Property, sales, maybe income. My problem with negative externalities is quantifying them well enough to justify a tax, and distinguishing them from moral judgements and prejudices.
I know the parent was an AC, but that's deserves more than a 0 score.
Good job dancing around issues. The law you refer to has more severe penalties for violations where one makes a copy of a copyrighted work, modifies it, and then proceeds to sell it as their own as opposed to making a copy (downloading) for personal use only (no redistribution). That is what I referred to when I stated "more offensive". It wasn't my personal moral judgement of the matter, though I do agree that one is worse than the other. And as such, the original premise is still not "exactly analogous", and is off by a long shot. Not sure what RMS has to do with this. He's a person, not the law, nor the GPL, nor was he mentioned by the GP's, and he has no say over the multitudes that are choosing to use the GPL. Adding personal attacks on an unrelated issue does not change the fact that the basic premise of "why not take the linux or some other open source code and sell it without giving back to the community?" is still perfectly legit, accepted, and encouraged.
"exactly analogous"... bullshit. In this case, there was no mention of modifying the GPL'd software prior to selling it. You tacked that on. And in the music sharing case, there were no sales - it was freely distributed. So that should be "take the linux (sic) or some other open source code and give it to people for free", which is also perfectly acceptable.
In addition, if you want to go with that angle (modified GPL software being resold), the analogy on the music side would be to copy someone else's music track, tweak it (maybe add an extra bass line), and resell it to others without compensating the original author. That would be far more offensive than letting someone download an mp3 from you.
If you're actually a lawyer, and that's what you call "intellectually honest", please stop assuming all lawyer jokes are guidelines for how to live.
...getting found liable in a civil trial for murder is going to cost you thousands of times what it costs to be found liable for copyright infringement.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think your math is off by a few orders of magnitude. first award: $222k second: $1.9m third: $1.5m
Even the lowest of those is only off by 1 order (10x's) compared to the lowest of the examples you provided, and the highest (1.9mil) is basically the same as Ramos' $2mil. Granted, those are all still higher, and this case was for 24 counts of infringement (which is pretty silly IMO), but they're a hell of a lot closer to each other than I'm comfortable with.
I like the format/size of the DS's, and I wouldn't mind having a little hand held game machine, but I just can't get over all that hardware sitting there and no way to use other apps than just the games. These things have just about everything one would need to call it a micro-netbook or something like that, if only it had any way to do anything other than play games. The homebrew on the DS is there, barely, but they should really just support it out of the box. For example, my household would probably have 3 less ebook readers, and might have skipped 2 tablet purchases and a netbook.
The bottom screen could easily be a small keyboard (obviously not as nice as a netbook, laptop, or desktop, but it'd work as good as a smartphone onscreen keyboard). You could also do a very nice email client on that thing, using both displays while reading mail. And it has good audio/video support already, so why not a multimedia player (mp3 at least)? Toss a video chat thing on there as well... that'd be kinda handy. As it is, it does a specific set of games better than my phone, tablet, and netbook, but completely lacks every other feature they have, and it's entirely a software issue - that seems very silly IMO.
FWIW, it irks me just as much that game consoles also have a very large void of apps (and I hate saying "apps", but it fits here). Why can't my PS3 w/ BT keyboard fire up a terminal, ssh, vnc, firefox/chrome, vlc, thunderbird, skype, rythmbox/etc, etc etc etc?
They monitor their own (ex. family, friends, etc) more closely than most. The 1% are definitely monitored. One of the motivations for said monitoring is to catch anything that could set off alarms elsewhere before anyone else catches it so they can provide protection if needed. And besides, it's fun to keep tabs on people you know.
In fact, that may be the privacy they're worried about breaking. Just a guess, but what if those monitored are mostly NOT made up of the scum of the earth, but are actually a list of those that are vulnerable, important, powerful, rich, etc.
The common man really has little to worry about, and is of little threat to society, until they rock the boat or start pushing the buttons of the 1%. If the 1% are monitored thoroughly, then that'll nab anyone that deviates from the norms and starts talking to them. Who knows... maybe they are monitoring "everyone", but then most are going to just fall into a statistical norm then. I know this is bordering on "if you didn't do anything wrong, you have nothing to fear", but that's probably not too terribly far from the truth.
Agreed. Pretty much any site of any size registers.com,.org, and.net. There's no meaning to the hierarchy anymore, so just flatten it. Instead of registering slashdot.org, slashdot.net, and slashdot.com, just register slashdot.
