I think the difference is that the Opera browser shows the whole web page (inc. the ads subsidising said page, etc) rather than accessing the underlying data.
Ta. I'd forgotten about the non-atomic commits - we had the same problem back with SCCS and ended up implementing an application that sits as a wrapper around RCS, SCCS, and now CVS repositories, maintaining a database of versions (and applying a common stamp tag in CVS case). Looks like we could eliminate a whole load of code / maintenance.
Unfortunately, GPL 3 and RMS pronouncements on open source in general suggest it's not going to happen. His intention has always been far more radical than the terms of the GPL suggest, and in recent interviews, he's talked about how the Free software movement will eventually have to cut off the oxygen of proprietary development, by cutting out the loopholes that allow non-GPL software to link to and use GPL code.
It's funny, in a way, how much this parallels the strategy of the largest IT firms - get people dependent on your systems, then start using that power to make them jump the way you want to.
Of course, I don't think it's likely to happen - I'd put a significant wager that the community would split and RMS lose control, if that isn't happening already, looking at how GPL 3 has been received.
I'd pretty much concur on the pricing - let's just say I imagine it will drop rapidly after the pent up demand of frustrated PowerBook customers waiting for a G5 laptop have been and gone. Apple's Cinema Display prices have typically seen drastic cuts 6 months after launch. They've shown, with the Mini, and occasionally with the eMac and iMac, that they CAN do price competitive - but the Pro machines have always been a rip-off - you'd think the Apple tax would be a barrier to entry at the bottom but reduce as a percentage the higher you went - factors like industrial design, unique PCB design, OS/X, etc, should become a smaller and smaller proportion of the total cost. Currently, each build-to-order option looks like a painful amount of money.
(Apple - when staff at your own Genius Bars recommend customers buy and upgrade their own memory from Crucial to save money, and there is a lively trade in third party upgrades that can undercut your own build-to-order, don't you think something is wrong?).
Production lines don't matter so much - a lot of production lines make both low and high quality goods, but as a general observation, my Mac Mini (the cheapest Mac available) strikes me as better designed that my (at time of purchase) top of the range Acer laptop. It's got a less powerful graphics card and slower HD, but at least it's USB ports don't wobble loosely in their sockets. They might have been assembled in the same Chinese sweatshop, but that is pretty much irrelevant.
Like you, I'm waiting for a 13" iBook - I want something that is shoulder-baggable, and getting a 12" iBook feels like a lost cause now.
Only thing is how quickly you'd run out of HD space if you partitioned it for 3 OS.
It's worth also stating that the exact model people are proposing Apple follow is the model that Jobs tried at NeXT, following their failure to establish another high-end hardware platform - and if Apple hadn't bought NeXT, they would now be regarded as another failure along with BeOS, and IBM's OS/2.
Mind you, I think a clever move would be either releasing or open sourcing the older versions of the OS and iLife as they move forward - with, say, a 24 month time delay.
I guess the best compromise is to always be using the cutting-edge stuff on internal tools to improve building the older stuff (which is how the guys at my place are currently using Tapestry and Spring). That way you build the experience and expertise to bring to production
>No they are not, the copyright system is. You are doing what most people who did not examine the details do, that is conflating two separate issues by assuming that an attack on the copyright system must >constitute an attack on livelyhood of individual artists. There are however alternative schemes to that of copyright, one of them being patronage, which do not have the same vastly negative social and >technological implications as copyright does. So please leave the poor, suffering, starving artists out of this, as they were never a part of the equation, other then in the minds of misguided politicians of old.
In your reply to both myself and Grab you have used the word 'greed' - this is equally emotive as 'poor starving artists' as you so patronisingly twisted my argument. Nor have I mistaken the two issues - I simply disagree that patronage will form an effective replacement for copyright as a system of compensation for artists.
>Patronage was (successfully being responsible for immense amount of art, still filling all of the major museums of the planet and endless private collections) and still is a viable alternative. It simply fails to bring >sufficient profits for the middlemen and distributors of knowledge and, in the long term, fails to deliver totalitarian controls over humanity's ability to communicate and learn to various corporate and governmental >stakeholders. That is why any discussion on the subject in any public forum must start with insinuations of "Thieves! Pirates!" followed by "Why wont someone think of poor starving artists!" followed by painting >the copyright in the most divine light possible, or by trying to present its illogical gory nature as "par for the course" in law, as "law does not adhere to logic". Sort of like what you just engaged into.
