He doesn't attack OSS/FS. He attacks the lack of a definitive release schedule. Mozilla development is a failure, no matter how good the software is when finally released.
Other people have slammed Mozilla for taking so long and, more importantly, adding so many unnecessary bells and whistles (the same thing we slam M$ for.) If they had planned an IE-3.0 equivalent browser by the end of year 1, and an IE-4.0ish for year 2, They'd have released an IE-5.5 equiv browser by now and IE might not have won the browser war, which is the real reason that the Mozilla project has failed.
The point Joel is trying to make is that you need to build in increments. Get a working version of your vision out there. The problem a lot of internet companies make, besides mismanaging their venture capital, is that the first version tries to do too much. If you have a novel idea, get the vision working and get it out there. Generate interest. The faster you generate interest the easier it will be to grow.
And to respond to another post, Mozilla could be considered the 3rd rewrite, if you include the point where Mozilla started over (maybe only on a couple parts but it seemed pretty involved at the time).
Re:Hope this works with Out-of-Print books...
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 1
The problem becomes:
Us: My out of print book doesn't have a digital version for print on demand.
Them: I'm sorry, we are generating digital versions for in demand books and your request isn't in demand.
So the books you desire will remain unobtainable until someone gets around to it unless it is a highly valued book. The hardest part about great technology like this is "the man" still controls the access. It will work great for books that already have a digital version even if the version isn't the appropriate one for the printer.
The problem is that the common man does not have the wherewithal to fight a corporation. It takes a special person, both financially and in character, to endure the tons of crap that the corporation will throw at you.
I don't know you, but I know I wouldn't fight over something so trivial. It isn't like there is anything to lose or gain, and they do own the trademark to Illustrator (why this was allowed, I don't know. Money talks...) So on the surface it looks like a good fight, but unless it is common to have trademarks reversed, it becomes hopeless.
IANAL, but a trademark is usually used in the marketing domain. As I recall, KIllustrator is not being sold and it isn't being marketed (though it is marketed by KDE/Linux as in "includes KIllustrator!") so there should be no confusion. There may, however, be confusion because of related products like "KIllustrator for Dummies". Then things would be officially confusing, but the average computer person would be able to figure it out because of the red circle surrounding the adobe logo with a slash through it.
If they started selling KIllustrator or even giving it away as a free product at computer stores, I could see a problem, but unless a trademark extends to all manner of life, this shouldn't be upheld.
That said, "KIllustrator" is definitely intended to remind you about Adobe's version from a feature POV.
Even though it is a frivilous lawsuit, a name change is the easiest way out. Lacking a financial backer, the common man cannot fight a corporation.
How is this interesting, as you recommend no alternatives?
And I like Google's Deja much better than the mess that Deja made of the original dejanews. I like being able to pull back a complete thread quickly. It would be nice if there were parent relationships, but I'll take the speed increase and just scan.
That said, I'd love to see how google intends to make investor-friendly (i.e. ever increasing profits) money. I still don't see how they can offset the IT costs with the minimal advertising they have. The deal with Yahoo and others can't be worth that much, can it?
I would suggest that, as a company and not knowing how much in debt they are, they would be better off not going public. If their sole goal is for the owners and investors to quickly make back their investments before the lure of the internet completely bottoms out, our beloved google will be dead within a year, or warped into a form we don't recognize or like.
sure, but this also means that people don't put a price on their time. to configure a system like you describe involves reading HOWTOs, FAQs, and installing stuff that you might not already have. and blowing a week of time testing, etc. needless to say, my mom isn't going to do this.
theoretically, 0knowledge can do all this with one install, magically. that's worth some $.
Hmmm, I always thought paying for products was something people did to avoid thinking/learning/reading?
The real question is how did your wife *not* get custody of your step-daughter? That, in and of itself, is a bigger mystery than preventing her from surfing porn or ESR gun propaganda.
(Of course, it could be your step daughter from a previous marriage, but % are probably against her visiting that frequently...)
So how many North Americans have DVD players that play other regions?
I bought one just so I could watch a handful of BBC movies that I didn't want on VHS. Luckily I also have a world VCR so I could decode the damn PAL encoding...