I can't believe this is getting any traction. There is a hierarchy that makes sense, but people aren't using it right, so let's drop it? How about we use it to solve the problem?
In addition, all this stuff should be under.us and the only TLD's allowed should be the 2 letter ISO country codes. This would quickly kill all the international drama about ICANN and the TLD talks. Want to allow any TLD - do it UNDER a TLD. If you really want, you can have your local DNS server default to appending that TLD (or use/etc/resolv.conf).
IMO, the "problem" with.com,.net,.org,.name,.biz, etc etc is that they're TLD's... so everyone wants in that game, and they've kept them open to all for the profits. Change the rule to only allow new registrations under the country code TLD, and make the.com.us and.org.us etc like every other country, or allow the us to pollute it with slashdot.us and such.... but leave the top alone.
I'm quite irritated they're selling out the TLD's. Doesn't the pricing alone raise some red flags for all those supporters? You're not going to get your own domain in there... it's too expensive. That expense is actually purposeful too... rather than a very small DB of TLD's under the root that point to other servers, it's going to bloat up with many more. That's not making the system better... there's still gotta be a root, and now it's growing substantially, and you're not invited unless you've got boatloads of cash.
There's no end user benefit to "https://coke" over "https://coke.com" either. The browsers solved that ages ago (automatically append.com and try it). ".com" should just be tightened down to be only commercial entities. If all the tld's were as strict as.org used to be, or as.xxx is now, we probably wouldn't be in this situation. (and yes, I'd still suggest those move to.com.us,.org.us, and.xxx.us, etc).
More like I haven't spent enough time to think of one.
A lot depends on whether the address has to be human-readable. For example, you could have an alternate system where sites are addressed by a public key hash, and you could ask numerous independent name-servers for any IP address signed by a key with that hash. But typing in 64-character hex strings to connect to Google or your bank would be troublesome, to say the least.
That sounds so great. Then we'll just have to add some sort of networked naming system so people could type in something human readable and find some response that identifies the service and where to find it. It should probably provide the same names to everyone, so people can tell each other about names and get to those neat things, but we'll have to have some way to distribute that load and cache it close to the user. And, maybe instead of that extra useless overhead of some hash of... well, what the hell are you making that hash from anyway?... we could use a really big number, like a 64bit integer (*cough* ipv6 *cough*). Maybe we could just re-purpose this DNS thing to find those big numbers? It sounds like that could do exactly what you want.
Remind me again what is "broken"? If you can't name what's broken, then you're just coming up with solutions looking for a problem. DNS works, and works very well.
Simple: on a mobile phone, you're not going to be using multiple terminal windows. If you even have a terminal on there (maybe to ssh into a server from your phone), you would only run one instance. I can't think of any time you'd want to run multiple instances of any application on a smartphone.
BS. If I'm doing any SSH'ing from my phone, i'll want multiple connections open. New terminals is one way, very valid, way to do that. There may be other solutions, but they'd be application-specific then (ex. hit something that tells that program to make a new tab).
While not 100% analogous, I already often have multiple SMS compose windows open on my smartphone. That's implemented differently, but that's because Android is quite different (an intent gets picked up by the app and triggers a behavior, which is to open a new composer instance).
I agree with the gist of your statement though... trying to make a desktop window manager fit onto smart phones and tablets is having a detrimental effect on the desktop usage.
But there is no reason to replace "start a new instance" with "go to an existing instance if exists, else start one". The latter should have simply been added, retaining the former. I wouldn't mind making some shortcuts for "go to existing instance of [app]"... it'd be useful for stuff like the Gimp. That's one area the browsers also went braindead (except, surprisingly, for IE)... I can't simply start a new/fresh instance of Firefox without having a separate profile for it, WTH?
Obviously Mbps. Virtually everything above buying shared hosting or low-commit-vms is charged by throughput (bandwidth), not usage (total megs transferred). Sometimes it's 90th percentile, but it's it's always about bandwidth.
Bump... when I finished reading the question, while initially a good one, the final test was horribly flawed.
Any ideas on business models that would allow me to open source while guaranteeing I can feed myself?
Why not simply ask, "Any ideas on business models that would guarantee I can feed myself?"
Sure, he may want to open source, but if "guarantee I can feed myself" is a prerequisite, then the open source part is a trivial element. I don't know of any business models that will guarantee that; maybe others do, but it's unlikely and grows more and more unlikely as you apply more conditions to it.
