> I'm not very impressed with Mandrake overall. They > seem to be a bunch of amateurs.
Well, technically you're correct - professionals by definition work for money, and it doesn't seem that Mandrake's going to be paying its' employees too much for a while...
Seriously though, I'm interested to know why you think Mandrake is "a bunch of amateurs". While I haven't used SuSE, and probably won't because of their non-free ISO policy, I've done a lot of work with Mandrake and RedHat over the last several years.
Over the last few releases, Mandrake has progressed in leaps and bounds compared to RedHat: - their hardware detection, which used to have trouble with lots of relatively common hardware, now seems to be significantly better than RedHat - urpmi is rock-solid, and (for me) performs better than up2date. And that's before you add in the (new) cost for RHN - IMHO, RedHat overreacted badly in pulling out all MP3 support from 8.0 at the last minute. At the time 8.0 was released, the MP3 patent holder (can't remember their name at the moment) had "made noises" about potentially charging for MP3 "stuff" at some point, but RH went over the top in deciding to simply pull all MP3-related tools from their distro at the last minute. It looked like a panic job (i.e. amateurish) - in my experience, Mandrake's out of the box installs have become more robust than RedHat's over the last few versions. My RedHat systems pretty much need to be updated straight away to avoid reliability issues; my Mandrake systems can survive on box-only versions of apps. Of course, this is largely influenced by the specific versions of gcc, cups, etc. involved, but the overall impression is of a more solid (=professional) product
What specifically is it about Mandrake that you find amateurish, in comparison to either RedHat or SuSE?
Me too - I've got 2.2 running a firewall on a 100MHz Pentium box, and the box does exactly what it's supposed to do, all the time, and has only ever been rebooted in the last 4 years when there's been blackouts in my area.
A 2.4 box would be "cooler", and would probably even have some extra capabilities that I might find useful, but the simple rule is that you don't change something that works perfectly.
You raise several points, so I'll address them in turn.
I'm quite happy if Qt provides little to no support for the "lower income" licensing options. What I want is the freedom to write some code using Qt and sell it, without having to take on the extra financial risk (on top of all the others you take on as a tiny software company) of having to fork out what to me are significant chunks of change for a commercial Qt licence.
I don't see that TT is taking any risk at all in this. Some/many potential TT customers will be put off by the cost of the commercial Qt licence, so they won't ever be financial customers of TT in the first place. What they would be doing is getting SOME income from people that they wouldn't have gotten it from under their existing system
Regarding my suggestion that Qt should be released under the GPL, my brain was thinking "BSD" and my fingers typed "GPL". Late night, and I apologize for the mistake...
There are precendents for people recouping their initial investment in a product, then making it free (as in "no cost"). Consider Codeweavers for one; they progressively release more of their in-house developed functionality to the Wine project as they recover costs and move further forward. In TT's case, they could do this and still turn a sizeable dollar; by offering services around the (now-free, and presumably more widely used) Qt, or by developing and enhancing new toolkits around Qt and selling those.
Finally, as far as your Disney analogy goes, I think there's already a fairly strong moral/ethical/public-interest argument that they should not have the level of copyright protection they now do. For example, I don't see how the public is being served by having the Mickey Mouse copyright extended from 75 to 95 years. IMHO, a copyright protection period of about 10 years for movies "feels" reasonable, in which case The Lion King would be coming out of copyright pretty soon now.
IANAL, and I'm sure 10 years would be too short for some people/projects, but my thinking is that the creator of something of value should be afforded what's effectively income protection for about the same period people stay in any one career path. Changing career about every 10 years seems to be about normal these days, and that same level of income security and protection should apply to copyright holders as well.
That picture of the PC plus two towers sitting on the floor in the bedroom, PC case jammed behind a chest of drawers, the metal "spikes" of the towers sitting on polished floorboards - I'm not seeing a lot of women in this guy's life.
And that's before I noticed the underwear peeking out of the drawer...
Some of the other pics show a significant lack of furniture. Well at least with all these drives spinning, he probably won't need too much in the way of extra heating appliances.
> So I want to know if others think my concerns are > legitimate or misinformed?
If you're misinformed, then so am I;->
I share your concern with Qt's licencing. I'd hoped Trolltech might have recouped whatever costs they have and then released Qt under something like the GPL - who knows, they still might? - but it hasn't happened yet.
What bugs me with licences such as those that apply to Qt is that it's not "scalable". If Adobe or Oracle want to buy a Qt licence for their commercial apps, well it's not really going to be a significant expense for them. However, if I want to release my "commercial" app, with no marketing budget, then a Qt licence represents a much more significant investment.
Suppose I only sell a single copy of my app (extreme example). Depending on the price I charge, I may find myself out of pocket when I factor in the Qt licence cost.
I'd be much happier if I could pick one of the following payment schemes for Qt licencing: - pay Trolltech x% of the gross income I derive from all software that uses Qt - pay Trolltech a flat $$$ amount which will allow me to sell any software I like that uses Qt - pay Trolltech a (smaller) $$$ amount per application that uses Qt - (maybe a few others as well) and have the freedom to switch between payment schemes at my own discretion.
