Other than that, I fully agree with what you're saying - production companies are exploiting the Regular > Special Edition > Collector's Edition > Director's Cut > Director's Cut Collector's Edition > etc. thing up the wazoo. I wish it would stop - but it's a moneymaker, so I doubt it will. As you said - it's just business.. but it's pretty dirty business.
That's not dirty business, it's smart business. This is part of the model that will allow free digital content to flourish. Hopefully we're on the cusp of an age where companies stop trying to charge for the "featureless" version of their products and start charging for the extras and add-ins that accompany special editions. In other words, if people will pay good money for jewel cases with album jackets it becomes less neccesary to persecute the people downloading individual tracks via P2P.
I think part of the reason (on top of the absence of a legal alternative) that illegal downloads became so popular was because there was no perceived loss-of-value. CDs have less and less tracks, oftentimes don't have anything in the jacket, and come in the same jewel case as all the other albums. There was less and less value in purchasing a CD from a brick & mortar store while the price never dropped.
If DVDs come in multiple editions at multiple price points it will be a good thing. A featureless "Regular" version for $5, a Special Edition with some extra featurettes for $10-15, and a Collector's/Directors-cut/whatever version for $25+. If I could buy a DVD for $3-5 and I didn't have to sit through a stupid "Piracy is bad" commercial or see "Trailers for other movies" listed in the Special Features menu, I'd buy more movies. If I really like a particular film and want the associated special crap, I can pick it up for a little extra cash. Beastie Boys Criterion Collection wasn't cheap but I got a value that would have been absent from a download.
I brought up quality of life because the colonists' lives were degraded by the presence of the Brits and they had no option but to comit treason, hence their illegal actions were noble. The reason I do not see illegally downloading RIAA/MPAA products as "noble" is simply because there are legal alternatives. The colonists could not evade the stamp tax or refuse quartering without facing penalties and/or imprisonment. I can (and mostly do) refuse to purchase RIAA products to no ill effect. The colonists had no option but to revolt or face continued degradation of their quality of living while having no parliamentary representation or alternative method of correcting their situation. The current RIAA/MPAA scenario, as I see it, is that these are certainly unneccesary organizations in the modern world but that people are by no means forced to do business with them.
Nobility, in my opinion, has nothing to do with the usefulness or utility of the organization being opposed. It has much more to do with taking the most morally-upright approach in your attempt to accomplish a goal for the greater good. Yes, in the long run it seems the greater good is for the RIAA & MPAA to vanish. Since people can simply purchase non-RIAA/MPAA products, not supporting these organizations becomes the most "noble" course of action for toppling those organizations. As long as people are illegally aquiring their products, they are able to "play the victim card" while at the same time inflate the supposed value of their goods/service. If demand for their products simply ceased to exist, they would cease to exist as well and nobody would feel sorry for them.
To be fair, you seem to have fairly good reasoning. When I read your post yesterday I thought it was just another knee-jerk "they arez badddd!" reaction like many of the anti-RIAA/MPAA sentiments on this board. Still, as someone who creates products for customers I have a hard time endorsing people who simply want to download products for free because they feel some sense of entitlement. If you want to use my products/services, pay me. If you don't want to pay, don't use my stuff.
(There is a problem with the RIAA overstepping its bounds and all the ridiculous suits currently before the courts, but I see that as much as an indication of a broken court system as it is of a corrupt/dying private organization. The RIAA should be penalized severely for every malicious case prosecuted in the absense of reasonable evidence.)
I was actually surprised. I forgot I had been browsing in Firefox and when I hit the site it told me I needed to click "Edit Options" on the yellow security bar. I think IE is slightly different wording so I was pleasantly surprised to notice that yes I was in Firefox and yes the tech preview was going to try and install as an extension anyway. I was even more surprised when it seemed to work nearly flawlessly. Interestingly though, when I tried to load it in Opera the site said "only IE 6 and 7" so they're certainly not publishing the fact that it works in FF. Oh well.
MS certainly has a long way to go before I'll consider them "good", but at least they're trying to play nicer. At times I wish the/. community was just a little nicer because when MS is trying to make strides to get better and they get no love anyway I think it may hinder their efforts. Even though they're the 800lb gorilla, they could still use a little encouragement when they do something right even if it's not perfect.
