Sad to say, but quality does NOT matter to 90% of the market. Only the experts care.
If quality mattered, people would use CAV laserdisc in all cases, but the majority uses CLV to put twice the content on each side of the disc.
If quality mattered, people would use uncompressed laserdisc over dvd, but the majority prefer the small discs at the expense of image integrity.
If quality mattered, people would use raw or lossless compression on images, but the majority prefer JPG at crappy levels.
If quality mattered, everyone would record MP3 at 192Kbps, even if it meant two songs fit into your old Rio, but the majority back off the quality to squeeze more music into their player.
If quality mattered, everyone would buy the best high-performance tires, spark plugs and other car parts, but the majority go for average or no-name automotive suppliers to stretch the paycheck a little farther.
If quality mattered, we'd have MENSA MEMBERS and ETHICS SPECIALISTS in our elected offices, and we'd pay attention to the legislation that they offered.
All this comes at a bad time for Mountain Dew's new fruity flavor, called Code Red, too.
First month it's on the market, and the brand new trademark is sullied by bad references to computer hacking, worms, viruses and international disputes. Is there truly "no bad publicity"?
Of course, like the word 'spam' and the Hormel product SPAM(tm), trademark law rightfully doesn't support serious legal implications, and wouldn't stand a chance against mob inevitability even if it did. Just kinda funny to watch it happen.
Midbar has already sold unidentified Cactus-embedded CDs in Eastern Europe.
Until specific titles of CDs are given, I'm very dubious about all these weekly claims of releases, cracks and damages. It sounds like RIAA-sponsored FUD, not actual discussions of real technologies or real products or real damages of real equipment.
Re:Badass compression algorithm?
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 2
The real problem is the SEARCHING for the data, which you seemed to blow off in your theorizing-remarks...;)
It's for the SEARCHING that you'd need to keep the digits, and additional indexing information besides. Yes, you can conjure the digits if someone tells you a key, but you have to conjure or search ALL the digits when you want to determine a key previously unknown.
Re:Badass compression algorithm?
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 2
Searching pi until you find that right position that matches your Max Payne ISO, which could be located on the far end of infinity.
Distributing what could be a multi-trillion digit number to your friends.
The second problem is easy, prima facie. Just "compress" it with your compression scheme until you've minimized the energy. Establish a convention: if the position'th digit is a known pattern, then the following minimum-compliant-digits describe the even-more-distant starting place for the actual content (or another copy of the known pattern to loop again yet-further-out). If you can't find the key digits of your position before the position itself in pi, then you've got the optimum key. Of course, the drawback is this: minimizing the energy a normal-to-base-10^n-for-all-n number is not going to be all that likely. The best key Y that encodes Max Payne's starting point of X may be such that Y > X!
The first problem's not that hard, but the storage for it is a big problem. You have to keep around all of the pi digits prior to the end of your most distant dataset instance. The upside: you can store Max Payne and Linux 6.5.3 ISO and DeCSS all in one archive. The downside: poor retrieval. There are a few helpful indexing methods for searching through all those digits fast, of course. See Knuth.
The whole point of the Infocom parser was that it WASN'T limited to stupid two word combinations.
> get all of the goo and the candle. blow out the candle then attack the interviewer Red goo: taken.
Blue goo: taken.
Silvery mystery goo: taken.
Brown goo: you cannot carry any more.
Candle: you cannot carry any more.
You blow out the candle, leaving everyone in a pitch blackness. The stench of a grue becomes apparent.
You can't see the interviewer.
You have been attacked by a grue.
What if you got a good narrator to record all the text from a game, and hooked up a speech-to-text engine for input. Then you could put it on a laptop, sit back in your favorite chair, put on some headphones, close your eyes and just imagine...
This is just the sort of thing that we need to install in cars to keep the driver awake!
> drive south You are feeling drowsy. You are likely to crash into a grue.
what happens if we need to approach a star that has a higher strength solar wind than the one propelling the craft? It seems to me it wouldn't matter what color, etc., the reverse side was, you'd still get a pressure front pushing you away
That's actually exactly what you WANT if you're trying to approach another star.