Patronage has indeed filled museums across the planet, but you seem to be neglecting the point that they are largely filled with physical artworks that can be owned, and have certainly brought vast profits for the middlemen and distributors.
I thank you kindly for summarising my argument, but unfortunately that wasn't it. What I was pointing out was that if you were to cut out the middlemen (a situation that has become increasingly possible throughout the last century) you are left with an argument directly with artists. I'm sure from your posts that you would have no problem in telling them that they are wrong, fundamentally, although of course it's not them, but the system that needs to go.
>Art is not business, it is not commerce, and it has nothing to do with marketplace. You are making an egregious assumption that everything in life must obey the principles of the free market. Art exists outside of >Capitalism and is not governed by the rules of that economic system, just as information in general is not. Actually, if you step back a message it was YOU who brought up the laws of free market economics - I certainly don't believe life should obey the principles of the free market. However, while Art (with a lovely capital A) may live outside Capitalism (and will certainly outlive it) - artists unfortunately have to live within it. At the end of the day, people have to eat. There's also the matter of art with a low A.
>Artists making more income then presently has never been a point of any of this. The only issues that concern me are that the knowledge of humanity and its ability to freely communicate does not become a ?>victim of totalitarian DRM-empowered entities, and that a fair and logical system for promotion of art exists. That is all. Excuse the word 'more'. That should have read 'replacement'. I still regard it as a deluded argument. And believe it or not, I share the same aims. I don't want to see either a DRM restricted world, or one where we pay a flat-fee and monitoring software reports what we listen to (art as popularity contest). I just don't think patronage will work. On the other hand, I'm rather cheered by the fact that the current UK No.1 album is
>>Which would be difficult to then pass onto a 3rd person, without writing it out yourself, unlike a digital copy >Oration? Story telling? Fine for more plot-centred stories and epic poetry, but rather missing the point of a lot of literature. I rather doubt you or I have the skill to recall a Dickens or Austen novel from memory, or even a Carver or Borges short in any more than it's outline.
>This is not a "technolibertarian" stance (and in fact I could be more accurately described as a "socialist" then a libertarian). It is merely a scientific stance.
>That is if you are going to claim that Witches are the foremost crime problem and then proceed to set up laws, complete with regulations of how to go about burning them on the stake, we would be in the same realm where the copyright debate is.
>The premise of copyright contradicts both science and logic (and that is in addition to violating free-market principles and contribution-reward schemes of capitalism).
>So unless you consider logic and science both dispensable and superfluous in the face of greed, the debate is not about technology uses but about fundamental principles governing the society.
> The technology aspect, which confuses you so badly, is merely a catalyst which exposed deep faults within the law and the whole present approach to this problem.
My understanding is that copyright law was introduced to protect authors from exploitation by unscrupulous publishers. I would say that the misrepresentation of the intention of copyright law by it's critics, falls into the same trap as those who are by your language, finding Witches everywhere. The RIAA and major labels form a useful equivalent bogeyman, and rallying point. It would be a much harder battle to fight, if the target was artists who had self-funded their own recordings and books - although of course, such artists are equally your target, given that they mistakenly believe they have a right to compensation for their costs and work, or that they 'own' anything they can sell.
I am also not at all confused by technology vs fundamental principles. The law is rarely about fundamental principles - particularly at the level of civil rather than criminal law, it is frequently about balancing the positive and negative impacts of technology on society. I would agree that the current situation exposes a crisis in the law, I'd also agree that the current approach is flawed (particularly the criminalisation of an essentially civil offence, and the tendency to extend rights for corporate owners of copyright, when the evidence suggests that society would benefit from a shorter period). I would also argue that the same QUESTION - what is the best mechanism for compensating artists, and those involved in artistic production - existed in the past. Copyright, despite it's contradiction of fundamental scientific and logical principles, which would have been understood at the time ('How can one own an abstract idea') was proposed as an answer to that question. I still don't believe anyone has put forward a viable alternative.
I'm not quite sure about violation of free-market principles. As far as I'm concerned they state that if there is no way of making a significant margin on production (i.e. generally speaking, in a situation of over-production) then the market will correct itself - either people move into profit making markets, consolidate (reduce costs / increase margins) or fail. On an individual level, it implies that if someone can't make money from a book, they will have to work doing something else to pay the rent. If the capitalist forces behind publishing companies can't make money out of books - they will take their capital into copper mining. The closest thing I can think of to 'zero cost for additional copies' is the broadcast radio and TV model - all the cost is before broadcast, but there is no additional cost for each additional customer. You should consider very carefully how conducive this has been to art vs commerce.
