I've had so many clients asking if I can scrape data from their legacy lockinware. Now I can confidently say "Yes" and bill them for the 1400 hours it takes to read this spec.
As usual MrNaz is crushing. 90% of the world wants exactly this from their document formats:
I create a document, and anyone else I choose to give it to can get the gist of it with any computer they want. It does not contain macros, dynamically-link embedded Windows Genuine Front Pages(TM) or anything of that sort. It is a bunch of text separated into paragraphs, or it is a spreadsheet. Under "advanced functionality" you may file -putting image(s) into the text document -having 2+ tabs in the spreadsheet
The technology to accomplish this was boring in 1996.
By "for charity" it seems quite clear that they mean software that -does not come with an unconscionable EULA -does not do its damnedest to prevent other software from working with it -is not protected from competition by government granted monopolies -does not have an expiration date in the form of planned obsolescence/end of support -does not require that the user surrender hisher hardware to the control of a remote party
Please note: this is not *at *all certain, unless you are among those who (incomprehensibly) consider the works of Britney Spears, her little sister Jamie Lynn, their boy DelRoy, and every other music Bob Ross to be "art".
"Yeah, I could probably google for a hack to fix it but damn it, I shouldn't have to. Linux never does that shit to me."
So true. I've been using Lx since approximately Mandrake 5.1 (ask your dad), and have never had to, um, google up a fix for anything. Nope. Not once. Except of course 3-5 times a week.
"To have lots and lots of customers you need quality results."
Alternatively, you could leverage your monopoly in one space (say, operating systems) to gain market share in another. Not that MS would do that; I'm just brainstorming here.
I dunno, you could maybe have a lightbox that says "in order to use your Yahoo! Mail, you will have to install Genuine SliverLight Express Addition, which btw requires one of the following Sliverlightable operating systems... "
Is *anyone, *anywhere, just aching to get their hands on the OOXML spec 'cause then they can springboard off of a bunch of the cool innovative things that MS formats can do?
Or is everyone, like me, just kinda hoping it's open enough so that we can sorta-promise clients that the software we develop will sorta-work with their piles of legacy, cruft-infested data. (At least, it'll sorta work until MS changes their document spec again and force-upgrades everyone through Genuine Windows YoureScrewed.)
"And if I value getting free electricity forever at $3, and so does everyone else, then what? $3 isn't enough for me to hunt down everyone else who would benefit.. "
Thanks for asking; here's what happens in that case (please note, I'm assuming something resembling a free market here).
Some crafty entrepreneur realizes the potential market value of the generator's output is ($3 X num/ppl), let's say $3K. Heshe spends a month hunting down everyone, signing contracts, hooking them up to the service, then pays the engineer $1,201.
All that's left to calculate is whether the remaining $1,799 is more than the payment for the next-most-profitable thing the entrepreneur might.
If the thing costs another $3K to build, the entrepreneur just has to find 2000 customers instead of 1000.
I'm old enough to recall a time when *most business models were built on this sort of calculation, rather than the nouvelle vague: 1. get angel investors 2. get some "intellectual property" 3. make it clear that you're ready to harrass and sue anyone who even contemplates entering the same general market that you're "intellectual property" pertains to 4.... 5. Profit. (us. == sell your "intellectual property" to some firm that has done this more times than you)
"The more people could benefit from having the results of your work, the less well that model works."
Sorry, I don't follow... If I can design a stable cold fusion reactor in a month, everyone gets free electricity forever, whether the population of the earth is 500 or 500 trillion.
If my next-most-desirable means of employment is delivering underwear to tanning salons for $1,200/mo. then the cost of designing the reactor is $1,201.
The number of people who could benefit doesn't matter.
"The movement from analog to digital is more important for the structure of social and legal relations than the more famous if less certain movement from status to contract" Moglen again
It is true that the marginal cost is not actually zero, but I find the difference to be radical. For many of these goods -- let's say an electonic textbook, to get back on topic -- the cost of implementing a system of exclusion, by which non-payers could be reliably prevented from getting access, would astronomically increase the fixed costs.
In fact, the cost of such a system seems to be infinite. Is this not what the DRM whack-a-mole keeps proving?
