No, you would take a low salary with lots of stock options or have a hugh performance bonus... so you would be very motivated to work you arse off and deliver the code, etc.
p.s. I'm always amazed at the amount of money that VC firms pour into startups... and even more amazed at how high the burn-rate it... gee, I wish somebody would pour millions into my company so I can move into a new office, buy lots of cool equipment, and pay myself a high salary, give myself lots of bonuses... basically burn the VS money and have a good time.
Imagine this. I have stolen your credit card details and purchase items through the internet. You then discover whats going on (usually when your credit card statement arrives and you see that several thousands of Euros/Dollars worth of transactions appear on it that you didn't make). After talking to some of the suppliers they look into their audit logs and tell you the IP address of the dude who did some of those transactions... and its all the same IP address... yeah, you then talk to the ISP to try to get the details of the user, who is clearly doing credit card fraud.
Now, how would you react when the ISP says, for privacy reasons, we don't log such details at all? The activities of the criminal have helped by the ISP.
There is a fine line between privacy, and irresponsibility, and I think the German ISP is being bloody irresponsible, since they have effectively said you can use their services and nobody can trace you via your IP address.
What if a you saw a car run over somebody, and the police were unable to trace the culprit because the vehicle was rented and Hertz/Avis/whoeveer didn't log details of the renter to the car's details becaue they were scared about privacy laws...
How about moving to a Unix-like operating system that doesn't require you to compile everything? Having the computer recompiling this, that, and the other uses much more energy than letting it idle and downloading binary packages
I've used other distros, but I eventually, after much hit-and-miss settled on gentoo - and its compile everything methodology for the following reasons
If you compile everything from source, then you know that everything works. In the past I had problems because of the way other distros package their system... they forced their choices onto me, which meant that, for example, I was unable to drop cvs and replace it with cvsnt.
Plus, by compiling everything, you know that the maintainers of the software have given you everything you need to compile you system... with a binary-only approach, the say will come when you want to tweak the system, so you decide to grab the source, mod it, then compile it... and that's when you discover the maintainer missed something, or it won't compile due to dependencies with your system.
So, I'd rather burn a few millwatts of power compiling, rather that blindling grabbing a binary distribution and installing it
.
Also, its not as if I'm constantly rebuiling my system... on averge I do a complete rebuild every 6 months (from Gentoo stage1)... and the systems that are up and running get minor updates every month or so... looking at my logs - thanks to Cactus (http://www.cacti.net/), my avergae CPU usage is so low, the blips when doing a major compile hardly show.
Finally, its kinda cool to compile your own Linux system from scratch!
Its funny that this topic appeared on/. today - I've been considering changing my computers to make them more energy efficient.
My electric bill has been increasing, thanks to having an ever increasing number of servers and workstations chugging away whilst I do development work on them.
I've also moved from Windows to Linux devlopment, and have been shocked at just how good Linux is... good as in how little it needs in terms of hardware:
my Windows 2003 systems run P4 processors with 1G RAM, huge hard drives, etc., and throw out quite a bit of heat...
My GNU/Linux (Gentoo) systems run on rather modest AMD 2200+ systems, with tiny hard drives
The joke is that the Linux machines are far more responsive than the Windows machine (and how little space the OS and applications occupy - how I hate bloat). Sure, compiling seems slower, but when running code, they just fly.
So, by moving to Linux I don't need high-powered machines, which means the costs are much lower (both capital and running. Being a bit of a geek, I'm probably going to throw the PSU out of the Linux machine and replace it with a DC-DC converter fed by a solar-panel... so my computer running costs will be effectively free... and the capital outlay for the solar panels and DC-DC is rather modest (thing 100s not 1000s of Euros).
.
Now, if more people switched to Linux, they could use less hardware hungry machines, which need less power (and could easily run from solar).