My tiny startup company would start out with the first option, as it would presumably cost me hardly anything for the first few copies of my product that were sold. Then I might switch to the 3rd option, once I'd sold a few more copies. Finally, I might switch to the 2nd option once my software company was in full swing and I was pulling in the big bucks.
The Adobes of the world would probably use option 2 from day one, simply because the expense would be a relatively tiny one for a company of that size.
The current licencing scheme seems biased in favor of large commercial software houses over the startups.
Does this strike anyone as a fairly effective terrorist strike against a country? Terrorism doesn't necessarily have to involve killing lots of people...
1. Acquire some paperwork containing the BSA letterhead. Probably not that tough by the sound of it
2. Scan and print some blank letters that would pass casual muster as having been printed by the BSA
3. Print the standard BSA "cease and desist" message and send it to EVERY business in the country
4. Large chunks of the corporate population stop what they're doing to devote time to checking their software compliance. I doubt any business of more than (say) 100 employees running non-free software could verify their software licences are 100% in order without wasting quite a bit of time
5. Productivity goes down, profits go down, people get laid off, country enters recession, etc., etc.
Total cost: a lot of stamps and envelopes
The "country enters recession" scenario is maybe a bit extreme, but I can see how this would hurt a lot of businesses and cost very little (and not involve those expensive pilot training courses)...I'm assuming, of course, that this isn't already happening today
I figure the EFF, with several prominent legal people "on call", might be very interested in this as a possible test case of the legality of the BSA's modus operandi...
> "The BBC has an interesting article about a 2,200 > year old battery discovered in Iraq in 1938. It is > basically a clay pot containing a copper/iron core > immersed in an electrolye solution (probably > acidic vinegar). The article talks about how > this priceless artifact as well as many others, > from the same civilisation that invented writing > and the ***wheel***, could be threatened by the > impending war."
So these guys could've been driving electric cars since, what, about 2000 years ago? *And* selling oil to the rest of us?
No wonder they were happy to torch the oilfields in 1991; we'd have all been walking while they were driving around with the top down, picking up chicks at will. Damn you Saddam; you and your whisper quiet automotive technology.
> Rivers uses a mathematical formula when writing > his songs based on songs by several bands > including Nirvana. As a huge Weezer fan, I'd have > to say he's on to something.
Most popular music is almost totally based on formulas e.g.: - 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, repeat till end - verse/chorus/verse/chorus/mid 8/chorus - use I, IV, V, IIm, VIm chords - sad verses, upbeat choruses (Bruce Springsteen loves this one!) - something around 120 beats per minute is what gets people tapping their feet in time with the music, even if they're not actually consciously listening to it - various instruments have their frequency ranges compressed in certain ways; this is what frequently separates the good/big-selling producers from the bad/not-so-big. Listen to multiple albums from the one producer, even across several different artists or styles of music, and you'll pick up the "brand" of specific producers in how they mix specific instruments in the audio spectrum....and on and on
Although I'm nowhere near up with state of the art, I'd be surprised if current sound analysis software couldn't detect most/all of the above and spit out some sort of number saying how well a song fits the above "rules".
Finally, if there's any doubt that these formulas exist, check the early 80s bubblegum Brit Pop stuff produced by Stock Aitken Waterman. You could remove the vocals, and what's left of the songs are almost interchangeable.
...an old geeky guy picks up his Coke, brushes the pizza crumbs off his gut, brushes spider web out of his waist length greasy hair, pushes his chair back and says "OK, who's gonna beat THIS uptime?"
> In reality shouldn't we expect more from modern > OSes?
For anyone who can remember back that far, there used to be a MS AntiVirus product back in the DOS 6 days - I think it was MSAV.COM or MSAV.EXE.
Of all the markets MS has ever been in, anti-virus is the only one I can think of where they didn't follow their normal practice: - big announcement about their new product, which gets people wondering "should I buy the competitive product from another vendor, since the MS version is sure to be better/stronger/faster?" - introduce a relatively dud product - bring out a new release fairly quickly, "acquiring" technology from their competitors along the way. This is the release where MS tries to get as many functionality check boxes filled as possible, so corporates can believe the MS product is at least viable - bring out a 3rd release some time later, which is pretty much on a par with the competition's products - market the competition out of existence - once they own the market in that area, stagnate their own product since no further development is required
The MSAV product (it may have still been around in Win95 days - can't be sure) never really got off the ground, and was quietly killed off. When you think about it, if there's one product area where MS should have had a competitive edge, it's anti-virus software - they've had the source code for Windows, Outlook, Exchange etc. all along and (if nothing else) could hire in the necessary experts to track down virus holes, highlight the vulnerabilities in the source and deal with them; they'd even have the power to *fix* holes exploited by viruses by making changes to the Windows or app source.
Norton, McAfee et al have it much harder; they have to reverse engineer things without the benefit of source code, to work out how a virus is doing its stuff, before patching it up. Furthermore, they don't have the option of fixing the vulnerabilities in the OS or application, so they're inevitably going to be hitting the same vulnerabilities over and over again with different viruses and probably have version control challenges as a result.
A sizeable percentage of PCs sold have anti-virus software deployed on them, and McAfee and Norton (and a bunch of others) have been in business for a while now; it seems there's money in the anti-virus business.
