Don't you know, Politicians shrivel up and die when not surrounded by simple minded peasants. Let's start with lawyers! At least they can survive by representing themselves.
I disagree. I think Firefox was primarily driven from a bloated Mozilla that was only getting fatter. Firefox 3 was driven from what relatively appeared to be history repeating itself.
I been there from close to the beginning (NS?) and have throughly enjoyed the ride thus far.
Oh GOD, both of your examples are such waste of visual real estate. I understand that its no longer worth as much as it used to be, but come on, show some respect for... the environment and all that.
I would write that as:
if (something) { do_something(); } else {
do_something_else();
if (otherthing) { do_otherthing(); } }
But yes, it does boil down to preference and my formatting would change to the else style if there were multiple/long lines. ^_^
The reason is simple. Professors are the customers, students are the consumers. The difference; the former makes the true purchasing decision. One free copy is simply an insignificant manufacturing cost for a 100 books, or an equally insignificant write off.
What I and a few of my friends used to do in college was get the international version. Many times, instead of being color, it was all black and white. Some times there was absolutely no difference. In the international versions there are so many options: no CDs, no additional "notes", no Current Events (read: <5 years) articles, PDF versions, Problems & Answers only, no "study material", soft/hard covers, no color, etc. Whatever combination of the product you could think of was out there. Compared to here, where you are lucky to find soft covers, used, or CD less options. The options here suck along with their prices. A bundle is barely 10% less than the sum of its parts!
We had a speaker come in once representing the publisher of our class's book (yeah, either brave, or an idiot). We discussed the above, and the response: "It isn't cost effective to print B&W options here." or "The market there has a lower price tolerance." WTF, BS!
I asked him if there will ever be electronic versions (2003). Response: "Oh we are providing ebooks next semester." Me: "How much will it cost?" Res: "Well we haven't figured out the market feasibility or the exact price, but considering you spend about $120 for this book, and sell it back for about $50, we will probably charge about $120-$50 = $70 dollars. Plus or minus depending on demand and if we want it to supplement our core business. And the ebook of course expires in one semester."
That's when we realized that the publishing industry really was that dumb.
Oh, btw, my friend skipped the soft cover, color US version of the $120 text book and got the international b&w hard cover for $50!!! This price included shipping over there costs, currency exchange costs, merchant markup, and the very expensive, shipping over here costs. He ended up selling the used book for ~$45 on eBay. Needless to say, by the 3rd year, he had a small business ordering books for classmates, he barely charged anything, but made enough to cover the cost of one or two of his classes' textbooks!!
That's pretty much what I was thinking. This doesn't seem any different than putting a de/compression algorithm in front of hard disk read/writes. In writing to a hard drive the file gets split up into chunks and spread out over the disks. Because of the compression, the duplicate chucks aren't written more than once. In comparison, here they are just dealing with really big chunks of data. Internet traffic flow would be similar too with certain tweaks, big file transmitted as small chunks that are reassembled.
Last I checked I don't think either escapes the law, and neither will this.
I wanted to buy a Vibe, then I drove it. I though it was ok; but the interior was crap!! Drove the Matrix (exactly the same car), felt a bit better, and the interior was far far better. Later on, I drove the G5... again, ok drive, horrible interior!
I have noticed this with most (not all, G6 is great) US vehicles. Their interiors are horrible. Either they look good, but very old (Oldsmobile - on purpose), or they look like cheap plastic cut outs, or they are boxy and don't transition/blend well across the dash. Even the controls, the idea seems to be: the more buttons the better, the less functions per button the better, the bigger the better, the more it screams "I am a button" the better,...
Contrast this to foreign cars across the ranges, they have sleeker, more blended, interiors with a softer feel, and god forbid, THEMES that flow throughout!! Buttons: multifunction, unintrusive, intuitive, and again, softer themed. Except for European cars, I feel most foreign cars are underpowered, so Americans do have that going for them. But overall, is it ANY wonder outside of "PATRIOTISM" that the foreign cars beat the crap out of US cars?
