At one point I was following the Yahoo SCOX message board and I can conclusively state that at no time did anyone ever try and drive Mr. Merkey insane. There was a clear consensus on the board that such activity would have been redundant. Mr. Merkey is, by all accounts, including his own statements, patently insane and a toad-licking freakazoid. An analysis of his public record will show, beyond a doubt, that he lives in his own reality (not looking up which judge put that in a ruling, but I've read it straight offa PACER).
An iPhone 2.0 feature that isn't getting much play is support for more VPN options. So for your customers who don't want to go through the iTunes store, they VPN in to your system and install the app from there. That'll cost you, iirc, US$299 for the enterprise developer deal. And Apple doesn't get a cut of your sales. There might be some fine print that would prohibit this, but I doubt it. If there is, open communications with the iFund people, something can probably be worked out.
That 30% cut for Apple has no relationship to the VC deal. You pay your US$99, you get your app in the iTunes store and Apple takes a 30% cut of your sales to cover hosting, credit card transaction fees, etc. Those wishing to publish a free application still pay the $99, but Apple will still distribute the application. It's a $99 one-time publishing deal (plus the 30% cut).
The iFund is where they give you money in exchange for a cut of profits when the application is published. Those are going to be your standard VC deals. If you want in on that money, you put together a prototype and a business plan. The iFund people work out a deal with you and fund the development to a shipping application in exchange for a cut of the profits.
Talking in round numbers, there will be around 10 million iPhones in use worldwide. A $10 application needs a 1% penetration rate to gross a million dollars. Games could do that well easily, a good set of office tools could hit 10% (port OpenOffice to the iPhone, give away the code, collect $10 for the binary - a reasonable fee for the work of making a good spreadsheet run on a mobile). There's going to be a lot of iPhones out there, and they'll all be looking in the same place for software. Get yourself in there and you have a ready market for your wares. Non-commercially, I'd love to see Sourceforge buy in to let all the Open Source folks get software on the iPhone.
I just caught "Stardust" on DVD last night. Very, very smart script and beautiful cinematography. The non-verbal exchange between Pfeiffer's witch and the unicorn was priceless. And Robert DeNiro as a pirate is a scene-chewing performance. Wait, DeNiro as a sky pirate. No, wait... Robert DeNiro as a flamingly gay sky pirate. The movie is chock full of win right there. Recommended. WAY better than the trailers made it look.
"...one or two of the best books from each author."
Baen's success in giving books away came from releasing the first books in a series for free when later volumes come out. Bookstores are awful about making sure they have the first books, and they're awesome about heavily promoting the newest one. Even if they can't sell you the ones you missed. Baen found a way around that, give stuff away that isn't in print. And real books are enough nicer than ebooks that people were buying up an author's books after being introduced to them by free ebooks.
Lots of straight-up FPS/RTS action. Beyond the Red Line (the BSG mod for Freespace 2) took first place in its category, and rightly so. the BtRL team has worked wonders in recreating the dogfights from the reimagined Galactica. Sound, voice chatter, environments and visuals all look Just Like The Show. And the dogfights play out like the ones on TV too. Gotta spend more time in multiplayer with that...
It is a shame that the Silent Hunter mod community isn't represented on ModDB. The Grey Wolves Expansion (GWX) is an amazing piece of work. One truisim of sim development is that most commercial projects aren't made up of enthusiasts (IL-2 Sturmovik is lucky to have aerospace engineers and pilots writing code), so commercial sim releases tend to have weak campaign modes and compromises to detail and realism. The GWX mod (now at 2.0) changes damage models, sounds, AI behavior, ship and aircraft models and textures and overhauls the dynamic world in which you run missions. Stock SH III campaigns get boring fast, in GWX you never know what you might run into on your next patrol. Oddly, it's both more varied and more realistic. And SH III always had the fear factor, attacking an escorted convoy is an exercise in applied terror: applied to you. Many SH III veterans will admit that their hands shake after an attack no matter how many times they hear depth charge splashes above them.
If you're at all interested in submarines or naval warfare, try it. Skip it if you get motion sickness, North Atlantic storms make for very rough patrols. SH III is still available cheaply, may still be available for download. GWX itself is a free download, check the www.subsim.com forums for links.