Wonder why MS hasn't devoted more attention in the past towards taking over the anti-virus market? Of course, Palladium will render all virii powerless, so the market will be going away soon anyway 8-P
> But who's going to argue that the latest versions > aren't more user-friendly and feature laden than > earlier editions? Their software is getting > better, you know.
OK, I'll bite. There's a whole raft of sites out there still running NT4Server+SP6, SQL 6.5 SP(whatever) and they're really happy with their systems.
No, really.
These people are well and truly aware that NT4 is now 7 years old, and that Win2k is now fully tested in the marketplace. The reasons they don't upgrade are: - the system they have now does all that they want. An often underrated consideration... - they don't want to enter into a cycle of applying security patches week after week, with a not-insignificant cost in terms of scheduled downtime. It's rare that more than 2-3 weeks goes by without a Win2k patch that should be put in ASAP; this was never the case for NT4, even shortly after it was released - NT4 MCSEs are dime-a-dozen, and the domain model is simple enough for even "paper MCSEs" to be able to configure and maintain it without much chance of screwing it up. Compare this with the design/implementation/maintenance costs of setting up even a relatively simple, multi-site Active Directory structure; well, there IS no comparison - features such as Media Player updates and prettier GUIs aren't that much use on machines that sit in racks and work as fileservers 24x7, or BDCs that sit in a dusty corner of a site office and run 24x7, or print servers that sit in a dusty corner...
At some point, these customers will have to face the fact that support for NT4 no longer exists. However, if the system's still working fine after 7 years, who cares? What chance is there that someone's going to find new problems AND write exploits for them after all this time?
For this group of customers, MS software is definitely getting worse, not better, as time goes by; the TCO of MS systems continually rises as MS tries to embrace both the enterprise and high-end desktop spaces and loses sight of small-office requirements. Chances are, when they are finally forced to upgrade off NT4, these customers will seriously consider moving to a Samba/Linux solution rather than take on Win2k Server or XP Server - if only for the lack of maintenance required.
I read "Good Grief!" and instantly added "...Charlie Brown". From there it was a small mental leap to Lucy and "The Doctor is IN"; now I'm wondering whether a call to this service will put me onto a delusional dog who's fighting the Red Baron, a bird who can't fly, a manic depressive kid with a big head and a striped shirt, a child prodigy pianist or a kid who's too scared to let go of his blanket.
Yep, that's the guys I'll want to talk to when my system's dead.
You seem to be equating "scripters" with self-taught d00ds who've created a few interactive Web pages and consider themselves experts, and "programmers" with college-trained wizards that can be turned loose on any project and relied upon to deliver.
Good coding practices are essential for any reasonably complex programming task, regardless of the language being used. In my experience, it's usually easier to get people to conform to multi-developer, project-specific rules using (say) Python rather than (say) C++, and I suspect the reason is that Python OO coding is more intuitive and less open to quirks of individual creativity than C++. On the other hand, I've seen some truly laughable Perl OO code, that defies any sort of analysis without the original coder being present; Perl seems to attract people who want to find new ways to solve old problems, and sometimes that's not what the project requires... The trick is to find coders who solve problems in a reasonably concise, auditable and consistent manner, and who are actually capable of adhering to a set of rules. The old term "software engineer" is key; people who approach coding with an engineering mindset tend to delivery higher quality results more consistently than those who approach coding as a creative outlet.
In my experience, the best programmers are those who are able to select the right tool for the job. In general, they won't use C++ for GUI design when VB is an option; they won't use Perl for high-speed numeric analysis. Well they might, but only if the decision is taken out of their hands.
> I don't pretend that it's real programming though.
"Real programming"? - that's easy to explain. It's getting the job done well, within a set of time and resource constraints.
More and more, scripting languages enable people to meet these criteria, *particularly* as the focus of almost all companies seems to be on reducing time and resources as much as possible.
Your classic C programming "expert" may be going the way of the dinosaur - not due to any inherent flaw in the language, but because there's now better ways of getting lots of job done within shrinking time and resource constraints.
I really like C, but more and more I'm using scripting languages just so I can deliver on time and under budget. *That's* what employers want; not speed of execution or some sort of intangible "expertise" that really adds nothing to the bottom line.
Re:Business Plan Math for the Startup
on
Salon Asks for Help
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· Score: 2, Funny
All of the parent comment seems totally reasonable, so here's my offer: if Salon files for Chapter 11 to get out of their ridiculous office rental costs, then I'm happy to front up with a $30 subscription.
Big deal, right? Well, I'm betting I'm not the only person out here that doesn't want to commit $30 towards lining the pockets of a very big creditor (if unclear on who I'm referring to, re-read the previous paragraph) WHEN Salon goes under. However, get that big monkey off your back, and we can talk.
Come on - this big $30 is a one-off deal and isn't going to last forever. Call now; our operators are waiting to take your call
> The politicians don't suck, the population sucks > if this is the best we have to offer.
I'm inclined to think it's a different issue altogether.
Here in Australia, there's ongoing outrage at the fact that "run of the mill" federal politicans make something around twice the average salary. Given the responsibility that these guys take on, compared with "average salary" guy, I think they're woefully underpaid.
