Compared to Speex (and other speech-specific, dedicated codecs), MP3s are extremely high bitrate. Further, given that I'm going to want to store my voice recordings in a compact form, I'm going to be converting them to Speex eventually anyhow... so it just plain makes sense to encode to Speex in the first place and avoid the artifacts from using multiple layers of lossy encoding.
To give you an idea of what I mean by "extremely high bitrate" -- speex starts at 2 kbps and tops out at 44 kbps for the ultra-wideband version; quality at 8kbps is quite good, and is what I use for my phone system. Sure, it doesn't effectively represent anything but human speech -- but that it does extremely well.
There are a *lot* more mistakes to be made in large number cryptography and security software than there are in wiring a house.
True.
Notably, while OpenVPN's core is documented well enough to allow peer review of its design, and the code is clean enough to allow for easy desk checking, I haven't seen a single 3rd-party patch to the crypto portions submitted or accepted. As such, it's not such an amateur effort as you perhaps make it out to be -- there's a single author of the core, and to the best of my limited knowledge said author has made maintaining said software his full-time job since 2002 [AFAIK, and that *is* a limited extent, the contract work he does these days is focused around OpenVPN], and his design decisions have so far stood up to all scrutiny.
Did you follow the ML post I linked? In short, I submit that the sensitive parts of OpenVPN are written by an expert. Granted, further peer review would still be a Good Thing -- but I'm confident in the software as it stands.
No, I'm not joking. I occasionally want voice recorder functionality, and just about everyone seems to use some proprietary format or another for their hardware -- while Speex gets compression rates with the best of them, and works on all the platforms I use.
Once upon a time I might have bought a player with Vorbis support -- but my money's gotten tighter since then, so my requirements have gone up. Where's the dedicated hardware with Speex support?
There is always someone who will do your job for the same or even less money. Skill sets are acquired.
Then why haven't we been able to find and hire such a person for the last two years? We've been looking for another me, and it simply hasn't happened. It's easy to say "there's always someone else" -- but if, in practice, we're unable to locate or recruite such a person, those words fall flat. It's likewise easy to say that skillsets can be acquired -- but at a startup, there's simply not time for the level of training required to acquire that diverse of a skillset. (I'm part OS developer, part app developer, part DBA, part revision control specialist, part sysadmin. In the latter two I'm better than the average specialist -- though that boast is partly based on the lack of respect I have for the revision control specialists I've met in real life so far).
Don't expect other people to believe you are irreplaceable no matter what you believe yourself.
I think it's a reasonable belief. Every fellow employee I've spoken with on the topic agrees there's a short list of irreplaceable individuals here. Given that everyone has a short list, it is indeed feasible that I may be on a few of them.
Unless you get something extra for the extra work you are putting in you are not making a wise decision by sticking around.
It's a startup -- you should already know what I get: Stock options. Lots of them. Enough that if the company does well, I'll be able to retire before 30. And if they don't do well -- heck, I'm still young, I've still got most of my health, I can go do something else. Yes, with a wife and a house, I won't be able to afford much of a transition period -- but I doubt I'll stay unemployed long.
As your company growth you will become less and less irreplaceable, less important to the overal success.
I'm not only prepared for that, I'm trying to help it along. I've got a trainee -- a fellow just out of school with minimal experience but who's exceedingly bright, a very fast learner, and almost completely unjaded. I hope that in another 6 months I'll be able to transfer to a different department and narrow my focus substantially without having the previously discussed negative impact on the anticipated value of my shares.
Wow. I'd be a little curious about what you went through to end up with this viewpoint. Perhaps you've been working with companies which are a bit too large or well-funded?