BoB actually got cut down a little recently. Their (allegedly) tame mercenary allies recently carved a region out of BoB's territory and other alliances are battering away at their defenses. My alliance (the SMASHKILL group) spent the winter holidays in BoB space taking a whack at the system that links Delve to Fountain. They held it, but it took two titans and four motherships to do it.
Here's a current territory map, this updates daily to show gains and losses in sovereignty. As you can see, BoB no longer controls half of 0.0. In fact, Goonswarm seems to be the big guys right now.
And Red Alliance (the Ruskies) may farm a lot, but they're vicious pvpers too. In EVE you can grind or farm your way to riches, but successful pvpers can make money off of their kills, and contribute to an actual change in the political map. Screw raiding WoW-style, I like my raids to mess up somebody's starbase.
Lastly, like WoW EVE is a free download and has a 21-day trial. It'll even be on Steam soon.
My corp has a policy where we have an "application fee" for obvious ISK farmers. We'll take their money and their application and then turn around and kick 'em out.
Umm, the $5 solitaire game will (probably) have better graphics, more layouts, more options, better testing, etc. etc. etc. If it doesn't, then a weekend project deserves to kick its ass in the marketplace. If it does, then they'll sell some. The iPod games seem to be selling reasonably well (I have no actual idea), and commercial smartphone software sells so a developer willing to a bit of work will have a salable product; just like always.
That said, playing solitaire on a touch screen is pretty sweet. Even if I did only find one so Mom would understand why I bought the thing. She isn't a techy, hates the games *I* play but will go to great lengths to obtain a truly great puzzle or solitaire game.
ClamAV isn't spreading FUD to sell AV systems like MacAfee and Symantec (at least not so's I've noticed), they've actually got a point here. Total viruses encountered on Mac systems this year: 2. One was a Word macro virus that came into the organization via email and the other was a suspect JPEG exploit virus (this one was caught by AVG on my home system). The JPEG security hole has been pretty much wiped out except for unpatched systems, but the Office macro viruses are still circulating. Since these viruses get passed around via documents, you have an excellent chance of a vendor or client sending one to you at some point, so even a Mac-based office should have some AV running everywhere.
Just don't buy Symantec AV, that shit is annoying to manage and support. Anything else (except MacAfee) would be preferable.
I'd argue Vista took more engineers to build than recent construction projects.
By the 'construction project' standard, exactly zero engineers worked on Vista. In terms of what you can legally put on a business card there are vast (legal) differences between a software engineer and an engineer engineer. Any construction project has a "professional engineer", state certified (strictly in at least 38), to sign off on and assume legal responsibility for all working documents. Microsoft doesn't even know how scared they are of that kind of standards being held to operating systems. Neither does Apple, Sun, Red Hat... Pretty much everything with the possible exception of some embedded OS or another and maybe the NSA's Linux distro.
Client performance in large fights is due for an upgrade by the end of the year, The Trinity v2 update is supposed to offload an awful lot of the processing to the GPU, plus the new engine is specifically designed to handle fleet engagements better. We can only hope it really pays off.
My Lotus guys are telling me that it does NOT run on 10.5
Better make that 301 features !
All kidding aside, it looks like the ComputerWorld 10.5 screenshots were taken on a user account that had been upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5, so he had his old applications. Since the screenshot in question is intended to be a direct comparison between the versions, having the exact same apps in the Dock is Working As Intended.
The Emperor's Hammer project looks lovely, but seems to be making only slow progress. The Beyond the Red Line people have a wicked demo out. I've only peeked at the Wing Commander project. God bless Freespace 2.
Oh, as far as I'm concerned, and as far as anyone who owned a Mac back then, when Half-Life's Mac version was canceled Valve can just shut the frak up. Yeah, ask Gabe why they canceled THAT. Sure, it was tainted by being a late-Sierra project [1], but it was Half Life ! And it was gonna be on the Mac ! Bastards.
In the OJ Simpson murder case the LAPD got caught trying to frame a guilty man. In the circumstances of that case, the jury had no choice but to turn him loose. Tampering with evidence is a big no-no in our criminal justice system. If they'd played it clean, they'd have convicted him easily. But all the important evidence was tainted. mishandled or planted.
And there's a non-zero chance that AC Cowlings did it and OJ drove him around, but I don't think so.
