If any of you can show how to support the salary cost it actually takes to support a product like Arch/Subversion/BitKeeper/whatever with an open source business model, we'll happily do so. We would like it much better if we could. As far as we can tell, we can't and we can also see that Tom can't either. Prove us wrong. Show us how. We'd love be shown that we don't understand. Just make sure that you show up with $100,000/day rather than $40/day which is what Tom is raising.
You are expectiong flak, I'm sure. You wont be disapointed.
Seems you don't get business, or open source.
Youre problem and Tom's are very different, and both due to scale, and philosophy just at different ends of the spectrum.
Both are likely to fail, but for different reasons, not that either of you were right and the other wrong.
Open sourcing your project would bring you resources that you cannot afford to hire, possibly even decreasing your development cost.
To do that you must however give up some of your ownership.
Not a trade you appear to be willing to make.
Your reasons for not making the trade are as valid as a someone who is willing to make the trade.
C2Net/Stronghold (now owned by Redhat) is an example of how opensource and business works (as is Redhat).
You have, I think, a crack in your business model.
I looks like you didn't build your end game in at the begining and instead figured that the end would take care of itself.
Business isn't static, change points, and end points need to be considered before you start.
If you were to switch to open source(liberate the code), and have a seperate supported version(ala Redhat and others), and an open(free as in freedom) version that anyone can code on and improve then you can add coordination and project management staff.
Doing so could magnify the effective results of your existing programming and development staff by orders of magnitude.
Tom's problem is the reverse.. too open, too small, and die rather than sell.
The requirement is balance, not an easy thing... Your going to need a zealot/visionary that can work with a business/accountant and they BOTH have to cooperate.
Tough thing to do, very tough, but not really that different than how a business really should be run anyways.
Expanding beyond the normal customer base for feedback and improvement, and being a good neighbor to the community.
You are right on the money, and should be mod'ed up. Of course patent, and all IP laws need to be revised. They are starting to do exactly what they were intended to prevent... What incentive do I as a creator, inventor, artist have to produce if doing so simply puts me at risk of being thown in jail and or financially ruined by someone with a previous vague patent, purchased at auction.
Cheap customers hmmm... Give me a second, I'm having trouble with the concept of Windows(AnyVer) and reliability. Nope, can't do it 2K is more reliable than Win3x or Win95 or Win98... But I just can't put reliability with it. Have you considered using a *nix system for backup of the Win system? Cost being a deciding factor, the trade is going to have to be in potential loss of data, depending on the load you could give the customer tiered options for recovery of data.
Write the Record company (Is it capitol or RCA?).
I got a David Bowie Live 2 album set back in the day, the album had a bad skip.
They sent me a new copy with a request that I send the old one back for quality control inspection.
The new set had the same skip... I wrote them back and let them know.
They recalled the entire run.
Re:We have all the good brands: Sorny, Panaphonic.
on
Mac-Case Clone for PCs
·
· Score: 2
My E-one(433)'s are still ticking along just fine.
I know there were a number that had problems with hard drives (one of mine did, right out of the box), and that the power supplies are too small.
But to fault the design as too, mac'ish is too simple an approach to the reason for the demise.
The All-In-One approach, using notebook components is a solid, right idea, green lowpower computers with tight integration between components.
Just the computer for Mom, or the kids.
The addition, or non removal of the PCMCIA slots was great, and the inclusion of RCA video in to capture video straight from the VCR, great.
I'm not claiming the the machines were powerhouses, they were not, and were not mean't to be.
The killer was the law suit over 'look infringement'.
That combined with production flaws and shipping induced failures killed the EOne, but only the Courts can hold back the concept.
The All-In-One has been here before, and it will come back again, the popularity of all notebook homes (homes with more than one PC, but no desktop PC's) is a sign of consumer demand.
jhampson has it right, the LEG not the heart. And pray that you had time to do it, because by the time symptoms start, you were not likely to have enough muscle control to hit something as big as your thigh, much less the relatively fine motor control needed to prep the injector. Most of us, I believe resigned to the fact that in a situation where it was needed, you were as good as dead. The injection would incapacitate you.
I could dig back into the OLD OLD rfc's etc and make a point that would in the end be pointless, I won't.
What this discussion has done is re-enforced an assertation that given the opportunity things tend to sink to the level of the lowest common denominator.
Tables have been a persistant problem for rendering by user-agents (browsers). The intelligent thing to do, standard, or no standard, is to be sure that your code (pages) are as complete as possible so that they survive transition to new methods (DTD, XML). An automated XML transcriber that would convert clunky old HTML into data that could be reused in XML and SGML is likely to fail on incomplete BASIC tags.