Agreed. I used to work as a clerk in a hospital back in the days of paper records. In emergency cases, getting hold of their files was one of the first steps, even while the frontline staff are trying to deal with the immediate problem.
Yep. I think the same thing is happening today with.NET - companies being sold on the idea of faster cheaper development.
Anyway, I did want to add some further comment to my earlier point. The main thing is 'Be sure that Linux IS the answer to the question'. You may be failing to justify it because it's the wrong answer, or you're just looking at a way to get Linux into the company - i.e. a solution looking for a problem.
Also, know the competition - actually investigate and compare proprietary products - many people familiar with mySQL can't tell the difference between Oracle, SQLServer and DB2, just that mySQL is THE open source database. Sell the product, not the ideology.
People in senior management tend to be old enough to have seen several suppliers go under, so it is something they worry about.
Using the same system for the next 20 years also isn't acceptable - most of the time you are buying hardware to run software that will itself advance in versions. Your vendor may no longer want to support packaging it's system for the 2005 edition of Ubuntu. Your vendor might even be open source and say 'well, if you want to rewrite it to work without GLX then fine but we don't see any economic benefit for us' . . . which is great for those places with in-house developers and skilled staff.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the OPPOSITE of the trend in most companies IT. First thing to understand - if they could get rid of the IT department, they would. Many already HAVE. Even companies that have company cars, don't employ mechanics. Selling open source is like trying to sell a firm a fleet car for their staff, and telling them it's better because it comes with a fuill technical manual - 'so it doesn't matter if we go bankrupt, you can still fix the car'. They don't want commodity, they want service.
Second thing to remember, and it's a similar one : Microsoft made a lot of corporate sales by pointing out that firms could replace their expensive graduate educated Unix admins with cheaper spotty kids certified on Windows. Apart from massively expensive server software, the cost of software is largely irrelevant compared to the cost of salary. Many managers still don't like the word Unix because it implies more expensive staff.
The key point, I think, is to sell Linux where it is unassailably the right answer - on new systems, such as web servers, that may be loosely coupled to legacy systems, rather than proposing an expensive migration of existing systems. Don't try and appeal to your boss on the grounds that the software is 'free'. While they may be penny-pinching most of the time, they will be suspicious of anything that sounds to good to be true, and secondly any good manager does not object to spending money on something that makes their staff more productive. Perhaps even suggest a paid for distribution like Red Hat and call it a 'Linux based system'. What they don't want is a return to the situation in the 70s and most of the 80s where the IT department wrote everything, so telling them you can modify the system yourself isn't a good idea. The things YOU think are positives are most likely negatives.
Which would be difficult to then pass onto a 3rd person, without writing it out yourself, unlike a digital copy.
I accept the point that there is no way to prevent copying, without actually preventing users from being able to run software of their choice, but I'm really really really bored with the technolibertarian stance that the whole world needs to adjust to do what technology ALLOWS - there are plenty of things that technology can do, from weaponry to spying, that we want to restrict our governments and companies from being able to do - but when it comes to our own usage, we want to live in the land of do-as-you-please.
I'd also add that every proposed alternative compensation scheme I've seen has flaws - either putting funding into the hands of gatekeepers (tax subsidised artists) or flat-fee systems which will require users to give up privacy, or gibberish like 'making money from T-shirts and live sales'. Yep, that will work for books.
Not that you mentioned either, I'm not trying to construct a straw man, so this isn't specifically about your post, but . . . I just don't read anything that makes sense, yet - just a desire to apply business models that work in software (support contracts and consultancy was always where the money was at) to places where they make no sense. It's like there is some intellectual inability to see a difference between software and art, because it's all just binary information.
Personally, I think a system that lets people buy and sell information at a price of the seller's choice (a la Landau's 'Xanadu') is the goal we should be aiming for - cutting out the distribution middle men as far as possible, which would reduce costs drastically - but still allowing economic value. Unfortunately, I don't think it will happen, because a significant number of people will always consider that a threat to their liberty.