When the marginal costs get so low that the cost-of-sale (i mean the bare-bones, cost-to-collect) exceeds it, the fundamental economics haven't changed but the practical ones have, namely the concept of selling as selling-individual copies of X. The individual copies are no longer the products, but the aggregate. And you don't sell to the recipients, you sell to someone who's interested in funding the aggregate.
'cause guess what the effort you can muster to build each reproduction is limited; you will do something else if it doesn't pay off, or give you a warm fuzzy feeling.
With knowledge, and anything digitizable, the situation is radically different. This is moglen's point, and this is why people who use industrial-economy analogies to address free culture discussions only embarrass themselves. The situations are *radically different.
It's more like this: if Ernie tells you that 2+3 is 5, and you etch that knowledge into a granite chunk called "the internet" and reproduce it endlessly, even after your death.
As to what you're "depriving the creator" of, how many levels do you go up? Who told Ernie? Do you owe himher a few bucks?
After you die, when people look at the stone you carved and tell others, what are you being deprived of? k, you're dead, how about your children?
It's all a bunch of nonsense, and it proceeds from ignorance about the fundamentals
Slashdot Mirror
I've had so many clients asking if I can scrape data from their legacy lockinware. Now I can confidently say "Yes" and bill them for the 1400 hours it takes to read this spec.
Thank you MS!
as a precautionary measure, i honestly think we *should take note whenever WL goes down.
Oh, yeah, sure. I'm going to go and... read, whatchamacallit .. *instructions about how to do the thing that I want to do.
Not likely. Firefox doesn't behave how I like by default because it's, um, open source software I guess.
-PseudoJello
As usual MrNaz is crushing. 90% of the world wants exactly this from their document formats:
I create a document, and anyone else I choose to give it to can get the gist of it with any computer they want. It does not contain macros, dynamically-link embedded Windows Genuine Front Pages(TM) or anything of that sort. It is a bunch of text separated into paragraphs, or it is a spreadsheet. Under "advanced functionality" you may file
-putting image(s) into the text document
-having 2+ tabs in the spreadsheet
The technology to accomplish this was boring in 1996.
By "for charity" it seems quite clear that they mean software that
-does not come with an unconscionable EULA
-does not do its damnedest to prevent other software from working with it
-is not protected from competition by government granted monopolies
-does not have an expiration date in the form of planned obsolescence/end of support
-does not require that the user surrender hisher hardware to the control of a remote party
"They want to be informed when watching the news."
Slight correction: they want to feel as though they're being informed when watching the news. Cf
http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html
woot, chime in below if you're celebrating bday today. Alas I'm not, as I had my wisdom teeth out yesterday. ick
we should be so lucky! Did you know they have conjugal visits there?
hm...
RIAAmbluance chasers?
better name?
"I wish that wikileaks would let/encourage others to fight using their facts"
Sorry, are they somehow preventing this from occurring? I don't know much about WL.
"Less art, certainly... "
Please note: this is not *at *all certain, unless you are among those who (incomprehensibly) consider the works of Britney Spears, her little sister Jamie Lynn, their boy DelRoy, and every other music Bob Ross to be "art".
what about that "O" with a line through it?
"Yeah, I could probably google for a hack to fix it but damn it, I shouldn't have to.
Linux never does that shit to me."
So true. I've been using Lx since approximately Mandrake 5.1 (ask your dad), and have never had to, um, google up a fix for anything. Nope. Not once. Except of course 3-5 times a week.
NB: it's well worth it to me.
'Let me rephrase this: the ugliest, most user-unfriendly OS out there is managed by a guy named "Nice".'
More irony. IIRC*, Vista's default theme is black?
"Nice White, manager of a mean, black product, recently stated that.. "
*Mercifully, I do not encounter Vista machines very often
"To have lots and lots of customers you need quality results."
Alternatively, you could leverage your monopoly in one space (say, operating systems) to gain market share in another. Not that MS would do that; I'm just brainstorming here.