The proper thing a browser _should_ do is to do it's best to display the information AND report an error to the viewer so that the viewer is aware that the presented display may be inaccurate allowing an informed decision about what has been presented.
subnote: HTML standards say that a browser should IGNORE invalid tags.
The question should be "What would happen if the Earth crashed into the Moon?"... Geesh, how do you expect to get intelligent answers, when you ask the wrong silly question. RTFM (Reverse the Freaking Moon)
There is no excuse for a browser to operate on pages that contain broken open and close tags.
Internet Explorer ignores/substitutes for missing close tags in tables.
Netscape 4.X incarnations at least do not.
Unfortunately users tend to blame Netscape for not ignoring a glaring error, and compliment Explorer for allowing them to view what may be error laden information.
There are standards that go deeper than simply being W3C compliant. Explorer fails at adhearing to these core programming standards.
Microsoft actually exhibits at the booth, and everyone keeps 10ft away from it and refuses to acknowledge it's existance, or the existance of M$'s droids when they wander the floor trying to drum up interest. The folks with booths near M$ should request to be moved.
You are correct, even better they could have caught it at the server level without any web page coding.
They could have used it as a draw, not fought against it.
Then again, the second anyone involves a corperate lawyer, all creativity disappears preceeded by reason.
From the article: (Bold added by me) In all, they seized 23 computers, including three laptops; three hard drives, and 13 cable modems. No charges were filed and no arrests were made.
Really? The government was used to sieze property, not owned by the provider, and not one charge was filed.
I don't believe this was a legal action, at most the cable modem was something that that could have been taken, not computers, at least not without charges.
My first reaction to this was cool.
My second reaction was cool.
My third reaction was, couldn't something like this be done through changes in existing software?
I suspect this is far more a funtion of software than the burner itself, and hope to see it added as a 'feature' by Ahead -soon-.
I can see the pr0n collectors lined up to buy it.
The DOD should love it, FOU, EYES, etc could be more useful when it's not just on a label that can be pasted over.
'from the back of the fan directly onto the top of a fan-less heatsink'
The air coming out of your case fan is carrying heat, not a real good idea. Consider this instead.
A tube with an external intake. In the section of the tube that passes over the heatsink and cpu, put slots or maybe a mesh section.
Carry the tube on up to the case fan so that air is drawn through the tube, not pushed into it.
The fan is going to have to have a substantial pull to be useful.
Consider this you have limited capability, limited resources, and a limited budget.
Instead of actually monitoring all communications all the time, you leak stories that you can, and are, but refuse to divulge -any- details, and totally deny it's existance.
Then...
Don't build it, don't do it, and let everyone hunt for your technological Elvis.
Call it Echalon, sit back and laugh while your foes assume you know everything.
Odds are against you saving enough money to really make cost the deciding factor.
As a tech in computers with 26 years experiance I can guarentee problems.
No matter how many reviews you read, no matter how many opinions you get, even if you build a machine with identical brand and model components as your trusted buddy next door... things change.
Even the best of companies have bad production runs from time to time.
Components have minor revisions even during a production run.
The result is a special kind of chaos that must be experianced to be appreciated.
1) Define Customer... something like mozilla.org would be be mozilla.netscape.com...confusion would arise because people would go to mozilla.org.
No, they couldn't go to mozilla.org - unless there were an independant entity, say a true not for profit named mozilla.org.
This is actually an improvement, not a detraction, and would probably be mozilla.netscape.aol.com if done within the corperation that holds netscape/mozilla. Really AOL should want it that way, and so should sun (mozilla.sun.com) for the sake of brand idenitification.
2) dove.com should be required to provide a list of alternate sites...
No, they could as a courtesy, but not a requirement. Dove is a cross product, cross industry brand name and really does not need to be refered by each entity. Things like Google, Yahoo and the open directory are good for that sort of 'find it' use.
Some of the generics should probably be taken back and supported by industries for indexing. soap.com could be paid for by industry members who want to be listed, if they don't pay, they don't get listed, and customers would have to hunt.
3) Your renewal rule makes sense, but w/o renewal, who will maintain the domain databases? It costs too much money to maintain large, important servers for a company to be responsible for without some means to pay for the service.
The DNS system is in honesty a large P2P application. The master databases that are located in a few places are at risk even now.
There really needs to be a massive overhaul in concept, and implimentation. I have no specific recomendation at this time, but feel that the traffic carriers, ISPs and backbone should provide the automated systems and servers, and that the system should work on a thumbs up or thumbs down type moderation like/. does.
Perhaps an endowment plus registration fees could fund 80 to 90 percent, if sticky fingers could be kept out of the endowment.