God you're high. Unless Minmei gets to kick some ass... nahhh. Of course, I'm in favor of Zhang Ziyi (sp?) in anything, but this doesn't look like a movie for her... wait, Miriya. Yeah, cast ZZ as Miriya. That would add the distinctive flavor of awesome to the film. And, if memory serves, we'd get to see ZZ painted green.
Yup. I agree. Owen Wilson as Roy Fokker
Ok. He's got enough experience now that he can probably carry a leadership/mentor role. In the movies anyway:-)
Jennifer Aniston as Lisa Hayes
Very nice choice ! She has the acting chops for that AND she looks the part.
Claudia Grant? Halle Berry!
I've seen Kill Bill too recently to not prefer Vivica Fox.
In the US you'll generally only find ISDN being used for videoconferencing. My experience is that a lot of companies are going to keep their ISDN lines for this purpose. A 256k/384k video stream looks surprisingly good on a boardroom sized screen.
At one point in my career (1997) I managed to institute a "password reset fee". By the time I walked out of that place (early 1999) the fee had risen from $5 to $20. As a further measure to encourage people to remember their password (and QuickMail Pro (abysmal mail client, imposed on us literally as a golf course purchase) needed the password frequently) and avoid the downtime I had the default password set as a punitive measure. The final default password for all resets was "bonehead". Only the 5 account managers ever forgot their passwords, the 60 production people and 10 management/staff personnel never forgot theirs (the owner didn't count). Those 5 boneheads kept me in beer money every damn month.
Nahh, Novell didn't get a ruling that says they owned it (they have some, UC Regents has some, some is public domain). This ruling just says that SCO got exactly none of what Novell had, however much that may have been - which probably isn't much, the UNIX copyrights are a horrible mess that no one in their right mind would dig into (or sue over).
Slashdot Mirror
At one point I was following the Yahoo SCOX message board and I can conclusively state that at no time did anyone ever try and drive Mr. Merkey insane. There was a clear consensus on the board that such activity would have been redundant. Mr. Merkey is, by all accounts, including his own statements, patently insane and a toad-licking freakazoid. An analysis of his public record will show, beyond a doubt, that he lives in his own reality (not looking up which judge put that in a ruling, but I've read it straight offa PACER).
An iPhone 2.0 feature that isn't getting much play is support for more VPN options. So for your customers who don't want to go through the iTunes store, they VPN in to your system and install the app from there. That'll cost you, iirc, US$299 for the enterprise developer deal. And Apple doesn't get a cut of your sales. There might be some fine print that would prohibit this, but I doubt it. If there is, open communications with the iFund people, something can probably be worked out.
That 30% cut for Apple has no relationship to the VC deal. You pay your US$99, you get your app in the iTunes store and Apple takes a 30% cut of your sales to cover hosting, credit card transaction fees, etc. Those wishing to publish a free application still pay the $99, but Apple will still distribute the application. It's a $99 one-time publishing deal (plus the 30% cut).
The iFund is where they give you money in exchange for a cut of profits when the application is published. Those are going to be your standard VC deals. If you want in on that money, you put together a prototype and a business plan. The iFund people work out a deal with you and fund the development to a shipping application in exchange for a cut of the profits.
Talking in round numbers, there will be around 10 million iPhones in use worldwide. A $10 application needs a 1% penetration rate to gross a million dollars. Games could do that well easily, a good set of office tools could hit 10% (port OpenOffice to the iPhone, give away the code, collect $10 for the binary - a reasonable fee for the work of making a good spreadsheet run on a mobile). There's going to be a lot of iPhones out there, and they'll all be looking in the same place for software. Get yourself in there and you have a ready market for your wares. Non-commercially, I'd love to see Sourceforge buy in to let all the Open Source folks get software on the iPhone.
(OK, trivia test. How many actually played snit-smashing when it first appeared in D&D mag?) /me raises hand.
I just caught "Stardust" on DVD last night. Very, very smart script and beautiful cinematography. The non-verbal exchange between Pfeiffer's witch and the unicorn was priceless. And Robert DeNiro as a pirate is a scene-chewing performance. Wait, DeNiro as a sky pirate. No, wait... Robert DeNiro as a flamingly gay sky pirate. The movie is chock full of win right there. Recommended. WAY better than the trailers made it look.
"...one or two of the best books from each author."