IMHO, if you want to sell your stuff and open source it, just do it. The open source version does not have to be advertised on the front page along with your for sale product. Nothing even has to link the two. Assuming it's your code, you can release your paid version under an entirely closed license, and still maintain a mirror that is open source living elsewhere. Maybe all you do it package it up and add a custom theme/icons/installer/whatever.
Sell the shit out of it, and if it ever takes off, the you can consider diverging the source if needed. Ditto if the open source version is somehow stumbled upon and it takes off more than your closed source version... just leverage it at that point (diverge and upsell, or just offer support, etc).
On the open source version, don't apply patches unless the author assigns copyright to you. Since you've worked on it for 5+ years by yourself, this isn't likely to happen any time soon anyway, so don't worry about it until you come to it. There are very few people that will opt to maintain a separate patch collection under a different license (ex. Eduardo Chappa for Pine/Alpine), and I believe that only really came about because Pine was NOT licensed under a truly open source license until recently (until the alpine fork/rewrite).
Dunno about always on top (I'm sure there's a solution), but last time I used VirtualWin it did let you put a window on all workspaces (aka sticky or pin'd depending on the app). It may have always on top as well.
We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another - porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc. [] Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink. Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable.
Uh... so what I said was accurate. Assuming they're supporting 2 platforms (Android and iOS), well, we still don't know the figures because that still doesn't tell use how much time was spent on iOs specific things (some part of those total man-hours must have been on common tasks, like artwork and payroll and stuff). The only (poor) assumption that could be drawn is that they spent about 80% of their total man-hours last year dealing with iOs in one way or another. There is no comparison unless they're spending equal or greater time on Android than on iOS (regardless of revenue), and nothing has even hinted at that being the case.
KeePass is also available for PocketPC, Winodws Phone 7, iPhone/iPad (multiple versions), Android, J2ME, BlackBerry, PalmOS, Linux, Max OS X, Windows 98 thought 7 + Wine + Mono, and there are libs that tie into several programming lanuages.
I read through the article, the linked PDF, and the PDF linked from the PDF to find out they didn't even test KeePass, which, AFAIK, is one of the most popular and widely available password managers out there.
I really hate it when someone claims to do a thorough test on something and states something like either "Of all the X we tested, none of them passed" or "Of all the X we tested, only one came close to passing". The former makes me think they should get off their high horse and write it themselves if it's so obvious. The latter that they're just trolling to push one product... especially when there are glaring holes in the tests.
BS. The "average" user will use whatever youtube, hulu, netflix, funnyordie, xtube, pornhub, etc etc spit out at them.
The past has had real player, quicktime, wmv, mpeg*, flash (with multiple video codecs), silverlight (multiple codecs), etc etc etc etc. Neither WebM nor h.264 is going to be the format to end all formats.
We're down to only two formats now in this spec. This should be easily fixed with a combo of:
a) let the browser support both via plugins of some sort (or OS media layer calls) b) let the site detect and send the supported format.
Maybe that's not ideal, but your average user won't give a rats ass. h.264 has the technical/performance edge, and WebM has the open edge... there is no clear winner (you may define one, but others obviously do not). There's no point in wasting any more time arguing about it until h.264 clears the patent roadblocks or WebM catches up in hardware and software support.... just plan to support both, and ALL your users will be happy.
* update google.de site to return only the links and ads. Provide a banner stating why it is this way (or info bubble or something). Provide a means for site administrators to opt out (or would it be opt in?) to allow text blubs.
* Leave google.com alone. Tell Germany to block google.com if it wants to - that'd be their responsibility (I think).
Let's look at the numbers: 20% of his development dollars is supporting 5% of sales. And the 5% is declining. Anybody who would keep developing for any platform in this environment is not a good business person.
Uh, you're not looking at the his numbers... you're looking at only 2 of them. That statement would make sense if he was developing for 5 platforms, 20% of his time to each, and getting 5% sales from one of them. If there are two platforms, and he's putting 20% to one and 80% to the other, it's no surprise he makes less on the one he barely supports! And anyone thinking that is not a good business person. (of course, there are too many unknowns to make either conclusion, but that didn't stop you)
If they are spending more money than they are getting then what do you want them to do?
The stats provided are damn near useless.
Let's hypothesize and say I develop some app. Let's count the app-specific dev time/costs as a separate baseline cost (cause that's how comparison of cost to maintain a port should start). Now, out of my remaining monies, I spend 20% supporting "Android", and the rest (80%) supporting iOS.
Would it surprise anyone if the platform receiving SIGNIFICANTLY less of my attention ran into more problems, bugs, bad reviews, fewer purchases, etc?