These things depend on acceleration, not velocity. That is, they don't move very fast at all at first, but each new photon bumps the speed up a little. By the time this craft is halfway between two stars, it's moving at a respectable clip.
Now, as the craft is closer to the target sunthan it is to the source sun, it might be time to put on the "brakes" as it were. How would you do that with a rocket? Turn around and THRUST back toward home. How do you do it with a sail? Turn around and let the target sun push against you. If the target sun is larger, you just fold the wings in a little bit to regulate the effectiveness of the thrust.
When the craft is slowed to a safe approach speed, fold the wings to reduce their effectiveness. Let the sun's gravity pull the craft in more, and regulate the speed with the wings so you don't just get sucked all the way in.
Now it's time to start taking pictures or finding something to orbit safely.
As has been pointed out before, Opera and Netscape and other browsers have been crying in their milk for years about the level of IE integration, when they could have been doing something about it.
Internet Explorer is two parts: a bundle of COM objects that adhere to a public and fixed com interface, and a bundle of glue that uses those COM objects together to make it a single application.
Netscape could have implemented these same COM interfaces, and have gotten at least half of the integration that IE did. By depending on the APIs, Microsoft would have likely cleaned it up to allow more seamless replacement, as they have cleaned up DirectX about eight times.
But no, Netscape sued Microsoft (oh, wait, Netscape asked the Feds to sue Microsoft), so of course the IE COM interfaces are still a little rough and incomplete.
Remember when Lotus bitched and moaned about how it was impossible to write a "real" program on Windows, because their 1-2-3W version 1.0 sucked bigtime? Remember how Philippe Kahn, hardly the friend of Redmond, told him to shut up because he didn't know what he was talking about?
Obligatory Slashdot Disclaimer: yes, Microsoft is vicious, ruthless, and large. It is exactly for these reasons that they often lose in court, and in many cases, they deserve to lose. I don't work for them, nor do I care what OS is monopolistic in ten years.
Don't win by litigation, win by quality products. Netscape, Adobe, Sun, they may win little battles with the help of a judge. You're not going to win a court war against a multi-billion-per-quarter revenue machine. You're going to win a war by making Microsoft irrelevant, one market at a time. But Microsoft is more vulnerable if you just write better code and use every interface they expose to integrate and replace their features.
our antitrust laws are leaning toward the more evolved EU laws; that being, a company's practices need not be bad for consumers in order to be bad; the health of the competitive market must also be taken into account, and if a company's practices are destroying competitors, they company is breaking the law
Hm, tell me how an API in the "wrong" DLL would be harmful to competition?
There are three cases:
the ms browser front-end is installed and calls the private API in the also-installed DLL
the ms browser front-end is not installed, and because it's private, nobody calls the API
that's orphaned in some installed DLL
the API is public, so the ms browser or any other browser interested in the feature uses it
If the API were actively breaking competitor's products, that's got nothing to do with what DLL embeds the API's code, and is actionable separately.
Having the courts or the government rule on methodology of software engineering is a very bad precedent.
Source code is akin to blueprints. Follow the instructions to make the actual product.
If the blueprints for your landscaping are mixed with the blueprints for your house, or the wiring within the house, how does this damage anything that the user does?
If the blueprints for ParseHtmlTable() are mixed with the blueprints for an FTP file server, again, how does this put the user at risk? Ultimate file size of the binaries is the only downside. If they expose the API to the developers, then every developer on the platform can use it, regardless of what bloated binary holds the bytes.
I think that the court shouldn't even tell the manufacturer what features can and cannot belong in a product: that's what the marketplace is for. Telling them HOW to build code, where it holds no relevance to the safety or choice of the user and infringement of copyright, is outside the expertise and purpose of the court.
You can change Microsoft and Adobe and Doubleclick's ways. Change them with your dollars, with your own quality competition, and with your voice.
