Why would I want to pay hundreds for professional graph software? That pretty much defeats the whole point of free software.
It is this kind of thinking that is the bane of the open source community. Free and open source software are not incompatible with boutique high-end solutions offered by Dundas or Visual Mining. Freedom and OSS are about flexibility, rapid innovation, social-consciousness, and represent a silver-bullet solution to the inefficient, 30-year-old build (reinvent-the-wheel)-vs-buy question. F/OSS reframes this as a participate-vs-buy question, under which your development team may consist of 100 developers scattered around the globe, collectively working 24x7, vs. the customary 5 or 10 developers working 9x5 in a typical corprate setting, whose code is 95% likely to be completely wasted after a comparatively short period of time during which another team is likely to completely (and inefficiently) refactor the design for several reasons.
Choose the best tool for the job. If OOO can crunch numbers with the best of 'em, what's the problem? If you need sexy charts to sell your ideas, well thats why we have choice.
Don't like it? Spend some of your time and $$-saved using OOO seeding a new F/OSS charting package that meets your needs. Make a difference while coming out ahead: it's a win-win situation.
There are really only 2 natural outcomes of this way of thinking:
1. You remain an insignificant minority, and are ignored. (neutral) 2. Over time content providers are less incented to publish freely accessible content online. (bad)
Therefore from the perpective of those interested in the proliferation of freely available content this is antisocial behavior.
Technology-based ad blocking is a violation of social contract. Those willing to transgress upon this higher contract do so with sociopathic disregard to the interests of networked society as a whole.
Mental ad blockage, however, well, that is a topic unto itself which has been, and continues to be studied in great detail.
Actually contains footage of the Material Girl. How on Earth can the RIAA justify claims of ownership over search terms containing the names of acts, especially those which deliberately identify themselves with household words? If this lateest RIAA proposal wins out, Search engines will be paying a tribute to the RIAA whenever someone searches for "eagles" or "nirvana".
Something needs to be done, really: If we all had cash like this to burn lobbying every conceivable interest, government would come to a come to a complete standstill.
It's an acronym; acronyms do not need to take the exact same pronunciation as the words the individual letters stand for.
I remember having this discussion in '96 while working for a high-end online-marketing consultancy in Boston. ultimately the soft-g speaking GIF camp in that circle agreed there was no good reason an acronym should not reflect the pronunciation of its constituent words. Of course, we were more apt then to question these sorts of things given the relative age of the field and the opportunity to prefer reason over anecdote.
The original pronunciation was "jiff"....
Link please?
To me, pronouncing "GIF" with a hard "g" labels you as a newbie - it tells me you first heard of the format after others had started using that pronunciation, and you've probably surrounded yourself with other newbies who use that same incorrect pronunciation.
To me, pronouncing "GIF" with a soft "g" labels you as either a newbie, or someone who has never really considered the question for whatever reason. Between '96 and '01, most web-professionals I had the opportunity to work with along the NE corridor used the hard "g" pronunciation. Granted it's been a while since I've done active web development in a social context (closing on 5 years), and maybe the pendulum has swung to soft 'g' during that time. Then again perhaps there are more complex regional preferences at play here than meet the ear.
The trouble is there is little risk in these types of lawsuits. The big players sue the little guy all day every day knowing full well their suits will be settled for a net profit, while the little guy with a pro-bono attorney in other cases also have a good shot at settlement. Personally I see no morality in either situation.
If judges were required on the other hand to impose upon a losing plaintiff the defendant's legal fees, the number of frivolous suits on both sides would fall dramatically -- perhaps to 5% of today's levels.
Unlike certain other organizations, OpenDocument is not lobbying the Mass. legislature for protection. Even if a subset of the OpenDoc consortium had managed to scrounge up a few-hundred k in persuasion, your accuasation would be entirely unfair -- organizations like M$ spend countless billions every year seeking government protection, buying legislation, spending the minimum it needs to reduce shareholder risk and maintain profitability. You speak of free-market competition, but quickly forget the impetus one of recent-history's least-regulated monopolies needed to pull its aging IE 6 product off the back burner. And when will the innovative (read: copycat) IE7 product finally become available?