Downloading digital content *is* every bit as noble as signing the declaration of independence.
Utter silliness.
Your quality of life would not be significantly degraded if you simply stopped consuming products that fall under the umbrella of the RIAA/MPAA. You may even find better music to listen to and movies to watch.
I agree 100%, that's why I threw the second paragraph in there.
Another poster had commented, "what happens when the college kids who think everything should be free get older and replace people who think paying for products/services is ok." I'm really curious to see what happens when these college kids, who while in school likely never had to rely on producing a marketable product/service, suddenly grow up and realize that they want to be paid for their contributions.
It seems to be that people respect other people with a common struggle. College kids who don't have to rely on selling anything obviously can't seem to grasp the concept of property and compensation. I have a feeling that may change to a large degree once they have to support families. I'm willing to bet that most houses get broken into by non-homeowners. Who knows, I'm talking out of my ass on/....;)
And the fact that it's illegal is absolutely immaterial to you?
Legality and morality are entirely different and people should care less about the former and more about the latter. If you're an American, think of it this way: Signing the Declaration of Independence was an act of treason. Now, downloading digital content isn't as noble as throwing off an oppresive empire in the hopes of starting a country based on freedom, but to assume something is bad because "it's illegal" is shortsighted.
Personally, I feel that downloading content without compensating the creator (in the way they ask) is immoral. I generate content for a living and I expect to be paid for it. It would be hypocritical not to extend the same courtesy to others. If something is simply illegal and not immoral I don't have a problem breaking that law.
I think because as a part of microsoft, the technology will be used to bolster the market share of internet explorer, rather than be available to everyone regardless of their OS or browser. The current photosynth demo is an activeX plugin.
While I've read that it doesn't work on Linux, the demo works fine on Firefox (but sadly not Opera). I realize that's not as good as it could be, but it's better than just IE...
I don't think it's silly. It's all about availability and making sure your in compliance with a license.
Availability is definitely a great thing, but it's hard to fault a product/solution/platform due to the incompetence of a third party (CDW). I do see your point about the ease-of-aquisition though and I can't/won't argue against that.
The lock-in thing is an issue, but at least for my situation it's rare that I have to contemplate switching to a different OS so it's a very small issue for me.
PHP documentation can be shoddy in places, I guess. I've never had a problem. There's plenty of freely available, working code out there in packages such as discussion boards that you can examine and reuse. I've never had a problem with PHP, either understanding it or finding the knowledge that I need. I'll take the rest of your commentary at face value.
I don't have a huge problem finding answers to my PHP questions, but generally I have to try a couple different discussion boards before I find what I'm looking for. Then I have to check the code and make sure that it appears they're doing what they say they're doing and then check to see if somebody further down the same discussion said that the first poster was completely wrong and it should be done a different way. With MSDN there is a certain trust level. I don't double-check every line of code because I trust that MS is not going to screw me since I'm developing for their platform.
It seems that the biggest difference is where the convenience is balanced. With licensing & deployment it's more convenient to go open-source, but development is more convenient on MS platform (at least in my experience).
To each their own, I'm just happy that VS.php exists so I can write PHP in VS2005. It's not quite as clean as native C# code but it still beats switching back and forth between IDEs (even though Wing is pretty kick-ass).
The parent poster had asked "how does it's existence hurt MS" and I was simply pointing out that if some people comply with licenses and others don't (without facing repurcussions) then it makes no sense for people to comply with the license and widespread disregard for licenses hurts Microsoft. This doesn't just apply to MS licenses. What if people just start ignoring terms of the GPL and stealing code for their own proprietary closed-source programs?
Microsoft has been _asking_ this guy to stop because they can't make him... Do you understand?
Don't get me wrong, I think it's absolutely ridiculous that the VS team couldn't find a way to make Express editions ignore VSIP extensions. At the same time, I'm not going to ridicule MS for _asking_ instead of trying to legally _make_ a developer to do something. It seems they're trying to be nicer these days, that should be encouraged.