Describe ROT-13 in terms of "Secret Decoder Rings". These plastic toys have been around for ages, lending a familiarity to the average US citizen who is technically uninformed.
Is there any way to communicate without having an accurate clock?
Morse Code has no accurate clock, and works just fine. (I'm not joking or patronizing in pointing this out. Your question is a good one.)
A "latch" signal is one which tells a related circuit that it is okay to perform some task: "the data is ready to read", "the data is ready to write", "the inputs are ready to combine", etc.
A "clock" is just a way to organize many circuits on the same latch signal. All data must be ready at the same time, and then the clock strikes, latching all the circuits that use that data. Most simple data circuits will work if you clock them once a year, instead of once every few nanoseconds.
A clock has to be set to a period that the worst-case circuit can cope with. If it takes a circuit a long time to generate its results, the next circuit had better not be latched too early, so the clock is slowed to make sure the results are always ready in time.
Parallel printers work on a single latch, and no clock is needed. Other communications would be possible quite easily without the assumption that latches always occur at a fixed frequency. Ethernet may be trickier, but it's the same principle.
Caffeine is dependency-forming. This is the major reason for adding it to cola drinks: it increases consumer loyalty.
Caffeine is a diuretic: it removes water and urea from cells and increases urine output.
Caffeine is a stimulant, only to a point. Once the body has become saturated, caffeine actually acts as a depressant.
Caffeine, like other stimulants, can help people with ADD, by enhancing the person's ability to focus on a goal instead of being distracted by everything else.
programmers and porters would be well served to throw in some 'MS Office Compatibility' in terms of functionality and/or 'Help for Microsoft Office Users'
Microsoft Excel has for years offered "Help for Lotus 1-2-3 Users", and Microsoft Word has for years offered "Help for WordPerfect Users."
Since these applications are trying to be fungible by supporting all of the commodity features in approximately the same way, the only reason to stay in the market is to get a piece of the market share. There's no corporate advantage to being compatible, other than to muscle in on established turf.
The article said they needed people, but didn't suggest one way or the other that they'd be paid for their work. Maybe so, maybe not.
Why should I help Scott "no privacy" "gates sucks" McNealy with his corporate strategic goals, without getting much in return?
Secondly, the writeup says 'lead'. Wouldn't the folks who are already writing bits of this product be the best applicants? Fishing for people out of the blue with no experience on the architecture of this particular product seems kinda strange, given that the source is open.
Closed Source pays its developers. I use that to pay my rent, which won't take free-as-in-beer lease agreements. Open Source is a spare-time hobby for the most part (the luminaries get speaking fees, the rest of the developers get... source code).
Hey, there are some projects that are sponsored, and some guys are finding cool companies that pay for open source. I hope this is one of those cases, but the article didn't give me much hope or indication of that.
What would you say if you bought a car and the rear windows didn't roll down?
I'd return it. You can return software, too, but most people don't. However, if you look at Consumer Reports, you'll find that the first year of a new model car is usually quite poor compared to following years: the syndrome of 1.0 versus 1.1, 1.2, and other updates.
Software that doesn't work right is called beta, and only Microsoft gets to charge for it.
Yes, it's a strange world where it's the norm to have EULAs that disavow any suitability to any task, and to dismiss any liability in the face of damages caused by their products.
You mention Microsoft, so in fairness, I'll troll the other way as well. I think of Linux as being in perpetual beta. Any distro is just a bunch of current snapshots of works in progress, instead of a concerted effort to get a coherent set of features together in one place. Without group cohesion, all I can hope for in a linux distro is that all of the snapshots are relatively stable, if not orchestrated. That said, I use Linux half the time, and Windows half the time.
I'm not defending either camp, so put away that (-1: Troll) click for a second.
The Director always wants to get it done right, taking forever to do it.
The Producer always wants to get it shipped, even with a few flaws.
These are naturally at odds, and the MMORPG market is no exception. When external beta testers get involved, however, they act as an extension of the Director: fix this, fix this, it's not ready yet. The Producer has to intensify the push to release the product before it's perfect but while it still has a market. Every week of development can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and if there are scheduled marketing agreements in place (say, retail endcaps), it's ruinous to blow your deadlines.