Think about it: a lot of us working in IT wouldn't even consider taking these jobs on, since we couldn't afford the pay *cut* we'd get in trying to help lead our countries. Doesn't that seem ridiculous? - we can make much more money doing relatively obscure IT work for large corporations that we could if we were running our countries!
Factor in the time commitment of a political career, and the only people left to take on the role are the independently wealthy and those who would otherwise be on relatively low incomes. For those with young kids, it's just about impossible, and that's been borne out by a significant number of Australian politicians "dropping out" to look after their families.
Of course, there will always be those who take on the job because they feel they "should contribute in some way", but they may tend to be the people who have some sort of axe to grind with the present system.
Look at a hypothetical alternative: Suppose we raised the income of politicians by a factor of (say) 10, and as a tradeoff limited the number of terms they could serve (maybe 10-15 years max). Suddenly, you'd get people who weren't interested in the role prepared to take it on. Now I'm not saying these people would do a better job (in fact, individually they might do worse), but by making the job more (financially) attractive you'd expect to a number of better quality people applying. By limiting the number of years someone can hold down a political career, you'd kill off the "career politician" mentality - those people who seem to focus simply on getting re-elected time after time, rather than contribute in any concrete way.
I think these two steps would have the effect of weeding out a lot of the dud politicians, while keeping most of the good ones. Maybe then such stupidities as the Patriot Act, Copyright Extension Act and DMCA in the US, and unenforceable Internet censorship laws and "Muslim=bad" political hype in Australia, wouldn't keep popping up.
> Who'd buy an XBOX to run Linux on it, without > wanting to play games on it?
I would, for one, and not as a hacking toy.
I've ripped all 500+ of my CDs onto hard disk, and I'd like to be able to play them from that in my lounge room through my stereo. I'm intending to run Linux on an XBox, and use it solely as a stereo component.
Cost: a few hundred dollars.
Benefit: no more digging through piles of CDs looking for the one I want. All CDs can be relegated to some "offline" storage area - in boxes under the house, for all I care. Anyone with more than a few hundred CDs will know how messy they look, and how much they clutter up a room
Potential benefit: the XBox might also double as a PVR, or DivX player, or Internet radio component, at some point. Who knows what else? - I can guarantee that it'll be far more flexible than any "normal" stereo component I buy anywhere else
Maybe I'll be the only one who never plays games on an XBox, but I doubt it. Once I get it up and going, I bet my dad (200+ CDs) will want one for his birthday as well!
The consulting agency I work for has several "business managers", whose role is largely to travel around the city to our various customer sites, scope out new work if it's there and keep tabs on the work that's currently being performed. These guys are in cars probably 50% of the time, and probably close to 1/2 that is spent trying to find a car parking space in a crowded city.
Most consulting companies of any size have several people who do this sort of role. They might be called "account managers" or something similar.
Rather than walking everywhere (city covers too large an area for this to be practical), or riding bikes (not an option when you're wearing a business suit and there's no place to shower at the other end), Segways would be a viable alternative and could possibly shave up to an hour a day in car parking time for each of these guys. At the hourly rates they get paid, that's not an inconsequential sum of money.
Furthermore, a lot of the people that these guys meet would tend to be impressed rather than scornful - it could well reinforce an impression of "a go-ahead company not afraid to try something new" in the minds of the people that we want to impress. Don't get me wrong - *I* think they look pretty silly, but I can see that certain corporate types would be fairly impressed.
> They should give these things away to people that > buy Hummer H2s (read:idiots).
Think of all those pro wrestler Hummer-drivers who could come knocking on your door. Not that I think they're likely to hurt you, but when they hear about it the police will be onto you as a suspected steroid dealer faster than you can say "Crisco makes the cheapest body oil"
which probably makes it a good choice in case of accidents. Recalling my high-school physics (way too long ago now...), if the whole thing collapses while being put in place, the rotation of the earth should mean it would fall to the west, and there isn't much west of Perth for quite a way (i.e. Africa).
Of course, if a 100,000km piece of very strong rope collapses, Africa probably won't be anywhere near far enough away. When they're designing the fail-safes for this thing, maybe they can give some thought to having it collapse in some sort of spiral shape - maybe with a 50km or so diameter. Anyone clued up enough on this to be able to say whether that's feasible?
Not sure that analogy holds up. A golf course membership has a solid, intrinsic value; you go to the course, ask the right person and he'll tell you a dollar (or yen) figure.
How do you establish such a value for something that's inherently "made up"? I mean, selling such a thing through EBay doesn't give much of an indication. You might say it's worth 50,000 yen, but that's simply the price that was requested. It may be that there was nobody willing to pay anything for it, or it may be that the market price at the time was 5,000,000 yen. Maybe the game will be out of fashion by the time the court hears the case, in which case the price at that time would probably be much lower.
However you look at it, (a) how do you establish a "fair price", and (b) how do you convince a 60yo judge that your idea of a "fair price" is reasonable?
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> I'm not very impressed with Mandrake overall. They
> seem to be a bunch of amateurs.
Well, technically you're correct - professionals by definition work for money, and it doesn't seem that Mandrake's going to be paying its' employees too much for a while...