What incentive does the BBC or any other non-US based production have in using the regioning system? Outside the MPAA, I would bet there are very few large, influential production companies so these non-region 1 companies have no real motive to prevent another region's people from buying their product. All these companies need to do is release their product on a double-sided DVD so that they can encode for PAL and NTSC.
I mean, really, what else do Americans really do besides consume? We've been training to be consumers for 100 years.
My best guess is that there is some law in the US about importing AV media without first paying the MPAA or some other body of fasci^H^H^H^H^Hcapitalists.
They should probably enforce companies already in possession of a current TLD to register under their full name, and not their trademark name.
E.G. Apple has apple.com => applecomputer.biz
This way apple records could get apple.biz.
There is no fair way to dispute between apple computer and apple records except on a first come first serve basis, which probably isn't very fair at all unless there is a centralized register. (There may be a centralized directory, but register.com and verisign and the countless others will have to post your request to that directory and who knows how corrupt that process is...)
Riiiiight. I don't think they'll dare cut off support for their business customers, it's one of their strong points, and they know it. NT is up to... SP6?
Well, SP6 was released in Oct of 1999 (as reported by the Downloads page of MS' site). I'm sure there have been problems since then...
And their strong point hasn't been support for their business customers unless they aren't making fixes for them publicly available. In general, SP's have historically broken things because they don't thoroughly test them. MS even tells you to not install it unless you absolutely have to.
While my examples may have originated in Academia, I don't think it matters. The people who have helped develop these projects come from all over the work spectrum and most probably aren't directly funded for these projects.
Working in academia is quite exciting. Unfortunately, academia can't compete with private sector salaries. I loved my academic job, and my boss bent over backwards to get me to the highest possible salary at the time (about 28k for my position). I had to leave just to advance my career. Of course, now I'm looking to get the best of both worlds (insert lazy link to ask slashdot article about supporting research...)
>>Furthermore, just as communism doesn't
>>encourage people to work harder or innovate
>>(which results in stagnation), so it is with
>>open source.
>What absolute rubbish. For an example, as
>mentioned in the interview, just look at KDE and
>Gnome. No innovation?? The two of them have
>certainly progressed far further than Windows
>over the past few years.
>Oh and by the way, please keep your "Capitalism
>is perfect - Commies are bad" philosophy out of
>this; it is totally irrelevant here.
Look at communism in the soviet union. It failed, in general (but so is capitalism, for that matter. I would say both failed because of the same reason: greed and disparity, but that's another topic).
But look at the Soviet space program. It was very successful. I would liken Open Source, or rather Unix, development to the soviet space program: intellectuals working on projects for the sake of country(OS) and knowledge that you helped. You may not make much money from it, but you probably enjoyed your work, which is much more important.
If you compare Unix with Windows/Mac/etc, Unix tends to have a greater amount of "freeware" whereas the other OSs are almost all shareware or payware. TeX, perl, gcc, gimp, etc... all exist because somebodies scratched their itch. For the other OSs (PalmOS seems to be the worst of the bunch these days), someone writes a fairly trivial program in a weekend and starts wanting
$20 for it, even if they wrote the program just for fun. This doesn't tend to happen in the Unix world.
I'm not against charging for software (I've purchased Textpad, WinZip and other tools I use regularly in the Win environment, as well as Palm apps such as Wordsmith et.al.) It just seems that the Unix mentality is geared towards the collective benefit of others and the other OSs are more about profit.
Disclaimer: I don't claim to be knowledgeable about the soviet space program, these are just my impressions.
This is the name of the link to take you from page n-1 to n. The last page doesn't say anything about XP being secure, so I guess we all know what to expect!
Hey, they've got a point - software patents have been issued often enough in the 1990s, and OSS has boomed nonetheless, much more than in the 80s (then again, so did the entire industry).
Depends on how you look at it.
It takes a couple of years to get a software patent and we have only recently started to see software patent enforcement.
The GIF patent is the first one I recall in the 90s. Look at the Gimp (w32 1.2), it doesn't read or write GIF files. So it seems that software patents have affected OSS since the Gimp is one of the most successful examples of OSS development. If I want to create a GIF I have to use Photoshop or another software product that is either not-free or illegal, and technically the latter should not be an option.
The 90's were also a time of extreme change in software development. It started out being a heavy C decade and now it is C++, Java, web scripting, etc. M$ started out as a relatively unimportant company and is now the big nasty (M$ was actually the good guy in the Word vs Wordperfect battle, IMHO.) There are more programmers now than ever before, churning out code faster than ever before.