I have no idea if that's what they meant by "20% of its time", but the other side of the coin is not even mentioned. It would be FAR more significant if they stated that they spent 5% of their time supporting iOS specific issues, 20% supporting Android specific issues, and 75% of their time improving core app and server functionality, and were still seeing 95% of their revenue come from iOS and 5% from Android.... but we just don't know.
The only fact I can see is that their software had numerous issues on Android. Maybe if they fixed those they'd actually be able to turn a profit - people don't like to pay for shoddy work.
It's EXTREMELY easy and common for businesses to spend more than they're making (ex. see restaurant turn-over). Plenty of people ARE making money though... so either you're spending too much, or you're not spending enough (assuming you're otherwise competent).
This company had other viable options, such as:
* go the hulu route - pick a small handful of officially supported devices, and add in device model restrictions. Only support those you can support well. * spend more time/money, and make sure you've got everything supported so people don't hate on your product. * combine those, and add devices as the beta/demo results show them working well.
IE. this isn't as much an Android story as it is a business story (and a really poor one at that - no real details at all).
And for the fanboy's ready to flame this... note I didn't say Android costs less to develop for or support. I'm only saying this "article" is for shit and doesn't provide enough to make any conclusions.
FWIW, metal detectors *could* detect these, but they often have those things turned down so low stuff like this would pass right through anyway (I've gone through a bunch of times with my chunky metal belt buckle still on... left it on by mistake, and always surprised when it doesn't go beep).
My favorite solution to this whole mess is to simply arm every passenger when they enter the plane.
Why on Earth would the corporation NOT want to make that information public? The effect of suing in the first place is to strike fear of financial ruin into the hearts of all who would share anything.
Precisely because they do NOT want to strike fear of financial ruin into the hearts of all their customers.
Most people know it's technically wrong to download "free music", but nearly everyone does it, and those same people also buy a lot of music. IMO, the RIAA is smarter than we give them credit for. They know those illegal downloads actually help them sell stuff, but it's a balancing act. If it were legal and everyone freely shared all music on the same network, they'd go bust (picture the hey days of napster, but legalized). On the other hand, if they go after every single person that is infringing, it would be such a wide majority of people that everyone would react and fight back (think of all the judges, lawyers, congressmen, police, etc.... plus everyone that is a close friend or family to all of them).
They're playing a careful game and making an example of a person here so that this story is possible.... it's an ubran legend that people get sued by the RIAA, one we're all pretty sure is true, but not so common that half of our friends and family have been directly affected. It keeps everyone from being entirely open with their sharing, which makes it just difficult enough that people will still buy stuff.
This/. story is great precisely because only the AC's are saying they've been threatened but nothing has come of it. And who knows how many of these posts are shills?
Many buses disallow cell phone calls (ex. express bus service in NYC). Many trains have "quiet cars" where cell phone calls are not permitted. They're not absolutely strict on that stuff, but it's certainly unacceptable.
Loud and obnoxious activities (because really, the cell phone itself isn't at issue) are never socially acceptable around a group of quiet people. To think otherwise is ignorant. Act otherwise and you're just an asshole.
It's also completely plausible the manufacturers would provide hi-res** 2d images of each side of the device, but they don't.
The current deficiencies are easy to overcome. We don't need detailed 3d models to figure out if that port on the back of a projector is HDMI, Display Port, USB, eSATA, or memory stick (all similar dimensions that would be difficult to differentiate in a 3d model, but dead simple with just a camera phone quality image of the back of the damn thing, or a few lines of text).
I'm not against adding 3d views of products. But the OP is saying there isn't enough info on the sites already, but if they added a 3d model to all the product pages it would help immensely. Car analogy - I'm not always sure where the taxis are taking me cause there is no map in them, but if they were all transparent flying cars I could use binoculars to look all around and see exactly where I am! Why ignore the simply solution (carry a map; use a detailed 2d picture) and push one that is far more complex, non-existent/supported, expensive, and provides no additional benefit.
** hi-res being at least what my camera phone is capable of... which is enough to make out all the little text on the back of a PC).
Slashdot Mirror
Property, sales, maybe income. My problem with negative externalities is quantifying them well enough to justify a tax, and distinguishing them from moral judgements and prejudices.
I know the parent was an AC, but that's deserves more than a 0 score.
Good job dancing around issues.
The law you refer to has more severe penalties for violations where one makes a copy of a copyrighted work, modifies it, and then proceeds to sell it as their own as opposed to making a copy (downloading) for personal use only (no redistribution). That is what I referred to when I stated "more offensive". It wasn't my personal moral judgement of the matter, though I do agree that one is worse than the other. And as such, the original premise is still not "exactly analogous", and is off by a long shot.
