How long before they are free with a $20 or $30 a month charge?
With a $200 to $300 wholesale cost, they can make their money back in a year on a unit, not counting what they make with targetted advertising on their captive audience.
Lock in grandma to a 2 year contract and you're set!
Bundle in a few Tivo-esque features... they are already set for VOIP... might be the killer app(s) for the grandparents!
does anybody have a better idea to help their neighbors?
The real question is why you feel the need to "help your neighbors"? What's the point?
It's not your job and they didn't ask you to. An open AP is not hurting anyone.
If you have an innate need to contribute to society, pick up trash by the side of the road... visit old folks in a retirement home... give blood... contribute to a SourceForge project.
But don't hack your neighbors to "teach them a lesson".
I knew this little old lady who didn't lock one of her windows, so I snuck in and changed all her locks and added a vulgar greeting to her answering machine! Boy was that funny!
Now she locks her windows, has new locks and generally has better security at her house! Mission accomplished! I'm glad I took the time to teach that stupid old lady a lesson.
The guy built a client server system for his doorbell! And then, big surprise, it didn't work.
If this makes sense to you, you might like RUP... otherwise, try something simpler!:)
I've told this story from time to time in my public lectures and I've decided to retire this tale, but before I do, I'll preserve it for reference in my blog.
My wife and I designed and built a home a few years ago, and being an alpha geek I just had to fill it with all sorts of automated elements. I hired a contractor to pull the wires (he put about 5 miles of Cat 5 wires in the walls) but as CTO/CIO of the home, I installed the rest of the network. Shortly after I booted the house for the first time, we invited some friends over for dinner. They arrived at the appointed time, rang the doorbell - but we never heard it. They knocked on the door - and we didn't hear that either - so they finally called us on their cell phone, while standing at the front door.
My doorbell had crashed.
Now, doorbells have very simple use cases: you push the button, it rings a tone inside the home. However, my implementation of said doorbell was a bit more complex, and I failed my user base by having the bones of the underlying technology stick through. You see, the doorbell sends a signal to our PBX system, which I hacked to extract events (such as the doorbell being pressed). That event gets routed to an application server - running a non-Macintosh, non-Linux operating system, I might add - which has a deamon that intercepts various events (such as from the PBX, the security system, and so on) and in this case would send an event to the A/V subsystem, where a seasonally-appropriate and pleasant tone would sound through the home. Alas, I failed to use Rational's own tools (Purify in this case) and I had a memory leak in my application server. The solution was to reboot that server, which brought the doorbell back to life.
I have a very demanding customer (my wife) who really doesn't like to have my software lying around on the floor, and so she was at first annoyed and then amused at the incident. The good news is that I've ripped out the first implementation (I'm not saddled by legacy software here) and my doorbell now works as any good little doorbell should, with all the complexity hidden below the surface.
Yet another example of why the primary task of the software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity.
That's right... they are well understood by the public and the public would understand that the "Free Software" positions and would write off the fundamentalists as kooks.
If you write some good software in-house (for less than it would cost to license commercial software to do the same job) that belongs to your company and your company alone, you have a competitive advantage over your competitors - that is, they either spent MORE money than you did, or they simply do not have the software do carry out the task
You are correct. This software is ~not~ a good candidate for open source (in your manager's eyes).
Instead, pick something more generic that is of use outside of your specific industry. Then the pitch becomes "I can't complete this on my own, but we need it, and it provides no industry specific benefit to our competitors. If you let me open source it, then lots of other developers across the world will help me finish it because they need it too."
Don't pitch open source as the "right thing to do". Pitch it as a way to get free help finishing a product. That's something that makes business sense... and it's true.
There are no free alternatives to Quicken that will sync up with your bank. We download transactions and reconcile. That's the one feature that keeps a lot of people of off Linux at home.
someone's work that is done for money will always be inferior to the work of someone who does it for love
What if I love money?:)
Seriously, the two are not mutually exclusive. I love to tinker with computers and am lucky enough to get paid quite decently to do that.
