In that case, though, who would ever want to work on personal projects there? I know I certainly wouldn't. I value my own ideas (rightly so or not) too much to throw them away for the benefit of some mega-corporation that already owns too much of my time. I make it a strict point never to work on personal things at work, and never to sign contracts giving away my off-time IP.
Maybe there is a reason to want to work on personal stuff for a corporation, but I honestly can't think of one offhand.
Then again, maybe Google is letting their engineers keep their IP, in which case this rant is pointless:-)
You may have heard about 20% time, in which Google engineers are encouraged to work on a personal project one day out of the week. Open Source interests a lot of Google developers, so we thought taking advantage of this program was a good way to prepare code for release and maintenance.
People at Google keep saying that they get ~20% time to work on personal projects. I'm curious about a couple of things here.
Does this 20% time come out of the normal 40hr/week thing (and for that matter, do these engineers work 40/week or are they doing 100/week and get 20% time out of that)?
Does Google or the developer own intellectual property developed out of that 20% time?
Seems to me that more people should learn to use alt-F4 (or ctl-F4 if you're using Firefox tabs):-P
This is like giving your wallet to a beggar so he'll stop bugging you on the street. I find it very...hard....to....feeel....*gasp*...sympathy... *wheeze*
Er right, I meant to say that clearly. You may get less people, but you'll (hopefully) have less hassles and a more positive experience since those people will not feel like you're forcing them to pay.:-)
For what it's worth, some people just write because they like to.
Me, for instance.
I won't complain if I ever get a publishing deal, but my works will remain available for free regardless. I write in my spare time because I enjoy it. My writing may or may not be in the same league as the aforementioned authors, but in any case a lack of money has not stopped me from completing one novel and working on another.
I'm sure other people will handle this question better, but my two cents:
A lot of times (at least in the beginning) the developer and support personnel are one and the same person. So typically someone will do an OSS project in their spare time and then once it's complete they do the customizations/support for extra cash.
Also, even if you charge the same, keep in mind that the difference is that the product is usually still available (GPL or whatever) for people to use. That means that people who don't want to shell out cash won't. That's a good thing!
For support/development, you might charge more, but you'll get paid by people who are actually WILLING to pay the fees. That can be a big advantage; less penny-pinchers (doing support for those types can be a nightmare!) and hopefully a generally more positive experience overall. Plus, if someone wants an extension and is too cheap, maybe the experience of trying to extend your project themselves might make them more appreciative and loosen the wallets a bit.
And, of course, if your product sucks, no one will want to buy it/extend it/support it anyway. But that's the nature of the game.:-)
Right, but at least he gave a hass-alf attempt to answer the question, rather than gesticulating wildly and mumbling vague threatening-sounding phrases.
I found it difficult to take him seriously after the first question:
What constitutes violence in video games?
There's no real debate over that. Any M-rated game has violence levels unacceptable and definitionally harmful to anyone under 17. The industry will rue the day it accepted this labeled scheme.
Again and again throughout the interview, he basically takes an elitist stance that says "if you don't agree with me you're stupid." Here, if you don't agree that "M-rated means violent" then the implication is that you must be too dumb to accept what "everybody" thinks.
It would have been interesting to see him actually answer the question, as Tim Buckley did. Compare and contrast:
What constitutes violence in video games?
The same things that constitute violence in real life constitute violence in video games. Blood and gore, for instance...
I know some people run warez/kiddie porn/whatever on it, but if the bandwidth is capped at a certain amount, within what you'd get with regular service, why don't they allow these to be ran? My website doesn't get a lot of traffic currently, maybe 200MB/month and that's (relatively speaking) a lot - I know many people with plain-text websites who get much less. It's not like people will easily find your site anyway because odds are you're located by dynamic IP address without a FQDN. I really don't understand what the ISP has to lose here:-)
Leet words possibly indicating illegal activity:...
"pwn": A typo-deliberate version of own, a slang term that means to dominate. This could also be spelled "0\/\/n3d" or "pwn3d," among other variations. Online video game bullies or "griefers" often use this term.
Most likely he was motivated by sheer boredom. There isn't a lot to do in Louisiana if you actually live there (as opposed to being a tourist). I speak from sad experience.:-P
If I play at all (as if I have time!), I'll probably only play on the outside-market-free server. I prefer to match skill with skill, and as this game is turn-based and you have a fixed number of turns in a day it's not so vulnerable to time abuse.:-)
Precisely.
Again, as long as everyone is going in knowing that a secondary market is acceptable within the TOS it's fine. I have no problems with that and am even in the process of coding a multiplayer game myself, wherein I intend to offer both a regular server and one in which a secondary market is encouraged. I have no problems with the market itself, but people shouldn't be cheating in servers which explicitly disallow it.:-)
I wasn't talking about cost of entry (there is a cost to buy a Monopoly board and it is greater than zero) and you know it. I have no problems with everyone paying the same basic fee to play.