Not sure what RMS has to do with this. He's a person, not the law, nor the GPL, nor was he mentioned by the GP's, and he has no say over the multitudes that are choosing to use the GPL.
Adding personal attacks on an unrelated issue does not change the fact that the basic premise of "why not take the linux or some other open source code and sell it without giving back to the community?" is still perfectly legit, accepted, and encouraged.
"exactly analogous"... bullshit. In this case, there was no mention of modifying the GPL'd software prior to selling it. You tacked that on. And in the music sharing case, there were no sales - it was freely distributed. So that should be "take the linux (sic) or some other open source code and give it to people for free", which is also perfectly acceptable.
In addition, if you want to go with that angle (modified GPL software being resold), the analogy on the music side would be to copy someone else's music track, tweak it (maybe add an extra bass line), and resell it to others without compensating the original author. That would be far more offensive than letting someone download an mp3 from you.
If you're actually a lawyer, and that's what you call "intellectually honest", please stop assuming all lawyer jokes are guidelines for how to live.
OK, how about these cases:
Hans Reiser - $60M
Roberto Ramirez - $10M
Jose Antonio Ramos - $2M
Aaron Walter Foster - $6M
Jason Young - $15.5M
...getting found liable in a civil trial for murder is going to cost you thousands of times what it costs to be found liable for copyright infringement.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think your math is off by a few orders of magnitude.
first award: $222k
second: $1.9m
third: $1.5m
Even the lowest of those is only off by 1 order (10x's) compared to the lowest of the examples you provided, and the highest (1.9mil) is basically the same as Ramos' $2mil.
Granted, those are all still higher, and this case was for 24 counts of infringement (which is pretty silly IMO), but they're a hell of a lot closer to each other than I'm comfortable with.
Mod parent up... perfect answer to the question.
I like the format/size of the DS's, and I wouldn't mind having a little hand held game machine, but I just can't get over all that hardware sitting there and no way to use other apps than just the games. These things have just about everything one would need to call it a micro-netbook or something like that, if only it had any way to do anything other than play games. The homebrew on the DS is there, barely, but they should really just support it out of the box. For example, my household would probably have 3 less ebook readers, and might have skipped 2 tablet purchases and a netbook.
The bottom screen could easily be a small keyboard (obviously not as nice as a netbook, laptop, or desktop, but it'd work as good as a smartphone onscreen keyboard). You could also do a very nice email client on that thing, using both displays while reading mail. And it has good audio/video support already, so why not a multimedia player (mp3 at least)? Toss a video chat thing on there as well... that'd be kinda handy. As it is, it does a specific set of games better than my phone, tablet, and netbook, but completely lacks every other feature they have, and it's entirely a software issue - that seems very silly IMO.
FWIW, it irks me just as much that game consoles also have a very large void of apps (and I hate saying "apps", but it fits here). Why can't my PS3 w/ BT keyboard fire up a terminal, ssh, vnc, firefox/chrome, vlc, thunderbird, skype, rythmbox/etc, etc etc etc?
They monitor their own (ex. family, friends, etc) more closely than most. The 1% are definitely monitored. One of the motivations for said monitoring is to catch anything that could set off alarms elsewhere before anyone else catches it so they can provide protection if needed. And besides, it's fun to keep tabs on people you know.
In fact, that may be the privacy they're worried about breaking. Just a guess, but what if those monitored are mostly NOT made up of the scum of the earth, but are actually a list of those that are vulnerable, important, powerful, rich, etc.
The common man really has little to worry about, and is of little threat to society, until they rock the boat or start pushing the buttons of the 1%. If the 1% are monitored thoroughly, then that'll nab anyone that deviates from the norms and starts talking to them. Who knows... maybe they are monitoring "everyone", but then most are going to just fall into a statistical norm then. I know this is bordering on "if you didn't do anything wrong, you have nothing to fear", but that's probably not too terribly far from the truth.
Agreed. Pretty much any site of any size registers .com, .org, and .net. There's no meaning to the hierarchy anymore, so just flatten it. Instead of registering slashdot.org, slashdot.net, and slashdot.com, just register slashdot.
I can't believe this is getting any traction. There is a hierarchy that makes sense, but people aren't using it right, so let's drop it? How about we use it to solve the problem?
In addition, all this stuff should be under .us and the only TLD's allowed should be the 2 letter ISO country codes. This would quickly kill all the international drama about ICANN and the TLD talks. /etc/resolv.conf).