I agree with the rest of your comment about the BS surrounding EULAs when it applies to home users who have to open a box or download a binary before reading an "agreement" that says the software they just aquired is limited. That shit should have to stop. I'd be curious to see what exactly is in the license agreement for VSIP partners creating extensions though. Did TestDriven.NET's author consent to an agreement before getting his license to create extensions? If so, did the agreement limit who he is allowed to develop for? I've no interest in becoming a VSIP partner so I don't know the hoops people jump through but if he made an agreement and then decided he didn't want to comply with that agreement then I have no sympathy for him.
That's right. I've the great stuff you've made only works on your system, and doesn't interoperate with other systems, you've only helped yourself and your systems, not any body else.
I think you missed my point. Their contribution is the ease-of-development that they've provided to developers who want to use their solutions. Unfortunately for the broader community, this is something that can only serve as an example and not a usable solution. If I could go to PHP.net and look up a function name and instantly see what parameters it takes, what it does with those parameters, and an example of how to use it I'd probably be using PHP more. Unfortunately it's easy to drag out examples of PHP.net "documentation" where a function is poorly documented with no example and then there is a thread of comments beneath the description and half of the comments are saying "so-and-so is wrong, you should do it like this..." This usability is not something that can be extended to helping other languages/solutions/platforms so of course you can't say "Microsoft's ease-of-development has been ported to Unix", but it's definitely a model that other software companies could learn from.
There is a vast collection of custom software that has been written for small businesses that will never help "the community" and that should be OK. The fact that such software has been written is a help to the community even if the software never helps more companies than the 1 that commissioned the contract. It's amazing that even small companies can now be automated and online and that's not because some geek in his basement thought up The Perfect open platform but because somewhere along the line development was made easier and less-skilled people could enter the software-development workforce. This influx of people drove down the cost of low-end work and made computers & software affordable and useful for small businesses. If you're some uber1337 coder you can probably still make a living doing stuff that some dumb MCSE can't, but the fact that he can't do what you do means he will provide a service for that small business that probably can't afford you. It's an ecosystem, everything influences everything else whether you recognize the contribution or not.
Can you name a MS solution, application, protocol, or anything of significance that has left the Windows platform and found it's way to Unix or OSX? Or something that runs on mainframes or non-Windows clusters?
How about people all over the world being online? The ubiquity of Windows has made it easier for less-computer-literate people to use technology. This is evidenced by the glut of botnets & viruses. If these were computer-savvy people, there wouldn't be as many problems. Windows was able to do something that *nix couldn't: get common people online. Linux is getting more usable for people so maybe "usability" is a concept that has been exported from Windows to *nix. Please don't think I'm flaming *nix - I know how powerful it is and I know how much geeks like their command lines, but I also know how much grannies just want to press "on" and click "email". Mac has aimed for this ease-of-use so it is by no means exclusive to Windows, but there's a reason that Windows is 90% and Mac isn't.
If you want a specific technology, how about XMLHttpRequest? It was created as an ActiveX object for OWA and as such wasn't free as in speach, but the idea was good enough that it's now a native JavaScript object for all modern browsers.
However, there are a great many things, such as Apache and Postgres, that work on any flavor of Unix, uncluding Solaris, BSD, OSX, and Linux, and also Windows.
That's cool. So what? If a person views my clients' website, they don't give a shit whether I'm using Apache or IIS, Postgres or MSSQL,.aspx or.php... all they care about is that the site renders properly and they
Reading slashdot, I get the impression that a lot of you don't know anything about what's going on in the real world, and you act like MS's dominance is receding. It isn't, I assure you. Most of the "hot technology" being cranked out by open source people is a) tinker toy compared to some MS equivelents and b) poorly interoperable and difficult to use.
I'll disagree that MS dominance is receding, but the rest of that is spot-on.
There have been multitudes of posts exalting Thunderbird as an "Outlook replacement" just because it happens to be an ok mail client, meanwhile they miss out on what a powerful combo Exchange + Outlook really is. Posts blasting ASP.NET because "PHP can do the same thing". I've even seen posters tell people that open source is better because all users could fix bugs and recompile, while disregarding the fact that 99% of computer users won't want to do that. Comparing single products to components of a larger solution is silly. I've seen a few posts, and they are rare, lucidly explaining that on a long enough timeline you could theoretically pick all the best FOSS components and test them together but it's unrealistic.