The MMORPG genre has a couple other wrinkles that Hollywood doesn't usually have, that complicates these roles.
For one, an Internet-age game can be patched or upgraded AFTER it is released. So 1.0 sucks, that's nothing new. 1.1.6b.alpha.release3 is where it gets better.
For two, the beta testing crowd is a fickle bunch. Some stick to the new product for a long time, while some flee for the Next Big Thing(tm). They're not the core audience. See my writeup on Everything2 about the Life Cycle of an Online Community for my three-act summary of this phenomenon.
Three, the shelf life of an Internet game is far longer than a movie or a solo game. Movies are in the dollar theaters and videotapes in a few months. Solo games are in Wal*Mart bins in a few months. An online community takes that long just to get up a good head of steam.
As Guy Kawasaki (ceo Garage.com) said, "Don't Worry, Be Crappy." You have to ship to make money. You have to get Revision One out there so you can see HOW to make it better, instead of noodling around in the workshop forever.
There have been several postings already that point out that the First Amendment does not in fact protect anonymous speech.
There is a confusion about what 'anonymity' means. Courts have ruled specifically about two aspects of anonymity, and have ruled that one form is protected, and one form is not protected. To lump them both under 'anonymity' is to ensure further confusion.
There is a First Amendment right to 'unsigned' expression. You can CHOOSE not to put your name on something you write, because you have the right to express yourself how you wish to express yourself, and to COMPELL an author or artist or whistleblower or witness to SIGN their own expressions is a blow against freedom of self-expression, and has a chilling effect on expression.
However, there is no right of 'unaccountability'. That is, if a third party is able to prove that you were the responsible author/artist/whistleblower/witness, then this fact is admissible, and you are able to be prosecuted if your expression is libelous, slanderous, or in some other way breaks existing laws. You are always accountable for your actions, including expression.
The Internet makes it easy to elude obvious signatures, but most ISPs keep enough logs to ensure some modicum of accountability. It is because of this linkage, and because of the confusion over the use of 'anonymity' that the courts are beginning to form guidelines.
The guidelines describe what standards must be followed to force ISPs to divulge private records to turn 'unsigned' expressions into 'accountable' expressions. In short, the courts seem to say that the specific expressions must be shown specifically to have a strong case for illegal forms of expression: again, libel, slander, or other legally disallowed forms of expression. This hurdle must be met BEFORE the ISPs are required to divulge private information.
... are strapped for cash because WE the public don't vote for school bonds! If they weren't broke, this would be less an issue.
The above-60 crowd is a major negative force for school moneys. They vote down anything that smells like a tax increase, and what do they care, they're not going to benefit from better schools. Their kids HAVE kids, so let the mommies and daddies pay for it, and leave granny's checkbook out of it.
The property owners (that is, real estate like houses and ranches) vote down anything that would raise property taxes, too. Down with urban growth! Down with sprawl! Blah blah.
Are property owners and sextagenarians likely to care about these issues of schools and "free" software? No. Can the rest of us overcome that? Yeah, but don't count on it.
I might pay for slashdot. A few bucks a year, but I would have some requirements first:
accessibility: automatic first-page mirrors of linked sites
integrity: confirmation of story facts
legibility: reasonable spelling and grammar
(I can understand an accidental misspelling of remuneration, Cliff, but CmdrTaco would have to go through remedial English classes)
customization: personalized killfiles on author and grep (kill/goatse/)
Slashdot Mirror
Did I get my math right?
About a billion seconds ago, the first man walked on the moon. (~31 years)
About a billion minutes ago, the first man was said to have walked on water. (~1860 years, sorta close to the 0 CE mark)
About a billion hours ago, the first man walked through what we now call Europe. (~111600 years, homo sapiens in upper pleistocene)
About a billion days ago, the first man walks. (over 2.6 million years, a bit before the oldest known homo habilis)
About a billion years ago, the first multicelled animals form. (eukaryotes supplant prokaryotes)
About a billion decades ago, the Milky Way galaxy began to form.