Capitalism is about calculated risk, not competition, and certainly not the best interest of democratic society. Competition is merely allowed under capitalism. Only occasionally does corporate interest align perfectly with social progress.
If your main point is: "Government dictation is not free market." -- Are you suggesting that an organization's purchasing requirements be dictated by the "free-market" and not it's own priorities, including those of its charter? Are you suggesting the tail wag the dog? No, organizational spending across all sectors, public and private is predicated upon need. Competent management does not allow its vendors to write its business plans over a power-lunch and game of golf. Free market efficiently responds to the needs of the market, of which the gov. is a participant. Nothing is stopping M$ from implementing OpenDocument support except it's own lack of confidence in ability to compete on level terrain.
In fact, I've been surprised the Romney administration has been far-sighted enough to continue to put the interests of its citizens first, despite increasing vendor sophistry and corresponding lobby cash. Score one for the old-school.
Why bother blowing it up when you can simply extort ONE HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLARS from the UN by threatening to send the moon on a collision course with the White House using your stash of WMD stolen from Iraq?
There is not so much a question of whether MS will dump.Net as whether it will eventually dump.Net 1.1. It has several good reasons to do so, for example, the.Net threading model was rushed out the door a half-baked hack. To continue to support apps written against that model throughout the life of the platform will prove a money-losing proposition even 5 years from now.
Sun dropped support for Java 1.1 years ago. Granted the changes needed to migrate apps to 1.2 were often minor and inexpensive, generally speaking one must go into distributed or desktop software development with the expectation that all such projects have by nature a far shorter lifespan than, say, that of a typical mainframe app.
Because your app was built over the course of "many years", the app must have begun life as a VB4 or VB5 app, no? Despite the fact these iterations of VB each required some changes to your codebase, it would be very interesting to get the scoop on how your IT organization managed to justify building a large mission critical app on VB4 (or 5) in the first place, when even the OS itself could hardly be relied upon to run continuously for 24 hours.
While Word 5.1, 6, etc. for Mac half-heartedly foisted Windows UX on the Mac community, Vista and MSO half-heartedly attempt to do the opposite: to foist Aqua's UX on the Windows community..:)
To reuse MSOffice look and feel under OSX. Look at the potential savings:
1. Full-time MacOS geeks on payroll eventually reduced by 90%.
2. No more OSX-specific marketing or tech support materials required -- all W32 Office materials will be perfectly suited to the Apple community (Just add "OSX" to the list of system req's, et voila).
3. Will greatly simplify porting of other strategic apps to the Mac (and eventually linux) platform. In order to properly compete with Firefox, IE must go cross-platform, period.
4. OpenOffice will soon gain critical mass. What Firefox is to IE, OOO will become to MSO -- lack of MSO cross-platform compatibility will become a liability (especially in the eyes of governments and orgs increasingly deploying linux to the desktop). Portable Vista should render porting MSO to x86 (and possibly PPC) linux a snap.
IBM stands to save no money over the short term under this program:
Organizations pay UI premium to the state during the course of an employee's employment. Once severed, the state then pays the former employee a certain amount (pro-rated against severance) for a fixed period of time.
The employer is contractually obligated to pay a severance regardless of the employee's ability to find work as stated in the employee's original employment contract.
A training program like this is likely to exceed US $1M per year in staffing, training program development, administration, employee productivity, etc.
This analogy is flawed. In this case your Old Man did not claim he "doesn't care" because "computers just work". He said that users of his who are delivered an F/OSS solution consistently prefer that solution over a non F/OSS solution. Granted some sense of scale and credibility would be interesting here, but it is important to remember the vast majority of users will choose the solution that most conveniently meets their needs, regardless of ideology.
While not insightful, the PP was informative (underrated at the very least).
Why not just fucking retire? You're worth billions... so what personal feeling of satisfaction is to be had by conquering google? Even if you don't conquer google, you'll still be filthy fucking rich.
Perhaps this recent quote will shed some light on your question:
Q: What do you want to be remembered as?