My other pet peeve is all the "web developers" here who proclaim that they design sites that "tell users to upgrade to a real browser like FireFox or Opera". Statements like that smack of classroom-naivete and a lack of "the customer doesn't care about your religion" reality.
Even the grandparent poster was bold enough to state that MS and its developer base hasn't made a contribution to computing... wow, that's ignorant. Apparently if you don't invent a protocol, you're not a contributor! I hope all the hobbyist devs who wasted time on small sourceforge projects didn't read that. Meanwhile, almost every company I do business with has some small custom app that was developed for them by a small MS developer. Ease of development is highly underrated on this site.
Bottom line- I use a lot of C#/ASP.NET because it's the easiest and fastest tool for me to roll out quick cheap apps for small customers who don't need enterprise reliability and speed. Not only that, but I can turn to MSDN and find examples and implementations for most functions that I have questions about. Try to figure something out by reading the PHP.net documentation, it ain't gonna' happen. Unfortunately most of the people on here would rather scream that VI is a better IDE than VS2005 instead of realizing that the real-world is not like a classroom and different jobs require different tools.
So... if most people don't even describe themselves as developers or even want this plugin... how does it's existence hurt MS again?
RTFA... "Additionally we have over 300 VSIP partners with over 1,000 legal Visual Studio extensions that cannot extend Express. It doesn't make business sense when our biggest and best partners are legally unable to extend Express, yet Jamie's company can."
He has a very valid point- If MS is going to restrict some developers they should restrict all. For some reason Slashdotters like to cry that MS has unfair advantages, but now they're crying that a particular developer isn't being allowed an unfair advantage. It can't be both ways...
If anyone *really* wants somebody from this list dead, doesn't it seem reasonable to think think they would've acted on that desire back when the information originally became public in the respective court case?
I'm set, but thanks for the offer. Your post had a valid point without resorting to "managers are teh problem!!1!" slashthink so I had to take a look at binopta. It's always nice to find that real-world-experience people still post here.
If the product's concept sucks, you're the manager of a bad product and are doomed to fail no matter what you do. If the concept is good but the final product sucks, you're the manager so FIX IT!
Read TFA. "That meant that I and the other product managers...". Not everyone has to walk into a meeting like this with billg and stand this trial by fire. If you're a product manager, you should be the ultimate champion of your product.
Well, I had said "If that's the real situation or if the campaign was really doing all the work and he just had the account, then fuck him." I won't defend a guy who really is trying to leverage extortion unjustly, but at the same time do you have any link to articles explaining the events the way you detailed them?
The last story I saw linked on/. was the piece about him having the MySpace since 2004 and them wanting control at which point he asked for $$ and they gave him the finger. I just hit Google News and the top3returns were all more-or-less saying the same thing. I don't put a ton of weight in that since they may have all read the same blog post before writing their articles, but I'm not going to sift through all 342 results to find the 1 dissenting opinion.
If I started a MySpace page called "Official Microsoft Windows Add-Ons", worked with Microsoft to give my products credibility...
We both know that MS would never allow such a stupid thing to happen. If Obama's campaign had been remotely responsible they wouldn't have participated in such a way that gave him all the power. They could've easily registered a different MySpace URL and allowed him to access it while they clearly retained control. If he didn't want to participate and wanted to keep doing his own thing all they would've had to do is make sure he explicitely labeled it as "Unoffical". I don't think anybody would have hated them for doing that.
Bullshit! He didn't register the myspace and then simply leave a link to his email with a "This MySpace can be available for $39k". He built up a friend network of 160k people. He obviously asked for more money than they were willing to pay, but he was also delivering a tangible product The other side of the spin that I've read is that he changed the password and then demanded money to give them control. If that's the real situation or if the campaign was really doing all the work and he just had the account, then fuck him.
As for people saying he was a volunteer so he shouldn't expect anything -- if you devoted time and code to an open source project and suddenly it went closed, wouldn't you want to be compensated? Obviously you'd be unhappy if it did go closed, but would you be out-of-line to want something in exchange? That's what I see essentially happening here: It was essentially an open project between the campaign and the volunteer and the campaign decided it needed to become closed. The volunteer would rather continue working on it, but since they don't see that as an option he wants to be compensated for the time & resources he devoted to the project. This sounds reasonable to me.