Seriously though, I'm interested to know why you think Mandrake is "a bunch of amateurs". While I haven't used SuSE, and probably won't because of their non-free ISO policy, I've done a lot of work with Mandrake and RedHat over the last several years.
Over the last few releases, Mandrake has progressed in leaps and bounds compared to RedHat:
- their hardware detection, which used to have trouble with lots of relatively common hardware, now seems to be significantly better than RedHat
- urpmi is rock-solid, and (for me) performs better than up2date. And that's before you add in the (new) cost for RHN
- IMHO, RedHat overreacted badly in pulling out all MP3 support from 8.0 at the last minute. At the time 8.0 was released, the MP3 patent holder (can't remember their name at the moment) had "made noises" about potentially charging for MP3 "stuff" at some point, but RH went over the top in deciding to simply pull all MP3-related tools from their distro at the last minute. It looked like a panic job (i.e. amateurish)
- in my experience, Mandrake's out of the box installs have become more robust than RedHat's over the last few versions. My RedHat systems pretty much need to be updated straight away to avoid reliability issues; my Mandrake systems can survive on box-only versions of apps. Of course, this is largely influenced by the specific versions of gcc, cups, etc. involved, but the overall impression is of a more solid (=professional) product
What specifically is it about Mandrake that you find amateurish, in comparison to either RedHat or SuSE?
Me too - I've got 2.2 running a firewall on a 100MHz Pentium box, and the box does exactly what it's supposed to do, all the time, and has only ever been rebooted in the last 4 years when there's been blackouts in my area.
A 2.4 box would be "cooler", and would probably even have some extra capabilities that I might find useful, but the simple rule is that you don't change something that works perfectly.
You raise several points, so I'll address them in turn.
I'm quite happy if Qt provides little to no support for the "lower income" licensing options. What I want is the freedom to write some code using Qt and sell it, without having to take on the extra financial risk (on top of all the others you take on as a tiny software company) of having to fork out what to me are significant chunks of change for a commercial Qt licence.
I don't see that TT is taking any risk at all in this. Some/many potential TT customers will be put off by the cost of the commercial Qt licence, so they won't ever be financial customers of TT in the first place. What they would be doing is getting SOME income from people that they wouldn't have gotten it from under their existing system
Regarding my suggestion that Qt should be released under the GPL, my brain was thinking "BSD" and my fingers typed "GPL". Late night, and I apologize for the mistake...
There are precendents for people recouping their initial investment in a product, then making it free (as in "no cost"). Consider Codeweavers for one; they progressively release more of their in-house developed functionality to the Wine project as they recover costs and move further forward. In TT's case, they could do this and still turn a sizeable dollar; by offering services around the (now-free, and presumably more widely used) Qt, or by developing and enhancing new toolkits around Qt and selling those.
Finally, as far as your Disney analogy goes, I think there's already a fairly strong moral/ethical/public-interest argument that they should not have the level of copyright protection they now do. For example, I don't see how the public is being served by having the Mickey Mouse copyright extended from 75 to 95 years. IMHO, a copyright protection period of about 10 years for movies "feels" reasonable, in which case The Lion King would be coming out of copyright pretty soon now.
IANAL, and I'm sure 10 years would be too short for some people/projects, but my thinking is that the creator of something of value should be afforded what's effectively income protection for about the same period people stay in any one career path. Changing career about every 10 years seems to be about normal these days, and that same level of income security and protection should apply to copyright holders as well.
but I'm betting this guy is single.
That picture of the PC plus two towers sitting on the floor in the bedroom, PC case jammed behind a chest of drawers, the metal "spikes" of the towers sitting on polished floorboards - I'm not seeing a lot of women in this guy's life.
And that's before I noticed the underwear peeking out of the drawer...
Some of the other pics show a significant lack of furniture. Well at least with all these drives spinning, he probably won't need too much in the way of extra heating appliances.
> So I want to know if others think my concerns are
;->
> legitimate or misinformed?
If you're misinformed, then so am I
I share your concern with Qt's licencing. I'd hoped Trolltech might have recouped whatever costs they have and then released Qt under something like the GPL - who knows, they still might? - but it hasn't happened yet.
What bugs me with licences such as those that apply to Qt is that it's not "scalable". If Adobe or Oracle want to buy a Qt licence for their commercial apps, well it's not really going to be a significant expense for them. However, if I want to release my "commercial" app, with no marketing budget, then a Qt licence represents a much more significant investment.
Suppose I only sell a single copy of my app (extreme example). Depending on the price I charge, I may find myself out of pocket when I factor in the Qt licence cost.
I'd be much happier if I could pick one of the following payment schemes for Qt licencing:
- pay Trolltech x% of the gross income I derive from all software that uses Qt
- pay Trolltech a flat $$$ amount which will allow me to sell any software I like that uses Qt
- pay Trolltech a (smaller) $$$ amount per application that uses Qt
- (maybe a few others as well)
and have the freedom to switch between payment schemes at my own discretion.
My tiny startup company would start out with the first option, as it would presumably cost me hardly anything for the first few copies of my product that were sold. Then I might switch to the 3rd option, once I'd sold a few more copies. Finally, I might switch to the 2nd option once my software company was in full swing and I was pulling in the big bucks.