Want to allow any TLD - do it UNDER a TLD. If you really want, you can have your local DNS server default to appending that TLD (or use
IMO, the "problem" with .com, .net, .org, .name, .biz, etc etc is that they're TLD's... so everyone wants in that game, and they've kept them open to all for the profits. Change the rule to only allow new registrations under the country code TLD, and make the .com.us and .org.us etc like every other country, or allow the us to pollute it with slashdot.us and such.... but leave the top alone.
I'm quite irritated they're selling out the TLD's. Doesn't the pricing alone raise some red flags for all those supporters? You're not going to get your own domain in there... it's too expensive. That expense is actually purposeful too... rather than a very small DB of TLD's under the root that point to other servers, it's going to bloat up with many more. That's not making the system better... there's still gotta be a root, and now it's growing substantially, and you're not invited unless you've got boatloads of cash.
There's no end user benefit to "https://coke" over "https://coke.com" either. The browsers solved that ages ago (automatically append .com and try it). ".com" should just be tightened down to be only commercial entities. If all the tld's were as strict as .org used to be, or as .xxx is now, we probably wouldn't be in this situation. (and yes, I'd still suggest those move to .com.us, .org.us, and .xxx.us, etc).
Therefore no other solution.
More like I haven't spent enough time to think of one.
A lot depends on whether the address has to be human-readable. For example, you could have an alternate system where sites are addressed by a public key hash, and you could ask numerous independent name-servers for any IP address signed by a key with that hash. But typing in 64-character hex strings to connect to Google or your bank would be troublesome, to say the least.
That sounds so great. Then we'll just have to add some sort of networked naming system so people could type in something human readable and find some response that identifies the service and where to find it. It should probably provide the same names to everyone, so people can tell each other about names and get to those neat things, but we'll have to have some way to distribute that load and cache it close to the user. And, maybe instead of that extra useless overhead of some hash of... well, what the hell are you making that hash from anyway?... we could use a really big number, like a 64bit integer (*cough* ipv6 *cough*). Maybe we could just re-purpose this DNS thing to find those big numbers? It sounds like that could do exactly what you want.
Remind me again what is "broken"? If you can't name what's broken, then you're just coming up with solutions looking for a problem. DNS works, and works very well.
Simple: on a mobile phone, you're not going to be using multiple terminal windows. If you even have a terminal on there (maybe to ssh into a server from your phone), you would only run one instance. I can't think of any time you'd want to run multiple instances of any application on a smartphone.
BS. If I'm doing any SSH'ing from my phone, i'll want multiple connections open. New terminals is one way, very valid, way to do that. There may be other solutions, but they'd be application-specific then (ex. hit something that tells that program to make a new tab).
While not 100% analogous, I already often have multiple SMS compose windows open on my smartphone. That's implemented differently, but that's because Android is quite different (an intent gets picked up by the app and triggers a behavior, which is to open a new composer instance).
I agree with the gist of your statement though... trying to make a desktop window manager fit onto smart phones and tablets is having a detrimental effect on the desktop usage.
But there is no reason to replace "start a new instance" with "go to an existing instance if exists, else start one". The latter should have simply been added, retaining the former. I wouldn't mind making some shortcuts for "go to existing instance of [app]"... it'd be useful for stuff like the Gimp. That's one area the browsers also went braindead (except, surprisingly, for IE)... I can't simply start a new/fresh instance of Firefox without having a separate profile for it, WTH?
Obviously Mbps.
Virtually everything above buying shared hosting or low-commit-vms is charged by throughput (bandwidth), not usage (total megs transferred). Sometimes it's 90th percentile, but it's it's always about bandwidth.
Good idea. But you can only tunnel traffic originating from programs supporting the SOCKS protocol, right ?
Wrong. Since you own both ends, it's trivial to set up ppp over ssh to make it a real and routable link. Here: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/ppp-ssh/
Bump... when I finished reading the question, while initially a good one, the final test was horribly flawed.
Any ideas on business models that would allow me to open source while guaranteeing I can feed myself?
Why not simply ask, "Any ideas on business models that would guarantee I can feed myself?"
Sure, he may want to open source, but if "guarantee I can feed myself" is a prerequisite, then the open source part is a trivial element. I don't know of any business models that will guarantee that; maybe others do, but it's unlikely and grows more and more unlikely as you apply more conditions to it.