Most (l)users are unable to distinguish the apps from the OS... which is why they don't realize that MS Office is actually separate from the OS and could be easily replaced with something else
However, I think you'll find that most copies of Office are installed in the workplace, and there is a general level of apathy about replacing it with something else - its the old syndrome of Nobody got fired for buying IBM updated to Nobody got fired for buying MS Office.
Me, I like MS Word... the early DOS version was great... it was when they upgraded to Window and the bloat became too much that it all just started to go downhill. I mean, just having startup macros was simply asking for exploits to be developed
The question that needs to be asked is, what useful purpose would a repository of presentations on F/OSS serve
Well, in future years, people will be able to look back and gasp in amazement at how things said in those presentations either came to fruition, or flopped magnificiently. The academic historians doing such research will just fall over themselves if there is a repository of all those presentations easily to hand.
Plus, if you ever have to do a presentations, its always useful to see what and how somebody else has done it, so you can get some inspiration and produce an amazing attention getting presentation, instead of the usual boring bullet.
When I was working on banking systems, the records in the database were encrypted... then again, it was private banking, opposed to retail banking, where they take privacy a bit more seriously (especially as the loss of business due to disclose not only causes fines, but lost customers).
That's why credit cards are now being issued with embeded ICs (smart cards) which provide a further level of card and cardholder validation.
I've noticed recently that my card now has to be put into the smart card reader instead of the usual mag stripe reader... seems my local clearing system has moved to smart card validation and given up on mag stripe:-)
The thing is that in the US its fairly easy to get VC funding... in other parts of the world, starting and funding a company is a much harder thing to do.. so whilst it would be technically possible for companies outide the US to innovate and compete, the reality is that they will face an uphill battle..
For example, my bankers in Germany have been a real pain in the ass and refused to give my company even a darn credit card (because we're not turning over enough busineess - we're in R&D phase at the moment, so what the heck do they expect!)... which means I have to use my personal cards and then refund myself from my company. The bank said they couldn't see the problem as we could pay by bank transfer!!! And doing an international is not exactly cheap (since they don't allow online internationl transfers and I have to visit them to fill in a form!)
So, while outside the US the 'netscape effect' may be less of a worry, there are plenty of other worries (that in the US are just no-brainers).
I somehow doubt that educating the public will have any real effect...
I mean, there's all that sillyness going on with patents that are being granted that are clearly bogus - yet the man/woman/whatever in the street doesn't really care enough to get the system changed...
The bigger issues like national security will swamp over the smaller issues like copyright and patents - because guns are more sexy than intellectual property
I'd have absolutely no problem with requiring tedious entry procedures for US government officials
They will just issue themselves diplomatic passports so they can simply bypass those procedures.
Still, I think most Amerecians will love the idea of all this border security... its makes them feel nice and safe (although as others have pointed out the security benefit of these measures is pretty minimal but politcally is great).
I do online banking, and the system my bank uses is more that just using an SSL connection.
1. There is the SSL connection to their site
2. I then have to enter my user ID
3. I then have to eneter my password
4. I then have to give 2 randomly chosen letters out of 16 from a card that they have given m
Now, all this is running inside a Java app, which then sends it down the wire to be verified before I can get at my account and do things like transferring money to pay bills. This is not an uncommon scenario for bank in Europe... I leave it as an exercise for the/. readers as to how good their software actually is:-) No software is perfect, but with carful planning to can stop stupid mistakes that lead to a nice big hole for somebody to exploit.
Nobody wants to pay $300 for thier printer when they can pay $100 for it (and later pay $40 for the cartridges).
Of course, but its the total cost of ownership that is important... not the initial capital outlay (which is usually low but with high running costs.
Sadly, many people just do do the math.
I was once at a company that were sending out CDs to clients. They printed nice labels on their inkjet, and were getting through expensive labels and ink like no tomorrow. I told them to get a dedicated CD label printer... I even did the math for them... sure the cap ex was a lot, but the running cos was minimal (like $0.2 per CD printed)... so, it would actually work out cheaper after only 14 months. Did they get it. No. Stupid, but that how it goes... cap ex spending was frozen, but running expenses could be sky high... and to hell with the bottom line.