Part of the issue is caused by the fact that in most of the existing network is asymmetric in capacity, which in turn is because it's mostly been cobbled together on top of existing infrastructure rather than investing in new infrastructure, which in turn is because that's what the majority of consumers have voted for with their wallets.
They wanted high download speeds at a cheap price point, which could be achieved using ADSL, rather than the full two-way networking that would have caused an infrastructure change. There's nothing unclear about this in most ISP contracts, but most consumers just see '8Mb Connection'. I expect as it becomes more important to people, and becomes something an ISP can distinguish itself on, we'll start seeing both rates being quoted - but I'd be intrigued to see if people are really willing to pay the price differential. Or maybe Google will do it for free, subsidised by advertising, as appears to be the solution to most problems.
Using the buffet comparison, people are entering into the all-you-can-eat buffet, then wondering why they can't have the items on the a la carte menu. On the other hand, the restaurants aren't being wholly honest in their advertising.
Really? I mean what really annoys you now? More likely to be your credit card details being stolen, or your PC slowing down as it becomes part of a zombie network.
An O/S upgrade and new Photoshop every 18-24 months, isn't really THAT significant compared to business income (especially as it will be a business expense and therefore deductible from some sort of tax). A lot of people will stretch that cycle out even further, maybe only upgrading every second version - and there should, in theory, be some good reason for them to do this (like the new 3-D cut and paste feature in PS).
IMO, OSS has worked enormously well with the likes of Eclipse, Apache, etc, because the audience of these programs are both capable of modifying the programs, and motivated to do so - if something annoys them about their tools, they can modify them. They rapidly change because of this input. That is as much an advantage as the fact that they're free - probably more so.
But your typical Photoshop or Flash Studio user is in the same boat - the program is a mystery, and they can only ask for a new feature to be implemented.
Bit like cars in a way - people have voted (with their wallets) for cars that are reliable and mysterious internally, over ones that are cheaper yet can be self-maintained. Techies often don't realise that (and nor to car mechanics, when you hear them pouring scorn on popular modern cars).
Nice distinction / emphasis - I think that's an issue with many software development books - that they try and pitch themselves somewhere between the two.
I've got a large number of books that I keep for reference, which are bloated by beginners training sections - basic how to's on configuration, walking through the interface / command line, what is a SELECT or INSERT - stuff you will genuinely only need to learn ONCE. From a learning point of view, they're often poor, because they will then be structured as references - i.e. everything to do with collections will be in one chapter, exception handling in another, meaning that each chapter has to follow a beginners to advanced curve, meaning it can never really focus on one audience.
Not really sure I agree with the first premise - there are plenty of examples of things that are easy to learn remaining in the minority, while a 'harder' solution wins out.
Also can't say that, say, Ruby is good because it's easy to learn and.NET is bad because it's easy to learn - not that you mentioned Ruby, but I hope you get the point. (Similar point - a lot of people get excited by persistence layers that remove the need to understand SQL). Bit like we'll never get people off Windows if we imply that other platforms are harder to use or develop on. And you'll especially never win an argument with a manager. 'No, we don't want to go with.NET, we should go with something harder to use, that fewer people know, and has no chance that it's salaries might be commoditised'.
There's also the fact that most businesses really do not care how badly written or architected their applications are UNTIL they start impacting their business (i.e. it doesn't matter if a program is unmaintainable if it never has to be maintained) - I've noticed that lately, speed of development has become a very important criteria, whereas 10 years ago the environment was much more about getting technical issues right - I guess part of this is that hardware speed can now cover up (to an extent) for bad architecture / coding.
I'd entirely agree - it (multiple layers from multiple vendors) is also absolute basic security.
End consumers need to understand that it's like putting loads of security on your house and car, which all works with one key. More convenient, but with an obvious point of failure.
Next step : Doing something like this that is integrated with the browser. It's just a shame that MS would rather produce a new 'standard' than do it with IE.
See - who said Mac users can't be helpful to PC users sometimes.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the difference is that the Opera browser shows the whole web page (inc. the ads subsidising said page, etc) rather than accessing the underlying data.
Ta. Google is good, but drawing on the knowledge of experienced developers is better.
Ta. I'd forgotten about the non-atomic commits - we had the same problem back with SCCS and ended up implementing an application that sits as a wrapper around RCS, SCCS, and now CVS repositories, maintaining a database of versions (and applying a common stamp tag in CVS case). Looks like we could eliminate a whole load of code / maintenance.