I dunno, you could maybe have a lightbox that says "in order to use your Yahoo! Mail, you will have to install Genuine SliverLight Express Addition, which btw requires one of the following Sliverlightable operating systems... "
I assumed he was talking about the great Wusthof Crustbuster, which has an umlaut over the "u" and is therefore probably Swedish.
Alas, it turns out to be the Germans, who live in Germany, which is also a good drive from Sweden.
Am I the only one who got a bit of deja vu when Abba was mentioned?
Is *anyone, *anywhere, just aching to get their hands on the OOXML spec 'cause then they can springboard off of a bunch of the cool innovative things that MS formats can do?
Or is everyone, like me, just kinda hoping it's open enough so that we can sorta-promise clients that the software we develop will sorta-work with their piles of legacy, cruft-infested data. (At least, it'll sorta work until MS changes their document spec again and force-upgrades everyone through Genuine Windows YoureScrewed.)
But that definitely seems to be headed toward zero. Which is kinda the point of this whole thread?
But it only takes one of those things to destroy the Cybermen
"And if I value getting free electricity forever at $3, and so does everyone else, then what? $3 isn't enough for me to hunt down everyone else who would benefit.. "
...
Thanks for asking; here's what happens in that case (please note, I'm assuming something resembling a free market here).
Some crafty entrepreneur realizes the potential market value of the generator's output is ($3 X num/ppl), let's say $3K. Heshe spends a month hunting down everyone, signing contracts, hooking them up to the service, then pays the engineer $1,201.
All that's left to calculate is whether the remaining $1,799 is more than the payment for the next-most-profitable thing the entrepreneur might.
If the thing costs another $3K to build, the entrepreneur just has to find 2000 customers instead of 1000.
I'm old enough to recall a time when *most business models were built on this sort of calculation, rather than the nouvelle vague:
1. get angel investors
2. get some "intellectual property"
3. make it clear that you're ready to harrass and sue anyone who even contemplates entering the same general market that you're "intellectual property" pertains to
4.
5. Profit. (us. == sell your "intellectual property" to some firm that has done this more times than you)
"The more people could benefit from having the results of your work, the less well that model works."
Sorry, I don't follow... If I can design a stable cold fusion reactor in a month, everyone gets free electricity forever, whether the population of the earth is 500 or 500 trillion.
If my next-most-desirable means of employment is delivering underwear to tanning salons for $1,200/mo. then the cost of designing the reactor is $1,201.
The number of people who could benefit doesn't matter.
"The movement from analog to digital is more important for the structure of social and legal relations than the more famous if less certain movement from status to contract"
Moglen again
It is true that the marginal cost is not actually zero, but I find the difference to be radical. For many of these goods -- let's say an electonic textbook, to get back on topic -- the cost of implementing a system of exclusion, by which non-payers could be reliably prevented from getting access, would astronomically increase the fixed costs.
In fact, the cost of such a system seems to be infinite. Is this not what the DRM whack-a-mole keeps proving?
When the marginal costs get so low that the cost-of-sale (i mean the bare-bones, cost-to-collect) exceeds it, the fundamental economics haven't changed but the practical ones have, namely the concept of selling as selling-individual copies of X. The individual copies are no longer the products, but the aggregate. And you don't sell to the recipients, you sell to someone who's interested in funding the aggregate.
Correct. That software doesn't get made. Some other software gets made.
In the same vein, some other ditches don't get dug because the people who potentially would have dug 'em are writing the software that got made.
'cause guess what the effort you can muster to build each reproduction is limited; you will do something else if it doesn't pay off, or give you a warm fuzzy feeling.
With knowledge, and anything digitizable, the situation is radically different. This is moglen's point, and this is why people who use industrial-economy analogies to address free culture discussions only embarrass themselves. The situations are *radically different.
It's more like this: if Ernie tells you that 2+3 is 5, and you etch that knowledge into a granite chunk called "the internet" and reproduce it endlessly, even after your death.
As to what you're "depriving the creator" of, how many levels do you go up? Who told Ernie? Do you owe himher a few bucks?
After you die, when people look at the stone you carved and tell others, what are you being deprived of? k, you're dead, how about your children?
It's all a bunch of nonsense, and it proceeds from ignorance about the fundamentals