GigsVT - It's not against the GPL to aggregate the distribution of GPL and non-GPL, even closed source, or patented components.
My original response was to the "one line of code anywhere in their distro".
The hinge would be on the word aggregate, I won't conceed that a 'secure linux distro' would be considered a simple aggregation. If they were distributing a 'secure linux component' I could see restrictions being allowed.
The following is from the end of the preamble to the GPL, I for one think it is quite clear.
Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
I am becoming increasingly concerned about the rising numbers of 'closed distros' that ride on the backs of folks who have had the courage to free thier work for the benefit of all, only to have a few take the benefit of themselves.
There has been great debate about what free means, but there also appears to be some confusion as to what open means in the GPL.
Your assertion is that nothing was violated, not about 'one line of code'.
I contend that they have at the least violated the spirit of the GPL copyright, even if by chance the didn't violate the law.
They need to find a way out of the box they've put themselves in and soon.
The commercial restriction is a violation of the GPL.
If they have not enforced it yet, I am not comforted.
As a contributor to thier product (The total distro), I would be a concerned party, and in fairnes would want them to consider my input before violating my agreement to the GPL.
So the question is really begging, but nobody really wants to answer it.
Who can we trust to administer the domain system?
A government, a group of governments, a group of individuals, or a corperation?
My gut response is none, all, some,and sometimes in no particular order
The internet was created on a trusted network achitecture.
That was great in the day when it was military and academic, but as the original architects feared, the net is not scaling well to a commercial and corperate environment.
Solutions?
Several I can see;
1.- Put it back in the hands of academia.
2.- Create a distributed user based system that is 'meta-moderated' something like the slash message system.
3.- Allow, or force a splinter into a sometimes compatible, sometimes not group of trans-internets that would sortof sometimes talk to each other in a fashion related to the way usenet works, and sometimes doesn't.
There's going to have to be medicine taken to fix these problems that have grown and grown, I'm just hopeful that whatever the medicine is, it doesn't kill the patient.
Slashdot Mirror
If any of you can show how to support the salary cost it actually takes to support a product like Arch/Subversion/BitKeeper/whatever with an open source business model, we'll happily do so. We would like it much better if we could. As far as we can tell, we can't and we can also see that Tom can't either. Prove us wrong. Show us how. We'd love be shown that we don't understand. Just make sure that you show up with $100,000/day rather than $40/day which is what Tom is raising.
You are expectiong flak, I'm sure. You wont be disapointed.
Seems you don't get business, or open source.
Youre problem and Tom's are very different, and both due to scale, and philosophy just at different ends of the spectrum.
Both are likely to fail, but for different reasons, not that either of you were right and the other wrong.
Open sourcing your project would bring you resources that you cannot afford to hire, possibly even decreasing your development cost.
To do that you must however give up some of your ownership.
Not a trade you appear to be willing to make.
Your reasons for not making the trade are as valid as a someone who is willing to make the trade.
C2Net/Stronghold (now owned by Redhat) is an example of how opensource and business works (as is Redhat).
You have, I think, a crack in your business model.
I looks like you didn't build your end game in at the begining and instead figured that the end would take care of itself.
Business isn't static, change points, and end points need to be considered before you start.
If you were to switch to open source(liberate the code), and have a seperate supported version(ala Redhat and others), and an open(free as in freedom) version that anyone can code on and improve then you can add coordination and project management staff.
Doing so could magnify the effective results of your existing programming and development staff by orders of magnitude.
Tom's problem is the reverse.. too open, too small, and die rather than sell.
The requirement is balance, not an easy thing... Your going to need a zealot/visionary that can work with a business/accountant and they BOTH have to cooperate.
Tough thing to do, very tough, but not really that different than how a business really should be run anyways.
Expanding beyond the normal customer base for feedback and improvement, and being a good neighbor to the community.
You are right on the money, and should be mod'ed up.
Of course patent, and all IP laws need to be revised. They are starting to do exactly what they were intended to prevent...
What incentive do I as a creator, inventor, artist have to produce if doing so simply puts me at risk of being thown in jail and or financially ruined by someone with a previous vague patent, purchased at auction.
Cheap customers hmmm...
Give me a second, I'm having trouble with the concept of Windows(AnyVer) and reliability.
Nope, can't do it 2K is more reliable than Win3x or Win95 or Win98... But I just can't put reliability with it.
Have you considered using a *nix system for backup of the Win system?
Cost being a deciding factor, the trade is going to have to be in potential loss of data,
depending on the load you could give the customer tiered options for recovery of data.
Write the Record company (Is it capitol or RCA?).