It's probably true that people who love what they do (in any industry) will do a better job... would it also be true that those who can manager to get paid for doing what they love are smarter than the people who can only manage to do what they want for free?
:)
Seriously though... do both. I work for money (writing 'enslaved' software) ~and~ contribute to various open (or 'free') projects. Of course, RMS doesn't agree with that, but who cares?
This kind of attitude is rather how should I say, Arrogant.
So is making stupid judgement calls without reading the article.
From the article
People who know Solaris better than I do will tell me and other people about the great things they offer. To try to figure it out on my own would be a waste of time.
Linus doesn't know the OS or the codebase and plans to leave the analysis in the hands of the experts.
If Lycos really wants to make a dent and get some free PR, they should release the source... it would ported to Linux, embedded in a virus, and live forever!;)
I know a lot of people don't agree with the concept, but I do. The law is getting better but it hasn't handled the spam problem yet. Making the business model invalid is a great idea.
Think of it as free speech... by having everyone visit the website, it's just like having an old fasioned sit in so the company can't do business.
you think MySQL has speed benefits only because MySQL developers are so much better than all other RDBMS developers, and not because of speed hacks that put your data at risk?
Nope. I was running MySql in a non-transactional mode... and that makes all the difference.
Do you think robust RDBMS design is just dumb luck?
Do you think every program that isn't your personal favorite must be "bad"?
Slashdot Mirror
With a $200 to $300 wholesale cost, they can make their money back in a year on a unit, not counting what they make with targetted advertising on their captive audience.
Lock in grandma to a 2 year contract and you're set!
Bundle in a few Tivo-esque features... they are already set for VOIP... might be the killer app(s) for the grandparents!
The real question is why you feel the need to "help your neighbors"? What's the point?
It's not your job and they didn't ask you to. An open AP is not hurting anyone.
If you have an innate need to contribute to society, pick up trash by the side of the road... visit old folks in a retirement home... give blood... contribute to a SourceForge project.
But don't hack your neighbors to "teach them a lesson".
I knew this little old lady who didn't lock one of her windows, so I snuck in and changed all her locks and added a vulgar greeting to her answering machine! Boy was that funny!
Now she locks her windows, has new locks and generally has better security at her house! Mission accomplished! I'm glad I took the time to teach that stupid old lady a lesson.
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blo g_comments.jspa?blog=317&entry=65728
The guy built a client server system for his doorbell! And then, big surprise, it didn't work.
If this makes sense to you, you might like RUP... otherwise, try something simpler! :)
I've told this story from time to time in my public lectures and I've decided to retire this tale, but before I do, I'll preserve it for reference in my blog.
My wife and I designed and built a home a few years ago, and being an alpha geek I just had to fill it with all sorts of automated elements. I hired a contractor to pull the wires (he put about 5 miles of Cat 5 wires in the walls) but as CTO/CIO of the home, I installed the rest of the network. Shortly after I booted the house for the first time, we invited some friends over for dinner. They arrived at the appointed time, rang the doorbell - but we never heard it. They knocked on the door - and we didn't hear that either - so they finally called us on their cell phone, while standing at the front door.
My doorbell had crashed.
Now, doorbells have very simple use cases: you push the button, it rings a tone inside the home. However, my implementation of said doorbell was a bit more complex, and I failed my user base by having the bones of the underlying technology stick through. You see, the doorbell sends a signal to our PBX system, which I hacked to extract events (such as the doorbell being pressed). That event gets routed to an application server - running a non-Macintosh, non-Linux operating system, I might add - which has a deamon that intercepts various events (such as from the PBX, the security system, and so on) and in this case would send an event to the A/V subsystem, where a seasonally-appropriate and pleasant tone would sound through the home. Alas, I failed to use Rational's own tools (Purify in this case) and I had a memory leak in my application server. The solution was to reboot that server, which brought the doorbell back to life.