He wanted half the price of a house plus a high-paying staffer job.
You're out of context. He wanted $49k total and he lives in Los Angeles. That's barely a down payment on a small condo on the outskirts of town. I don't know about the staffer-job request, but more importantly did Obama's campaign managers even counter his offer or did they just go into "shut him down" mode? If I read anywhere that they said "no, but we'll give you $25k and a picture with him if he's elected" I could respect them more...
I like that the only evidence that Gates did not say the 640k thing is Bill Gate's denying it.
As opposed to the overwhelming evidence that he did say it? There's no evidence either way and the man himself denies it, we don't have much else to go on.
NO! Gaming the system is the same as killing babies. And not just ugly babies, cute babies!
Just kidding (do I really have to say that?) Serious question though:
Searching for "mysolitaire" fetched 0 results. Searching for "link:mysolitaire.com" brought about 5 results, one of which was http://directory.iserv.com.au/?sub=Jewellery&in=bu siness_shopping which looks link-farmish to me. The weird thing is that 5 minutes later I searched the same phrases and received 28.9k and 0 results, respectively, and a AdSense ad for MySolitaire. Wtf? Has anyone else had something like this happen?
It doesn't repeat itself so much as it gets extremely off-topic mid-article and then tries to bring things home again at the end. Race relations and Crazy Horse Malt Liquor have absolutely nothing to do with the original thesis.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not dirty business, it's smart business. This is part of the model that will allow free digital content to flourish. Hopefully we're on the cusp of an age where companies stop trying to charge for the "featureless" version of their products and start charging for the extras and add-ins that accompany special editions. In other words, if people will pay good money for jewel cases with album jackets it becomes less neccesary to persecute the people downloading individual tracks via P2P.
I think part of the reason (on top of the absence of a legal alternative) that illegal downloads became so popular was because there was no perceived loss-of-value. CDs have less and less tracks, oftentimes don't have anything in the jacket, and come in the same jewel case as all the other albums. There was less and less value in purchasing a CD from a brick & mortar store while the price never dropped.
If DVDs come in multiple editions at multiple price points it will be a good thing. A featureless "Regular" version for $5, a Special Edition with some extra featurettes for $10-15, and a Collector's/Directors-cut/whatever version for $25+. If I could buy a DVD for $3-5 and I didn't have to sit through a stupid "Piracy is bad" commercial or see "Trailers for other movies" listed in the Special Features menu, I'd buy more movies. If I really like a particular film and want the associated special crap, I can pick it up for a little extra cash. Beastie Boys Criterion Collection wasn't cheap but I got a value that would have been absent from a download.
I brought up quality of life because the colonists' lives were degraded by the presence of the Brits and they had no option but to comit treason, hence their illegal actions were noble. The reason I do not see illegally downloading RIAA/MPAA products as "noble" is simply because there are legal alternatives. The colonists could not evade the stamp tax or refuse quartering without facing penalties and/or imprisonment. I can (and mostly do) refuse to purchase RIAA products to no ill effect. The colonists had no option but to revolt or face continued degradation of their quality of living while having no parliamentary representation or alternative method of correcting their situation. The current RIAA/MPAA scenario, as I see it, is that these are certainly unneccesary organizations in the modern world but that people are by no means forced to do business with them.
Nobility, in my opinion, has nothing to do with the usefulness or utility of the organization being opposed. It has much more to do with taking the most morally-upright approach in your attempt to accomplish a goal for the greater good. Yes, in the long run it seems the greater good is for the RIAA & MPAA to vanish. Since people can simply purchase non-RIAA/MPAA products, not supporting these organizations becomes the most "noble" course of action for toppling those organizations. As long as people are illegally aquiring their products, they are able to "play the victim card" while at the same time inflate the supposed value of their goods/service. If demand for their products simply ceased to exist, they would cease to exist as well and nobody would feel sorry for them.