Because if you are in the US, you would fall foul of the DCMA... luckily there are those, like me, who don't live in the US and therefore wouldn't be subject to it (despite what some Americans think)... let's just hope that over governments don't come up with their own daft versions of the DCMA... I'm all for having free-trade, as long as the playing field is level and fair...
Cough, um why would use use a bunch of mini projectors when you can use one normal projector? The resolution sucks but other than that it's a popular method
Because you could then build a really BIG widescreen TV with decent resolution and brightness... instead of one big high-powered projector you have a matrix of many smaller medium-powered projectors.
Now, if lots of these min-projectors could be put together in a matrix, will this mean that, finally, big screen TVs can be produced more cheaply. (If one mini-projector does dead, just swap it out).
Perhaps I've come up with a good idea - OpenConsumables. Why do us users get together to try and encourage the manufacturers to be more open with the consumables and not lock us into purchasing only their brand consumables.
Let's be honest, no manufacturer forces you to stick their brand on paper into their equipment (so the free-market applies)... but when it comes to consumables they will, if they can, lock you in.
Yes, I know that a lot of mnufacturers sell their machines with hardly any margin and recoup all their profit from the consumables, but when the same consumable is sold by two different manufacturers at at 50% price differential, it does make you think.
Time to form the Free Consumables Foundation - with free as in choice
Re:Prediction about "social network software"
on
ICQ Universe
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The thing that has made IM so popular is not that it tries to facilitate the true exchange of human social networks, but instead it tries to support it.
Exactly. IM should be seen as a way to support communication between people who know each other, rather than being a way to start the communication between unknown people. For many years, I avoided things like IM because it just seemed to be full of kiddies with nothing more to say that A/S/L;-) But recently, because people I work with are all around the world, we use IM to stay in touch with each other - much to the regret of my local telco who have seen my internation phone calls drop to almost nothing:) Of course, there is a big difference between using IM between a closed group of contacts and IM between the unwashed masses (which is more what IRC is all about)
Re:Prediction about "social network software"
on
ICQ Universe
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I think it will take less time that the 5-10 years you talk about... software development moves quite quickly - although I would have to say that software innovation moves less slowly;-)
How difficult would it be to create a network that caters for the different social groups that you talk about. But, are there any differences between the networks that these groups create? Sure, the criteria for determining who is added/excluded from a group will be different, but the underlying requirements are the same. Psychologists feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!!
social networking
on
ICQ Universe
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This looks like somebody else is jumping on the social bandwagon... how many services will be popping up to offer such facilities in 2004?
Actually, this reminds me of LinkedIn.com, but I suspect the signal-to-noise ratio will be a bit different;-)
In fact, I don't see anything wrong with using a computerized system to help with social netwoking... but as in real life, you gotta be careful out there, although its too early to say whether it will be better or worse than getting scammed/screwed/whatever through a service like this or in real life.
No, this is just defeating hardware-based (i.e. physical) security. But, when they start doing things like putting codes in the cartridge to be read by the printer so they can locked to a specific manufacturer - or rather OEM;-) - then you can't get around it... well, not without doing something that could lead to DCMA infringement. Still, this all looks like price-fixing to me... in a free-market, I should be able to source cartridges from any supplier, not just the original manufacturer... people, vote with your feet: only buy machines with Open Consumables (after all, there is Open Source, so why not Open Consumables!!! be Free as in right to choose)... hey, have I just coined a new phrase?
Only yesterday I got some UCE from a local company... a nice large PDF file containing details of a promo they were doing for photocopiers. This company clearly think its OK to send out such junk... whilst they included in the message their email address to request to get off their list, the replyto address was a placebo... so for that alone they're breaking the acceptable use policy of the ISP that they sent from... who got a suitable complaint from me (and I hope they yank their account!). Now, this company were using some software to bulk send these messages (pdfmail)... and they harvested my email address from somewhere. You would have thought that by now comapnies would know better than to send out SPAM/UCE.. in my case the company sent crap themselves, so they can't even blame some unscrupulous marketing company.
