach is that, for e.g. books or music that are currently within copyright but out of print, there is no legal way of obtaining a new copy - even if I want to pay for it, the copyright owner won't sell it to me. If these works reverted into the public domain after 10-15 years, I could buy a copy from someone (anyone!), and the economy would get a little stimulus as a result. It's quite likely that businesses would spring up specifically to sell ex-copyright material to punters like myself; it's a win-win situation, and the supposedly aggrieved copyright owner has no cause for complaint because they weren't actually making it available for sale.
Finally, think back 100 years and imagine if today's long-term copyright laws applied then. Would we have had movie cinemas, television, computers, cars,
> Why keep us geeks ona retainer? Just sue Google, and it'll appear on Slashdot, then you'll get all the
> free prior art guidance you need.
Try explaining to one of your non-geek acquaintances what procmail does, and why it's useful. About 4 hours into the explanation, it'll dawn on you that non-geeks won't ever be able to comprehend stuff in Slashdot - we speak/write in a language that isn't recognisable as English to 99% of people out there.
There's a *huge* impedance mismatch between IT people and legal people - that's why Groklaw is so popular, because it goes a long way to removing that mismatch. Oh, and feel free to try explaining the term "impedance mismatch" (and why we use the term) to your non-geek buds as well!
Absolutely - Procmail covers so many bases in terms of "automated stuff that can be done with email" that it's hard to see how it wouldn't be prior art for just about any patent issues in this area.
On a broader topic, I can see the day when law firms engaged to provide legal defences against software patent claims start to employ older geeks specifically to identify prior art solutions. It's gotta be cheaper to keep a bunch of us around on some sort of "professional retainer" basis than to engage paralegals to trawl through old patent documents (and I'd "Procmail" probably wouldn't come up in a patent document search anyway) - many of us who've been around for a while would've thought "Procmail" before we'd finished reading this summary.
"The six data centers currently take up over 8 million square feet, or the size of nearly 140 football fields."
I suppose when the US finally goes metric, they'll have to deal with units of area such as "millifields", "centifields" and "kilofields". In time, the measure will have to formalised e.g. "the distance a 100kg, 190cm man is able to kick a leather-encased rubber bladder...".
Or maybe the current generation of writers that thinks "140 football fields" is a meaningful substitute for "a really big chunk of space" will have died off by then.
I'm with the parent in terms of when to choose what...
For anything "small" (and you can put your own definition to that) and Web-based, SQLite is my first choice. Works well, solid, runs on any platform, and there's only a single file to worry about when it comes time to backup/restore so development version control is a non-issue. In particular, I'd suggest that SQLite would be a fine choice for just about any small-scale DB-backed Web site out there (again, choosing your own definition for the word "small").
For bigger stuff, I'd choose Postgres over MySQL, but that's more a personal preference than anything else at this point. There's pros and cons to both - coming from an Oracle background, I find the mentality behind Postgres easier to work with, but I'll happily work with MySQL when the situation requires it.
Oracle, DB2, MS-SQL - you've got to use them when the situation demands it. They all work great, scale well and have excellent support, but you pay for it. I wouldn't even think about using them with a startup, but many big corps won't consider anything else.
> 1. If you're a geek, try to wrap your head around Asterisk - I'd have to think either it would have that
... - pretty much any "property" of either incoming or outgoing calls.
> functionality built in, and if not - wouldn't be too hard to tell it to pass whitelisted #s, but dump everything
> else to voicemail....
Absolutely - I'm putting in an Asterisk box progressively over the last few nights to do all this and more. The rules aren't absolutely fixed in my head yet, but will be something like:
- voicemail for everyone in the house; if someone calls, they can choose who they leave a message for
- no calls after 10pm, unless it's from a whitelisted number (i.e. parents, friends)
- no calls between 7pm-8:30pm, unless it's from a whitelisted number
- *all* calls from numbers without caller ID go direct to voicemail (i.e. phone doesn't even ring), regardless of when the call comes in
Asterisk basically gives you full-on routing capability for your incoming and outgoing calls. You can define rules based on caller ID, time of day,
> But as a small developer, he's pretty screwed anyway...