IMHO, if you want to sell your stuff and open source it, just do it. The open source version does not have to be advertised on the front page along with your for sale product. Nothing even has to link the two. Assuming it's your code, you can release your paid version under an entirely closed license, and still maintain a mirror that is open source living elsewhere. Maybe all you do it package it up and add a custom theme/icons/installer/whatever.
Sell the shit out of it, and if it ever takes off, the you can consider diverging the source if needed. Ditto if the open source version is somehow stumbled upon and it takes off more than your closed source version... just leverage it at that point (diverge and upsell, or just offer support, etc).
On the open source version, don't apply patches unless the author assigns copyright to you. Since you've worked on it for 5+ years by yourself, this isn't likely to happen any time soon anyway, so don't worry about it until you come to it. There are very few people that will opt to maintain a separate patch collection under a different license (ex. Eduardo Chappa for Pine/Alpine), and I believe that only really came about because Pine was NOT licensed under a truly open source license until recently (until the alpine fork/rewrite).
Dunno about always on top (I'm sure there's a solution), but last time I used VirtualWin it did let you put a window on all workspaces (aka sticky or pin'd depending on the app). It may have always on top as well.
From the fine blog post (emphasize mine):
We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another - porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc. [] Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink. Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable.
Uh... so what I said was accurate. Assuming they're supporting 2 platforms (Android and iOS), well, we still don't know the figures because that still doesn't tell use how much time was spent on iOs specific things (some part of those total man-hours must have been on common tasks, like artwork and payroll and stuff). The only (poor) assumption that could be drawn is that they spent about 80% of their total man-hours last year dealing with iOs in one way or another. There is no comparison unless they're spending equal or greater time on Android than on iOS (regardless of revenue), and nothing has even hinted at that being the case.
KeePass is also available for PocketPC, Winodws Phone 7, iPhone/iPad (multiple versions), Android, J2ME, BlackBerry, PalmOS, Linux, Max OS X, Windows 98 thought 7 + Wine + Mono, and there are libs that tie into several programming lanuages.
I read through the article, the linked PDF, and the PDF linked from the PDF to find out they didn't even test KeePass, which, AFAIK, is one of the most popular and widely available password managers out there.
I really hate it when someone claims to do a thorough test on something and states something like either "Of all the X we tested, none of them passed" or "Of all the X we tested, only one came close to passing". The former makes me think they should get off their high horse and write it themselves if it's so obvious. The latter that they're just trolling to push one product... especially when there are glaring holes in the tests.
Thus, the average user won't use it.
BS. The "average" user will use whatever youtube, hulu, netflix, funnyordie, xtube, pornhub, etc etc spit out at them.
The past has had real player, quicktime, wmv, mpeg*, flash (with multiple video codecs), silverlight (multiple codecs), etc etc etc etc. Neither WebM nor h.264 is going to be the format to end all formats.
We're down to only two formats now in this spec. This should be easily fixed with a combo of:
a) let the browser support both via plugins of some sort (or OS media layer calls)
b) let the site detect and send the supported format.
Maybe that's not ideal, but your average user won't give a rats ass. h.264 has the technical/performance edge, and WebM has the open edge... there is no clear winner (you may define one, but others obviously do not). There's no point in wasting any more time arguing about it until h.264 clears the patent roadblocks or WebM catches up in hardware and software support.... just plan to support both, and ALL your users will be happy.
The point is, they can easily do that...
* update google .de site to return only the links and ads. Provide a banner stating why it is this way (or info bubble or something). Provide a means for site administrators to opt out (or would it be opt in?) to allow text blubs.
* Leave google.com alone. Tell Germany to block google.com if it wants to - that'd be their responsibility (I think).
The only new equipment I would like to see the police and military employ are mittens.
The only new equipment I would like to see the police and military employ are kittens.
Thank you. Reminds me of one of my favorite Always Sunny episodes :-)
Let's look at the numbers: 20% of his development dollars is supporting 5% of sales. And the 5% is declining. Anybody who would keep developing for any platform in this environment is not a good business person.
Uh, you're not looking at the his numbers... you're looking at only 2 of them. That statement would make sense if he was developing for 5 platforms, 20% of his time to each, and getting 5% sales from one of them. If there are two platforms, and he's putting 20% to one and 80% to the other, it's no surprise he makes less on the one he barely supports! And anyone thinking that is not a good business person. (of course, there are too many unknowns to make either conclusion, but that didn't stop you)
If they are spending more money than they are getting then what do you want them to do?
The stats provided are damn near useless.
Let's hypothesize and say I develop some app. Let's count the app-specific dev time/costs as a separate baseline cost (cause that's how comparison of cost to maintain a port should start).