Any good sites / pointers as to why Subversion beats CVS?
Unfortunately, GPL 3 and RMS pronouncements on open source in general suggest it's not going to happen. His intention has always been far more radical than the terms of the GPL suggest, and in recent interviews, he's talked about how the Free software movement will eventually have to cut off the oxygen of proprietary development, by cutting out the loopholes that allow non-GPL software to link to and use GPL code.
It's funny, in a way, how much this parallels the strategy of the largest IT firms - get people dependent on your systems, then start using that power to make them jump the way you want to.
Of course, I don't think it's likely to happen - I'd put a significant wager that the community would split and RMS lose control, if that isn't happening already, looking at how GPL 3 has been received.
I'd pretty much concur on the pricing - let's just say I imagine it will drop rapidly after the pent up demand of frustrated PowerBook customers waiting for a G5 laptop have been and gone. Apple's Cinema Display prices have typically seen drastic cuts 6 months after launch. They've shown, with the Mini, and occasionally with the eMac and iMac, that they CAN do price competitive - but the Pro machines have always been a rip-off - you'd think the Apple tax would be a barrier to entry at the bottom but reduce as a percentage the higher you went - factors like industrial design, unique PCB design, OS/X, etc, should become a smaller and smaller proportion of the total cost. Currently, each build-to-order option looks like a painful amount of money.
(Apple - when staff at your own Genius Bars recommend customers buy and upgrade their own memory from Crucial to save money, and there is a lively trade in third party upgrades that can undercut your own build-to-order, don't you think something is wrong?).
Production lines don't matter so much - a lot of production lines make both low and high quality goods, but as a general observation, my Mac Mini (the cheapest Mac available) strikes me as better designed that my (at time of purchase) top of the range Acer laptop. It's got a less powerful graphics card and slower HD, but at least it's USB ports don't wobble loosely in their sockets. They might have been assembled in the same Chinese sweatshop, but that is pretty much irrelevant.
Like you, I'm waiting for a 13" iBook - I want something that is shoulder-baggable, and getting a 12" iBook feels like a lost cause now.
Only thing is how quickly you'd run out of HD space if you partitioned it for 3 OS.
It's worth also stating that the exact model people are proposing Apple follow is the model that Jobs tried at NeXT, following their failure to establish another high-end hardware platform - and if Apple hadn't bought NeXT, they would now be regarded as another failure along with BeOS, and IBM's OS/2.
Mind you, I think a clever move would be either releasing or open sourcing the older versions of the OS and iLife as they move forward - with, say, a 24 month time delay.
I guess the best compromise is to always be using the cutting-edge stuff on internal tools to improve building the older stuff (which is how the guys at my place are currently using Tapestry and Spring).
That way you build the experience and expertise to bring to production
>No they are not, the copyright system is. You are doing what most people who did not examine the details do, that is conflating two separate issues by assuming that an attack on the copyright system must >constitute an attack on livelyhood of individual artists. There are however alternative schemes to that of copyright, one of them being patronage, which do not have the same vastly negative social and >technological implications as copyright does. So please leave the poor, suffering, starving artists out of this, as they were never a part of the equation, other then in the minds of misguided politicians of old.
In your reply to both myself and Grab you have used the word 'greed' - this is equally emotive as 'poor starving artists' as you so patronisingly twisted my argument. Nor have I mistaken the two issues - I simply disagree that patronage will form an effective replacement for copyright as a system of compensation for artists.
>Patronage was (successfully being responsible for immense amount of art, still filling all of the major museums of the planet and endless private collections) and still is a viable alternative. It simply fails to bring >sufficient profits for the middlemen and distributors of knowledge and, in the long term, fails to deliver totalitarian controls over humanity's ability to communicate and learn to various corporate and governmental >stakeholders. That is why any discussion on the subject in any public forum must start with insinuations of "Thieves! Pirates!" followed by "Why wont someone think of poor starving artists!" followed by painting >the copyright in the most divine light possible, or by trying to present its illogical gory nature as "par for the course" in law, as "law does not adhere to logic". Sort of like what you just engaged into.
Patronage has indeed filled museums across the planet, but you seem to be neglecting the point that they are largely filled with physical artworks that can be owned, and have certainly brought vast profits for the middlemen and distributors.