Sad to say, but quality does NOT matter to 90% of the market. Only the experts care.
If quality mattered, people would use CAV laserdisc in all cases, but the majority uses CLV to put twice the content on each side of the disc.
If quality mattered, people would use uncompressed laserdisc over dvd, but the majority prefer the small discs at the expense of image integrity.
If quality mattered, people would use raw or lossless compression on images, but the majority prefer JPG at crappy levels.
If quality mattered, everyone would record MP3 at 192Kbps, even if it meant two songs fit into your old Rio, but the majority back off the quality to squeeze more music into their player.
If quality mattered, everyone would buy the best high-performance tires, spark plugs and other car parts, but the majority go for average or no-name automotive suppliers to stretch the paycheck a little farther.
If quality mattered, we'd have MENSA MEMBERS and ETHICS SPECIALISTS in our elected offices, and we'd pay attention to the legislation that they offered.
All this comes at a bad time for Mountain Dew's new fruity flavor, called Code Red, too.
First month it's on the market, and the brand new trademark is sullied by bad references to computer hacking, worms, viruses and international disputes. Is there truly "no bad publicity"?
Of course, like the word 'spam' and the Hormel product SPAM(tm), trademark law rightfully doesn't support serious legal implications, and wouldn't stand a chance against mob inevitability even if it did. Just kinda funny to watch it happen.
"Be careful what you ask for. You might get it."
Midbar has already sold unidentified Cactus-embedded CDs in Eastern Europe.
Until specific titles of CDs are given, I'm very dubious about all these weekly claims of releases, cracks and damages. It sounds like RIAA-sponsored FUD, not actual discussions of real technologies or real products or real damages of real equipment.
The real problem is the SEARCHING for the data, which you seemed to blow off in your theorizing-remarks... ;)
It's for the SEARCHING that you'd need to keep the digits, and additional indexing information besides. Yes, you can conjure the digits if someone tells you a key, but you have to conjure or search ALL the digits when you want to determine a key previously unknown.
Searching pi until you find that right position that matches your Max Payne ISO, which could be located on the far end of infinity.
Distributing what could be a multi-trillion digit number to your friends.
The second problem is easy, prima facie. Just "compress" it with your compression scheme until you've minimized the energy. Establish a convention: if the position'th digit is a known pattern, then the following minimum-compliant-digits describe the even-more-distant starting place for the actual content (or another copy of the known pattern to loop again yet-further-out). If you can't find the key digits of your position before the position itself in pi, then you've got the optimum key. Of course, the drawback is this: minimizing the energy a normal-to-base-10^n-for-all-n number is not going to be all that likely. The best key Y that encodes Max Payne's starting point of X may be such that Y > X!
The first problem's not that hard, but the storage for it is a big problem. You have to keep around all of the pi digits prior to the end of your most distant dataset instance. The upside: you can store Max Payne and Linux 6.5.3 ISO and DeCSS all in one archive. The downside: poor retrieval. There are a few helpful indexing methods for searching through all those digits fast, of course. See Knuth.
The whole point of the Infocom parser was that it WASN'T limited to stupid two word combinations.
> get all of the goo and the candle. blow out the candle then attack the interviewer
Red goo: taken.
Blue goo: taken.
Silvery mystery goo: taken.
Brown goo: you cannot carry any more.
Candle: you cannot carry any more.
You blow out the candle, leaving everyone in a pitch blackness. The stench of a grue becomes apparent.
You can't see the interviewer. You have been attacked by a grue.
What if you got a good narrator to record all the text from a game, and hooked up a speech-to-text engine for input. Then you could put it on a laptop, sit back in your favorite chair, put on some headphones, close your eyes and just imagine...
This is just the sort of thing that we need to install in cars to keep the driver awake!