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No, you would take a low salary with lots of stock options or have a hugh performance bonus... so you would be very motivated to work you arse off and deliver the code, etc.
p.s. I'm always amazed at the amount of money that VC firms pour into startups... and even more amazed at how high the burn-rate it... gee, I wish somebody would pour millions into my company so I can move into a new office, buy lots of cool equipment, and pay myself a high salary, give myself lots of bonuses... basically burn the VS money and have a good time.
Imagine this. I have stolen your credit card details and purchase items through the internet. You then discover whats going on (usually when your credit card statement arrives and you see that several thousands of Euros/Dollars worth of transactions appear on it that you didn't make). After talking to some of the suppliers they look into their audit logs and tell you the IP address of the dude who did some of those transactions... and its all the same IP address... yeah, you then talk to the ISP to try to get the details of the user, who is clearly doing credit card fraud.
Now, how would you react when the ISP says, for privacy reasons, we don't log such details at all? The activities of the criminal have helped by the ISP.
There is a fine line between privacy, and irresponsibility, and I think the German ISP is being bloody irresponsible, since they have effectively said you can use their services and nobody can trace you via your IP address.
What if a you saw a car run over somebody, and the police were unable to trace the culprit because the vehicle was rented and Hertz/Avis/whoeveer didn't log details of the renter to the car's details becaue they were scared about privacy laws...
I've used other distros, but I eventually, after much hit-and-miss settled on gentoo - and its compile everything methodology for the following reasons
If you compile everything from source, then you know that everything works. In the past I had problems because of the way other distros package their system... they forced their choices onto me, which meant that, for example, I was unable to drop cvs and replace it with cvsnt.
Plus, by compiling everything, you know that the maintainers of the software have given you everything you need to compile you system... with a binary-only approach, the say will come when you want to tweak the system, so you decide to grab the source, mod it, then compile it... and that's when you discover the maintainer missed something, or it won't compile due to dependencies with your system.
So, I'd rather burn a few millwatts of power compiling, rather that blindling grabbing a binary distribution and installing it
.Also, its not as if I'm constantly rebuiling my system... on averge I do a complete rebuild every 6 months (from Gentoo stage1)... and the systems that are up and running get minor updates every month or so... looking at my logs - thanks to Cactus (http://www.cacti.net/), my avergae CPU usage is so low, the blips when doing a major compile hardly show.
Finally, its kinda cool to compile your own Linux system from scratch!
Its funny that this topic appeared on /. today - I've been considering changing my computers to make them more energy efficient.
My electric bill has been increasing, thanks to having an ever increasing number of servers and workstations chugging away whilst I do development work on them.
I've also moved from Windows to Linux devlopment, and have been shocked at just how good Linux is... good as in how little it needs in terms of hardware:
The joke is that the Linux machines are far more responsive than the Windows machine (and how little space the OS and applications occupy - how I hate bloat). Sure, compiling seems slower, but when running code, they just fly.
So, by moving to Linux I don't need high-powered machines, which means the costs are much lower (both capital and running. Being a bit of a geek, I'm probably going to throw the PSU out of the Linux machine and replace it with a DC-DC converter fed by a solar-panel... so my computer running costs will be effectively free... and the capital outlay for the solar panels and DC-DC is rather modest (thing 100s not 1000s of Euros).
.Now, if more people switched to Linux, they could use less hardware hungry machines, which need less power (and could easily run from solar).
Most (l)users are unable to distinguish the apps from the OS... which is why they don't realize that MS Office is actually separate from the OS and could be easily replaced with something else
However, I think you'll find that most copies of Office are installed in the workplace, and there is a general level of apathy about replacing it with something else - its the old syndrome of Nobody got fired for buying IBM updated to Nobody got fired for buying MS Office.