I thank you kindly for summarising my argument, but unfortunately that wasn't it. What I was pointing out was that if you were to cut out the middlemen (a situation that has become increasingly possible throughout the last century) you are left with an argument directly with artists. I'm sure from your posts that you would have no problem in telling them that they are wrong, fundamentally, although of course it's not them, but the system that needs to go.
>Art is not business, it is not commerce, and it has nothing to do with marketplace. You are making an egregious assumption that everything in life must obey the principles of the free market. Art exists outside of >Capitalism and is not governed by the rules of that economic system, just as information in general is not.
Actually, if you step back a message it was YOU who brought up the laws of free market economics - I certainly don't believe life should obey the principles of the free market. However, while Art (with a lovely capital A) may live outside Capitalism (and will certainly outlive it) - artists unfortunately have to live within it. At the end of the day, people have to eat. There's also the matter of art with a low A.
>Artists making more income then presently has never been a point of any of this. The only issues that concern me are that the knowledge of humanity and its ability to freely communicate does not become a ?>victim of totalitarian DRM-empowered entities, and that a fair and logical system for promotion of art exists. That is all.
Excuse the word 'more'. That should have read 'replacement'. I still regard it as a deluded argument. And believe it or not, I share the same aims. I don't want to see either a DRM restricted world, or one where we pay a flat-fee and monitoring software reports what we listen to (art as popularity contest). I just don't think patronage will work. On the other hand, I'm rather cheered by the fact that the current UK No.1 album is
>>Which would be difficult to then pass onto a 3rd person, without writing it out yourself, unlike a digital copy
>Oration? Story telling?
Fine for more plot-centred stories and epic poetry, but rather missing the point of a lot of literature. I rather doubt you or I have the skill to recall a Dickens or Austen novel from memory, or even a Carver or Borges short in any more than it's outline.
>This is not a "technolibertarian" stance (and in fact I could be more accurately described as a "socialist" then a libertarian). It is merely a scientific stance.
>That is if you are going to claim that Witches are the foremost crime problem and then proceed to set up laws, complete with regulations of how to go about burning them on the stake, we would be in the same realm where the copyright debate is.
>The premise of copyright contradicts both science and logic (and that is in addition to violating free-market principles and contribution-reward schemes of capitalism).
>So unless you consider logic and science both dispensable and superfluous in the face of greed, the debate is not about technology uses but about fundamental principles governing the society.
> The technology aspect, which confuses you so badly, is merely a catalyst which exposed deep faults within the law and the whole present approach to this problem.
My understanding is that copyright law was introduced to protect authors from exploitation by unscrupulous publishers. I would say that the misrepresentation of the intention of copyright law by it's critics, falls into the same trap as those who are by your language, finding Witches everywhere. The RIAA and major labels form a useful equivalent bogeyman, and rallying point. It would be a much harder battle to fight, if the target was artists who had self-funded their own recordings and books - although of course, such artists are equally your target, given that they mistakenly believe they have a right to compensation for their costs and work, or that they 'own' anything they can sell.
I am also not at all confused by technology vs fundamental principles. The law is rarely about fundamental principles - particularly at the level of civil rather than criminal law, it is frequently about balancing the positive and negative impacts of technology on society. I would agree that the current situation exposes a crisis in the law, I'd also agree that the current approach is flawed (particularly the criminalisation of an essentially civil offence, and the tendency to extend rights for corporate owners of copyright, when the evidence suggests that society would benefit from a shorter period). I would also argue that the same QUESTION - what is the best mechanism for compensating artists, and those involved in artistic production - existed in the past. Copyright, despite it's contradiction of fundamental scientific and logical principles, which would have been understood at the time ('How can one own an abstract idea') was proposed as an answer to that question. I still don't believe anyone has put forward a viable alternative.
I'm not quite sure about violation of free-market principles. As far as I'm concerned they state that if there is no way of making a significant margin on production (i.e. generally speaking, in a situation of over-production) then the market will correct itself - either people move into profit making markets, consolidate (reduce costs / increase margins) or fail. On an individual level, it implies that if someone can't make money from a book, they will have to work doing something else to pay the rent. If the capitalist forces behind publishing companies can't make money out of books - they will take their capital into copper mining. The closest thing I can think of to 'zero cost for additional copies' is the broadcast radio and TV model - all the cost is before broadcast, but there is no additional cost for each additional customer. You should consider very carefully how conducive this has been to art vs commerce.
Did anyone think to Slashdot them?