To be fair, you seem to have fairly good reasoning. When I read your post yesterday I thought it was just another knee-jerk "they arez badddd!" reaction like many of the anti-RIAA/MPAA sentiments on this board. Still, as someone who creates products for customers I have a hard time endorsing people who simply want to download products for free because they feel some sense of entitlement. If you want to use my products/services, pay me. If you don't want to pay, don't use my stuff.
(There is a problem with the RIAA overstepping its bounds and all the ridiculous suits currently before the courts, but I see that as much as an indication of a broken court system as it is of a corrupt/dying private organization. The RIAA should be penalized severely for every malicious case prosecuted in the absense of reasonable evidence.)
I was actually surprised. I forgot I had been browsing in Firefox and when I hit the site it told me I needed to click "Edit Options" on the yellow security bar. I think IE is slightly different wording so I was pleasantly surprised to notice that yes I was in Firefox and yes the tech preview was going to try and install as an extension anyway. I was even more surprised when it seemed to work nearly flawlessly. Interestingly though, when I tried to load it in Opera the site said "only IE 6 and 7" so they're certainly not publishing the fact that it works in FF. Oh well.
/. community was just a little nicer because when MS is trying to make strides to get better and they get no love anyway I think it may hinder their efforts. Even though they're the 800lb gorilla, they could still use a little encouragement when they do something right even if it's not perfect.
MS certainly has a long way to go before I'll consider them "good", but at least they're trying to play nicer. At times I wish the
Utter silliness.
Your quality of life would not be significantly degraded if you simply stopped consuming products that fall under the umbrella of the RIAA/MPAA. You may even find better music to listen to and movies to watch.
You reeeeeeeeally need to get some perspective.
I agree 100%, that's why I threw the second paragraph in there.
/.... ;)
Another poster had commented, "what happens when the college kids who think everything should be free get older and replace people who think paying for products/services is ok." I'm really curious to see what happens when these college kids, who while in school likely never had to rely on producing a marketable product/service, suddenly grow up and realize that they want to be paid for their contributions.
It seems to be that people respect other people with a common struggle. College kids who don't have to rely on selling anything obviously can't seem to grasp the concept of property and compensation. I have a feeling that may change to a large degree once they have to support families. I'm willing to bet that most houses get broken into by non-homeowners. Who knows, I'm talking out of my ass on
Legality and morality are entirely different and people should care less about the former and more about the latter. If you're an American, think of it this way: Signing the Declaration of Independence was an act of treason. Now, downloading digital content isn't as noble as throwing off an oppresive empire in the hopes of starting a country based on freedom, but to assume something is bad because "it's illegal" is shortsighted.
Personally, I feel that downloading content without compensating the creator (in the way they ask) is immoral. I generate content for a living and I expect to be paid for it. It would be hypocritical not to extend the same courtesy to others. If something is simply illegal and not immoral I don't have a problem breaking that law.
While I've read that it doesn't work on Linux, the demo works fine on Firefox (but sadly not Opera). I realize that's not as good as it could be, but it's better than just IE...
Thanks to sandwichtron's post it turns out they did... http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3160096
Doesn't take much imagination. Watch the last scene of Shaun of the Dead.
Availability is definitely a great thing, but it's hard to fault a product/solution/platform due to the incompetence of a third party (CDW). I do see your point about the ease-of-aquisition though and I can't/won't argue against that.
The lock-in thing is an issue, but at least for my situation it's rare that I have to contemplate switching to a different OS so it's a very small issue for me.
I don't have a huge problem finding answers to my PHP questions, but generally I have to try a couple different discussion boards before I find what I'm looking for. Then I have to check the code and make sure that it appears they're doing what they say they're doing and then check to see if somebody further down the same discussion said that the first poster was completely wrong and it should be done a different way. With MSDN there is a certain trust level. I don't double-check every line of code because I trust that MS is not going to screw me since I'm developing for their platform.
It seems that the biggest difference is where the convenience is balanced. With licensing & deployment it's more convenient to go open-source, but development is more convenient on MS platform (at least in my experience).
To each their own, I'm just happy that VS.php exists so I can write PHP in VS2005. It's not quite as clean as native C# code but it still beats switching back and forth between IDEs (even though Wing is pretty kick-ass).