I'm three years into employment with a startup, and (after watching how hard it is to find more people with my skillset willing to work at the pay levels we can provide) am rather convinced that I do matter. That may because I'm the only sucker with my particular skillset to be stupid enough to work this far below market rate -- but whatever the case may be, if I walked out the door, the company's chances of success would go down somewhat. Not all that much, necessarily -- the guy we hired who knows the line of business and the people involved in it whose personal relationships have brought in our resellers, investors and customers makes more of a difference. The lead architect we hired whose individual efforts in getting the dev team shipshape and rewriting the core of our app are responsible for us having a shippable, usable product makes more of a difference. The chief medical officer who produced more of the content for our app than anyone else, despite having over four MDs under him makes more of a difference... but see, there are individuals here in this organization who are recognized by their fellows and peers as individually making a difference -- and I get some of that recognition as well. It's a fulfilling thing, to be sure -- but it's not necessarily fiction.
Given enough funding, a large enough team of MDs to make up for losing the productivity of our individual CMO could be found. Given enough funding and time, we could find another lead architect of comparable skill, and we could find a replacement for me and my team. But given the limited funding we have, and given the limited time we have, our staff aren't replacable -- so we do make a difference. We miss the IT lead we lost, because the IT department isn't as effective without him.
And quite possibly, this is why I'm still here after three years working well under market value -- because I get the recognition that I really do add something to the company, without the separation from reality you imply always comes with it.
If you're an audiophile and you don't want to be tied to media, encode to a lossless codec (such as FLAC) instead. OGG, like MP3, is lossy -- so if you lose your original media, your other copy is no longer pristine.
Heinlein came up with it first -- one of the characters had a doorbell which would only ring after a deposit was made -- refundable if it was agreed that her time was not being wasted. I think someone else here referred to Heinlein doing the same thing with a telephone call at some point or another -- I'm not sure if it's the same reference (and one of us is misremembering it) or if he used the same idea twice (which is really quite plausable).
If you were involved in an accident tomorrow that rendered you unable to work, would you kill yourself to avoid being a drain on the species' resources? I guess i'd have to break your spine to find out.
In the case of most accidents, I'd find ways to continue my work -- my effective value to society being measured by [1] the amount my employer voluntarily gives me in exchange for my work, and [2] the level of resources (not necessarily limited to funding -- food, shelter, etc also qualify) that other people are voluntarily willing to provide for my continued wellbeing. I would hope, under [2], that my family or friends would be willing to offer some level of support -- but if no entity is willing to voluntarily support my existance, why should I consider such existance to be worthy of support? (Indeed, if it weren't for my impending marriage, I'd consider suicide quite reasonable under your hypothetical; since there are now 3rd parties who would suffer substantial emotional harm if I did that without their consultation and support, however, I'm more inclined to rely on their charity if said 3rd parties consider such appropriate).
And no, it's not that I'd be concerned about being "a drain on the species' resources", but rather about being an effectively useless human being, and unable to do what I love (that is, my work). Similar effect, but the latter motive is considerably more personal.
The removal of "natural" (what is that anyway, should we deny all medicines, housing, and civilisation to a few generations just to clear out the gene pool?
Hmm? "Natural selection" is in this case quite clearly intended simply to reduce to "survival of the fittest". Fitness now will certainly mean a different thing than it did five hundred years ago, much less ten thousand -- but the point is that the natural order of things is for the fittest to have a higher likelihood of being able to survive and reproduce. Now that we have social safety nets and free health care to permit even those who aren't able to look after their own survival to live and reproduce... well, the effect should be obvious.
As for the argument that having a more diverse popultion means more room for mutations -- I'm not arguing against diversity, so long as some kind of reasonable fitness function -- such as that provided by making food/housing/etc available strictly via a market economy -- is being applied. If a fitness function is so limiting as to substantially reduce the number of variations which don't directly impact one's ability to tend to one's own survival, that fitness function is broken. To put it bluntly: A society of six-foot, blonde-haired, blue-eyed caucasians is the last thing I would want -- and if relying on a pure market economy in our present society would cause a trend towards that norm, our society needs to be fixed.
That said, it wouldn't be a Good Thing to apply this whole pure-market-economy worldwide. Just doing it in some significant (reasonably diverse) region should cause it to succeed (inasmuch as that region, over the course of a few generations, generates individuals more fit than the population median) or fail (obviously, the inverse) without eliminating gene lines surviving elsewhere in the world which might be falsely targeted by the fitness function in question. In short: I might be wrong, and I don't want to take over the world; a US state or two (allowing folks who don't like it to easily leave, and folks who do like the idea to emigrate in) would be more than enough.