I will give you the lack of documentation bit. But on that point, you have to understand that the customer base for FOSS software is different from the customer base of commercial closed source software. The former doesn't put as much weight on formal/external documentation (they got code) in terms of requirements.
On the QC side, I would say FOSS does far better than commercial closed source software (CCSS). Both camps have developers, testers/QCers, and end users. I would say in a good SDLC setup, relative to the other groups, the less developers, and more testers, the better. Meaning the ratio of devs to users is low (r1), devs to testers is low (r2), and the ratio of testers to users is high (r3).
In CCSS, an entity is the creator of software, end users are the consumers and they are separate. So r1 is low, r2 is high (few can justify a lot of testers), and r3 is low (source is closed, so users can only do limited testing). In FOSS, a significant portion (relative to CCSS) of end users are developers and testers. So r1 is high, r2 is low, and r3 is high (users are the testers). The FOSS method is closer to ideal SDLC resources with too many developers being the crutch.
In addition, CCSS has the fault that every issue they find has to go through a risk analysis. "Is the cost of pushing this out worth it to us? Is it serious?..." End users are usually irrelevant unless it effects the company. FOSS doesn't dabble in this as much. Unless everyone knows about it and no one cares enough about the issue, they don't have a choice; they have to put out a fix.
Hackers/crackers put another dimension into this equation, and I think both sides are fairly even in this regard. Long story short, the assumption that hackers/crackers don't have access to the source code in CCSS is a head in the sand scenario.
Oh, I completely agree. I would go further to say that MS could stop you from distributing period. Not to mention, they can probably hit you for defamation (based on intent).
But, you should be able to do whatever you want with your personal copy (due to fair use), you just can't sell copies of your copy. Of course as you stated, leaving aside Parodies and such which add to fair use.
In the Glider case, I don't think there is anything wrong with the program itself as long as each individual obtains, compiles, installs, and modifies their own instance/copy of the WOW program that they legally obtained. BUT, I think Blizzard is totally in their right to kick these guys out of their servers. If it is hard to see who is a bot and who isn't... tough luck, the law shouldn't be bent to make it easy for Blizzard.
Only to a certain point. I can do nearly whatever I want with _my_ copy of the program. I can reverse engineer it, replace all instances of "bob" with "idiot" in the source code, double space it, and recompile it. Do all that and still play the damn thing! Of course I can't sell copies of my version as I don't have distribution rights, but I should be able to sell my single version.
I can understand if you won't allow _my_ new version to connect to the game server, but that's all you should be allowed to do. You should have no direct control over _my_ copy.
In a client-server setup, I would extend that to say that as long as I meet the server interface to the letter, it is irrelevant how I do what on my side of the equation.
Unless it is clearly spelled out in a binding contract, this idea shouldn't even come up! Even if it is spelled in a contract, it would still be questionable to legal pass. And the contract needs to be entirely up front, and completely rejectable. Not something that you need to break the seal upon just to read, and can't get your money back for breaking the seal.
I can understand I can't do x,y,z on _your_ servers, but by the same token, you shouldn't be able to do a,b,c on what is rightfully mine!! Your control stops at your internet connection, mine starts at mine! It is really _that_ simple. And don't come crying to me about people cheating and crap! Don't crush my rights just cause you suck at your job.
Not everyone needs an "OS". What people need is an interface to services. Thus far, the majority have been getting it through one time payments for an OS (interface), applications (services), and maintenance of the applications (quality of service).
There is nothing that says that you must have a distinct OS, that you directly interact with. The OS in the traditional sense should have long ago (~2002) become stitched into the fabric of technology and disappeared from sight. Yesterday should have been about browsers, thin clients, and such. Today should be about massive computing and energy savings. Tomorrow should be immersive interaction.
And Google is doing fine, thou the economic conditions might hit them a bit. No matter what we do, we always produce data and hopefully store it. Google's value proposition is to convert, index, and catalog that data into information. They do ventures, but everything pretty much ties back to that core concept.