There was a lot of innovation in the 90's, and the companies that patented code are only just starting to try enforcing it. If we are lucky, the US will adopt a similar stance as the UK.
I downloaded the december compile in early january and did some very basic image creation. Then when I clicked on the 'X' to close the window, it would generate a fault and crash. I'm a graphics wimp, so I didn't test it beyond this.
1.2 is recent, but 1.21 is more recent. I will admit that I'm probably confusing links and other unix-first software with gimp. Most of the time it takes some kind soul to compile the win32 version.
I doubt slashdot would run this poll, but how about:
Slashdot Banner Advertising:
a) I have clicked on/. ads.
b) I have research a product/company after viewing/clicking on an ad.
c) I have bought something from the advertising company because of (one way or another) the ad.
d) JunkBuster!
I posting this so late in the thread that it will probably never be read, but I love the sawfish dome themes (moondome and dragdome, to be exact), but kde.themes.org doesn't even have a BeOS theme.
I tried using KDE 1.1 this weekend (I have generally always used gnome), and I really like it's snappy response. Is it possible to make the minimalistic title bar in KDE 2.1?
Your library (not the Library of Congress...)doesn't have a 10th of the information that the Internet contains. Plus, most of the useful content on the internet is currently not published, so no library will even have it archived.
Try searching for at your library for solutions to uncommon/tricky IT questions (coding, admin, database, etc...). Good luck finding a decent/current resource for just about anything.
The tricky part is avoiding abuse and making all of the systems work together (good luck.) Pay pal is great, but I don't know if it would support micropayments well.
Slashdot Mirror
Naw, that would just piss the French off. Weren't they trying to grow their own meridian out of trees that could be seen from space?
He doesn't attack OSS/FS. He attacks the lack of a definitive release schedule. Mozilla development is a failure, no matter how good the software is when finally released.
Other people have slammed Mozilla for taking so long and, more importantly, adding so many unnecessary bells and whistles (the same thing we slam M$ for.) If they had planned an IE-3.0 equivalent browser by the end of year 1, and an IE-4.0ish for year 2, They'd have released an IE-5.5 equiv browser by now and IE might not have won the browser war, which is the real reason that the Mozilla project has failed.
The point Joel is trying to make is that you need to build in increments. Get a working version of your vision out there. The problem a lot of internet companies make, besides mismanaging their venture capital, is that the first version tries to do too much. If you have a novel idea, get the vision working and get it out there. Generate interest. The faster you generate interest the easier it will be to grow.
And to respond to another post, Mozilla could be considered the 3rd rewrite, if you include the point where Mozilla started over (maybe only on a couple parts but it seemed pretty involved at the time).
The problem becomes:
Us: My out of print book doesn't have a digital version for print on demand.
Them: I'm sorry, we are generating digital versions for in demand books and your request isn't in demand.
So the books you desire will remain unobtainable until someone gets around to it unless it is a highly valued book. The hardest part about great technology like this is "the man" still controls the access. It will work great for books that already have a digital version even if the version isn't the appropriate one for the printer.
The problem is that the common man does not have the wherewithal to fight a corporation. It takes a special person, both financially and in character, to endure the tons of crap that the corporation will throw at you.
I don't know you, but I know I wouldn't fight over something so trivial. It isn't like there is anything to lose or gain, and they do own the trademark to Illustrator (why this was allowed, I don't know. Money talks...) So on the surface it looks like a good fight, but unless it is common to have trademarks reversed, it becomes hopeless.
IANAL, but a trademark is usually used in the marketing domain. As I recall, KIllustrator is not being sold and it isn't being marketed (though it is marketed by KDE/Linux as in "includes KIllustrator!") so there should be no confusion. There may, however, be confusion because of related products like "KIllustrator for Dummies". Then things would be officially confusing, but the average computer person would be able to figure it out because of the red circle surrounding the adobe logo with a slash through it.
If they started selling KIllustrator or even giving it away as a free product at computer stores, I could see a problem, but unless a trademark extends to all manner of life, this shouldn't be upheld.
That said, "KIllustrator" is definitely intended to remind you about Adobe's version from a feature POV.