I am aware that there are more than a few people of low intelligence who are genetically built that way, but I would say these are in the vast minority. Much of this has to do with environment rather than their genes.
If having good genes is less important than having good memes (and the nature/nurture debate is far from decided), how does that actually change anything once we consider that memes are typically passed on through one's family?
Your sweeping characterisation of the stupid as being born that way smacks very much of a particularily nasty type of eugenics
Yes, it does -- which isn't to say that it's wrong. (Devil's advocate aside, I honestly do think that voluntary, temporary sterilization as a precondition for accepting welfare funds makes quite a lot of sense. The moral argument against has always been presented as self-evident, which to me it isn't. Anything much beyond that [ie. anything that involves using force of government to compell actions which would not be taken voluntarily] I'm unlikely to support. As for my motivation for taking this view -- I grew up around far too many welfare mothers having more kids so they'd get a bigger check from the government each month. And just to go back to the race thing briefly -- said welfare mothers were almost execlusively caucasian).
If by "almost the same money" you mean "twice as much". A SPA3000 runs about $100, a TDM400 costs about $200.
Also, I don't have expansion slots, and my always-on home box is running Windows w/ coLinux (so the Linux side doesn't have direct access to the PCI bus -- but the fiancee gets to play The Sims).
OpenVPN's security model is quite strong -- as documented in the FAQ, it borrows heavily from preexisting (time-tested, heavily reviewed) protocols (not just SSL but ESP as well), and supports multiple layers of security (ie. "tls-auth", a pre-shared key authenticating all traffic; support for running unprivileged and within a chroot jail to prevent OS-level security breaches; etc). Further, the (limited region of) code which handles pre-authentication network traffic is heavily audited.
There has been analysis resulting in security vulnerabilities found; these have exclusively been related to misconfiguration, and even in those cases the daemon now spits out a warning when it detects such misuse. Certainly, OpenVPN hasn't garnered the level of direct review (as opposed to inderect review of components it borrows) that IPsec has -- but I'm confident in its security. Certainly, the other homegrown userspace VPNs all have serious issues -- but notably, those issues have by and large been pointed out, whereas OpenVPN's security model has had no serious flaws documented despite significant popularity.
OpenVPN has a number of other advantages as well -- plays nice with NAT, tunnels over almost any network, no interop issues (since there's just one implementation that runs anywhere), etc.
I haven't forgotten it, but Intel's in a strange spot -- they want to promote their own compiler, to be sure, but they also want to promote their architecture as a whole, and they've given assistance to GCC in the past.
More likely is that Intel would arrange (ie. throw some money, tech, patent licenses, whatever) at Borland in return for such a thing. Borland doesn't have any motivation to make stack-based SEH available to free x86-targeting compilers [the patent's irrelevant on RISC], but Intel arguably does.
First off -- license violation isn't illegal. Copyright violation is; license compliance is a defense to copyright violation charges.
That said -- there's a substantial difference (well, not so substantial as it used to be) between copyright violation for commercial use versus copyright violation where the violater doesn't gain from their actions (including gaining access to other pirated works) -- and even if there weren't a legal difference, the former is certainly much more ethically reprehensible.
"Copyright violation is copyright violation" is like saying "theft is theft" -- but someone who steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family is much less morally reprehensible than someone who steals an inventor's prototype to sell it as his own.
Anyone else feel that this post is just as as bad?
I don't. Just because a religion fails to match beliefs with the orthedoxy (and the bulk of Christian churches consider LDS to have substantially different beliefs) doesn't mean it's inherently more "wacko" than the orthodoxy from which it separates -- indeed, it's entirely possible for the orthodoxy to be wrong. "Unorthodox" is a descriptive word, and an accurate one. I don't see why its use in this context is in any way opposed to religious freedom.
companies arn't gonna just take a risk with something that might not work.