Agreed. I used to work as a clerk in a hospital back in the days of paper records. In emergency cases, getting hold of their files was one of the first steps, even while the frontline staff are trying to deal with the immediate problem.
Yep. I think the same thing is happening today with .NET - companies being sold on the idea of faster cheaper development.
Anyway, I did want to add some further comment to my earlier point. The main thing is 'Be sure that Linux IS the answer to the question'.
You may be failing to justify it because it's the wrong answer, or you're just looking at a way to get Linux into the company - i.e. a solution looking for a problem.
Also, know the competition - actually investigate and compare proprietary products - many people familiar with mySQL can't tell the difference between Oracle, SQLServer and DB2, just that mySQL is THE open source database. Sell the product, not the ideology.
Nah, not when they can do the same with programming as they did with hardware and OS!!
People in senior management tend to be old enough to have seen several suppliers go under, so it is something they worry about.
Using the same system for the next 20 years also isn't acceptable - most of the time you are buying hardware to run software that will itself advance in versions. Your vendor may no longer want to support packaging it's system for the 2005 edition of Ubuntu. Your vendor might even be open source and say 'well, if you want to rewrite it to work without GLX then fine but we don't see any economic benefit for us' . . . which is great for those places with in-house developers and skilled staff.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the OPPOSITE of the trend in most companies IT. First thing to understand - if they could get rid of the IT department, they would. Many already HAVE. Even companies that have company cars, don't employ mechanics. Selling open source is like trying to sell a firm a fleet car for their staff, and telling them it's better because it comes with a fuill technical manual - 'so it doesn't matter if we go bankrupt, you can still fix the car'. They don't want commodity, they want service.
Second thing to remember, and it's a similar one : Microsoft made a lot of corporate sales by pointing out that firms could replace their expensive graduate educated Unix admins with cheaper spotty kids certified on Windows. Apart from massively expensive server software, the cost of software is largely irrelevant compared to the cost of salary. Many managers still don't like the word Unix because it implies more expensive staff.
The key point, I think, is to sell Linux where it is unassailably the right answer - on new systems, such as web servers, that may be loosely coupled to legacy systems, rather than proposing an expensive migration of existing systems. Don't try and appeal to your boss on the grounds that the software is 'free'. While they may be penny-pinching most of the time, they will be suspicious of anything that sounds to good to be true, and secondly any good manager does not object to spending money on something that makes their staff more productive. Perhaps even suggest a paid for distribution like Red Hat and call it a 'Linux based system'. What they don't want is a return to the situation in the 70s and most of the 80s where the IT department wrote everything, so telling them you can modify the system yourself isn't a good idea. The things YOU think are positives are most likely negatives.
Which would be difficult to then pass onto a 3rd person, without writing it out yourself, unlike a digital copy.
I accept the point that there is no way to prevent copying, without actually preventing users from being able to run software of their choice, but I'm really really really bored with the technolibertarian stance that the whole world needs to adjust to do what technology ALLOWS - there are plenty of things that technology can do, from weaponry to spying, that we want to restrict our governments and companies from being able to do - but when it comes to our own usage, we want to live in the land of do-as-you-please.
I'd also add that every proposed alternative compensation scheme I've seen has flaws - either putting funding into the hands of gatekeepers (tax subsidised artists) or flat-fee systems which will require users to give up privacy, or gibberish like 'making money from T-shirts and live sales'. Yep, that will work for books.
Not that you mentioned either, I'm not trying to construct a straw man, so this isn't specifically about your post, but . . . I just don't read anything that makes sense, yet - just a desire to apply business models that work in software (support contracts and consultancy was always where the money was at) to places where they make no sense. It's like there is some intellectual inability to see a difference between software and art, because it's all just binary information.
Personally, I think a system that lets people buy and sell information at a price of the seller's choice (a la Landau's 'Xanadu') is the goal we should be aiming for - cutting out the distribution middle men as far as possible, which would reduce costs drastically - but still allowing economic value. Unfortunately, I don't think it will happen, because a significant number of people will always consider that a threat to their liberty.
My fault - I was only thinking about the 'last mile', but that's the step they've avoided tackling due to expense.
Part of the issue is caused by the fact that in most of the existing network is asymmetric in capacity, which in turn is because it's mostly been cobbled together on top of existing infrastructure rather than investing in new infrastructure, which in turn is because that's what the majority of consumers have voted for with their wallets.