If advertising is wanted in a few years, internet advertising will be it. Thou we might not view it as coming from the net. Today, advertisers are willing to pay millions to have specific non-interactive real estate at specific times on the basis of estimated viewers and potential return. The net offers that plus interactivity, localization, and more concrete viewers. Yet, advertisers pay pennies on the dollar. If anything, I think the billboard will feed of the net well before net advertising goes down.
A more accurate assessment would be: - Net income has gone up from 8 billion to 14 billion per year - Headcount has increased from 35,000 to 80,000 - Revenue has increased from 25 billions dollars to 51 billion dollars per year I actually don't think those numbers look that good. Especially when you factor in the headcount over such a long time. Their net income didn't double to match their revenue, but that can be explained away by their investment into Vista/XBox/Zune development. And when you consider that, those numbers are actually ok. Would have been far better if the Vista investment played out. But their headcount more than doubled. The additional workforce didn't generate as much revenue as the original. Overall, their efficiency went down. That reflects poorly on their management. You could play the investment card again, but when you look at the overall picture, you lean toward a conclusion of: less efficiency.
If this was an industry that looks out 10+ years (ie: oil/air), this would be great, but its an industry that sees 3-5 years. Based on that and considering how the ventures have been playing out, it doesn't look so good.
Having said all that, I think Ballmer is a pretty good CEO. He takes risks that he should. He dives head first into markets (mobile, cars, gaming, hardware...) and tries to make things work. If anything, he should be leveraging more of MS's assets to open up additional opportunities for MS's future.
The opposite would be one who just keeps piling money into a warehouse to be given to shareholders... not a good use of money.
A chicken is a member of the species Gallus Domesticus. Regardless of the mechanism of formation, by divine creation, cloning, or hatching, any genetic member of that species is a chicken. Actually, I always saw it as a philosophical question, not a physical realistic one. Kind of like, if A and only A produces B, and B and only B produces A, which came 1st? That's why the joke: everything was fine until you defined the second part.
Just like "complex numbers" are just imaginary and have no possible analogue or use in the real world. At least, that's what we thought for a hundred years. Actually, "complex numbers" aren't used directly in the real world. They are used to get from point A to point C through B which doesn't exist in the real world. Also, their multi-vector like properties are used to keep distinct attributes of an observation separate. What I mean is that there is no "imaginary" and "real" part to an electrical circuit; rather both are real, but must always be separate.
What I am trying to say is that there are certain concepts in math that can not be fully represented by the real world. In complex numbers' case, certain attributes are representable, and we exploit where we can, but that doesn't mean we have fully represented them. I didn't mean to imply that there are parts of math that will never have real world applications, rather the real world is kind of limited in comparison.
Also, "real world" for me is defined as our universe, math can seem to go places where the universe and its limited x number of dimensions can not.
I was stating that although we doubt the very existence of our own beings (or more accurately, per Descartes, everything else around us) we do not doubt that these concepts are true and valid. We can doubt everything that "exists" around us and write it off as an illusion, but even within that illusion, we state that math is valid!
In fact, we make the assumption, nay the assertion, that these concepts can define ours and everything else's very existence! So I propose that math exists more so than all others and that we merely discover it within the depths of our minds.
If you were to define "existence" as something that we can poke and prod, then I would have to resolve that math does not exist.
Personally, I didn't like the Unix in OSX. I liked both individually, but programming on it for me was no different than having 2 separate machines.
The OSX and Unix sides don't play as well as say Gnome, KDE, daemons/services, and Unix (you know what I mean) do in Linux and the BSDs. Not to mention I am programming/interacting with a specific proprietary system instead of a more generic, open, flexible one.
It's just my style of programming. I try not to be implementation specific where I can and rather be generic interface based.
No, the chicken did NOT come first, cause I (among others) define a "chicken" as something that comes from a chicken egg. Now, that settles the question, until you gone and defined a "chicken egg" as something laid by a chicken!!