Well, that's why they need to have a mostly-working solution in place already, to make it clear that their solution will work for the potential sponsor with some customization.
Sponsoring an OSS project involves quite a bit more control than what you suggest. Look at Digium sponsoring Asterisk, IBM sponsoring Eclipse, Canonical sponsoring Ubuntu: In all of these cases, the sponsor has a great deal of ability to guide the project's development into what they want it to be.
Thinking this would be any different is naiive -- on your part, and (if they think otherwise) theirs as well.
No, not give money away -- pay to have freely available software modified to do what they need it to do (as opposed to spending bigger money to buy something off-the-shelf, or still bigger money yet to develop their own purely proprietary solution).
Of course, if someone else pays the open source outfit to produce the software, and you get it for free, you're even further ahead.
Except you miss out on having the ability to guide development (get exactly the features you need, as opposed to the features that other guy needs) -- and, more importantly, it's frequently quite substantially cheaper for you to start with a preexisting open source solution and add just the few bits you need that are missing than to (1) develop a proprietary solution ground-up, or (2) buy an off-the-shelf commercial solution (frequently, in a niche market, for very very big bucks) and then need to shoehorn the h*ll out of it for it to start to meet your needs.
I've been doing OSS professionally for quite a while now, and as long as the software is something that enables you to get your business done, as opposed to the entire thing you make your profit off of, it's a pretty reasonable thing. I currently work at a proprietary software shop -- but we're more than happy to use open components, and even give a few of the tools we've developed internally, so long as we don't threaten the secret sauce. (Yes, I do OSS professionally, but I work at a proprietary software shop. Those aren't mutually exclusive; think about it).
Ticket management software is a cost center that can be reduced, not a core-competency item that makes people decide to go to one theater rather than another. As such, it's a reasonable candidate.
So then, both the developers and the venture capitalists are in it in order to lower the operating costs of movie theaters?
Of course not. I'm going to make a few guesses here which are in line with my experience:
The initial developers probably have their own vested interest of some sort -- either they're employed by a theater, or volunteer for a community-run one, or something of that sort. Having generated some useful software out of self-interest (and quite possibly with some baseline of funding which is no longer available), they're now looking for a way to get paid to continue working on what they consider to be an interesting project. So... how can they motivate some organization to fund their project? Arguing that they can reduce said organization's operating costs is one pretty strong motivation.
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What's wrong with recording to mp3?
Compared to Speex (and other speech-specific, dedicated codecs), MP3s are extremely high bitrate. Further, given that I'm going to want to store my voice recordings in a compact form, I'm going to be converting them to Speex eventually anyhow... so it just plain makes sense to encode to Speex in the first place and avoid the artifacts from using multiple layers of lossy encoding.
To give you an idea of what I mean by "extremely high bitrate" -- speex starts at 2 kbps and tops out at 44 kbps for the ultra-wideband version; quality at 8kbps is quite good, and is what I use for my phone system. Sure, it doesn't effectively represent anything but human speech -- but that it does extremely well.
There are a *lot* more mistakes to be made in large number cryptography and security software than there are in wiring a house.
True.
Notably, while OpenVPN's core is documented well enough to allow peer review of its design, and the code is clean enough to allow for easy desk checking, I haven't seen a single 3rd-party patch to the crypto portions submitted or accepted. As such, it's not such an amateur effort as you perhaps make it out to be -- there's a single author of the core, and to the best of my limited knowledge said author has made maintaining said software his full-time job since 2002 [AFAIK, and that *is* a limited extent, the contract work he does these days is focused around OpenVPN], and his design decisions have so far stood up to all scrutiny.
Did you follow the ML post I linked? In short, I submit that the sensitive parts of OpenVPN are written by an expert. Granted, further peer review would still be a Good Thing -- but I'm confident in the software as it stands.
No, I'm not joking. I occasionally want voice recorder functionality, and just about everyone seems to use some proprietary format or another for their hardware -- while Speex gets compression rates with the best of them, and works on all the platforms I use.
Once upon a time I might have bought a player with Vorbis support -- but my money's gotten tighter since then, so my requirements have gone up. Where's the dedicated hardware with Speex support?