> If his product becomes popular, it's likely to get cloned either by a larger company selling a commercial version, or by a group of
> enthusiasts making a free version. Either way, he has no control over the situation and the clones will ultimately take over
> because they have more developers and in the case of the commercial company, greater marketting clout.
Come on - it's quite possible to make a popular product and derive a quite nice income from it, without attracting the attention of cloners and large companies.
Big Co are only interested if they're going to make mega millions out of it - if you're making a few hundred thousand a year, you won't even show up on their radar. There's an awful lot of software out there that falls into that category.
If you're selling to a tight niche of customers, then only people in and around that niche are likely to even be aware that your product exists, never mind want to clone it themselves. If you're building software for e.g. dentists, while a few dentists may want to add new shiny features to your product, it's highly likely that they'd want YOU to do it for them, rather than track down some software developer, pay him to clone your software and add their desired features to it. Conversely, while a random software developer might come across your software and think he can clone & extend it, he then also has to create a means of distributing his software (no, dentists won't downloaded their critical software from SourceForge), building relationships with an existing base of dentists, then providing support to those dentists (with all the associated issues of dealing with non-IT literate users).
I've got a mate who runs a garbage collection business. Many years ago, he paid a student to create software to allow him to manage his business - sort of a highly-customised piece of accounting software. He still uses that software, still engages that ex-student (now working in IT) to support & extend it, and is extremely happy with it. Shock, horror - it runs on MS Access. He's very happy with the software, and the guy who wrote it has both made a nice side income from it and sold it to a bunch of other garbos - I wouldn't be surprised if he's collectively made a tidy sum from it over a period of several years. Nobody's gonna clone this software, and no big company's gonna be interested in it either.
My OpenBSD firewall box is several years old now (version 3.x), just keeps working and probably will until the 8yo hardware finally dies. Although I'm interested in the features in 4.1, and congratulate the developers on what'll doubtless be another good release, ultimately I'll probably stick with my existing setup. I *love* OpenBSD, for precisely one reason; it does what it's supposed to, and in my experience it *never* fails. However, I'm very unlikely to upgrade to any new version; why change something that works perfectly?
For those of you using OpenBSD, how many of you are in a similar situation?
...for the person who can smuggle a bunch of copied DVDs into the casket, preferably into his suit pockets.
(Some time later)
Devil: Welcome to Hell, Jack. Glad to have you aboard
Jack: B...b...but I've been good. I've been brave, loyal and true to my industry masters this past 38 years! Why am I here?
Devil: Check your pockets. Now, will it be the burning spear up the clacker, or eternity watching Waterworld?
> I read these stories about ODF and OOXML all the time, but I've never understood *why* these
> XML-based formats are so smiled upon. An open standard is great, but does XML really do the
> job we want here?
As I understand it, the big advantage of using XML in ODF (don't know about OOXML) is that you can extract the actual content of your document as XML, change it, resave it and it all renders properly (this assumes that your styles etc. are set up correctly).
For example, in theory I should be able to create an empty document that just contains all my style info, insert *all* the content with appropriate pointers to the styles I want to use, save it, and then someone else can come along, open my document and read my content in their program of choice. If my raw content is XML (as is increasingly the case these days), I can fairly easily automate converting it to ODF format (just as I've been able to easily convert it to HTML, PDF and a bunch of other formats for a while now). ODF then becomes a simple "container" that anyone anywhere can use without needing any proprietary tools to do so.
I can then save my content as strict XML, then render it in whatever format the user requires. If they've got Acrobat, I'll give them a PDF file; if they've got OpenOffice or AbiWord, I'll give them an ODF doc; if they've got a Web browser, I'll give them HTML. *This* is the big plus of open document formats in general; the actual format of the document essentially becomes unimportant, since anyone who wants to look at it can do so in their tool of choice. If one tool is crappy, or becomes unavailable, or doesn't support e.g. Swahili, no problem - just find a different tool.