A: Now you're asking deep, profound, questions. Mostly I want to be remembered by my three sons as a great dad and a great husband.
The majority of this discussion seems focused on the potential costs involved using Sun's service vs purchasing and managing your very own n-node cluster. Out of curiosity, who exactly purchases their own equipment these days? Organizations with any cash prefer leasing everything ranging from cellphones to PDAs to desktops to servers to SAN devices. With production equipment often hosted at an offsite facility, managed at least in part by a 3rd party.
The four primary reasons for this are:
1. Comprehensive support. 2. Homogeneity (1000 identical systems can easily be ordered and loaded with the same software image), with additional systems easily ordered on an ongoing basis. 3. Economy of scale -- leasing 1000 identical machines costs less than purchasing, supporting and regularly upgrading 1000 individually customised machines. 4. Automatic periodic equipment refresh, ensuring an org is able to leverage improvements in technology (CPU, memory, storage, bus speed, etc) on an ongoing basis.
Sun's offering is merely the next logical step in an already ubiquitous model.
So why haven't ISPs begun requiring users to "opt in" to port 25? Maybe 1 in 10000 users has a legitimate need to relay email, and 100% of those users would be knowledgeable enough to choose the right setting on their ISPs account configuration page.
Richard Stallman aims to 'lower barriers that today prevent the mixing of software covered by the GPL and other licenses.
The original GPL has succeeded in promoting the F/OSS ideal in ways both anticipated and unanticipated. Two decades later however, the most hotly contested tenet of the GPL has been its strictly viral 'if thou modify thou must publish' suggestion -- admittedly vague in the ubiquitous enterprise consulting arena. Clarifying this point in a more liberal fashion can do nothing but further entrench GPL code in the enterprise and thus further solidify the F/OSS ideal among the IT elite: those against whom deployment decisions are modeled the world over.
While I had not originally intended this post to lead to further argument in favor of P2P, it does occur to me that the substantial interest P2P generates across various media justifies a greater effort among publishers put into in demoware. For example offering 75% functional demos vs today's typical 10% functional demos (10% = 30 second preview of a 5 minute track).
Slashdot Mirror
GORM also obsoletes XTerm, Vista, Web 2.0, the Automobile and the Universe in general.
It is this kind of thinking that is the bane of the open source community. Free and open source software are not incompatible with boutique high-end solutions offered by Dundas or Visual Mining. Freedom and OSS are about flexibility, rapid innovation, social-consciousness, and represent a silver-bullet solution to the inefficient, 30-year-old build (reinvent-the-wheel)-vs-buy question. F/OSS reframes this as a participate-vs-buy question, under which your development team may consist of 100 developers scattered around the globe, collectively working 24x7, vs. the customary 5 or 10 developers working 9x5 in a typical corprate setting, whose code is 95% likely to be completely wasted after a comparatively short period of time during which another team is likely to completely (and inefficiently) refactor the design for several reasons.
Choose the best tool for the job. If OOO can crunch numbers with the best of 'em, what's the problem? If you need sexy charts to sell your ideas, well thats why we have choice.
Don't like it? Spend some of your time and $$-saved using OOO seeding a new F/OSS charting package that meets your needs. Make a difference while coming out ahead: it's a win-win situation.
+1 Insightful
There are really only 2 natural outcomes of this way of thinking:
1. You remain an insignificant minority, and are ignored. (neutral)
2. Over time content providers are less incented to publish freely accessible content online. (bad)
Therefore from the perpective of those interested in the proliferation of freely available content this is antisocial behavior.
Technology-based ad blocking is a violation of social contract. Those willing to transgress upon this higher contract do so with sociopathic disregard to the interests of networked society as a whole.
/. again?
Mental ad blockage, however, well, that is a topic unto itself which has been, and continues to be studied in great detail.
What was the point of this Ask
Only 1 in 20 videos in a generic search for the Virgin Mum:
G =Search+Video
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=madonna&btn
Actually contains footage of the Material Girl. How on Earth can the RIAA justify claims of ownership over search terms containing the names of acts, especially those which deliberately identify themselves with household words? If this lateest RIAA proposal wins out, Search engines will be paying a tribute to the RIAA whenever someone searches for "eagles" or "nirvana".