The problem comes in when people with greater financial resources OUT of the game get to trump people inside the game. I don't really care if some loser spends 25 hours playing the game to get that mega item; more power to him, I have better things to do with my life. However, I don't really consider it fair that Joe Rich Kid who doesn't work gets to buy his items and go around being an ass to the newbies who played the game without resorting to a secondary (and usually against the rules of the game) market.
Again, that whole "everyone is cheating" thing is a nice attempt to distract from the real issue here, but then you don't really have anything useful to add in your post so I'm not particularly surprised that you had to invent something.
If you actually read my post carefully, I have no problems with secondary markets for those people who want to play with them, so long as there is another server where everyone pays the same base entry price to play and the secondary markets are disallowed. That way, Sam Highschool Kid who worked at minimum wage for 10 hours to play the damn game isn't stuck getting raped by the aforementioned Joe Rich Kid who just bought his way to the top.
I'm not even sure why I bothered to explain this. If you don't get it, try reading again. Otherwise, you might want to 'educate yourself' by taking some more reading comprehension lessons.
Let us take for example you invite your friend and myself to your house to play Monopoly . I land on park place and buy it. Your friend then lands on Boardwalk. I offer your friend 5 real life dollars to sell Boardwalk to me, and he does. I now have an in game advantage. Does this behavior undermine the spirit of the game?
PR MOUTHPIECE: I THINK YOU'RE REACHING A BIT WITH THIS ANALOGY. THE SECONDARY MARKET FOR MOG IS A YOUNG PHENOMENON AND ALWAYS EVOLVING, WHICH LEAVES IT OPEN TO A LOT OF DEBATE AND DISCUSSION. HOWEVER, YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT BLATANT CHEATING, WHICH IS NOT WHAT THE SECONDARY MARKET IS ABOUT, IN A GAME THAT IN NO WAY MIRRORS AN MOG. WE COULD GO ROUND AND ROUND ON THIS BUT I THINK STEVE HAS STATED HIS THOUGHTS PRETTY CLEARLY.
Am I the only one who doesn't see a difference between paying $5 for Boardwalk and $5 for that +5 Mega Item of Doom to complete my Doom Set of Items?
I think that it's cheating, and I also think the PR person knows it. The only way this would be fair is if it was allowed only on servers where players would know going in that it was being done.
I suppose the fact that IE has all sorts of nice direct access to the Windows code with god-knows-what tricks embedded to speed it up helps. Firefox is bound by what any non-MS program can do with the API.
That is not to say that I find Firefox slower - but thinking about it, I believe the Firefox interface (especially tabs and yes I know it was Opera first(?)) speeds _me_ up. So my perception is that using Firefox is generally faster than using Internet Explorer, even though it may be in actuality slower.
I run a Debian system and haven't had to make too many patches. The ones I've made tended to be around things that aren't really core OS stuff, like patching my media player or some other random additional package that I've added.
Granted, MS makes a media player, but do these counts include only the actual OS, or everything? I'm just wondering if Linux gets bashed because the non-core packages are included in the patch count, while MS gets to update mainly core stuff and comes out looking better.
Thoughts?
The second part of my post addressed that. Banks typically flag unusual transactions, and you'd think that if that particular bank had EVER flagged ANY sort of "unusual activity" for any account whatsoever that they'd have set themselves up for some responsibility to ensure that transactions were valid. Maybe the bank didn't, and certainly the guy was rather stupid, but I don't think the bank can be seen as entirely blameless.
It seems to me that by allowing a compromised system into their network, the bank can't really claim that it is "not responsible for the loss because no one hacked into its system to initiate the wire transfer." I mean, from everything I've ever read about hacking, 99% of the time compromised middleman systems are used to do the hack, which is exactly what this appears to be to me. The only difference is that this hack attacked a more exposed portion of the network (the customer's system) first.
Of course, the bank is probably still going to win on this, but that excuse is BS. While I agree that Mr. Lopez should've been running a virus scanner, you'd think that they would flag transactions to Latvia; after all, my bank has prevented me from taking out cash at an ATM for far more trivial amounts just because it was an "unusual transaction." I'd imagine that $90K to Latvia probably qualifies as an unusual transaction.:-P
(Unless, of course, Mr. Lopez is really an illegal arms trader or something.)
I would respectfully disagree with that. It's both controlled growth AND a form of viral marketing; I don't think half as many people would have checked out Gmail if they wouldn't have been excluded from doing so. As long as this Rojo thing is even faintly interesting, people will be talking about it and the exclusionary membership will simply serve to whet the interests of those who are (however temporarily) excluded. Granted, a lot of those people will probably check it out and never go back again - but then, a lot of people I know have done that with Gmail as well.