All I can say is again: good luck.
Thanks. I was working in the Bay Area when the boom turned bust, so I'm under no illusions with regard to the risks I'm taking.
There is always someone who will do your job for the same or even less money. Skill sets are acquired.
Then why haven't we been able to find and hire such a person for the last two years? We've been looking for another me, and it simply hasn't happened. It's easy to say "there's always someone else" -- but if, in practice, we're unable to locate or recruite such a person, those words fall flat. It's likewise easy to say that skillsets can be acquired -- but at a startup, there's simply not time for the level of training required to acquire that diverse of a skillset. (I'm part OS developer, part app developer, part DBA, part revision control specialist, part sysadmin. In the latter two I'm better than the average specialist -- though that boast is partly based on the lack of respect I have for the revision control specialists I've met in real life so far).
Don't expect other people to believe you are irreplaceable no matter what you believe yourself.
I think it's a reasonable belief. Every fellow employee I've spoken with on the topic agrees there's a short list of irreplaceable individuals here. Given that everyone has a short list, it is indeed feasible that I may be on a few of them.
Unless you get something extra for the extra work you are putting in you are not making a wise decision by sticking around.
It's a startup -- you should already know what I get: Stock options. Lots of them. Enough that if the company does well, I'll be able to retire before 30. And if they don't do well -- heck, I'm still young, I've still got most of my health, I can go do something else. Yes, with a wife and a house, I won't be able to afford much of a transition period -- but I doubt I'll stay unemployed long.
As your company growth you will become less and less irreplaceable, less important to the overal success.
I'm not only prepared for that, I'm trying to help it along. I've got a trainee -- a fellow just out of school with minimal experience but who's exceedingly bright, a very fast learner, and almost completely unjaded. I hope that in another 6 months I'll be able to transfer to a different department and narrow my focus substantially without having the previously discussed negative impact on the anticipated value of my shares.
Wow. I'd be a little curious about what you went through to end up with this viewpoint. Perhaps you've been working with companies which are a bit too large or well-funded?
I'm three years into employment with a startup, and (after watching how hard it is to find more people with my skillset willing to work at the pay levels we can provide) am rather convinced that I do matter. That may because I'm the only sucker with my particular skillset to be stupid enough to work this far below market rate -- but whatever the case may be, if I walked out the door, the company's chances of success would go down somewhat. Not all that much, necessarily -- the guy we hired who knows the line of business and the people involved in it whose personal relationships have brought in our resellers, investors and customers makes more of a difference. The lead architect we hired whose individual efforts in getting the dev team shipshape and rewriting the core of our app are responsible for us having a shippable, usable product makes more of a difference. The chief medical officer who produced more of the content for our app than anyone else, despite having over four MDs under him makes more of a difference... but see, there are individuals here in this organization who are recognized by their fellows and peers as individually making a difference -- and I get some of that recognition as well. It's a fulfilling thing, to be sure -- but it's not necessarily fiction.
Given enough funding, a large enough team of MDs to make up for losing the productivity of our individual CMO could be found. Given enough funding and time, we could find another lead architect of comparable skill, and we could find a replacement for me and my team. But given the limited funding we have, and given the limited time we have, our staff aren't replacable -- so we do make a difference. We miss the IT lead we lost, because the IT department isn't as effective without him.
And quite possibly, this is why I'm still here after three years working well under market value -- because I get the recognition that I really do add something to the company, without the separation from reality you imply always comes with it.
Actually, the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster was free with admission to the Hitchhiker's Guide.
Not to the matinee. (Not that I'm complaining, mind you -- they still kick ass).
You think they don't have the resources to figure out that they can set "--max_upload_rate 0"?
I will just re-encode my CDs if I need to change formats
Thing is, that doesn't do much good if they're lost or scratched -- and it means you need to spend a bunch of time at your system swapping CDs.
If you're an audiophile and you don't want to be tied to media, encode to a lossless codec (such as FLAC) instead. OGG, like MP3, is lossy -- so if you lose your original media, your other copy is no longer pristine.