More seriously, there are concepts of math that do not have bearing in the real world, nor can be represented by it (ex: infinity)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you know, Politicians shrivel up and die when not surrounded by simple minded peasants. Let's start with lawyers! At least they can survive by representing themselves.
I disagree. I think Firefox was primarily driven from a bloated Mozilla that was only getting fatter. Firefox 3 was driven from what relatively appeared to be history repeating itself.
I been there from close to the beginning (NS?) and have throughly enjoyed the ride thus far.
Oh GOD, both of your examples are such waste of visual real estate. I understand that its no longer worth as much as it used to be, but come on, show some respect for... the environment and all that.
I would write that as:
if (something) { do_something(); }
else {
do_something_else();
if (otherthing) { do_otherthing(); }
}
But yes, it does boil down to preference and my formatting would change to the else style if there were multiple/long lines. ^_^
The reason is simple. Professors are the customers, students are the consumers. The difference; the former makes the true purchasing decision. One free copy is simply an insignificant manufacturing cost for a 100 books, or an equally insignificant write off.
What I and a few of my friends used to do in college was get the international version. Many times, instead of being color, it was all black and white. Some times there was absolutely no difference. In the international versions there are so many options: no CDs, no additional "notes", no Current Events (read: <5 years) articles, PDF versions, Problems & Answers only, no "study material", soft/hard covers, no color, etc. Whatever combination of the product you could think of was out there. Compared to here, where you are lucky to find soft covers, used, or CD less options. The options here suck along with their prices. A bundle is barely 10% less than the sum of its parts!
We had a speaker come in once representing the publisher of our class's book (yeah, either brave, or an idiot). We discussed the above, and the response: "It isn't cost effective to print B&W options here." or "The market there has a lower price tolerance." WTF, BS!
I asked him if there will ever be electronic versions (2003).
Response: "Oh we are providing ebooks next semester."
Me: "How much will it cost?"
Res: "Well we haven't figured out the market feasibility or the exact price, but considering you spend about $120 for this book, and sell it back for about $50, we will probably charge about $120-$50 = $70 dollars. Plus or minus depending on demand and if we want it to supplement our core business. And the ebook of course expires in one semester."
That's when we realized that the publishing industry really was that dumb.
Oh, btw, my friend skipped the soft cover, color US version of the $120 text book and got the international b&w hard cover for $50!!! This price included shipping over there costs, currency exchange costs, merchant markup, and the very expensive, shipping over here costs. He ended up selling the used book for ~$45 on eBay. Needless to say, by the 3rd year, he had a small business ordering books for classmates, he barely charged anything, but made enough to cover the cost of one or two of his classes' textbooks!!
That's pretty much what I was thinking. This doesn't seem any different than putting a de/compression algorithm in front of hard disk read/writes. In writing to a hard drive the file gets split up into chunks and spread out over the disks. Because of the compression, the duplicate chucks aren't written more than once. In comparison, here they are just dealing with really big chunks of data. Internet traffic flow would be similar too with certain tweaks, big file transmitted as small chunks that are reassembled.
Last I checked I don't think either escapes the law, and neither will this.
"The best way to not get caught is not to _upload_."
There, fixed that for you. Downloading is perfectly legal, except in very specific situations.
Sorry, this is a rant, but I got to let it out.
...
I wanted to buy a Vibe, then I drove it. I though it was ok; but the interior was crap!! Drove the Matrix (exactly the same car), felt a bit better, and the interior was far far better. Later on, I drove the G5... again, ok drive, horrible interior!
I have noticed this with most (not all, G6 is great) US vehicles. Their interiors are horrible. Either they look good, but very old (Oldsmobile - on purpose), or they look like cheap plastic cut outs, or they are boxy and don't transition/blend well across the dash. Even the controls, the idea seems to be: the more buttons the better, the less functions per button the better, the bigger the better, the more it screams "I am a button" the better,
Contrast this to foreign cars across the ranges, they have sleeker, more blended, interiors with a softer feel, and god forbid, THEMES that flow throughout!! Buttons: multifunction, unintrusive, intuitive, and again, softer themed. Except for European cars, I feel most foreign cars are underpowered, so Americans do have that going for them. But overall, is it ANY wonder outside of "PATRIOTISM" that the foreign cars beat the crap out of US cars?