Something needs to be done, really: If we all had cash like this to burn lobbying every conceivable interest, government would come to a come to a complete standstill.
I remember having this discussion in '96 while working for a high-end online-marketing consultancy in Boston. ultimately the soft-g speaking GIF camp in that circle agreed there was no good reason an acronym should not reflect the pronunciation of its constituent words. Of course, we were more apt then to question these sorts of things given the relative age of the field and the opportunity to prefer reason over anecdote.
Link please?
To me, pronouncing "GIF" with a soft "g" labels you as either a newbie, or someone who has never really considered the question for whatever reason. Between '96 and '01, most web-professionals I had the opportunity to work with along the NE corridor used the hard "g" pronunciation. Granted it's been a while since I've done active web development in a social context (closing on 5 years), and maybe the pendulum has swung to soft 'g' during that time. Then again perhaps there are more complex regional preferences at play here than meet the ear.
The trouble is there is little risk in these types of lawsuits. The big players sue the little guy all day every day knowing full well their suits will be settled for a net profit, while the little guy with a pro-bono attorney in other cases also have a good shot at settlement. Personally I see no morality in either situation.
If judges were required on the other hand to impose upon a losing plaintiff the defendant's legal fees, the number of frivolous suits on both sides would fall dramatically -- perhaps to 5% of today's levels.
Unlike certain other organizations, OpenDocument is not lobbying the Mass. legislature for protection. Even if a subset of the OpenDoc consortium had managed to scrounge up a few-hundred k in persuasion, your accuasation would be entirely unfair -- organizations like M$ spend countless billions every year seeking government protection, buying legislation, spending the minimum it needs to reduce shareholder risk and maintain profitability. You speak of free-market competition, but quickly forget the impetus one of recent-history's least-regulated monopolies needed to pull its aging IE 6 product off the back burner. And when will the innovative (read: copycat) IE7 product finally become available?
Capitalism is about calculated risk, not competition, and certainly not the best interest of democratic society. Competition is merely allowed under capitalism. Only occasionally does corporate interest align perfectly with social progress.
If your main point is: "Government dictation is not free market." -- Are you suggesting that an organization's purchasing requirements be dictated by the "free-market" and not it's own priorities, including those of its charter? Are you suggesting the tail wag the dog? No, organizational spending across all sectors, public and private is predicated upon need. Competent management does not allow its vendors to write its business plans over a power-lunch and game of golf. Free market efficiently responds to the needs of the market, of which the gov. is a participant. Nothing is stopping M$ from implementing OpenDocument support except it's own lack of confidence in ability to compete on level terrain.
In fact, I've been surprised the Romney administration has been far-sighted enough to continue to put the interests of its citizens first, despite increasing vendor sophistry and corresponding lobby cash. Score one for the old-school.
Why bother blowing it up when you can simply extort ONE HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLARS from the UN by threatening to send the moon on a collision course with the White House using your stash of WMD stolen from Iraq?
You appear to have confused IE with IIS, several portions of which do run in kernelspace: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windo wsserver2003/technologies/webapp/iis/iis6perf.mspx
There is not so much a question of whether MS will dump .Net as whether it will eventually dump .Net 1.1. It has several good reasons to do so, for example, the .Net threading model was rushed out the door a half-baked hack. To continue to support apps written against that model throughout the life of the platform will prove a money-losing proposition even 5 years from now.
Sun dropped support for Java 1.1 years ago. Granted the changes needed to migrate apps to 1.2 were often minor and inexpensive, generally speaking one must go into distributed or desktop software development with the expectation that all such projects have by nature a far shorter lifespan than, say, that of a typical mainframe app.
Because your app was built over the course of "many years", the app must have begun life as a VB4 or VB5 app, no? Despite the fact these iterations of VB each required some changes to your codebase, it would be very interesting to get the scoop on how your IT organization managed to justify building a large mission critical app on VB4 (or 5) in the first place, when even the OS itself could hardly be relied upon to run continuously for 24 hours.