I got a David Bowie Live 2 album set back in the day, the album had a bad skip.
They sent me a new copy with a request that I send the old one back for quality control inspection.
The new set had the same skip... I wrote them back and let them know.
They recalled the entire run.
My E-one(433)'s are still ticking along just fine.
I know there were a number that had problems with hard drives (one of mine did, right out of the box), and that the power supplies are too small.
But to fault the design as too, mac'ish is too simple an approach to the reason for the demise.
The All-In-One approach, using notebook components is a solid, right idea, green lowpower computers with tight integration between components.
Just the computer for Mom, or the kids.
The addition, or non removal of the PCMCIA slots was great, and the inclusion of RCA video in to capture video straight from the VCR, great.
I'm not claiming the the machines were powerhouses, they were not, and were not mean't to be.
The killer was the law suit over 'look infringement'.
That combined with production flaws and shipping induced failures killed the EOne, but only the Courts can hold back the concept.
The All-In-One has been here before, and it will come back again, the popularity of all notebook homes (homes with more than one PC, but no desktop PC's) is a sign of consumer demand.
jhampson has it right, the LEG not the heart.
And pray that you had time to do it, because by the time symptoms start, you were not likely to have enough muscle control to hit something as big as your thigh, much less the relatively fine motor control needed to prep the injector.
Most of us, I believe resigned to the fact that in a situation where it was needed, you were as good as dead.
The injection would incapacitate you.
I could dig back into the OLD OLD rfc's etc and make a point that would in the end be pointless, I won't.
What this discussion has done is re-enforced an assertation that given the opportunity things tend to sink to the level of the lowest common denominator.
Tables have been a persistant problem for rendering by user-agents (browsers).
The intelligent thing to do, standard, or no standard, is to be sure that your code (pages) are as complete as possible so that they survive transition to new methods (DTD, XML).
An automated XML transcriber that would convert clunky old HTML into data that could be reused in XML and SGML is likely to fail on incomplete BASIC tags.
The proper thing a browser _should_ do is to do it's best to display the information AND report an error to the viewer so that the viewer is aware that the presented display may be inaccurate allowing an informed decision about what has been presented.
subnote: HTML standards say that a browser should IGNORE invalid tags.
W3C does specify which tags REQUIRE close, and which have an optional close.
I suggest you check the standards before you claim to know them.
Boucher for UberGeek (aka President)
The question should be "What would happen if the Earth crashed into the Moon?"...
Geesh, how do you expect to get intelligent answers, when you ask the wrong silly question.
RTFM (Reverse the Freaking Moon)
There is no excuse for a browser to operate on pages that contain broken open and close tags.
Internet Explorer ignores/substitutes for missing close tags in tables.
Netscape 4.X incarnations at least do not.
Unfortunately users tend to blame Netscape for not ignoring a glaring error, and compliment Explorer for allowing them to view what may be error laden information.
There are standards that go deeper than simply being W3C compliant. Explorer fails at adhearing to these core programming standards.
Microsoft actually exhibits at the booth,
and everyone keeps 10ft away from it and refuses to acknowledge it's existance,
or the existance of M$'s droids when they wander the floor trying to drum up interest.
The folks with booths near M$ should request to be moved.
The referer isn't important, it's the location fuckgm.com. My server knows it's not called fuckgm.com, and bounces it elsewhere.
You are correct, even better they could have caught it at the server level without any web page coding.
They could have used it as a draw, not fought against it.
Then again, the second anyone involves a corperate lawyer, all creativity disappears preceeded by reason.
From the article: (Bold added by me)
In all, they seized 23 computers, including three laptops; three hard drives, and 13 cable modems.
No charges were filed and no arrests were made.
Really? The government was used to sieze property, not owned by the provider, and not one charge was filed.
I don't believe this was a legal action, at most the cable modem was something that that could have been taken, not computers, at least not without charges.
It's so nice to live in Amerika.
Is this one of those legendary 'it cant be done' statements? ... Start your compilers
Code Hackers
My first reaction to this was cool.
My second reaction was cool.
My third reaction was, couldn't something like this be done through changes in existing software?
I suspect this is far more a funtion of software than the burner itself, and hope to see it added as a 'feature' by Ahead -soon-.
I can see the pr0n collectors lined up to buy it.
The DOD should love it, FOU, EYES, etc could be more useful when it's not just on a label that can be pasted over.
For me it's the geek factor.
'from the back of the fan directly onto the top of a fan-less heatsink'
The air coming out of your case fan is carrying heat, not a real good idea.
Consider this instead.
A tube with an external intake.
In the section of the tube that passes over the heatsink and cpu, put slots or maybe a mesh section.