The Adobes of the world would probably use option 2 from day one, simply because the expense would be a relatively tiny one for a company of that size.
The current licencing scheme seems biased in favor of large commercial software houses over the startups.
Does this strike anyone as a fairly effective terrorist strike against a country? Terrorism doesn't necessarily have to involve killing lots of people...
...I'm assuming, of course, that this isn't already happening today
1. Acquire some paperwork containing the BSA letterhead. Probably not that tough by the sound of it
2. Scan and print some blank letters that would pass casual muster as having been printed by the BSA
3. Print the standard BSA "cease and desist" message and send it to EVERY business in the country
4. Large chunks of the corporate population stop what they're doing to devote time to checking their software compliance. I doubt any business of more than (say) 100 employees running non-free software could verify their software licences are 100% in order without wasting quite a bit of time
5. Productivity goes down, profits go down, people get laid off, country enters recession, etc., etc.
Total cost: a lot of stamps and envelopes
The "country enters recession" scenario is maybe a bit extreme, but I can see how this would hurt a lot of businesses and cost very little (and not involve those expensive pilot training courses)
I figure the EFF, with several prominent legal people "on call", might be very interested in this as a possible test case of the legality of the BSA's modus operandi...
"Don't you agree, Bob"
A 2200 year old battery? Where can I get one for a Sony laptop?
Cop that, Energizer bunny!
> "The BBC has an interesting article about a 2,200
> year old battery discovered in Iraq in 1938. It is
> basically a clay pot containing a copper/iron core
> immersed in an electrolye solution (probably
> acidic vinegar). The article talks about how
> this priceless artifact as well as many others,
> from the same civilisation that invented writing
> and the ***wheel***, could be threatened by the
> impending war."
So these guys could've been driving electric cars since, what, about 2000 years ago? *And* selling oil to the rest of us?
No wonder they were happy to torch the oilfields in 1991; we'd have all been walking while they were driving around with the top down, picking up chicks at will. Damn you Saddam; you and your whisper quiet automotive technology.
> Rivers uses a mathematical formula when writing
...and on and on
> his songs based on songs by several bands
> including Nirvana. As a huge Weezer fan, I'd have
> to say he's on to something.
Most popular music is almost totally based on formulas e.g.:
- 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, repeat till end
- verse/chorus/verse/chorus/mid 8/chorus
- use I, IV, V, IIm, VIm chords
- sad verses, upbeat choruses (Bruce Springsteen loves this one!)
- something around 120 beats per minute is what gets people tapping their feet in time with the music, even if they're not actually consciously listening to it
- various instruments have their frequency ranges compressed in certain ways; this is what frequently separates the good/big-selling producers from the bad/not-so-big. Listen to multiple albums from the one producer, even across several different artists or styles of music, and you'll pick up the "brand" of specific producers in how they mix specific instruments in the audio spectrum.
Although I'm nowhere near up with state of the art, I'd be surprised if current sound analysis software couldn't detect most/all of the above and spit out some sort of number saying how well a song fits the above "rules".
Finally, if there's any doubt that these formulas exist, check the early 80s bubblegum Brit Pop stuff produced by Stock Aitken Waterman. You could remove the vocals, and what's left of the songs are almost interchangeable.
...an old geeky guy picks up his Coke, brushes the pizza crumbs off his gut, brushes spider web out of his waist length greasy hair, pushes his chair back and says "OK, who's gonna beat THIS uptime?"
> "Doesn't everyone run anti-virus software?"
> In reality shouldn't we expect more from modern
> OSes?
For anyone who can remember back that far, there used to be a MS AntiVirus product back in the DOS 6 days - I think it was MSAV.COM or MSAV.EXE.
Of all the markets MS has ever been in, anti-virus is the only one I can think of where they didn't follow their normal practice:
- big announcement about their new product, which gets people wondering "should I buy the competitive product from another vendor, since the MS version is sure to be better/stronger/faster?"
- introduce a relatively dud product
- bring out a new release fairly quickly, "acquiring" technology from their competitors along the way. This is the release where MS tries to get as many functionality check boxes filled as possible, so corporates can believe the MS product is at least viable
- bring out a 3rd release some time later, which is pretty much on a par with the competition's products
- market the competition out of existence
- once they own the market in that area, stagnate their own product since no further development is required
The MSAV product (it may have still been around in Win95 days - can't be sure) never really got off the ground, and was quietly killed off. When you think about it, if there's one product area where MS should have had a competitive edge, it's anti-virus software - they've had the source code for Windows, Outlook, Exchange etc. all along and (if nothing else) could hire in the necessary experts to track down virus holes, highlight the vulnerabilities in the source and deal with them; they'd even have the power to *fix* holes exploited by viruses by making changes to the Windows or app source.
Norton, McAfee et al have it much harder; they have to reverse engineer things without the benefit of source code, to work out how a virus is doing its stuff, before patching it up. Furthermore, they don't have the option of fixing the vulnerabilities in the OS or application, so they're inevitably going to be hitting the same vulnerabilities over and over again with different viruses and probably have version control challenges as a result.