It's a bit like setting up a giant bag-o-toys on a playground and telling kids that they can only dip their hand in the bag if some other kid invites them. Something about human nature makes you want to participate dammit! You don't want to be the only one left out, even if the toys suck.
Once you get up to a high speed, be sure to press all pedals at once - that will make you go even faster. In addition, you need to turn the wheel really fast and hard any time another vehicle approaches in the opposite lane. This will scare away any crash demons that might try to take over your car.
Slashdot Mirror
That's my suspicion as well.
In that case, though, who would ever want to work on personal projects there? I know I certainly wouldn't. I value my own ideas (rightly so or not) too much to throw them away for the benefit of some mega-corporation that already owns too much of my time. I make it a strict point never to work on personal things at work, and never to sign contracts giving away my off-time IP.
Maybe there is a reason to want to work on personal stuff for a corporation, but I honestly can't think of one offhand.
Then again, maybe Google is letting their engineers keep their IP, in which case this rant is pointless:-)
From the FAQ:
People at Google keep saying that they get ~20% time to work on personal projects. I'm curious about a couple of things here.
Except they don't know how to spell "name" and "favourite colour." :-D
"What...is your login..."
"What...is your password?"
Seems to me that more people should learn to use alt-F4 (or ctl-F4 if you're using Firefox tabs) :-P
. *wheeze*
This is like giving your wallet to a beggar so he'll stop bugging you on the street. I find it very...hard....to....feeel....*gasp*...sympathy..
Er right, I meant to say that clearly. You may get less people, but you'll (hopefully) have less hassles and a more positive experience since those people will not feel like you're forcing them to pay.:-)
For what it's worth, some people just write because they like to.
Me, for instance.
I won't complain if I ever get a publishing deal, but my works will remain available for free regardless. I write in my spare time because I enjoy it. My writing may or may not be in the same league as the aforementioned authors, but in any case a lack of money has not stopped me from completing one novel and working on another.
I'm sure other people will handle this question better, but my two cents:
A lot of times (at least in the beginning) the developer and support personnel are one and the same person. So typically someone will do an OSS project in their spare time and then once it's complete they do the customizations/support for extra cash.
Also, even if you charge the same, keep in mind that the difference is that the product is usually still available (GPL or whatever) for people to use. That means that people who don't want to shell out cash won't. That's a good thing!
For support/development, you might charge more, but you'll get paid by people who are actually WILLING to pay the fees. That can be a big advantage; less penny-pinchers (doing support for those types can be a nightmare!) and hopefully a generally more positive experience overall. Plus, if someone wants an extension and is too cheap, maybe the experience of trying to extend your project themselves might make them more appreciative and loosen the wallets a bit.
And, of course, if your product sucks, no one will want to buy it/extend it/support it anyway. But that's the nature of the game.:-)
All conjecture, but I think it makes sense:-)
Right, but at least he gave a hass-alf attempt to answer the question, rather than gesticulating wildly and mumbling vague threatening-sounding phrases.
Right, but that shouldn't (theoretically) be invoked to stop me from running an Apache server on my Debian-based laptop.:-P
:-(
Yeah, yeah, I know...in an ideal world.
I found it difficult to take him seriously after the first question:
Again and again throughout the interview, he basically takes an elitist stance that says "if you don't agree with me you're stupid." Here, if you don't agree that "M-rated means violent" then the implication is that you must be too dumb to accept what "everybody" thinks.
It would have been interesting to see him actually answer the question, as Tim Buckley did. Compare and contrast:
I know some people run warez/kiddie porn/whatever on it, but if the bandwidth is capped at a certain amount, within what you'd get with regular service, why don't they allow these to be ran? My website doesn't get a lot of traffic currently, maybe 200MB/month and that's (relatively speaking) a lot - I know many people with plain-text websites who get much less. It's not like people will easily find your site anyway because odds are you're located by dynamic IP address without a FQDN. I really don't understand what the ISP has to lose here:-)
Just curious. One is a lot more impressive than the other.:-P
From the article:
The ??AA are on their way to lock you up, buddy.
Most likely he was motivated by sheer boredom. There isn't a lot to do in Louisiana if you actually live there (as opposed to being a tourist). I speak from sad experience.:-P
If I play at all (as if I have time!), I'll probably only play on the outside-market-free server. I prefer to match skill with skill, and as this game is turn-based and you have a fixed number of turns in a day it's not so vulnerable to time abuse.:-)
Precisely. Again, as long as everyone is going in knowing that a secondary market is acceptable within the TOS it's fine. I have no problems with that and am even in the process of coding a multiplayer game myself, wherein I intend to offer both a regular server and one in which a secondary market is encouraged. I have no problems with the market itself, but people shouldn't be cheating in servers which explicitly disallow it.:-)
Nice try.