The parent poster had asked "how does it's existence hurt MS" and I was simply pointing out that if some people comply with licenses and others don't (without facing repurcussions) then it makes no sense for people to comply with the license and widespread disregard for licenses hurts Microsoft. This doesn't just apply to MS licenses. What if people just start ignoring terms of the GPL and stealing code for their own proprietary closed-source programs?
Don't get me wrong, I think it's absolutely ridiculous that the VS team couldn't find a way to make Express editions ignore VSIP extensions. At the same time, I'm not going to ridicule MS for _asking_ instead of trying to legally _make_ a developer to do something. It seems they're trying to be nicer these days, that should be encouraged.
I agree with the rest of your comment about the BS surrounding EULAs when it applies to home users who have to open a box or download a binary before reading an "agreement" that says the software they just aquired is limited. That shit should have to stop. I'd be curious to see what exactly is in the license agreement for VSIP partners creating extensions though. Did TestDriven.NET's author consent to an agreement before getting his license to create extensions? If so, did the agreement limit who he is allowed to develop for? I've no interest in becoming a VSIP partner so I don't know the hoops people jump through but if he made an agreement and then decided he didn't want to comply with that agreement then I have no sympathy for him.
I think you missed my point. Their contribution is the ease-of-development that they've provided to developers who want to use their solutions. Unfortunately for the broader community, this is something that can only serve as an example and not a usable solution. If I could go to PHP.net and look up a function name and instantly see what parameters it takes, what it does with those parameters, and an example of how to use it I'd probably be using PHP more. Unfortunately it's easy to drag out examples of PHP.net "documentation" where a function is poorly documented with no example and then there is a thread of comments beneath the description and half of the comments are saying "so-and-so is wrong, you should do it like this..." This usability is not something that can be extended to helping other languages/solutions/platforms so of course you can't say "Microsoft's ease-of-development has been ported to Unix", but it's definitely a model that other software companies could learn from.
There is a vast collection of custom software that has been written for small businesses that will never help "the community" and that should be OK. The fact that such software has been written is a help to the community even if the software never helps more companies than the 1 that commissioned the contract. It's amazing that even small companies can now be automated and online and that's not because some geek in his basement thought up The Perfect open platform but because somewhere along the line development was made easier and less-skilled people could enter the software-development workforce. This influx of people drove down the cost of low-end work and made computers & software affordable and useful for small businesses. If you're some uber1337 coder you can probably still make a living doing stuff that some dumb MCSE can't, but the fact that he can't do what you do means he will provide a service for that small business that probably can't afford you. It's an ecosystem, everything influences everything else whether you recognize the contribution or not.
How about people all over the world being online? The ubiquity of Windows has made it easier for less-computer-literate people to use technology. This is evidenced by the glut of botnets & viruses. If these were computer-savvy people, there wouldn't be as many problems. Windows was able to do something that *nix couldn't: get common people online. Linux is getting more usable for people so maybe "usability" is a concept that has been exported from Windows to *nix. Please don't think I'm flaming *nix - I know how powerful it is and I know how much geeks like their command lines, but I also know how much grannies just want to press "on" and click "email". Mac has aimed for this ease-of-use so it is by no means exclusive to Windows, but there's a reason that Windows is 90% and Mac isn't.
If you want a specific technology, how about XMLHttpRequest? It was created as an ActiveX object for OWA and as such wasn't free as in speach, but the idea was good enough that it's now a native JavaScript object for all modern browsers.
That's cool. So what? If a person views my clients' website, they don't give a shit whether I'm using Apache or IIS, Postgres or MSSQL, .aspx or .php... all they care about is that the site renders properly and they
I'll disagree that MS dominance is receding, but the rest of that is spot-on.
There have been multitudes of posts exalting Thunderbird as an "Outlook replacement" just because it happens to be an ok mail client, meanwhile they miss out on what a powerful combo Exchange + Outlook really is. Posts blasting ASP.NET because "PHP can do the same thing". I've even seen posters tell people that open source is better because all users could fix bugs and recompile, while disregarding the fact that 99% of computer users won't want to do that. Comparing single products to components of a larger solution is silly. I've seen a few posts, and they are rare, lucidly explaining that on a long enough timeline you could theoretically pick all the best FOSS components and test them together but it's unrealistic.