A sizeable percentage of PCs sold have anti-virus software deployed on them, and McAfee and Norton (and a bunch of others) have been in business for a while now; it seems there's money in the anti-virus business.
Wonder why MS hasn't devoted more attention in the past towards taking over the anti-virus market? Of course, Palladium will render all virii powerless, so the market will be going away soon anyway 8-P
> But who's going to argue that the latest versions
> aren't more user-friendly and feature laden than
> earlier editions? Their software is getting
> better, you know.
OK, I'll bite. There's a whole raft of sites out there still running NT4Server+SP6, SQL 6.5 SP(whatever) and they're really happy with their systems.
No, really.
These people are well and truly aware that NT4 is now 7 years old, and that Win2k is now fully tested in the marketplace. The reasons they don't upgrade are:
- the system they have now does all that they want. An often underrated consideration...
- they don't want to enter into a cycle of applying security patches week after week, with a not-insignificant cost in terms of scheduled downtime. It's rare that more than 2-3 weeks goes by without a Win2k patch that should be put in ASAP; this was never the case for NT4, even shortly after it was released
- NT4 MCSEs are dime-a-dozen, and the domain model is simple enough for even "paper MCSEs" to be able to configure and maintain it without much chance of screwing it up. Compare this with the design/implementation/maintenance costs of setting up even a relatively simple, multi-site Active Directory structure; well, there IS no comparison
- features such as Media Player updates and prettier GUIs aren't that much use on machines that sit in racks and work as fileservers 24x7, or BDCs that sit in a dusty corner of a site office and run 24x7, or print servers that sit in a dusty corner...
At some point, these customers will have to face the fact that support for NT4 no longer exists. However, if the system's still working fine after 7 years, who cares? What chance is there that someone's going to find new problems AND write exploits for them after all this time?
For this group of customers, MS software is definitely getting worse, not better, as time goes by; the TCO of MS systems continually rises as MS tries to embrace both the enterprise and high-end desktop spaces and loses sight of small-office requirements. Chances are, when they are finally forced to upgrade off NT4, these customers will seriously consider moving to a Samba/Linux solution rather than take on Win2k Server or XP Server - if only for the lack of maintenance required.
I read "Good Grief!" and instantly added "...Charlie Brown". From there it was a small mental leap to Lucy and "The Doctor is IN"; now I'm wondering whether a call to this service will put me onto a delusional dog who's fighting the Red Baron, a bird who can't fly, a manic depressive kid with a big head and a striped shirt, a child prodigy pianist or a kid who's too scared to let go of his blanket.
Yep, that's the guys I'll want to talk to when my system's dead.
What the hell's IN this beer anyway...?
> Flame away...
;->
OK
You seem to be equating "scripters" with self-taught d00ds who've created a few interactive Web pages and consider themselves experts, and "programmers" with college-trained wizards that can be turned loose on any project and relied upon to deliver.
Good coding practices are essential for any reasonably complex programming task, regardless of the language being used. In my experience, it's usually easier to get people to conform to multi-developer, project-specific rules using (say) Python rather than (say) C++, and I suspect the reason is that Python OO coding is more intuitive and less open to quirks of individual creativity than C++. On the other hand, I've seen some truly laughable Perl OO code, that defies any sort of analysis without the original coder being present; Perl seems to attract people who want to find new ways to solve old problems, and sometimes that's not what the project requires... The trick is to find coders who solve problems in a reasonably concise, auditable and consistent manner, and who are actually capable of adhering to a set of rules. The old term "software engineer" is key; people who approach coding with an engineering mindset tend to delivery higher quality results more consistently than those who approach coding as a creative outlet.
In my experience, the best programmers are those who are able to select the right tool for the job. In general, they won't use C++ for GUI design when VB is an option; they won't use Perl for high-speed numeric analysis. Well they might, but only if the decision is taken out of their hands.
> I don't pretend that it's real programming though.
"Real programming"? - that's easy to explain. It's getting the job done well, within a set of time and resource constraints.
More and more, scripting languages enable people to meet these criteria, *particularly* as the focus of almost all companies seems to be on reducing time and resources as much as possible.
Your classic C programming "expert" may be going the way of the dinosaur - not due to any inherent flaw in the language, but because there's now better ways of getting lots of job done within shrinking time and resource constraints.
I really like C, but more and more I'm using scripting languages just so I can deliver on time and under budget. *That's* what employers want; not speed of execution or some sort of intangible "expertise" that really adds nothing to the bottom line.
All of the parent comment seems totally reasonable, so here's my offer: if Salon files for Chapter 11 to get out of their ridiculous office rental costs, then I'm happy to front up with a $30 subscription.
Big deal, right? Well, I'm betting I'm not the only person out here that doesn't want to commit $30 towards lining the pockets of a very big creditor (if unclear on who I'm referring to, re-read the previous paragraph) WHEN Salon goes under. However, get that big monkey off your back, and we can talk.
Come on - this big $30 is a one-off deal and isn't going to last forever. Call now; our operators are waiting to take your call
> The politicians don't suck, the population sucks
> if this is the best we have to offer.
I'm inclined to think it's a different issue altogether.