In terms of whether XML is the optimal format for this type of data in the first place, it's probably a good fit for almost all cases, as distinct from being a really great fit for only a few cases. Depending on how you define "better", it's not hard to come up with a better format for a book than:
<title>My document</title>
<subtitle>Written by me</subtitle>
<chapter>First chapter</chapter>
<chaptertext>The quick brown fox...</chaptertext>
However, XML is here now, works well enough, is insufficiently bad to try to replace it with something else (assuming that "something else" is actually better than XML), and a lot of tools and libraries (both free and commercial) exist that make working with it pretty straightforward.
I'd go along with your approach, but my (limited) experience with laundromats is that my clothes emerge with "Mystery Hair Syndrome".
I know pretty much what all of my various hair types look like, and I know what the various hair types of my SO look like; it's those I can't place that make me stay away from laundromats.
More power to you if it doesn't bother you...
I think the OP is saying that the browser/HTML combination is too big and clunky to cope with "Web 3.0", and I'd agree with that.
If you look at what Laszlo is doing with Flash, there's conceivably a large-scale future for Flash beyond dinky ads. I know Flash does useful stuff, but it's *still* used far and away for really annoying advertising, and it's really capable of a whole lot more. Unfortunately, the focus with Flash has always been on (um) flashiness and glitz over all else, and the Flash Enterprise products really haven't done much to change the perception that that's all it's good for. Laszlo really has some interesting stuff going on; the question is whether it'll reach critical mass, or something better (in capabilities, or marketing terms) comes along. A big plus of Flash as a platform is that it runs just about everywhere that a browser can run now, but it's potentially much more capable as a UI.
Mozilla's XUL adds a whole lot of useful stuff to the browser's UI capabilities. Although it doesn't seem to have caught on to any real extent, I'd like to think that today's HTML-driven sites could eventually morph into XUL (or something equally capable) in the future. If not, and HTML stays largely as it is in terms of capabilities, I can't see it being the presentation protocol of choice - it simply isn't powerful enough.
Finally, SOAP (or something equivalent) is needed to tie good looking user interfaces with backend systems. Good old stateless HTTP is well past its use-by date - although it's done a lot, there's only so much you can do with it. A fullblown RPC mechanism is going to be required to deliver Web 3.0.
Now, what the hell is Web 3.0 anyway?
The OnLine Guitar Archive (OLGA) is a great resource for getting melodies and chord arrangements for zillions of songs. Although I play guitar, I find it very valuable for keyboard as well, and I suspect you would for violin.
Also check out Audacity (audio editor) - runs on Windows, Linux and Mac
Thanks for the offer, but it's one of those things that I know I'll find a good use for some day. I don't have that use right now, but I *know* it's gonna appear.
;->
Just like those old 386 PCs in the back room...
I've got a Sharp Zaurus, but it sits unused because of the terrible battery life. While the fact that it runs Linux makes it highly configurable and theoretically a good fit for just about any purpose, the battery life makes it just about useless as a PDA.
Free, runs on Windows & Linux, lets you load a filesystem into a single file.
I use it every day, and it just works. Can't recommend it highly enough
Great...so...now...everything...I...type...will... look...like...William...Shatner...speaking...
Each...word...gets...it's...own...sentence
At least stuff I type will appear more dramatic
As an indicator that there is a target market here, I recently bought 2 X-Boxes, but no games. I've got no intention of buying any games either.
My *sole* reason for buying them is to convert them to X-Box Media Centre players. I've got all our music CDs ripped and stored on a file server, along with my (bought) DVDs and TV recorded with Myth TV. After getting the X-Boxes chipped and attached to wireless bridges, I can play all this content through any TV in the house, without running wires around.
Although it was a big disappointment for the kids ("Where are the games????", "Feel free to buy them yourselves!"), my SO *loves* it. She can pick the music she wants to listen to when she's e.g. on the treadmill, and all the CDs are now in storage; she can watch "her" TV shows (from Myth, after they've been run through nuv2avi) whenever she wants, on any TV in the house. The X-Box Media Centre interface is via the DVD remote, which has a minimal set of buttons that need no explanation. From power on, it takes ~30 seconds to access any DVD, TV show or songs we have, which is at least as fast as finding the physical media, loading it into a player, and navigating through menus. The X-Boxes themselves are pretty easy on the eye, and small enough to hide out of the way. Even the Media Centre screensavers are pretty cool.