Even though it is a frivilous lawsuit, a name change is the easiest way out. Lacking a financial backer, the common man cannot fight a corporation.
How is this interesting, as you recommend no alternatives?
And I like Google's Deja much better than the mess that Deja made of the original dejanews. I like being able to pull back a complete thread quickly. It would be nice if there were parent relationships, but I'll take the speed increase and just scan.
That said, I'd love to see how google intends to make investor-friendly (i.e. ever increasing profits) money. I still don't see how they can offset the IT costs with the minimal advertising they have. The deal with Yahoo and others can't be worth that much, can it?
I would suggest that, as a company and not knowing how much in debt they are, they would be better off not going public. If their sole goal is for the owners and investors to quickly make back their investments before the lure of the internet completely bottoms out, our beloved google will be dead within a year, or warped into a form we don't recognize or like.
sure, but this also means that people don't put a price on their time. to configure a system like you describe involves reading HOWTOs, FAQs, and installing stuff that you might not already have. and blowing a week of time testing, etc. needless to say, my mom isn't going to do this.
theoretically, 0knowledge can do all this with one install, magically. that's worth some $.
Hmmm, I always thought paying for products was something people did to avoid thinking/learning/reading?
The real question is how did your wife *not* get custody of your step-daughter? That, in and of itself, is a bigger mystery than preventing her from surfing porn or ESR gun propaganda.
(Of course, it could be your step daughter from a previous marriage, but % are probably against her visiting that frequently...)
So how many North Americans have DVD players that play other regions?
I bought one just so I could watch a handful of BBC movies that I didn't want on VHS. Luckily I also have a world VCR so I could decode the damn PAL encoding...
What incentive does the BBC or any other non-US based production have in using the regioning system? Outside the MPAA, I would bet there are very few large, influential production companies so these non-region 1 companies have no real motive to prevent another region's people from buying their product. All these companies need to do is release their product on a double-sided DVD so that they can encode for PAL and NTSC.
I mean, really, what else do Americans really do besides consume? We've been training to be consumers for 100 years.
My best guess is that there is some law in the US about importing AV media without first paying the MPAA or some other body of fasci^H^H^H^H^Hcapitalists.
They should probably enforce companies already in possession of a current TLD to register under their full name, and not their trademark name.
E.G. Apple has apple.com => applecomputer.biz
This way apple records could get apple.biz.
There is no fair way to dispute between apple computer and apple records except on a first come first serve basis, which probably isn't very fair at all unless there is a centralized register. (There may be a centralized directory, but register.com and verisign and the countless others will have to post your request to that directory and who knows how corrupt that process is...)
Riiiiight. I don't think they'll dare cut off support for their business customers, it's one of their strong points, and they know it. NT is up to... SP6?
Well, SP6 was released in Oct of 1999 (as reported by the Downloads page of MS' site). I'm sure there have been problems since then...
And their strong point hasn't been support for their business customers unless they aren't making fixes for them publicly available. In general, SP's have historically broken things because they don't thoroughly test them. MS even tells you to not install it unless you absolutely have to.
Rather, "Define a new comment indicator"...
2) Redefine a new comment indicator.
/* */
//
/** **/
shell: #
C:
C++:
asp: '
curl: ||
SQL: -- (some, not all?)
Javadoc:
lisp: ;
vim: "
Forth: \
These are just the ones I know...
While my examples may have originated in Academia, I don't think it matters. The people who have helped develop these projects come from all over the work spectrum and most probably aren't directly funded for these projects.
Working in academia is quite exciting. Unfortunately, academia can't compete with private sector salaries. I loved my academic job, and my boss bent over backwards to get me to the highest possible salary at the time (about 28k for my position). I had to leave just to advance my career. Of course, now I'm looking to get the best of both worlds (insert lazy link to ask slashdot article about supporting research...)
>>Furthermore, just as communism doesn't
>>encourage people to work harder or innovate
>>(which results in stagnation), so it is with
>>open source.
>What absolute rubbish. For an example, as
>mentioned in the interview, just look at KDE and
>Gnome. No innovation?? The two of them have
>certainly progressed far further than Windows
>over the past few years.
>Oh and by the way, please keep your "Capitalism
>is perfect - Commies are bad" philosophy out of
>this; it is totally irrelevant here.