Here in Australia, there's ongoing outrage at the fact that "run of the mill" federal politicans make something around twice the average salary. Given the responsibility that these guys take on, compared with "average salary" guy, I think they're woefully underpaid.
Think about it: a lot of us working in IT wouldn't even consider taking these jobs on, since we couldn't afford the pay *cut* we'd get in trying to help lead our countries. Doesn't that seem ridiculous? - we can make much more money doing relatively obscure IT work for large corporations that we could if we were running our countries!
Factor in the time commitment of a political career, and the only people left to take on the role are the independently wealthy and those who would otherwise be on relatively low incomes. For those with young kids, it's just about impossible, and that's been borne out by a significant number of Australian politicians "dropping out" to look after their families.
Of course, there will always be those who take on the job because they feel they "should contribute in some way", but they may tend to be the people who have some sort of axe to grind with the present system.
Look at a hypothetical alternative: Suppose we raised the income of politicians by a factor of (say) 10, and as a tradeoff limited the number of terms they could serve (maybe 10-15 years max). Suddenly, you'd get people who weren't interested in the role prepared to take it on. Now I'm not saying these people would do a better job (in fact, individually they might do worse), but by making the job more (financially) attractive you'd expect to a number of better quality people applying. By limiting the number of years someone can hold down a political career, you'd kill off the "career politician" mentality - those people who seem to focus simply on getting re-elected time after time, rather than contribute in any concrete way.
I think these two steps would have the effect of weeding out a lot of the dud politicians, while keeping most of the good ones. Maybe then such stupidities as the Patriot Act, Copyright Extension Act and DMCA in the US, and unenforceable Internet censorship laws and "Muslim=bad" political hype in Australia, wouldn't keep popping up.
> Who'd buy an XBOX to run Linux on it, without
> wanting to play games on it?
I would, for one, and not as a hacking toy.
I've ripped all 500+ of my CDs onto hard disk, and I'd like to be able to play them from that in my lounge room through my stereo. I'm intending to run Linux on an XBox, and use it solely as a stereo component.
Cost: a few hundred dollars.
Benefit: no more digging through piles of CDs looking for the one I want. All CDs can be relegated to some "offline" storage area - in boxes under the house, for all I care. Anyone with more than a few hundred CDs will know how messy they look, and how much they clutter up a room
Potential benefit: the XBox might also double as a PVR, or DivX player, or Internet radio component, at some point. Who knows what else? - I can guarantee that it'll be far more flexible than any "normal" stereo component I buy anywhere else
Maybe I'll be the only one who never plays games on an XBox, but I doubt it. Once I get it up and going, I bet my dad (200+ CDs) will want one for his birthday as well!
The consulting agency I work for has several "business managers", whose role is largely to travel around the city to our various customer sites, scope out new work if it's there and keep tabs on the work that's currently being performed. These guys are in cars probably 50% of the time, and probably close to 1/2 that is spent trying to find a car parking space in a crowded city.
Most consulting companies of any size have several people who do this sort of role. They might be called "account managers" or something similar.
Rather than walking everywhere (city covers too large an area for this to be practical), or riding bikes (not an option when you're wearing a business suit and there's no place to shower at the other end), Segways would be a viable alternative and could possibly shave up to an hour a day in car parking time for each of these guys. At the hourly rates they get paid, that's not an inconsequential sum of money.
Furthermore, a lot of the people that these guys meet would tend to be impressed rather than scornful - it could well reinforce an impression of "a go-ahead company not afraid to try something new" in the minds of the people that we want to impress. Don't get me wrong - *I* think they look pretty silly, but I can see that certain corporate types would be fairly impressed.
> They should give these things away to people that
> buy Hummer H2s (read:idiots).
Think of all those pro wrestler Hummer-drivers who could come knocking on your door. Not that I think they're likely to hurt you, but when they hear about it the police will be onto you as a suspected steroid dealer faster than you can say "Crisco makes the cheapest body oil"
> Once this would be built, how do you protect the
> length of the ribbon from attack???
"Harsh language" seems to be the preferred terrorist deterrent at present
which probably makes it a good choice in case of accidents. Recalling my high-school physics (way too long ago now...), if the whole thing collapses while being put in place, the rotation of the earth should mean it would fall to the west, and there isn't much west of Perth for quite a way (i.e. Africa).
Of course, if a 100,000km piece of very strong rope collapses, Africa probably won't be anywhere near far enough away. When they're designing the fail-safes for this thing, maybe they can give some thought to having it collapse in some sort of spiral shape - maybe with a 50km or so diameter. Anyone clued up enough on this to be able to say whether that's feasible?
Not sure that analogy holds up. A golf course membership has a solid, intrinsic value; you go to the course, ask the right person and he'll tell you a dollar (or yen) figure.
How do you establish such a value for something that's inherently "made up"? I mean, selling such a thing through EBay doesn't give much of an indication. You might say it's worth 50,000 yen, but that's simply the price that was requested. It may be that there was nobody willing to pay anything for it, or it may be that the market price at the time was 5,000,000 yen. Maybe the game will be out of fashion by the time the court hears the case, in which case the price at that time would probably be much lower.
However you look at it, (a) how do you establish a "fair price", and (b) how do you convince a 60yo judge that your idea of a "fair price" is reasonable?