I don't think it's entirely zero-profit for backers. If the project succeeds then I get a thing that I wanted that might not otherwise have been created.
Or you could have waited for the item to be available in stores and bought it, risk-free. Let other people take the risk.
Paying with equity would be illegal, and thus not such a great idea.
Perhaps, but profit sharing is common. For example, 30% of mobile app sales go to Apple or Google. In a similar fashion, 1% sales or 5% profit of all future sales of the kickstarted product should go to the backers. Without their collective risk-taking and investment in the creator's idea, there is going to be no product to be sold.
If you don't charge anything to the creators, even rich companies like Microsoft and Apple are going put up kickstarter pages for any product remotely risky. That is, making the backers pay (like in TFA case), for any risk involved.
And FYI, Kickstarter is not a donation platform as evidenced by the dozens of angry posts about "we want full refund."
Don't Kickstart something that seems like a good idea but has never been done before.
Terrible advice. The whole point of kickstarter is to invest in something new and risky. But right now the game is tilted towards fleecing backers. If the project succeeds, the creators become filthy rich but if it fails, the creators lose nothing whereas the backers get nothing for risking their micro-capital. It's a zero-loss game for creators and a zero-profit game for backers.
This would change if the backers were paid with equity -- say greater of 1% of total sales or 5% of profit of product being backed. If some products fail, while others succeed, there is a good chance backers won't lose money.
If 5% seems high, what about the 30% cut that Apple and Google take on games in iOS and Android? Unreal seems to be following ios and android, and before that, Playstation -- charging a percentage of sales as "platform" fees.
Easy, facts are determined by: a) proof b) authority figures (scientists, politicians, book authors etc.) c) combined opinion of many experts and wannabe experts.
(a) is the only valid form of fact but is often difficult to obtain and therefore you have rely on (b) and/or (c). BTW, slashdot uses the (c) model for facts.
Because leftists are societal parasites unemployment is a good achievement in their eyes.
Why not? If companies can build robots to replace workers, can't the common man build robots to obviate his requirement to work. The robot would do all the chores, build houses, buy/grow your food and cook it, etc. You could also 3D print appliances and tools yourself. Who needs companies?
In 100-200 years time, there will be wars over natural resources such as land for food or raw materials for 3D printing. All you need for jobless existence is robots, raw materials and power (electricity).
This could work. As long as the OS is not started during the update... only an uninfected BIOS running and a flash drive would be involved in updating whatever firmware requires updating.
Also, the BIOS should flag an error and stop booting to OS if any firmware switch is in the write-enable position.
What good will physical switches do if a virus is waiting for you to flip that switch to write-enable so that it can now infect the HDD firmware? Switches would be useful if you never update the firmware. In which case, eliminate the switch and make the firmware permanently read-only. My point is, we need a more secure way to update firmware.
Class "2" (when the work packages have been built out) +50 / -10%
I hope you realize the task at hand has not been done before in the same way as Scotty repairing the warp drive or someone clearing dry leaves from around their trees. This software task has not been done before. So how exactly do you calculate X in your formula: X +50 / -10% ??
Dozens of posts in this slashdot thread about "It's easy. Just multiply your estimate X, by 2, or 3 or 4." Fine, but how exactly do you come up with X other than pulling it out of your ass?
In this case, please inform me what the fuck that useless manager is here for? If I have to do his job, he's essentially a waste of precious oxygen.
I think the manager is essential mainly to make sure programmers are not wasting too much time on games, slashdot, other social media, chit chat, etc. He also monitors the programmers and the situation around the project to provide feedback/status to upper management so they can decide whether to continue the project, change it or outright cancel it. He can be useful to programmers in connecting them with other developers or customers, or providing hardware, software or other relevant expensive stuff.
so, estimating time is a waste of time, but complaining about estimating time is not?
No, you complain only once, whereas software estimation has to be done over and over for every task... for many years. Software coding/design is similar to solving a maze -- you just can't give an accurate estimate how long it will take to solve the maze. Estimates are good for repetitive or non-creative tasks that have been done for many years and you know exactly how long some task takes.
Estimation in the software world is a scam perpetuated by managers and management to get developers to work extra hard.
Just as buggy whip makers couldn't possibly think of the millions of jobs automobiles would create, tomorrows technology will destroy current jobs while creating new ones.
You don't get it. If any of these new jobs are repetitive and require little creativity, a cheap robot can replace the human worker.
I expect as car ownership is reduced, many garages become workshops, studios, and project labs for lots of fun new ideas that will create many new jobs that computers couldn't possible come up with,
The problem there is, only a few people are interested in such (risky) endeavors, and only a small of fraction of their ideas are useful. What do you expect the rest of the people to do?