Baen's success in giving books away came from releasing the first books in a series for free when later volumes come out. Bookstores are awful about making sure they have the first books, and they're awesome about heavily promoting the newest one. Even if they can't sell you the ones you missed. Baen found a way around that, give stuff away that isn't in print. And real books are enough nicer than ebooks that people were buying up an author's books after being introduced to them by free ebooks.
Lots of straight-up FPS/RTS action. Beyond the Red Line (the BSG mod for Freespace 2) took first place in its category, and rightly so. the BtRL team has worked wonders in recreating the dogfights from the reimagined Galactica. Sound, voice chatter, environments and visuals all look Just Like The Show. And the dogfights play out like the ones on TV too. Gotta spend more time in multiplayer with that...
It is a shame that the Silent Hunter mod community isn't represented on ModDB. The Grey Wolves Expansion (GWX) is an amazing piece of work. One truisim of sim development is that most commercial projects aren't made up of enthusiasts (IL-2 Sturmovik is lucky to have aerospace engineers and pilots writing code), so commercial sim releases tend to have weak campaign modes and compromises to detail and realism. The GWX mod (now at 2.0) changes damage models, sounds, AI behavior, ship and aircraft models and textures and overhauls the dynamic world in which you run missions. Stock SH III campaigns get boring fast, in GWX you never know what you might run into on your next patrol. Oddly, it's both more varied and more realistic. And SH III always had the fear factor, attacking an escorted convoy is an exercise in applied terror: applied to you. Many SH III veterans will admit that their hands shake after an attack no matter how many times they hear depth charge splashes above them.
If you're at all interested in submarines or naval warfare, try it. Skip it if you get motion sickness, North Atlantic storms make for very rough patrols. SH III is still available cheaply, may still be available for download. GWX itself is a free download, check the www.subsim.com forums for links.
BoB actually got cut down a little recently. Their (allegedly) tame mercenary allies recently carved a region out of BoB's territory and other alliances are battering away at their defenses. My alliance (the SMASHKILL group) spent the winter holidays in BoB space taking a whack at the system that links Delve to Fountain. They held it, but it took two titans and four motherships to do it.
Here's a current territory map, this updates daily to show gains and losses in sovereignty. As you can see, BoB no longer controls half of 0.0. In fact, Goonswarm seems to be the big guys right now.
And Red Alliance (the Ruskies) may farm a lot, but they're vicious pvpers too. In EVE you can grind or farm your way to riches, but successful pvpers can make money off of their kills, and contribute to an actual change in the political map. Screw raiding WoW-style, I like my raids to mess up somebody's starbase.
Lastly, like WoW EVE is a free download and has a 21-day trial. It'll even be on Steam soon.
My corp has a policy where we have an "application fee" for obvious ISK farmers. We'll take their money and their application and then turn around and kick 'em out.
I don't think we've caught anyone, but...
ISK FARMERS BEWARE !!!
Umm, the $5 solitaire game will (probably) have better graphics, more layouts, more options, better testing, etc. etc. etc. If it doesn't, then a weekend project deserves to kick its ass in the marketplace. If it does, then they'll sell some. The iPod games seem to be selling reasonably well (I have no actual idea), and commercial smartphone software sells so a developer willing to a bit of work will have a salable product; just like always.
That said, playing solitaire on a touch screen is pretty sweet. Even if I did only find one so Mom would understand why I bought the thing. She isn't a techy, hates the games *I* play but will go to great lengths to obtain a truly great puzzle or solitaire game.
Just send the Linux guys a, err, bucket of specs for it.
ClamAV isn't spreading FUD to sell AV systems like MacAfee and Symantec (at least not so's I've noticed), they've actually got a point here. Total viruses encountered on Mac systems this year: 2. One was a Word macro virus that came into the organization via email and the other was a suspect JPEG exploit virus (this one was caught by AVG on my home system). The JPEG security hole has been pretty much wiped out except for unpatched systems, but the Office macro viruses are still circulating. Since these viruses get passed around via documents, you have an excellent chance of a vendor or client sending one to you at some point, so even a Mac-based office should have some AV running everywhere.
Just don't buy Symantec AV, that shit is annoying to manage and support. Anything else (except MacAfee) would be preferable.
This.
Exactly this.
Almost every single damned day of my desktop support career.
I'd argue Vista took more engineers to build than recent construction projects.