> drive south
You are feeling drowsy. You are likely to crash into a grue.
what happens if we need to approach a star that has a higher strength solar wind than the one propelling the craft? It seems to me it wouldn't matter what color, etc., the reverse side was, you'd still get a pressure front pushing you away
That's actually exactly what you WANT if you're trying to approach another star.
These things depend on acceleration, not velocity. That is, they don't move very fast at all at first, but each new photon bumps the speed up a little. By the time this craft is halfway between two stars, it's moving at a respectable clip.
Now, as the craft is closer to the target sunthan it is to the source sun, it might be time to put on the "brakes" as it were. How would you do that with a rocket? Turn around and THRUST back toward home. How do you do it with a sail? Turn around and let the target sun push against you. If the target sun is larger, you just fold the wings in a little bit to regulate the effectiveness of the thrust.
When the craft is slowed to a safe approach speed, fold the wings to reduce their effectiveness. Let the sun's gravity pull the craft in more, and regulate the speed with the wings so you don't just get sucked all the way in.
Now it's time to start taking pictures or finding something to orbit safely.
Chinese "Code Red" Internet Worm misses White House, Microsoft issues fix
So Microsoft's fix does what? Attacks the WhiteHouse.gov properly next time? :)
As has been pointed out before, Opera and Netscape and other browsers have been crying in their milk for years about the level of IE integration, when they could have been doing something about it.
Internet Explorer is two parts: a bundle of COM objects that adhere to a public and fixed com interface, and a bundle of glue that uses those COM objects together to make it a single application.
Netscape could have implemented these same COM interfaces, and have gotten at least half of the integration that IE did. By depending on the APIs, Microsoft would have likely cleaned it up to allow more seamless replacement, as they have cleaned up DirectX about eight times.
But no, Netscape sued Microsoft (oh, wait, Netscape asked the Feds to sue Microsoft), so of course the IE COM interfaces are still a little rough and incomplete.
Remember when Lotus bitched and moaned about how it was impossible to write a "real" program on Windows, because their 1-2-3W version 1.0 sucked bigtime? Remember how Philippe Kahn, hardly the friend of Redmond, told him to shut up because he didn't know what he was talking about?
Obligatory Slashdot Disclaimer: yes, Microsoft is vicious, ruthless, and large. It is exactly for these reasons that they often lose in court, and in many cases, they deserve to lose. I don't work for them, nor do I care what OS is monopolistic in ten years.
Don't win by litigation, win by quality products. Netscape, Adobe, Sun, they may win little battles with the help of a judge. You're not going to win a court war against a multi-billion-per-quarter revenue machine. You're going to win a war by making Microsoft irrelevant, one market at a time. But Microsoft is more vulnerable if you just write better code and use every interface they expose to integrate and replace their features.
our antitrust laws are leaning toward the more evolved EU laws; that being, a company's practices need not be bad for consumers in order to be bad; the health of the competitive market must also be taken into account, and if a company's practices are destroying competitors, they company is breaking the law
Hm, tell me how an API in the "wrong" DLL would be harmful to competition?
There are three cases:
If the API were actively breaking competitor's products, that's got nothing to do with what DLL embeds the API's code, and is actionable separately.
Having the courts or the government rule on methodology of software engineering is a very bad precedent.
Source code is akin to blueprints. Follow the instructions to make the actual product.
If the blueprints for your landscaping are mixed with the blueprints for your house, or the wiring within the house, how does this damage anything that the user does?
If the blueprints for ParseHtmlTable() are mixed with the blueprints for an FTP file server, again, how does this put the user at risk? Ultimate file size of the binaries is the only downside. If they expose the API to the developers, then every developer on the platform can use it, regardless of what bloated binary holds the bytes.
I think that the court shouldn't even tell the manufacturer what features can and cannot belong in a product: that's what the marketplace is for. Telling them HOW to build code, where it holds no relevance to the safety or choice of the user and infringement of copyright, is outside the expertise and purpose of the court.
You can change Microsoft and Adobe and Doubleclick's ways. Change them with your dollars, with your own quality competition, and with your voice.