Start reforming what can be patented. No software patents
That is moronic... most industry innovation is coming from software (which BTW, is just like hardware, but cheaper and easier to create) rather than hardware. How many hardware patents were filed last year compared to software patents? Not many, I bet.
Remove software patents and there will be no motivation to invest millions/billions in innovative software that can be cloned by competitors in a year or two.
throw out the crap that is obviously not invention but intellectual property land-grabbing.
Agreed, reject overly broad patents that are a simple combination of existing technologies (eg: internet + DRM + mobile phone).
Sure they do, especially if customers are using the result of the work, a song in this case. If you drink lemonade from a lemonade stand, you need to pay for the drink. Making lemonade is no guarantee of income to the lemonade owner, but if he finds a customer, he needs to get paid.
If they did, homeless people could dig ditches and fill them in all day and get paid for that because they were working really hard.
If people want ditches dug and these homeless people do it for them, they definitely need to get paid. Likewise, if people want to listen to music, and musicians produce music and hand it over to the customers, the musicians need to get paid for they work.
all the bitching and moaning that happens on Slashdot about how shit should be free.
Where? I don't see it anywhere.
Are you being disingenuous? There are plenty of posts about "greedy musicians," "basic income," "get another job," "money from concerts" etc. that are just code for we just want your music for free, find another way to make money; it's not our problem.
But who buys these Chinese products? It's not the Chinese.
How about companies manufacture reliable goods like computers, TVs, cars, other electronics so that they don't break easily, and so we don't have to replace them constantly? But companies intentionally build inferior goods that get damaged easily or go obsolete quickly so they can keep selling various micro version updates of the same product (at a huge environment cost of mining raw materials and then manufacturing the product).
Then they cry about global warming -- hypocrites. How come there's no regulation about minimum standards for long a product should last? That would cut the so-called global warming effect by half.
... this is one company suing another company for being a more attractive employer? Seriously?
What about transferring company trade secrets to a competitor, like Apple? After all, there is no shortage of PhDs with knowledgeable in battery tech. Why did Apple hire 5 whopping engineers from a single company instead of from the open market? Was it because they had experience in this technology?
But digital currency is so easy to hack and steal. If you want to secure something, you usually disconnect it from the Internet. Everyone loves the convenience, but what about security of this currency? There are no known servers that are unhackable. Why should we trust our hard-earned money to this bitcoinesque technology?
But perhaps a govt cryptocoin can be more secure than bitcoin as it would run on centralized servers and not be distributed like Bitcoin. So if someone steals another person's money, it would be easily traceable via transaction logs indicating which accounts the money went to.
Nice idea, but why? Because France did? No, really, do you have a valid reason for this assertion or are you spouting something like a low-rent politician trying to score mod points?
Why not? Many technological advances in the past hundred years have continuously reduced the cost of production. But the price of goods/services has not go down much, and in fact has risen in many cases. The capitalists benefit heavily from new technology with profits that increase 10x or more. But they are unwilling to share any of that wealth with the inventors/discoverers of the technologies, nor with their employees or customers.
This is classic case of unfair enrichment by the capitalists. And the remedy for that is increased fairness: fairness in paying people who bring them these technologies (not just paper certificates and awards), fairness in paying their employees if they go above and beyond their duty, and lastly charging a fair price to their customers instead of endless price gouging.
With higher pay and lower cost of products/services, one can easily live with 32 hours of work as well as increase the size of the workforce. But that's unlikely to happen because of massive greed from the capitalists. In which case, expect a vast difference between lives of the rich and lives of every one else. The rich will live comfortably in big cities whereas the rest will live in ghetto cities, in hundred years or so.
While some latency is acceptable, any trained musician will easily hear 5 ms latency if he's recording, especially with voice. Since FIR filters and the hardware audio chain already add latency, there's really no room for the mixer to add much.
So why can't you just shift the voice back 5 ms before integrating it with other instruments in the song? This is assuming the voice was recorded separately from other musical instruments.
Red Hat, who makes more than 85% of their money from 3 letter agencies, suddenly decides out of the blue "This crucial part MUST be replaced by this big creeping mess that will touch more and more systems!"
This systemd pdf article is pretty unremarkable except for what is written in big font in the 2nd page:
Another aspect of systemd is that it collects all output from processes that it starts.
Since systemd launches all processes, it can easily spy on all the process outputs and transmit that to whichever TLA it wants. This is a major spying attack.
It's the end result that matters. 5% shaved off my development time with some minor 'improvements' of some new language isn't worth spending years re-writing my code-base and half the libraries that don't yet exist in that language.