I have a very demanding customer (my wife) who really doesn't like to have my software lying around on the floor, and so she was at first annoyed and then amused at the incident. The good news is that I've ripped out the first implementation (I'm not saddled by legacy software here) and my doorbell now works as any good little doorbell should, with all the complexity hidden below the surface.
Yet another example of why the primary task of the software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity.
That's right... they are well understood by the public and the public would understand that the "Free Software" positions and would write off the fundamentalists as kooks.
You are correct. This software is ~not~ a good candidate for open source (in your manager's eyes).
Instead, pick something more generic that is of use outside of your specific industry. Then the pitch becomes "I can't complete this on my own, but we need it, and it provides no industry specific benefit to our competitors. If you let me open source it, then lots of other developers across the world will help me finish it because they need it too."
Don't pitch open source as the "right thing to do". Pitch it as a way to get free help finishing a product. That's something that makes business sense... and it's true.
There are no free alternatives to Quicken that will sync up with your bank. We download transactions and reconcile. That's the one feature that keeps a lot of people of off Linux at home.
What if I love money? :)
Seriously, the two are not mutually exclusive. I love to tinker with computers and am lucky enough to get paid quite decently to do that.
It's probably true that people who love what they do (in any industry) will do a better job... would it also be true that those who can manager to get paid for doing what they love are smarter than the people who can only manage to do what they want for free?
Seriously though... do both. I work for money (writing 'enslaved' software) ~and~ contribute to various open (or 'free') projects. Of course, RMS doesn't agree with that, but who cares?
Have you ever tried to find anything on /. with the built in search engine?
Heck, for all we know, the editors ~are~ looking, but the search engine tells them it's a new article!
It's a joke! Laugh! :)
Exactly! Before this happens, IBM will start shipping the Apache web server and Sun will release the Solaris source code!
Big corporations will never see the benefit to letting other eyes look over source code or bio research!
Oh, wait...
Anyone know why the AF would come up with their own system? Is it just to be able to backdoor it for security reasons?
That blasted Wesley Crusher has been screwing around with his school projects again!
I agree completely. It's also ridiculous to say that you didn't steal something that you did steal.
That's like saying that you ~could~ run Linux, but you pirated Windows... but it's okay because you would have never actually bought Windows.
So is making stupid judgement calls without reading the article.
From the article
People who know Solaris better than I do will tell me and other people about the great things they offer. To try to figure it out on my own would be a waste of time.
Linus doesn't know the OS or the codebase and plans to leave the analysis in the hands of the experts.
He's busy. There's nothing arrogant about that.
And that pretty much sums it up doesn't it?
Kewl!
The Sultan problem rephrased: How many people can I screw and discard while keeping good odds of not getting stuck with someone just like myself?
Seriously though, if they can spin off another group, it can be parallel PARC-ing while the other group drives on.
(Ducking and running now)
You underestimate the power that is Intel!
They'll hire more blue guys and release the P4-Zooper Speedy edition (a P4 with a cool sticker on it) and win it on marketing alone.
I'm only half joking, sadly enough...
A list of new and innovative ideas hidden behind a required login.
Isn't that what companies do with Microsoft when MS prices are too high? ;)
I'm not gonna touch that one... but I wouldn't smoke it if I were you. ;)
I know a lot of people don't agree with the concept, but I do. The law is getting better but it hasn't handled the spam problem yet. Making the business model invalid is a great idea.
Think of it as free speech... by having everyone visit the website, it's just like having an old fasioned sit in so the company can't do business.
Nope. I was running MySql in a non-transactional mode... and that makes all the difference.
Do you think robust RDBMS design is just dumb luck?
Do you think every program that isn't your personal favorite must be "bad"?
It's funny ~and~ sad at the same time! Someone will end up doing this just to get their name on the Wiki!