Look at communism in the soviet union. It failed, in general (but so is capitalism, for that matter. I would say both failed because of the same reason: greed and disparity, but that's another topic).
But look at the Soviet space program. It was very successful. I would liken Open Source, or rather Unix, development to the soviet space program: intellectuals working on projects for the sake of country(OS) and knowledge that you helped. You may not make much money from it, but you probably enjoyed your work, which is much more important.
If you compare Unix with Windows/Mac/etc, Unix tends to have a greater amount of "freeware" whereas the other OSs are almost all shareware or payware. TeX, perl, gcc, gimp, etc... all exist because somebodies scratched their itch. For the other OSs (PalmOS seems to be the worst of the bunch these days), someone writes a fairly trivial program in a weekend and starts wanting
$20 for it, even if they wrote the program just for fun. This doesn't tend to happen in the Unix world.
I'm not against charging for software (I've purchased Textpad, WinZip and other tools I use regularly in the Win environment, as well as Palm apps such as Wordsmith et.al.) It just seems that the Unix mentality is geared towards the collective benefit of others and the other OSs are more about profit.
Disclaimer: I don't claim to be knowledgeable about the soviet space program, these are just my impressions.
This is the name of the link to take you from page n-1 to n. The last page doesn't say anything about XP being secure, so I guess we all know what to expect!
The USA is a Republic, we only practice Democracy.
Except in Florida.
Hey, they've got a point - software patents have been issued often enough in the 1990s, and OSS has boomed nonetheless, much more than in the 80s (then again, so did the entire industry).
Depends on how you look at it.
It takes a couple of years to get a software patent and we have only recently started to see software patent enforcement.
The GIF patent is the first one I recall in the 90s. Look at the Gimp (w32 1.2), it doesn't read or write GIF files. So it seems that software patents have affected OSS since the Gimp is one of the most successful examples of OSS development. If I want to create a GIF I have to use Photoshop or another software product that is either not-free or illegal, and technically the latter should not be an option.
The 90's were also a time of extreme change in software development. It started out being a heavy C decade and now it is C++, Java, web scripting, etc. M$ started out as a relatively unimportant company and is now the big nasty (M$ was actually the good guy in the Word vs Wordperfect battle, IMHO.) There are more programmers now than ever before, churning out code faster than ever before.
There was a lot of innovation in the 90's, and the companies that patented code are only just starting to try enforcing it. If we are lucky, the US will adopt a similar stance as the UK.
I'm from Va and I sent him a "thanks for having a clue" email after the last slashdot article where he was mentioned and reading some of his bills.
I received a very nice email back. It seemed personalized or a very good form letter. It might have been a henchman that wrote it, though.
Anyway, this was during the end of the campaign and I wasn't in his district, and the reply was fairly quick.
Unfortunately, I can't find where I saved it...
I downloaded the december compile in early january and did some very basic image creation. Then when I clicked on the 'X' to close the window, it would generate a fault and crash. I'm a graphics wimp, so I didn't test it beyond this.
1.2 is recent, but 1.21 is more recent. I will admit that I'm probably confusing links and other unix-first software with gimp. Most of the time it takes some kind soul to compile the win32 version.
I doubt slashdot would run this poll, but how about:
/. ads.
Slashdot Banner Advertising:
a) I have clicked on
b) I have research a product/company after viewing/clicking on an ad.
c) I have bought something from the advertising company because of (one way or another) the ad.
d) JunkBuster!
But it is unstable and less frequently updated.
You mean like empeg?
I posting this so late in the thread that it will probably never be read, but I love the sawfish dome themes (moondome and dragdome, to be exact), but kde.themes.org doesn't even have a BeOS theme.
I tried using KDE 1.1 this weekend (I have generally always used gnome), and I really like it's snappy response. Is it possible to make the minimalistic title bar in KDE 2.1?
Your library (not the Library of Congress...)doesn't have a 10th of the information that the Internet contains. Plus, most of the useful content on the internet is currently not published, so no library will even have it archived.
Try searching for at your library for solutions to uncommon/tricky IT questions (coding, admin, database, etc...). Good luck finding a decent/current resource for just about anything.
The tricky part is avoiding abuse and making all of the systems work together (good luck.) Pay pal is great, but I don't know if it would support micropayments well.