You seem rather ignorant, because we are not talking about 5%, it's more like 50% to 70% reduction in time spent.
Say you or your company wants to develop a big, in-house program for something important. You can choose C/C++ so that the program will run fast. But it's going to take long time to develop, a long time debug and longer time to maintain that stuff. That's great for programmers, but not for the company paying for those programmers.
Suppose the company decides to switch to Python to reduce development time by 1/2. But now the program runs quite 5x slowly than C++, which is also unacceptable.
Enter Nim. The development time of Nim is still half of C/C++, but the speed drop is only 5% less than C++. Nim is clearly a winner because it's as fast as Python in reducing development time while almost as fast as C/C++ during execution. It's like having your cake and eating it too.
the uncountable man-years of losses since Python doesn't allow the coder to specify input & return Types.
I agree, without types I have to read the code or comments to figure out the types of input/ouput types of a function. But Nim requires input and output types for functions.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could have waited for the item to be available in stores and bought it, risk-free. Let other people take the risk.
Perhaps, but profit sharing is common. For example, 30% of mobile app sales go to Apple or Google. In a similar fashion, 1% sales or 5% profit of all future sales of the kickstarted product should go to the backers. Without their collective risk-taking and investment in the creator's idea, there is going to be no product to be sold.
If you don't charge anything to the creators, even rich companies like Microsoft and Apple are going put up kickstarter pages for any product remotely risky. That is, making the backers pay (like in TFA case), for any risk involved.
And FYI, Kickstarter is not a donation platform as evidenced by the dozens of angry posts about "we want full refund."
Terrible advice. The whole point of kickstarter is to invest in something new and risky. But right now the game is tilted towards fleecing backers. If the project succeeds, the creators become filthy rich but if it fails, the creators lose nothing whereas the backers get nothing for risking their micro-capital. It's a zero-loss game for creators and a zero-profit game for backers.
This would change if the backers were paid with equity -- say greater of 1% of total sales or 5% of profit of product being backed. If some products fail, while others succeed, there is a good chance backers won't lose money.
If 5% seems high, what about the 30% cut that Apple and Google take on games in iOS and Android? Unreal seems to be following ios and android, and before that, Playstation -- charging a percentage of sales as "platform" fees.
It's theft of time using drive-by advertising.
Easy, facts are determined by:
a) proof
b) authority figures (scientists, politicians, book authors etc.)
c) combined opinion of many experts and wannabe experts.
(a) is the only valid form of fact but is often difficult to obtain and therefore you have rely on (b) and/or (c). BTW, slashdot uses the (c) model for facts.
Why not? If companies can build robots to replace workers, can't the common man build robots to obviate his requirement to work. The robot would do all the chores, build houses, buy/grow your food and cook it, etc. You could also 3D print appliances and tools yourself. Who needs companies?
In 100-200 years time, there will be wars over natural resources such as land for food or raw materials for 3D printing. All you need for jobless existence is robots, raw materials and power (electricity).
This could work. As long as the OS is not started during the update... only an uninfected BIOS running and a flash drive would be involved in updating whatever firmware requires updating.
Also, the BIOS should flag an error and stop booting to OS if any firmware switch is in the write-enable position.
What good will physical switches do if a virus is waiting for you to flip that switch to write-enable so that it can now infect the HDD firmware? Switches would be useful if you never update the firmware. In which case, eliminate the switch and make the firmware permanently read-only. My point is, we need a more secure way to update firmware.
I hope you realize the task at hand has not been done before in the same way as Scotty repairing the warp drive or someone clearing dry leaves from around their trees. This software task has not been done before. So how exactly do you calculate X in your formula:
X +50 / -10%
??
Dozens of posts in this slashdot thread about "It's easy. Just multiply your estimate X, by 2, or 3 or 4." Fine, but how exactly do you come up with X other than pulling it out of your ass?
I think the manager is essential mainly to make sure programmers are not wasting too much time on games, slashdot, other social media, chit chat, etc. He also monitors the programmers and the situation around the project to provide feedback/status to upper management so they can decide whether to continue the project, change it or outright cancel it. He can be useful to programmers in connecting them with other developers or customers, or providing hardware, software or other relevant expensive stuff.
No, you complain only once, whereas software estimation has to be done over and over for every task... for many years. Software coding/design is similar to solving a maze -- you just can't give an accurate estimate how long it will take to solve the maze. Estimates are good for repetitive or non-creative tasks that have been done for many years and you know exactly how long some task takes.
Estimation in the software world is a scam perpetuated by managers and management to get developers to work extra hard.
You don't get it. If any of these new jobs are repetitive and require little creativity, a cheap robot can replace the human worker.
