I was afraid when I opted for extremely reduced speed, slower multiprocessor support, and paid THOUSANDS of dollars more by buying a P3 chip that I would be without worries! And I was bummed out when I found out the P3 600s were melting and I didn't get one of those. Boy, those people with Athlons with their speed and their stability and their 200MHz bus, they're just stupid, huh? Esperandi
If graphics programs were written as they were 10 years ago, disassembling the programs might prove useful. However, graphics applications nowadays and any application that runs on a windowed system is a big bundle of API code. Reversing from the assembly code to API code is, basically, impossible.
Most Open Source users seem to think programming is just something you pick up on the weekend and then you whip out 9 or 10 professional-grade apps whenever you want to. It doesn't happen like that. Programming is an extremely complicated skill. The reason most people don't program is because it requires an entirely different way of thinking about problems and effort. Personally, I would expect something like the programmers to grow linearly, or, as is true of the _vast_majority_ of Open Source projects, I would expect all programmers involved to lose interest and have the project die. Eventually, being a slave doing something you could be making thousands or millions of dollars at for free has to get old.
Screw the privacy issue. I can't believe people are so blind. I've got one word for all of you. Meterware. What do you think the software companies have been waiting for? A widespread method to identify PCs so they can bill you each time you use a piece of software. I used to say that any software was crackable. If things continue to develop as they are right now, this form of meterware will not be crackable unless someone from the company who releases the meterware is involved. How? Easy, have you seen the Win2k specifications? What's the big new thing? Decentralized computing. Meaning you only have a part of the application on your hard drive and another part (say absolutely critical DLLs) is stored on a server. With the ubiquity of net access and the ability to identify machines, this could get hairy. Want to forge an ID number? Okay, but the bill will go to someone else and it will be considered as bad as credit fraud. No one cares what porn sites you're looking at, but they'd love to charge you $.05 every time you look at their page or run their applications. You think Linux is a haven? It will be quite easy to simply lock out anyone from a web page that can't furnish an ID #, so you'll just be left out. Chances are nothing worth viewing will do this once a big public outcry comes along, but think of what this will do to kids wanting to learn how to really use their PC. They won't be allowed because their parents will end up with huge bills and such.... it has far-reaching implications and it is on its way. Soon. I imagine the people backing meterware absolutely love this "privacy" uproar, it takes the heat off of them. Esperandi
There's one big problem with broadband providers and TV streaming over the Internet. No longer will Joe Public be able to put out content in the same forum as the big corporations. Thanks to limited upstreams and ratioed connections that severely limit the upstream, the idea that gave birth to the Internet we have today (the idea that everyones voice is equal) is dying, and AT&T and the other broadband providers are killing it. Esperandi
Contractors are nomads, obviously. They move from job to job as the contracts last. They do not bond with the driving ideas behind any company and they do not have experience as to what will make a company work. For junk work contractors might be fine, but if you are developing a product that you'd like your users to use without suspecting a schizophrenic of writing it you won't contract 10 different groups of programmers for your 10 versions.
The fact that code is readable and modular and all that came from the idea that other people would be seeing your code but it doesn't mean other people HAVE to see your code and that every revision MUST be handled by a different person.
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I was afraid when I opted for extremely reduced speed, slower multiprocessor support, and paid THOUSANDS of dollars more by buying a P3 chip that I would be without worries! And I was bummed out when I found out the P3 600s were melting and I didn't get one of those. Boy, those people with Athlons with their speed and their stability and their 200MHz bus, they're just stupid, huh? Esperandi
If graphics programs were written as they were 10 years ago, disassembling the programs might prove useful. However, graphics applications nowadays and any application that runs on a windowed system is a big bundle of API code. Reversing from the assembly code to API code is, basically, impossible.
Esperandi
Most Open Source users seem to think programming is just something you pick up on the weekend and then you whip out 9 or 10 professional-grade apps whenever you want to. It doesn't happen like that. Programming is an extremely complicated skill. The reason most people don't program is because it requires an entirely different way of thinking about problems and effort.
Personally, I would expect something like the programmers to grow linearly, or, as is true of the _vast_majority_ of Open Source projects, I would expect all programmers involved to lose interest and have the project die. Eventually, being a slave doing something you could be making thousands or millions of dollars at for free has to get old.
Esperandi
Screw the privacy issue. I can't believe people are so blind. I've got one word for all of you. Meterware. What do you think the software companies have been waiting for? A widespread method to identify PCs so they can bill you each time you use a piece of software. I used to say that any software was crackable. If things continue to develop as they are right now, this form of meterware will not be crackable unless someone from the company who releases the meterware is involved. How? Easy, have you seen the Win2k specifications? What's the big new thing? Decentralized computing. Meaning you only have a part of the application on your hard drive and another part (say absolutely critical DLLs) is stored on a server. With the ubiquity of net access and the ability to identify machines, this could get hairy. Want to forge an ID number? Okay, but the bill will go to someone else and it will be considered as bad as credit fraud. No one cares what porn sites you're looking at, but they'd love to charge you $.05 every time you look at their page or run their applications. You think Linux is a haven? It will be quite easy to simply lock out anyone from a web page that can't furnish an ID #, so you'll just be left out. Chances are nothing worth viewing will do this once a big public outcry comes along, but think of what this will do to kids wanting to learn how to really use their PC. They won't be allowed because their parents will end up with huge bills and such.... it has far-reaching implications and it is on its way. Soon. I imagine the people backing meterware absolutely love this "privacy" uproar, it takes the heat off of them. Esperandi
There's one big problem with broadband providers and TV streaming over the Internet. No longer will Joe Public be able to put out content in the same forum as the big corporations. Thanks to limited upstreams and ratioed connections that severely limit the upstream, the idea that gave birth to the Internet we have today (the idea that everyones voice is equal) is dying, and AT&T and the other broadband providers are killing it. Esperandi
Contractors are nomads, obviously. They move from job to job as the contracts last. They do not bond with the driving ideas behind any company and they do not have experience as to what will make a company work. For junk work contractors might be fine, but if you are developing a product that you'd like your users to use without suspecting a schizophrenic of writing it you won't contract 10 different groups of programmers for your 10 versions.
The fact that code is readable and modular and all that came from the idea that other people would be seeing your code but it doesn't mean other people HAVE to see your code and that every revision MUST be handled by a different person.