By the 'construction project' standard, exactly zero engineers worked on Vista. In terms of what you can legally put on a business card there are vast (legal) differences between a software engineer and an engineer engineer. Any construction project has a "professional engineer", state certified (strictly in at least 38), to sign off on and assume legal responsibility for all working documents. Microsoft doesn't even know how scared they are of that kind of standards being held to operating systems. Neither does Apple, Sun, Red Hat... Pretty much everything with the possible exception of some embedded OS or another and maybe the NSA's Linux distro.
Client performance in large fights is due for an upgrade by the end of the year, The Trinity v2 update is supposed to offload an awful lot of the processing to the GPU, plus the new engine is specifically designed to handle fleet engagements better. We can only hope it really pays off.
Look at it this way, now the nation knows how the system is run. That's a win.
My Lotus guys are telling me that it does NOT run on 10.5
Better make that 301 features !
All kidding aside, it looks like the ComputerWorld 10.5 screenshots were taken on a user account that had been upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5, so he had his old applications. Since the screenshot in question is intended to be a direct comparison between the versions, having the exact same apps in the Dock is Working As Intended.
The Emperor's Hammer project looks lovely, but seems to be making only slow progress. The Beyond the Red Line people have a wicked demo out. I've only peeked at the Wing Commander project. God bless Freespace 2.
Forget Air Warrior, what about MultiPlayer BattleTech; 3025 ? Microsoft had ahand in that too, but that's the EA cancellation that kills me.
Oh, as far as I'm concerned, and as far as anyone who owned a Mac back then, when Half-Life's Mac version was canceled Valve can just shut the frak up. Yeah, ask Gabe why they canceled THAT. Sure, it was tainted by being a late-Sierra project [1], but it was Half Life ! And it was gonna be on the Mac ! Bastards.
http://forums.appleinsider.com/archive/index.php/t-18299.html
Bastards !!!
[1] No network play with PCs, PC mods wouldn't work, this is why Sierra died.
Just to put this out there again:
In the OJ Simpson murder case the LAPD got caught trying to frame a guilty man. In the circumstances of that case, the jury had no choice but to turn him loose. Tampering with evidence is a big no-no in our criminal justice system. If they'd played it clean, they'd have convicted him easily. But all the important evidence was tainted. mishandled or planted.
And there's a non-zero chance that AC Cowlings did it and OJ drove him around, but I don't think so.
Just a couple comments...
:-)
Zhang Ziyi as Lynn Minmei
God you're high. Unless Minmei gets to kick some ass... nahhh. Of course, I'm in favor of Zhang Ziyi (sp?) in anything, but this doesn't look like a movie for her... wait, Miriya. Yeah, cast ZZ as Miriya. That would add the distinctive flavor of awesome to the film. And, if memory serves, we'd get to see ZZ painted green.
Yup. I agree. Owen Wilson as Roy Fokker
Ok. He's got enough experience now that he can probably carry a leadership/mentor role. In the movies anyway
Jennifer Aniston as Lisa Hayes
Very nice choice ! She has the acting chops for that AND she looks the part.
Claudia Grant? Halle Berry!
I've seen Kill Bill too recently to not prefer Vivica Fox.
Keanu Reeves as Zor
*snort*
In the US you'll generally only find ISDN being used for videoconferencing. My experience is that a lot of companies are going to keep their ISDN lines for this purpose. A 256k/384k video stream looks surprisingly good on a boardroom sized screen.
At one point in my career (1997) I managed to institute a "password reset fee". By the time I walked out of that place (early 1999) the fee had risen from $5 to $20. As a further measure to encourage people to remember their password (and QuickMail Pro (abysmal mail client, imposed on us literally as a golf course purchase) needed the password frequently) and avoid the downtime I had the default password set as a punitive measure. The final default password for all resets was "bonehead". Only the 5 account managers ever forgot their passwords, the 60 production people and 10 management/staff personnel never forgot theirs (the owner didn't count). Those 5 boneheads kept me in beer money every damn month.
Nahh, Novell didn't get a ruling that says they owned it (they have some, UC Regents has some, some is public domain). This ruling just says that SCO got exactly none of what Novell had, however much that may have been - which probably isn't much, the UNIX copyrights are a horrible mess that no one in their right mind would dig into (or sue over).