Describe ROT-13 in terms of "Secret Decoder Rings". These plastic toys have been around for ages, lending a familiarity to the average US citizen who is technically uninformed.
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a01a8'
Maybe the processor wasn't "seated" properly. Causes all sorts of unpredictable errors.
Is there any way to communicate without having an accurate clock?
Morse Code has no accurate clock, and works just fine. (I'm not joking or patronizing in pointing this out. Your question is a good one.)
A "latch" signal is one which tells a related circuit that it is okay to perform some task: "the data is ready to read", "the data is ready to write", "the inputs are ready to combine", etc.
A "clock" is just a way to organize many circuits on the same latch signal. All data must be ready at the same time, and then the clock strikes, latching all the circuits that use that data. Most simple data circuits will work if you clock them once a year, instead of once every few nanoseconds.
A clock has to be set to a period that the worst-case circuit can cope with. If it takes a circuit a long time to generate its results, the next circuit had better not be latched too early, so the clock is slowed to make sure the results are always ready in time.
Parallel printers work on a single latch, and no clock is needed. Other communications would be possible quite easily without the assumption that latches always occur at a fixed frequency. Ethernet may be trickier, but it's the same principle.
Caffeine is dependency-forming. This is the major reason for adding it to cola drinks: it increases consumer loyalty.
Caffeine is a diuretic: it removes water and urea from cells and increases urine output.
Caffeine is a stimulant, only to a point. Once the body has become saturated, caffeine actually acts as a depressant.
Caffeine, like other stimulants, can help people with ADD, by enhancing the person's ability to focus on a goal instead of being distracted by everything else.
Normalized Comparisons (USA distributions):
Drip Coffee (7oz cup): 197-300mg/12oz
Brewed Coffee (7oz cup): 137-231mg/12oz
Red Bull (8.3oz can): 115.5mg/12oz
Espresso (1.5~2oz shot): 100-135mg/shot
Jolt Cola (12oz can): 72mg/12oz
Coca-Cola (12oz can): 46.5mg/12oz
Pepsi Cola (12oz can): 38.4mg/12oz
programmers and porters would be well served to throw in some 'MS Office Compatibility' in terms of functionality and/or 'Help for Microsoft Office Users'
Microsoft Excel has for years offered "Help for Lotus 1-2-3 Users", and Microsoft Word has for years offered "Help for WordPerfect Users."
Since these applications are trying to be fungible by supporting all of the commodity features in approximately the same way, the only reason to stay in the market is to get a piece of the market share. There's no corporate advantage to being compatible, other than to muscle in on established turf.
The article said they needed people, but didn't suggest one way or the other that they'd be paid for their work. Maybe so, maybe not.
Why should I help Scott "no privacy" "gates sucks" McNealy with his corporate strategic goals, without getting much in return?
Secondly, the writeup says 'lead'. Wouldn't the folks who are already writing bits of this product be the best applicants? Fishing for people out of the blue with no experience on the architecture of this particular product seems kinda strange, given that the source is open.
Closed Source pays its developers. I use that to pay my rent, which won't take free-as-in-beer lease agreements. Open Source is a spare-time hobby for the most part (the luminaries get speaking fees, the rest of the developers get... source code).
Hey, there are some projects that are sponsored, and some guys are finding cool companies that pay for open source. I hope this is one of those cases, but the article didn't give me much hope or indication of that.
What would you say if you bought a car and the rear windows didn't roll down?
I'd return it. You can return software, too, but most people don't. However, if you look at Consumer Reports, you'll find that the first year of a new model car is usually quite poor compared to following years: the syndrome of 1.0 versus 1.1, 1.2, and other updates.
Software that doesn't work right is called beta, and only Microsoft gets to charge for it.
Yes, it's a strange world where it's the norm to have EULAs that disavow any suitability to any task, and to dismiss any liability in the face of damages caused by their products.
You mention Microsoft, so in fairness, I'll troll the other way as well. I think of Linux as being in perpetual beta. Any distro is just a bunch of current snapshots of works in progress, instead of a concerted effort to get a coherent set of features together in one place. Without group cohesion, all I can hope for in a linux distro is that all of the snapshots are relatively stable, if not orchestrated. That said, I use Linux half the time, and Windows half the time.