Carry the tube on up to the case fan so that air is drawn through the tube, not pushed into it.
The fan is going to have to have a substantial pull to be useful.
Consider this you have limited capability, limited resources, and a limited budget.
Instead of actually monitoring all communications all the time, you leak stories that you can, and are, but refuse to divulge -any- details, and totally deny it's existance.
Then...
Don't build it, don't do it, and let everyone hunt for your technological Elvis.
Call it Echalon, sit back and laugh while your foes assume you know everything.
I'm not saying it's so, but it sure could be.
Do it for the experiance.
Odds are against you saving enough money to really make cost the deciding factor.
As a tech in computers with 26 years experiance I can guarentee problems.
No matter how many reviews you read, no matter how many opinions you get, even if you build a machine with identical brand and model components as your trusted buddy next door... things change.
Even the best of companies have bad production runs from time to time.
Components have minor revisions even during a production run.
The result is a special kind of chaos that must be experianced to be appreciated.
Have fun
Expect problems
1) Define Customer... something like mozilla.org would be be mozilla.netscape.com...confusion would arise because people would go to mozilla.org.
/. does.
No, they couldn't go to mozilla.org - unless there were an independant entity, say a true not for profit named mozilla.org.
This is actually an improvement, not a detraction, and would probably be mozilla.netscape.aol.com if done within the corperation that holds netscape/mozilla. Really AOL should want it that way, and so should sun (mozilla.sun.com) for the sake of brand idenitification.
2) dove.com should be required to provide a list of alternate sites...
No, they could as a courtesy, but not a requirement. Dove is a cross product, cross industry brand name and really does not need to be refered by each entity. Things like Google, Yahoo and the open directory are good for that sort of 'find it' use.
Some of the generics should probably be taken back and supported by industries for indexing.
soap.com could be paid for by industry members who want to be listed, if they don't pay, they don't get listed, and customers would have to hunt.
3) Your renewal rule makes sense, but w/o renewal, who will maintain the domain databases? It costs too much money to maintain large, important servers for a company to be responsible for without some means to pay for the service.
The DNS system is in honesty a large P2P application. The master databases that are located in a few places are at risk even now.
There really needs to be a massive overhaul in concept, and implimentation.
I have no specific recomendation at this time, but feel that the traffic carriers, ISPs and backbone should provide the automated systems and servers, and that the system should work on a thumbs up or thumbs down type moderation like
Perhaps an endowment plus registration fees could fund 80 to 90 percent, if sticky fingers could be kept out of the endowment.
GigsVT - It's not against the GPL to aggregate the distribution of GPL and non-GPL, even closed source, or patented components.
My original response was to the "one line of code anywhere in their distro".
The hinge would be on the word aggregate, I won't conceed that a 'secure linux distro' would be considered a simple aggregation. If they were distributing a 'secure linux component' I could see restrictions being allowed.
The following is from the end of the preamble to the GPL, I for one think it is quite clear.
Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary.
To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
I am becoming increasingly concerned about the rising numbers of 'closed distros' that ride on the backs of folks who have had the courage to free thier work for the benefit of all, only to have a few take the benefit of themselves.
There has been great debate about what free means, but there also appears to be some confusion as to what open means in the GPL.
Your assertion is that nothing was violated, not about 'one line of code'.
I contend that they have at the least violated the spirit of the GPL copyright, even if by chance the didn't violate the law.
They need to find a way out of the box they've put themselves in and soon.
The commercial restriction is a violation of the GPL.
If they have not enforced it yet, I am not comforted.
As a contributor to thier product (The total distro), I would be a concerned party, and in fairnes would want them to consider my input before violating my agreement to the GPL.
Does anyone know if there is a GPL for patents?
They had better consider quite carefully, and soon.
If I had one line of code of my opensource in thier distro, I'd be on them like mad.
So the question is really begging, but nobody really wants to answer it.
Who can we trust to administer the domain system?
A government, a group of governments, a group of individuals, or a corperation?
My gut response is none, all, some,and sometimes in no particular order
The internet was created on a trusted network achitecture.
That was great in the day when it was military and academic, but as the original architects feared, the net is not scaling well to a commercial and corperate environment.
Solutions?
Several I can see;
1.- Put it back in the hands of academia.
2.- Create a distributed user based system that is 'meta-moderated' something like the slash message system.
3.- Allow, or force a splinter into a sometimes compatible, sometimes not group of trans-internets that would sortof sometimes talk to each other in a fashion related to the way usenet works, and sometimes doesn't.
There's going to have to be medicine taken to fix these problems that have grown and grown, I'm just hopeful that whatever the medicine is, it doesn't kill the patient.