WRT the rest of your question, damnedifIknow.
Heinlein came up with it first -- one of the characters had a doorbell which would only ring after a deposit was made -- refundable if it was agreed that her time was not being wasted. I think someone else here referred to Heinlein doing the same thing with a telephone call at some point or another -- I'm not sure if it's the same reference (and one of us is misremembering it) or if he used the same idea twice (which is really quite plausable).
If you were involved in an accident tomorrow that rendered you unable to work, would you kill yourself to avoid being a drain on the species' resources? I guess i'd have to break your spine to find out.
In the case of most accidents, I'd find ways to continue my work -- my effective value to society being measured by [1] the amount my employer voluntarily gives me in exchange for my work, and [2] the level of resources (not necessarily limited to funding -- food, shelter, etc also qualify) that other people are voluntarily willing to provide for my continued wellbeing. I would hope, under [2], that my family or friends would be willing to offer some level of support -- but if no entity is willing to voluntarily support my existance, why should I consider such existance to be worthy of support? (Indeed, if it weren't for my impending marriage, I'd consider suicide quite reasonable under your hypothetical; since there are now 3rd parties who would suffer substantial emotional harm if I did that without their consultation and support, however, I'm more inclined to rely on their charity if said 3rd parties consider such appropriate).
And no, it's not that I'd be concerned about being "a drain on the species' resources", but rather about being an effectively useless human being, and unable to do what I love (that is, my work). Similar effect, but the latter motive is considerably more personal.
As for the argument that having a more diverse popultion means more room for mutations -- I'm not arguing against diversity, so long as some kind of reasonable fitness function -- such as that provided by making food/housing/etc available strictly via a market economy -- is being applied. If a fitness function is so limiting as to substantially reduce the number of variations which don't directly impact one's ability to tend to one's own survival, that fitness function is broken. To put it bluntly: A society of six-foot, blonde-haired, blue-eyed caucasians is the last thing I would want -- and if relying on a pure market economy in our present society would cause a trend towards that norm, our society needs to be fixed.
That said, it wouldn't be a Good Thing to apply this whole pure-market-economy worldwide. Just doing it in some significant (reasonably diverse) region should cause it to succeed (inasmuch as that region, over the course of a few generations, generates individuals more fit than the population median) or fail (obviously, the inverse) without eliminating gene lines surviving elsewhere in the world which might be falsely targeted by the fitness function in question. In short: I might be wrong, and I don't want to take over the world; a US state or two (allowing folks who don't like it to easily leave, and folks who do like the idea to emigrate in) would be more than enough.
If having good genes is less important than having good memes (and the nature/nurture debate is far from decided), how does that actually change anything once we consider that memes are typically passed on through one's family? Yes, it does -- which isn't to say that it's wrong. (Devil's advocate aside, I honestly do think that voluntary, temporary sterilization as a precondition for accepting welfare funds makes quite a lot of sense. The moral argument against has always been presented as self-evident, which to me it isn't. Anything much beyond that [ie. anything that involves using force of government to compell actions which would not be taken voluntarily] I'm unlikely to support. As for my motivation for taking this view -- I grew up around far too many welfare mothers having more kids so they'd get a bigger check from the government each month. And just to go back to the race thing briefly -- said welfare mothers were almost execlusively caucasian).If by "almost the same money" you mean "twice as much". A SPA3000 runs about $100, a TDM400 costs about $200.
Also, I don't have expansion slots, and my always-on home box is running Windows w/ coLinux (so the Linux side doesn't have direct access to the PCI bus -- but the fiancee gets to play The Sims).
Spin it however you like -- but read this.
OpenVPN's security model is quite strong -- as documented in the FAQ, it borrows heavily from preexisting (time-tested, heavily reviewed) protocols (not just SSL but ESP as well), and supports multiple layers of security (ie. "tls-auth", a pre-shared key authenticating all traffic; support for running unprivileged and within a chroot jail to prevent OS-level security breaches; etc). Further, the (limited region of) code which handles pre-authentication network traffic is heavily audited.