Me, I like MS Word... the early DOS version was great... it was when they upgraded to Window and the bloat became too much that it all just started to go downhill. I mean, just having startup macros was simply asking for exploits to be developed
Well, in future years, people will be able to look back and gasp in amazement at how things said in those presentations either came to fruition, or flopped magnificiently. The academic historians doing such research will just fall over themselves if there is a repository of all those presentations easily to hand.
Plus, if you ever have to do a presentations, its always useful to see what and how somebody else has done it, so you can get some inspiration and produce an amazing attention getting presentation, instead of the usual boring bullet.
When I was working on banking systems, the records in the database were encrypted... then again, it was private banking, opposed to retail banking, where they take privacy a bit more seriously (especially as the loss of business due to disclose not only causes fines, but lost customers).
That's why credit cards are now being issued with embeded ICs (smart cards) which provide a further level of card and cardholder validation.
I've noticed recently that my card now has to be put into the smart card reader instead of the usual mag stripe reader... seems my local clearing system has moved to smart card validation and given up on mag stripe :-)
The thing is that in the US its fairly easy to get VC funding... in other parts of the world, starting and funding a company is a much harder thing to do.. so whilst it would be technically possible for companies outide the US to innovate and compete, the reality is that they will face an uphill battle..
For example, my bankers in Germany have been a real pain in the ass and refused to give my company even a darn credit card (because we're not turning over enough busineess - we're in R&D phase at the moment, so what the heck do they expect!)... which means I have to use my personal cards and then refund myself from my company. The bank said they couldn't see the problem as we could pay by bank transfer!!! And doing an international is not exactly cheap (since they don't allow online internationl transfers and I have to visit them to fill in a form!)
So, while outside the US the 'netscape effect' may be less of a worry, there are plenty of other worries (that in the US are just no-brainers).
I somehow doubt that educating the public will have any real effect...
I mean, there's all that sillyness going on with patents that are being granted that are clearly bogus - yet the man/woman/whatever in the street doesn't really care enough to get the system changed...
The bigger issues like national security will swamp over the smaller issues like copyright and patents - because guns are more sexy than intellectual property
I'd have absolutely no problem with requiring tedious entry procedures for US government officials
They will just issue themselves diplomatic passports so they can simply bypass those procedures.
Still, I think most Amerecians will love the idea of all this border security... its makes them feel nice and safe (although as others have pointed out the security benefit of these measures is pretty minimal but politcally is great).
Just when you think you understand the naming conventions, the marketing droids go and change the names. Don't they have anything better to do?
Its also a lot of publicity for the university... and I'm sure many an academic paper will be written by the teams... publish or perish!
I do online banking, and the system my bank uses is more that just using an SSL connection.
1. There is the SSL connection to their site
2. I then have to enter my user ID
3. I then have to eneter my password
4. I then have to give 2 randomly chosen letters out of 16 from a card that they have given m
Now, all this is running inside a Java app, which then sends it down the wire to be verified before I can get at my account and do things like transferring money to pay bills. This is not an uncommon scenario for bank in Europe... I leave it as an exercise for the /. readers as to how good their software actually is :-) No software is perfect, but with carful planning to can stop stupid mistakes that lead to a nice big hole for somebody to exploit.
Nobody wants to pay $300 for thier printer when they can pay $100 for it (and later pay $40 for the cartridges).
Of course, but its the total cost of ownership that is important... not the initial capital outlay (which is usually low but with high running costs.
Sadly, many people just do do the math.
I was once at a company that were sending out CDs to clients. They printed nice labels on their inkjet, and were getting through expensive labels and ink like no tomorrow. I told them to get a dedicated CD label printer... I even did the math for them... sure the cap ex was a lot, but the running cos was minimal (like $0.2 per CD printed)... so, it would actually work out cheaper after only 14 months. Did they get it. No. Stupid, but that how it goes... cap ex spending was frozen, but running expenses could be sky high... and to hell with the bottom line.