X-Box Media Centre has a really good interface, and original X-Boxes are a whole lot cheaper than dedicated media players as well as a whole lot more flexible. Who knows, we might even play games on them one day!
1. For *everyone* who wants you to fix their PC, push Linux. Hard. My kids use Linux for all their IM, surfing, homework, downloading etc., and I'd devote 10% of the time maintaining their PC compared to when they used Windows. ...
2. If they insist on Windows, consider whether you want come back again in 6 months when "your fix didn't work". Think hard about this; it's as predictable as the sun rising tomorrow...
3. Ignore all requests except from family members. "Sorry, I don't do my 9-5 job at home" will suffice for some, for others maybe "I'll do that if you'll do X for me for free", where X is the job the other person does for a living (e.g. "do my accounts", "fix my car", "wash my windows".) People tend to forget that you get paid e.g. $30+ per hour for doing this sort of work, and that it's only reasonable if they offer something of similar value in exchange
4. Imaging software (e.g. Ghost, g4u) is your friend; take an image of their PC after it's built, then just restore over it next time they have a problem. Make sure their data files are held on a different partition first, though...
5. Never, ever, EVER think "I'll just do it this one time". I'm sure crack addicts start out with exactly that thought in mind, and look where it gets them!
6. While you might not be able to avoid doing it for family members, you probably can get away with not giving them admin rights. Do that if you possibly can; it won't necessarily save you, but it will lengthen the time before you get called back (see point 2). Unless of course you're doing it for Mum and she's going to cook you a good meal, wash all your clothes, clean up your apartment, throw out the mouldy food in the pantry,
I _hate_ fixing other people's PCs, even though I've spent a large chunk of this weekend working on my own.
Screened content? Check
Parents notified? Check
Oooh, no email? Check
Yep, hits all my buttons.
Unfortunately, I'm a parent, with teenagers. I'd have as much success leading them to this site as I have getting them to tidy their rooms, speak respectfully to their elders and cook dinner occasionally.
Interesting question.
My partner and I are at the point where we can see retirement in the next several years. At that point, neither of us want to keep living in a house in the suburbs, so we're talking about where we want to spend the rest of our lives.
*If* we move overseas, which is maybe a 20-30% chance, then I'd lean strongly towards an OSS-friendly country. I'd like to think I can spend a sizeable chunk of my retirement time writing and/or improving FOSS, because I've done OK out of using it and would like to give more back than I have to date. If doing that means I have to worry about infringing patents etc., then I'll give serious thought to what I'll have to do to remove that concern, and if we're already planning on moving countries anyway, finding a non-software-patent regime starts to become a significant factor.
For what it's worth, quite a few of my work buddies are thinking along similar lines. It's conceivable that this could result in a noticeable brain drain of still-highly-productive IT staff in their 40s-50s-60s over the next several years, and that might start to have a financial impact down the track. Even us taking our retirement dollars out of the country and spending them elsewhere would make a dent in local economies.
I currently rely on my Treo and Yahoo Calendar for my calendaring needs - I enter stuff on the Treo, and my SO and friends can read and/or update my Yahoo Calendar.
I use a very old copy of Outlook as an intermediary to keep them in sync - Treo syncs with Outlook, which then syncs with Yahoo. I never use Outlook for anything other than this purpose, but it's particularly well suited to this task - like it or not, just about everything can sync with Outlook.
I'll be checking out calendar.google.com, now that I've played around with it a bit. It can sync with Outlook (albeit in a clunky manner, at the moment), so it should be fine for me if I decide to go ahead with it. No harm in running Treo+Yahoo+Google, if Outlook is the pipe between all three.
For those of you who *could* use Outlook to solve your problems, but you hate the product or Microsoft, give this approach some thought.