Now, out of my remaining monies, I spend 20% supporting "Android", and the rest (80%) supporting iOS.
Would it surprise anyone if the platform receiving SIGNIFICANTLY less of my attention ran into more problems, bugs, bad reviews, fewer purchases, etc?
I have no idea if that's what they meant by "20% of its time", but the other side of the coin is not even mentioned. It would be FAR more significant if they stated that they spent 5% of their time supporting iOS specific issues, 20% supporting Android specific issues, and 75% of their time improving core app and server functionality, and were still seeing 95% of their revenue come from iOS and 5% from Android.... but we just don't know.
The only fact I can see is that their software had numerous issues on Android. Maybe if they fixed those they'd actually be able to turn a profit - people don't like to pay for shoddy work.
It's EXTREMELY easy and common for businesses to spend more than they're making (ex. see restaurant turn-over). Plenty of people ARE making money though... so either you're spending too much, or you're not spending enough (assuming you're otherwise competent).
This company had other viable options, such as:
* go the hulu route - pick a small handful of officially supported devices, and add in device model restrictions. Only support those you can support well.
* spend more time/money, and make sure you've got everything supported so people don't hate on your product.
* combine those, and add devices as the beta/demo results show them working well.
IE. this isn't as much an Android story as it is a business story (and a really poor one at that - no real details at all).
And for the fanboy's ready to flame this... note I didn't say Android costs less to develop for or support. I'm only saying this "article" is for shit and doesn't provide enough to make any conclusions.
Also that would detect things sewn into clothing, but probably not thin things like wires taped to the body.
Or 2x foot long razor blades: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3yaqq9Jjb4
(that's a link to Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame giving a talk at w00tstock 2.0)
FWIW, metal detectors *could* detect these, but they often have those things turned down so low stuff like this would pass right through anyway (I've gone through a bunch of times with my chunky metal belt buckle still on... left it on by mistake, and always surprised when it doesn't go beep).
My favorite solution to this whole mess is to simply arm every passenger when they enter the plane.
Why on Earth would the corporation NOT want to make that information public? The effect of suing in the first place is to strike fear of financial ruin into the hearts of all who would share anything.
Precisely because they do NOT want to strike fear of financial ruin into the hearts of all their customers.
Most people know it's technically wrong to download "free music", but nearly everyone does it, and those same people also buy a lot of music. IMO, the RIAA is smarter than we give them credit for. They know those illegal downloads actually help them sell stuff, but it's a balancing act. If it were legal and everyone freely shared all music on the same network, they'd go bust (picture the hey days of napster, but legalized). On the other hand, if they go after every single person that is infringing, it would be such a wide majority of people that everyone would react and fight back (think of all the judges, lawyers, congressmen, police, etc.... plus everyone that is a close friend or family to all of them).
They're playing a careful game and making an example of a person here so that this story is possible.... it's an ubran legend that people get sued by the RIAA, one we're all pretty sure is true, but not so common that half of our friends and family have been directly affected. It keeps everyone from being entirely open with their sharing, which makes it just difficult enough that people will still buy stuff.
This /. story is great precisely because only the AC's are saying they've been threatened but nothing has come of it. And who knows how many of these posts are shills?
Many buses disallow cell phone calls (ex. express bus service in NYC). Many trains have "quiet cars" where cell phone calls are not permitted. They're not absolutely strict on that stuff, but it's certainly unacceptable.
Loud and obnoxious activities (because really, the cell phone itself isn't at issue) are never socially acceptable around a group of quiet people. To think otherwise is ignorant. Act otherwise and you're just an asshole.
It's also completely plausible the manufacturers would provide hi-res** 2d images of each side of the device, but they don't.
The current deficiencies are easy to overcome. We don't need detailed 3d models to figure out if that port on the back of a projector is HDMI, Display Port, USB, eSATA, or memory stick (all similar dimensions that would be difficult to differentiate in a 3d model, but dead simple with just a camera phone quality image of the back of the damn thing, or a few lines of text).
I'm not against adding 3d views of products. But the OP is saying there isn't enough info on the sites already, but if they added a 3d model to all the product pages it would help immensely. Car analogy - I'm not always sure where the taxis are taking me cause there is no map in them, but if they were all transparent flying cars I could use binoculars to look all around and see exactly where I am! Why ignore the simply solution (carry a map; use a detailed 2d picture) and push one that is far more complex, non-existent/supported, expensive, and provides no additional benefit.
** hi-res being at least what my camera phone is capable of... which is enough to make out all the little text on the back of a PC).