Because if you are in the US, you would fall foul of the DCMA... luckily there are those, like me, who don't live in the US and therefore wouldn't be subject to it (despite what some Americans think)... let's just hope that over governments don't come up with their own daft versions of the DCMA... I'm all for having free-trade, as long as the playing field is level and fair...
Cough, um why would use use a bunch of mini projectors when you can use one normal projector? The resolution sucks but other than that it's a popular method
Because you could then build a really BIG widescreen TV with decent resolution and brightness... instead of one big high-powered projector you have a matrix of many smaller medium-powered projectors.
Now, if lots of these min-projectors could be put together in a matrix, will this mean that, finally, big screen TVs can be produced more cheaply. (If one mini-projector does dead, just swap it out).
The site is down for "Software Upgrading" :(
Perhaps I've come up with a good idea - OpenConsumables. Why do us users get together to try and encourage the manufacturers to be more open with the consumables and not lock us into purchasing only their brand consumables.
Let's be honest, no manufacturer forces you to stick their brand on paper into their equipment (so the free-market applies)... but when it comes to consumables they will, if they can, lock you in.
Yes, I know that a lot of mnufacturers sell their machines with hardly any margin and recoup all their profit from the consumables, but when the same consumable is sold by two different manufacturers at at 50% price differential, it does make you think.
Time to form the Free Consumables Foundation - with free as in choice
The thing that has made IM so popular is not that it tries to facilitate the true exchange of human social networks, but instead it tries to support it.
Exactly. IM should be seen as a way to support communication between people who know each other, rather than being a way to start the communication between unknown people. For many years, I avoided things like IM because it just seemed to be full of kiddies with nothing more to say that A/S/L ;-) But recently, because people I work with are all around the world, we use IM to stay in touch with each other - much to the regret of my local telco who have seen my internation phone calls drop to almost nothing :) Of course, there is a big difference between using IM between a closed group of contacts and IM between the unwashed masses (which is more what IRC is all about)
I think it will take less time that the 5-10 years you talk about... software development moves quite quickly - although I would have to say that software innovation moves less slowly ;-)
How difficult would it be to create a network that caters for the different social groups that you talk about. But, are there any differences between the networks that these groups create? Sure, the criteria for determining who is added/excluded from a group will be different, but the underlying requirements are the same. Psychologists feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!!
This looks like somebody else is jumping on the social bandwagon... how many services will be popping up to offer such facilities in 2004?
Actually, this reminds me of LinkedIn.com, but I suspect the signal-to-noise ratio will be a bit different ;-)
In fact, I don't see anything wrong with using a computerized system to help with social netwoking... but as in real life, you gotta be careful out there, although its too early to say whether it will be better or worse than getting scammed/screwed/whatever through a service like this or in real life.
No, this is just defeating hardware-based (i.e. physical) security. But, when they start doing things like putting codes in the cartridge to be read by the printer so they can locked to a specific manufacturer - or rather OEM ;-) - then you can't get around it... well, not without doing something that could lead to DCMA infringement. Still, this all looks like price-fixing to me... in a free-market, I should be able to source cartridges from any supplier, not just the original manufacturer... people, vote with your feet: only buy machines with Open Consumables (after all, there is Open Source, so why not Open Consumables!!! be Free as in right to choose) ... hey, have I just coined a new phrase?
Only yesterday I got some UCE from a local company... a nice large PDF file containing details of a promo they were doing for photocopiers. This company clearly think its OK to send out such junk... whilst they included in the message their email address to request to get off their list, the replyto address was a placebo... so for that alone they're breaking the acceptable use policy of the ISP that they sent from... who got a suitable complaint from me (and I hope they yank their account!). Now, this company were using some software to bulk send these messages (pdfmail)... and they harvested my email address from somewhere. You would have thought that by now comapnies would know better than to send out SPAM/UCE.. in my case the company sent crap themselves, so they can't even blame some unscrupulous marketing company.