I'm not defending either camp, so put away that (-1: Troll) click for a second.
The Director always wants to get it done right, taking forever to do it.
The Producer always wants to get it shipped, even with a few flaws.
These are naturally at odds, and the MMORPG market is no exception. When external beta testers get involved, however, they act as an extension of the Director: fix this, fix this, it's not ready yet. The Producer has to intensify the push to release the product before it's perfect but while it still has a market. Every week of development can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and if there are scheduled marketing agreements in place (say, retail endcaps), it's ruinous to blow your deadlines.
The MMORPG genre has a couple other wrinkles that Hollywood doesn't usually have, that complicates these roles.
For one, an Internet-age game can be patched or upgraded AFTER it is released. So 1.0 sucks, that's nothing new. 1.1.6b.alpha.release3 is where it gets better.
For two, the beta testing crowd is a fickle bunch. Some stick to the new product for a long time, while some flee for the Next Big Thing(tm). They're not the core audience. See my writeup on Everything2 about the Life Cycle of an Online Community for my three-act summary of this phenomenon.
Three, the shelf life of an Internet game is far longer than a movie or a solo game. Movies are in the dollar theaters and videotapes in a few months. Solo games are in Wal*Mart bins in a few months. An online community takes that long just to get up a good head of steam.
As Guy Kawasaki (ceo Garage.com) said, "Don't Worry, Be Crappy." You have to ship to make money. You have to get Revision One out there so you can see HOW to make it better, instead of noodling around in the workshop forever.
There have been several postings already that point out that the First Amendment does not in fact protect anonymous speech.
There is a confusion about what 'anonymity' means. Courts have ruled specifically about two aspects of anonymity, and have ruled that one form is protected, and one form is not protected. To lump them both under 'anonymity' is to ensure further confusion.
There is a First Amendment right to 'unsigned' expression. You can CHOOSE not to put your name on something you write, because you have the right to express yourself how you wish to express yourself, and to COMPELL an author or artist or whistleblower or witness to SIGN their own expressions is a blow against freedom of self-expression, and has a chilling effect on expression.
However, there is no right of 'unaccountability'. That is, if a third party is able to prove that you were the responsible author/artist/whistleblower/witness, then this fact is admissible, and you are able to be prosecuted if your expression is libelous, slanderous, or in some other way breaks existing laws. You are always accountable for your actions, including expression.
The Internet makes it easy to elude obvious signatures, but most ISPs keep enough logs to ensure some modicum of accountability. It is because of this linkage, and because of the confusion over the use of 'anonymity' that the courts are beginning to form guidelines.
The guidelines describe what standards must be followed to force ISPs to divulge private records to turn 'unsigned' expressions into 'accountable' expressions. In short, the courts seem to say that the specific expressions must be shown specifically to have a strong case for illegal forms of expression: again, libel, slander, or other legally disallowed forms of expression. This hurdle must be met BEFORE the ISPs are required to divulge private information.
The above-60 crowd is a major negative force for school moneys. They vote down anything that smells like a tax increase, and what do they care, they're not going to benefit from better schools. Their kids HAVE kids, so let the mommies and daddies pay for it, and leave granny's checkbook out of it.
The property owners (that is, real estate like houses and ranches) vote down anything that would raise property taxes, too. Down with urban growth! Down with sprawl! Blah blah.
Are property owners and sextagenarians likely to care about these issues of schools and "free" software? No. Can the rest of us overcome that? Yeah, but don't count on it.
I might pay for slashdot. A few bucks a year, but I would have some requirements first:
accessibility: automatic first-page mirrors of linked sites
integrity: confirmation of story facts
legibility: reasonable spelling and grammar
(I can understand an accidental misspelling of remuneration, Cliff, but CmdrTaco would have to go through remedial English classes)
customization: personalized killfiles on author and grep (kill /goatse/)