I wasn't talking about cost of entry (there is a cost to buy a Monopoly board and it is greater than zero) and you know it. I have no problems with everyone paying the same basic fee to play.
The problem comes in when people with greater financial resources OUT of the game get to trump people inside the game. I don't really care if some loser spends 25 hours playing the game to get that mega item; more power to him, I have better things to do with my life. However, I don't really consider it fair that Joe Rich Kid who doesn't work gets to buy his items and go around being an ass to the newbies who played the game without resorting to a secondary (and usually against the rules of the game) market.
Again, that whole "everyone is cheating" thing is a nice attempt to distract from the real issue here, but then you don't really have anything useful to add in your post so I'm not particularly surprised that you had to invent something.
If you actually read my post carefully, I have no problems with secondary markets for those people who want to play with them, so long as there is another server where everyone pays the same base entry price to play and the secondary markets are disallowed. That way, Sam Highschool Kid who worked at minimum wage for 10 hours to play the damn game isn't stuck getting raped by the aforementioned Joe Rich Kid who just bought his way to the top.
I'm not even sure why I bothered to explain this. If you don't get it, try reading again. Otherwise, you might want to 'educate yourself' by taking some more reading comprehension lessons.
Am I the only one who doesn't see a difference between paying $5 for Boardwalk and $5 for that +5 Mega Item of Doom to complete my Doom Set of Items?
I think that it's cheating, and I also think the PR person knows it. The only way this would be fair is if it was allowed only on servers where players would know going in that it was being done.
I suppose the fact that IE has all sorts of nice direct access to the Windows code with god-knows-what tricks embedded to speed it up helps. Firefox is bound by what any non-MS program can do with the API.
That is not to say that I find Firefox slower - but thinking about it, I believe the Firefox interface (especially tabs and yes I know it was Opera first(?)) speeds _me_ up. So my perception is that using Firefox is generally faster than using Internet Explorer, even though it may be in actuality slower.
Really impressive work by that tester tho.:-)
I run a Debian system and haven't had to make too many patches. The ones I've made tended to be around things that aren't really core OS stuff, like patching my media player or some other random additional package that I've added. Granted, MS makes a media player, but do these counts include only the actual OS, or everything? I'm just wondering if Linux gets bashed because the non-core packages are included in the patch count, while MS gets to update mainly core stuff and comes out looking better. Thoughts?
I did, and nearly got murdered.;-)
The second part of my post addressed that. Banks typically flag unusual transactions, and you'd think that if that particular bank had EVER flagged ANY sort of "unusual activity" for any account whatsoever that they'd have set themselves up for some responsibility to ensure that transactions were valid. Maybe the bank didn't, and certainly the guy was rather stupid, but I don't think the bank can be seen as entirely blameless.
It seems to me that by allowing a compromised system into their network, the bank can't really claim that it is "not responsible for the loss because no one hacked into its system to initiate the wire transfer." I mean, from everything I've ever read about hacking, 99% of the time compromised middleman systems are used to do the hack, which is exactly what this appears to be to me. The only difference is that this hack attacked a more exposed portion of the network (the customer's system) first.
:-P
Of course, the bank is probably still going to win on this, but that excuse is BS. While I agree that Mr. Lopez should've been running a virus scanner, you'd think that they would flag transactions to Latvia; after all, my bank has prevented me from taking out cash at an ATM for far more trivial amounts just because it was an "unusual transaction." I'd imagine that $90K to Latvia probably qualifies as an unusual transaction.
(Unless, of course, Mr. Lopez is really an illegal arms trader or something.)
I would respectfully disagree with that. It's both controlled growth AND a form of viral marketing; I don't think half as many people would have checked out Gmail if they wouldn't have been excluded from doing so. As long as this Rojo thing is even faintly interesting, people will be talking about it and the exclusionary membership will simply serve to whet the interests of those who are (however temporarily) excluded. Granted, a lot of those people will probably check it out and never go back again - but then, a lot of people I know have done that with Gmail as well.
:-)
It's a bit like setting up a giant bag-o-toys on a playground and telling kids that they can only dip their hand in the bag if some other kid invites them. Something about human nature makes you want to participate dammit! You don't want to be the only one left out, even if the toys suck.
Just my $0.02
Once you get up to a high speed, be sure to press all pedals at once - that will make you go even faster. In addition, you need to turn the wheel really fast and hard any time another vehicle approaches in the opposite lane. This will scare away any crash demons that might try to take over your car.
Hope this helps!