HEY, this is America! Our 2.4 children ARE too large to fit in your undersized small penis Japanese sedans. /sarcasm
Bush's Sweden to English (provided by MPAA):
PyratByran: Terrorist!
And yet somehow the **AA have lost absolute revenue from these "freeloaders and pirates who won't pay for anything."
I will give you the lack of documentation bit. But on that point, you have to understand that the customer base for FOSS software is different from the customer base of commercial closed source software. The former doesn't put as much weight on formal/external documentation (they got code) in terms of requirements.
..." End users are usually irrelevant unless it effects the company. FOSS doesn't dabble in this as much. Unless everyone knows about it and no one cares enough about the issue, they don't have a choice; they have to put out a fix.
On the QC side, I would say FOSS does far better than commercial closed source software (CCSS). Both camps have developers, testers/QCers, and end users. I would say in a good SDLC setup, relative to the other groups, the less developers, and more testers, the better. Meaning the ratio of devs to users is low (r1), devs to testers is low (r2), and the ratio of testers to users is high (r3).
In CCSS, an entity is the creator of software, end users are the consumers and they are separate. So r1 is low, r2 is high (few can justify a lot of testers), and r3 is low (source is closed, so users can only do limited testing). In FOSS, a significant portion (relative to CCSS) of end users are developers and testers. So r1 is high, r2 is low, and r3 is high (users are the testers). The FOSS method is closer to ideal SDLC resources with too many developers being the crutch.
In addition, CCSS has the fault that every issue they find has to go through a risk analysis. "Is the cost of pushing this out worth it to us? Is it serious?
Hackers/crackers put another dimension into this equation, and I think both sides are fairly even in this regard. Long story short, the assumption that hackers/crackers don't have access to the source code in CCSS is a head in the sand scenario.
5 min later...
Oh, I completely agree. I would go further to say that MS could stop you from distributing period. Not to mention, they can probably hit you for defamation (based on intent).
But, you should be able to do whatever you want with your personal copy (due to fair use), you just can't sell copies of your copy. Of course as you stated, leaving aside Parodies and such which add to fair use.
In the Glider case, I don't think there is anything wrong with the program itself as long as each individual obtains, compiles, installs, and modifies their own instance/copy of the WOW program that they legally obtained. BUT, I think Blizzard is totally in their right to kick these guys out of their servers. If it is hard to see who is a bot and who isn't... tough luck, the law shouldn't be bent to make it easy for Blizzard.
I think before all that, RAM probably falls under fair use / personal use.
Nah, I think we would suddenly have 4 million criminals. That 30 rule might remove 100 or so every year.
Only to a certain point. I can do nearly whatever I want with _my_ copy of the program. I can reverse engineer it, replace all instances of "bob" with "idiot" in the source code, double space it, and recompile it. Do all that and still play the damn thing! Of course I can't sell copies of my version as I don't have distribution rights, but I should be able to sell my single version.
I can understand if you won't allow _my_ new version to connect to the game server, but that's all you should be allowed to do. You should have no direct control over _my_ copy.
In a client-server setup, I would extend that to say that as long as I meet the server interface to the letter, it is irrelevant how I do what on my side of the equation.
Unless it is clearly spelled out in a binding contract, this idea shouldn't even come up! Even if it is spelled in a contract, it would still be questionable to legal pass. And the contract needs to be entirely up front, and completely rejectable. Not something that you need to break the seal upon just to read, and can't get your money back for breaking the seal.
I can understand I can't do x,y,z on _your_ servers, but by the same token, you shouldn't be able to do a,b,c on what is rightfully mine!! Your control stops at your internet connection, mine starts at mine! It is really _that_ simple. And don't come crying to me about people cheating and crap! Don't crush my rights just cause you suck at your job.