They wanted high download speeds at a cheap price point, which could be achieved using ADSL, rather than the full two-way networking that would have caused an infrastructure change. There's nothing unclear about this in most ISP contracts, but most consumers just see '8Mb Connection'. I expect as it becomes more important to people, and becomes something an ISP can distinguish itself on, we'll start seeing both rates being quoted - but I'd be intrigued to see if people are really willing to pay the price differential. Or maybe Google will do it for free, subsidised by advertising, as appears to be the solution to most problems.
Using the buffet comparison, people are entering into the all-you-can-eat buffet, then wondering why they can't have the items on the a la carte menu. On the other hand, the restaurants aren't being wholly honest in their advertising.
Really? I mean what really annoys you now? More likely to be your credit card details being stolen, or your PC slowing down as it becomes part of a zombie network.
But that's kind of the point.
An O/S upgrade and new Photoshop every 18-24 months, isn't really THAT significant compared to business income (especially as it will be a business expense and therefore deductible from some sort of tax). A lot of people will stretch that cycle out even further, maybe only upgrading every second version - and there should, in theory, be some good reason for them to do this (like the new 3-D cut and paste feature in PS).
IMO, OSS has worked enormously well with the likes of Eclipse, Apache, etc, because the audience of these programs are both capable of modifying the programs, and motivated to do so - if something annoys them about their tools, they can modify them. They rapidly change because of this input. That is as much an advantage as the fact that they're free - probably more so.
But your typical Photoshop or Flash Studio user is in the same boat - the program is a mystery, and they can only ask for a new feature to be implemented.
Bit like cars in a way - people have voted (with their wallets) for cars that are reliable and mysterious internally, over ones that are cheaper yet can be self-maintained. Techies often don't realise that (and nor to car mechanics, when you hear them pouring scorn on popular modern cars).
Nice distinction / emphasis - I think that's an issue with many software development books - that they try and pitch themselves somewhere between the two. I've got a large number of books that I keep for reference, which are bloated by beginners training sections - basic how to's on configuration, walking through the interface / command line, what is a SELECT or INSERT - stuff you will genuinely only need to learn ONCE. From a learning point of view, they're often poor, because they will then be structured as references - i.e. everything to do with collections will be in one chapter, exception handling in another, meaning that each chapter has to follow a beginners to advanced curve, meaning it can never really focus on one audience.
Not really sure I agree with the first premise - there are plenty of examples of things that are easy to learn remaining in the minority, while a 'harder' solution wins out.
.NET is bad because it's easy to learn - not that you mentioned Ruby, but I hope you get the point. (Similar point - a lot of people get excited by persistence layers that remove the need to understand SQL). Bit like we'll never get people off Windows if we imply that other platforms are harder to use or develop on. And you'll especially never win an argument with a manager. 'No, we don't want to go with .NET, we should go with something harder to use, that fewer people know, and has no chance that it's salaries might be commoditised'.
Also can't say that, say, Ruby is good because it's easy to learn and
There's also the fact that most businesses really do not care how badly written or architected their applications are UNTIL they start impacting their business (i.e. it doesn't matter if a program is unmaintainable if it never has to be maintained) - I've noticed that lately, speed of development has become a very important criteria, whereas 10 years ago the environment was much more about getting technical issues right - I guess part of this is that hardware speed can now cover up (to an extent) for bad architecture / coding.
I'd entirely agree - it (multiple layers from multiple vendors) is also absolute basic security.
End consumers need to understand that it's like putting loads of security on your house and car, which all works with one key. More convenient, but with an obvious point of failure.
Quick Google search has found at least two :
9 _4-10470005.html?v=1/
h e-day-foxit-pdf-reader-109741.php/
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php#/
Reviewed at
http://www.download.com/Foxit-PDF-Reader/3640-207
Downside : won't work in a Tab in Firefox. Then again, Acrobat doesn't always like to play properly with Firefox also.
http://www.lifehacker.com/software//download-of-t
Also :
http://www.visagesoft.com/products/pdfreader/
Next step : Doing something like this that is integrated with the browser. It's just a shame that MS would rather produce a new 'standard' than do it with IE.
See - who said Mac users can't be helpful to PC users sometimes.
Maybe the editor's a Mac user and forgot about Acrobat? (The one definite benefit of using Safari or other Webkit based browsers - native PDF)>