The problem there is, only a few people are interested in such (risky) endeavors, and only a small of fraction of their ideas are useful. What do you expect the rest of the people to do?
That is moronic... most industry innovation is coming from software (which BTW, is just like hardware, but cheaper and easier to create) rather than hardware. How many hardware patents were filed last year compared to software patents? Not many, I bet.
Remove software patents and there will be no motivation to invest millions/billions in innovative software that can be cloned by competitors in a year or two.
Agreed, reject overly broad patents that are a simple combination of existing technologies (eg: internet + DRM + mobile phone).
Looks like 7334720 is just applying DRM "over the internet," using a portable computer. How can anyone be granted such wide patents?
There are several orders of magnitude more non-concert music listeners than concert goers. Concerts are for extra income, not main income.
Sure they do, especially if customers are using the result of the work, a song in this case. If you drink lemonade from a lemonade stand, you need to pay for the drink. Making lemonade is no guarantee of income to the lemonade owner, but if he finds a customer, he needs to get paid.
If people want ditches dug and these homeless people do it for them, they definitely need to get paid. Likewise, if people want to listen to music, and musicians produce music and hand it over to the customers, the musicians need to get paid for they work.
Are you being disingenuous? There are plenty of posts about "greedy musicians," "basic income," "get another job," "money from concerts" etc. that are just code for we just want your music for free, find another way to make money; it's not our problem.
But who buys these Chinese products? It's not the Chinese.
How about companies manufacture reliable goods like computers, TVs, cars, other electronics so that they don't break easily, and so we don't have to replace them constantly? But companies intentionally build inferior goods that get damaged easily or go obsolete quickly so they can keep selling various micro version updates of the same product (at a huge environment cost of mining raw materials and then manufacturing the product).
Then they cry about global warming -- hypocrites. How come there's no regulation about minimum standards for long a product should last? That would cut the so-called global warming effect by half.
What about transferring company trade secrets to a competitor, like Apple? After all, there is no shortage of PhDs with knowledgeable in battery tech. Why did Apple hire 5 whopping engineers from a single company instead of from the open market? Was it because they had experience in this technology?
But digital currency is so easy to hack and steal. If you want to secure something, you usually disconnect it from the Internet. Everyone loves the convenience, but what about security of this currency? There are no known servers that are unhackable. Why should we trust our hard-earned money to this bitcoinesque technology?
But perhaps a govt cryptocoin can be more secure than bitcoin as it would run on centralized servers and not be distributed like Bitcoin. So if someone steals another person's money, it would be easily traceable via transaction logs indicating which accounts the money went to.
Why not? Many technological advances in the past hundred years have continuously reduced the cost of production. But the price of goods/services has not go down much, and in fact has risen in many cases. The capitalists benefit heavily from new technology with profits that increase 10x or more. But they are unwilling to share any of that wealth with the inventors/discoverers of the technologies, nor with their employees or customers.
This is classic case of unfair enrichment by the capitalists. And the remedy for that is increased fairness: fairness in paying people who bring them these technologies (not just paper certificates and awards), fairness in paying their employees if they go above and beyond their duty, and lastly charging a fair price to their customers instead of endless price gouging.
With higher pay and lower cost of products/services, one can easily live with 32 hours of work as well as increase the size of the workforce. But that's unlikely to happen because of massive greed from the capitalists. In which case, expect a vast difference between lives of the rich and lives of every one else. The rich will live comfortably in big cities whereas the rest will live in ghetto cities, in hundred years or so.
So why can't you just shift the voice back 5 ms before integrating it with other instruments in the song? This is assuming the voice was recorded separately from other musical instruments.
This systemd pdf article is pretty unremarkable except for what is written in big font in the 2nd page:
Since systemd launches all processes, it can easily spy on all the process outputs and transmit that to whichever TLA it wants. This is a major spying attack.
You seem rather ignorant, because we are not talking about 5%, it's more like 50% to 70% reduction in time spent.
Say you or your company wants to develop a big, in-house program for something important. You can choose C/C++ so that the program will run fast. But it's going to take long time to develop, a long time debug and longer time to maintain that stuff. That's great for programmers, but not for the company paying for those programmers.
Suppose the company decides to switch to Python to reduce development time by 1/2. But now the program runs quite 5x slowly than C++, which is also unacceptable.
Enter Nim. The development time of Nim is still half of C/C++, but the speed drop is only 5% less than C++. Nim is clearly a winner because it's as fast as Python in reducing development time while almost as fast as C/C++ during execution. It's like having your cake and eating it too.
I agree, without types I have to read the code or comments to figure out the types of input/ouput types of a function. But Nim requires input and output types for functions.