There has been analysis resulting in security vulnerabilities found; these have exclusively been related to misconfiguration, and even in those cases the daemon now spits out a warning when it detects such misuse. Certainly, OpenVPN hasn't garnered the level of direct review (as opposed to inderect review of components it borrows) that IPsec has -- but I'm confident in its security. Certainly, the other homegrown userspace VPNs all have serious issues -- but notably, those issues have by and large been pointed out, whereas OpenVPN's security model has had no serious flaws documented despite significant popularity.
OpenVPN has a number of other advantages as well -- plays nice with NAT, tunnels over almost any network, no interop issues (since there's just one implementation that runs anywhere), etc.
I haven't forgotten it, but Intel's in a strange spot -- they want to promote their own compiler, to be sure, but they also want to promote their architecture as a whole, and they've given assistance to GCC in the past.
More likely is that Intel would arrange (ie. throw some money, tech, patent licenses, whatever) at Borland in return for such a thing. Borland doesn't have any motivation to make stack-based SEH available to free x86-targeting compilers [the patent's irrelevant on RISC], but Intel arguably does.
First off -- license violation isn't illegal. Copyright violation is; license compliance is a defense to copyright violation charges.
That said -- there's a substantial difference (well, not so substantial as it used to be) between copyright violation for commercial use versus copyright violation where the violater doesn't gain from their actions (including gaining access to other pirated works) -- and even if there weren't a legal difference, the former is certainly much more ethically reprehensible.
"Copyright violation is copyright violation" is like saying "theft is theft" -- but someone who steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family is much less morally reprehensible than someone who steals an inventor's prototype to sell it as his own.
Anyone else feel that this post is just as as bad?
I don't. Just because a religion fails to match beliefs with the orthedoxy (and the bulk of Christian churches consider LDS to have substantially different beliefs) doesn't mean it's inherently more "wacko" than the orthodoxy from which it separates -- indeed, it's entirely possible for the orthodoxy to be wrong. "Unorthodox" is a descriptive word, and an accurate one. I don't see why its use in this context is in any way opposed to religious freedom.
My supplier just quoted me a T1 card and a channel bank, together, for $850.
Tell that to the Alamo Drafthouse.
Well, that's why they need to have a mostly-working solution in place already, to make it clear that their solution will work for the potential sponsor with some customization.
They want a "sponsor" to just give them money.
Sponsoring an OSS project involves quite a bit more control than what you suggest. Look at Digium sponsoring Asterisk, IBM sponsoring Eclipse, Canonical sponsoring Ubuntu: In all of these cases, the sponsor has a great deal of ability to guide the project's development into what they want it to be.
Thinking this would be any different is naiive -- on your part, and (if they think otherwise) theirs as well.
No, not give money away -- pay to have freely available software modified to do what they need it to do (as opposed to spending bigger money to buy something off-the-shelf, or still bigger money yet to develop their own purely proprietary solution).
I've been doing OSS professionally for quite a while now, and as long as the software is something that enables you to get your business done, as opposed to the entire thing you make your profit off of, it's a pretty reasonable thing. I currently work at a proprietary software shop -- but we're more than happy to use open components, and even give a few of the tools we've developed internally, so long as we don't threaten the secret sauce. (Yes, I do OSS professionally, but I work at a proprietary software shop. Those aren't mutually exclusive; think about it).
Ticket management software is a cost center that can be reduced, not a core-competency item that makes people decide to go to one theater rather than another. As such, it's a reasonable candidate.
So then, both the developers and the venture capitalists are in it in order to lower the operating costs of movie theaters?
Of course not. I'm going to make a few guesses here which are in line with my experience:
The initial developers probably have their own vested interest of some sort -- either they're employed by a theater, or volunteer for a community-run one, or something of that sort. Having generated some useful software out of self-interest (and quite possibly with some baseline of funding which is no longer available), they're now looking for a way to get paid to continue working on what they consider to be an interesting project. So... how can they motivate some organization to fund their project? Arguing that they can reduce said organization's operating costs is one pretty strong motivation.
Get it?