I am also kind of replying to the grandparent.
Not everyone needs an "OS". What people need is an interface to services. Thus far, the majority have been getting it through one time payments for an OS (interface), applications (services), and maintenance of the applications (quality of service).
There is nothing that says that you must have a distinct OS, that you directly interact with. The OS in the traditional sense should have long ago (~2002) become stitched into the fabric of technology and disappeared from sight. Yesterday should have been about browsers, thin clients, and such. Today should be about massive computing and energy savings. Tomorrow should be immersive interaction.
And Google is doing fine, thou the economic conditions might hit them a bit. No matter what we do, we always produce data and hopefully store it. Google's value proposition is to convert, index, and catalog that data into information. They do ventures, but everything pretty much ties back to that core concept.
If advertising is wanted in a few years, internet advertising will be it. Thou we might not view it as coming from the net. Today, advertisers are willing to pay millions to have specific non-interactive real estate at specific times on the basis of estimated viewers and potential return. The net offers that plus interactivity, localization, and more concrete viewers. Yet, advertisers pay pennies on the dollar. If anything, I think the billboard will feed of the net well before net advertising goes down.
- Net income has gone up from 8 billion to 14 billion per year
- Headcount has increased from 35,000 to 80,000
- Revenue has increased from 25 billions dollars to 51 billion dollars per year I actually don't think those numbers look that good. Especially when you factor in the headcount over such a long time. Their net income didn't double to match their revenue, but that can be explained away by their investment into Vista/XBox/Zune development. And when you consider that, those numbers are actually ok. Would have been far better if the Vista investment played out. But their headcount more than doubled. The additional workforce didn't generate as much revenue as the original. Overall, their efficiency went down. That reflects poorly on their management. You could play the investment card again, but when you look at the overall picture, you lean toward a conclusion of: less efficiency.
If this was an industry that looks out 10+ years (ie: oil/air), this would be great, but its an industry that sees 3-5 years. Based on that and considering how the ventures have been playing out, it doesn't look so good.
Having said all that, I think Ballmer is a pretty good CEO. He takes risks that he should. He dives head first into markets (mobile, cars, gaming, hardware...) and tries to make things work. If anything, he should be leveraging more of MS's assets to open up additional opportunities for MS's future.
The opposite would be one who just keeps piling money into a warehouse to be given to shareholders... not a good use of money.
What I am trying to say is that there are certain concepts in math that can not be fully represented by the real world. In complex numbers' case, certain attributes are representable, and we exploit where we can, but that doesn't mean we have fully represented them. I didn't mean to imply that there are parts of math that will never have real world applications, rather the real world is kind of limited in comparison.
Also, "real world" for me is defined as our universe, math can seem to go places where the universe and its limited x number of dimensions can not.
I was stating that although we doubt the very existence of our own beings (or more accurately, per Descartes, everything else around us) we do not doubt that these concepts are true and valid. We can doubt everything that "exists" around us and write it off as an illusion, but even within that illusion, we state that math is valid!
In fact, we make the assumption, nay the assertion, that these concepts can define ours and everything else's very existence! So I propose that math exists more so than all others and that we merely discover it within the depths of our minds.
If you were to define "existence" as something that we can poke and prod, then I would have to resolve that math does not exist.
Personally, I didn't like the Unix in OSX. I liked both individually, but programming on it for me was no different than having 2 separate machines.
The OSX and Unix sides don't play as well as say Gnome, KDE, daemons/services, and Unix (you know what I mean) do in Linux and the BSDs. Not to mention I am programming/interacting with a specific proprietary system instead of a more generic, open, flexible one.
It's just my style of programming. I try not to be implementation specific where I can and rather be generic interface based.
No, the chicken did NOT come first, cause I (among others) define a "chicken" as something that comes from a chicken egg. Now, that settles the question, until you gone and defined a "chicken egg" as something laid by a chicken!!
More seriously, there are concepts of math that do not have bearing in the real world, nor can be represented by it (ex: infinity)
FYI, you are both on the same side of the fence.