While Word 5.1, 6, etc. for Mac half-heartedly foisted Windows UX on the Mac community, Vista and MSO half-heartedly attempt to do the opposite: to foist Aqua's UX on the Windows community..:)
To reuse MSOffice look and feel under OSX. Look at the potential savings:
1. Full-time MacOS geeks on payroll eventually reduced by 90%.
2. No more OSX-specific marketing or tech support materials required -- all W32 Office materials will be perfectly suited to the Apple community (Just add "OSX" to the list of system req's, et voila).
3. Will greatly simplify porting of other strategic apps to the Mac (and eventually linux) platform. In order to properly compete with Firefox, IE must go cross-platform, period.
4. OpenOffice will soon gain critical mass. What Firefox is to IE, OOO will become to MSO -- lack of MSO cross-platform compatibility will become a liability (especially in the eyes of governments and orgs increasingly deploying linux to the desktop). Portable Vista should render porting MSO to x86 (and possibly PPC) linux a snap.
But should this be the case? Are your dreams so fatalistic as to welcome ends built upon anticompetitive means?
IBM stands to save no money over the short term under this program:
Organizations pay UI premium to the state during the course of an employee's employment. Once severed, the state then pays the former employee a certain amount (pro-rated against severance) for a fixed period of time.
The employer is contractually obligated to pay a severance regardless of the employee's ability to find work as stated in the employee's original employment contract.
A training program like this is likely to exceed US $1M per year in staffing, training program development, administration, employee productivity, etc.
This analogy is flawed. In this case your Old Man did not claim he "doesn't care" because "computers just work". He said that users of his who are delivered an F/OSS solution consistently prefer that solution over a non F/OSS solution. Granted some sense of scale and credibility would be interesting here, but it is important to remember the vast majority of users will choose the solution that most conveniently meets their needs, regardless of ideology.
While not insightful, the PP was informative (underrated at the very least).
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a few hours.
Set him on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Lack of support for OGG.
Why not just fucking retire? You're worth billions... so what personal feeling of satisfaction is to be had by conquering google? Even if you don't conquer google, you'll still be filthy fucking rich.
Perhaps this recent quote will shed some light on your question:
Channel 9 Interview with Steve Ballmer (July 8, 2005) (bottom of the interview)Q: What do you want to be remembered as?
A: Now you're asking deep, profound, questions. Mostly I want to be remembered by my three sons as a great dad and a great husband.
So there you have it.
The majority of this discussion seems focused on the potential costs involved using Sun's service vs purchasing and managing your very own n-node cluster. Out of curiosity, who exactly purchases their own equipment these days? Organizations with any cash prefer leasing everything ranging from cellphones to PDAs to desktops to servers to SAN devices. With production equipment often hosted at an offsite facility, managed at least in part by a 3rd party.
The four primary reasons for this are:
1. Comprehensive support.
2. Homogeneity (1000 identical systems can easily be ordered and loaded with the same software image), with additional systems easily ordered on an ongoing basis.
3. Economy of scale -- leasing 1000 identical machines costs less than purchasing, supporting and regularly upgrading 1000 individually customised machines.
4. Automatic periodic equipment refresh, ensuring an org is able to leverage improvements in technology (CPU, memory, storage, bus speed, etc) on an ongoing basis.
Sun's offering is merely the next logical step in an already ubiquitous model.
So why haven't ISPs begun requiring users to "opt in" to port 25? Maybe 1 in 10000 users has a legitimate need to relay email, and 100% of those users would be knowledgeable enough to choose the right setting on their ISPs account configuration page.
Sorry for the me-too post, but alas I have no mod points and feel this need to broadcast my giant *grin* -- great post.
While I had not originally intended this post to lead to further argument in favor of P2P, it does occur to me that the substantial interest P2P generates across various media justifies a greater effort among publishers put into in demoware. For example offering 75% functional demos vs today's typical 10% functional demos (10% = 30 second preview of a 5 minute track).