My other pet peeve is all the "web developers" here who proclaim that they design sites that "tell users to upgrade to a real browser like FireFox or Opera". Statements like that smack of classroom-naivete and a lack of "the customer doesn't care about your religion" reality.
Even the grandparent poster was bold enough to state that MS and its developer base hasn't made a contribution to computing... wow, that's ignorant. Apparently if you don't invent a protocol, you're not a contributor! I hope all the hobbyist devs who wasted time on small sourceforge projects didn't read that. Meanwhile, almost every company I do business with has some small custom app that was developed for them by a small MS developer. Ease of development is highly underrated on this site.
Bottom line- I use a lot of C#/ASP.NET because it's the easiest and fastest tool for me to roll out quick cheap apps for small customers who don't need enterprise reliability and speed. Not only that, but I can turn to MSDN and find examples and implementations for most functions that I have questions about. Try to figure something out by reading the PHP.net documentation, it ain't gonna' happen. Unfortunately most of the people on here would rather scream that VI is a better IDE than VS2005 instead of realizing that the real-world is not like a classroom and different jobs require different tools.
RTFA... "Additionally we have over 300 VSIP partners with over 1,000 legal Visual Studio extensions that cannot extend Express. It doesn't make business sense when our biggest and best partners are legally unable to extend Express, yet Jamie's company can."
He has a very valid point- If MS is going to restrict some developers they should restrict all. For some reason Slashdotters like to cry that MS has unfair advantages, but now they're crying that a particular developer isn't being allowed an unfair advantage. It can't be both ways...
Apparently you haven't seen the ads in the sports section...
If anyone *really* wants somebody from this list dead, doesn't it seem reasonable to think think they would've acted on that desire back when the information originally became public in the respective court case?
I'm set, but thanks for the offer. Your post had a valid point without resorting to "managers are teh problem!!1!" slashthink so I had to take a look at binopta. It's always nice to find that real-world-experience people still post here.
Cheers,
I agree completely.
;)
So... do you get good deals on shoes?
If the product's concept sucks, you're the manager of a bad product and are doomed to fail no matter what you do. If the concept is good but the final product sucks, you're the manager so FIX IT!
Read TFA. "That meant that I and the other product managers...". Not everyone has to walk into a meeting like this with billg and stand this trial by fire. If you're a product manager, you should be the ultimate champion of your product.
Well, I had said "If that's the real situation or if the campaign was really doing all the work and he just had the account, then fuck him." I won't defend a guy who really is trying to leverage extortion unjustly, but at the same time do you have any link to articles explaining the events the way you detailed them?
The last story I saw linked on /. was the piece about him having the MySpace since 2004 and them wanting control at which point he asked for $$ and they gave him the finger. I just hit Google News and the top 3 returns were all more-or-less saying the same thing. I don't put a ton of weight in that since they may have all read the same blog post before writing their articles, but I'm not going to sift through all 342 results to find the 1 dissenting opinion.
We both know that MS would never allow such a stupid thing to happen. If Obama's campaign had been remotely responsible they wouldn't have participated in such a way that gave him all the power. They could've easily registered a different MySpace URL and allowed him to access it while they clearly retained control. If he didn't want to participate and wanted to keep doing his own thing all they would've had to do is make sure he explicitely labeled it as "Unoffical". I don't think anybody would have hated them for doing that.
Bullshit! He didn't register the myspace and then simply leave a link to his email with a "This MySpace can be available for $39k". He built up a friend network of 160k people. He obviously asked for more money than they were willing to pay, but he was also delivering a tangible product The other side of the spin that I've read is that he changed the password and then demanded money to give them control. If that's the real situation or if the campaign was really doing all the work and he just had the account, then fuck him.
As for people saying he was a volunteer so he shouldn't expect anything -- if you devoted time and code to an open source project and suddenly it went closed, wouldn't you want to be compensated? Obviously you'd be unhappy if it did go closed, but would you be out-of-line to want something in exchange? That's what I see essentially happening here: It was essentially an open project between the campaign and the volunteer and the campaign decided it needed to become closed. The volunteer would rather continue working on it, but since they don't see that as an option he wants to be compensated for the time & resources he devoted to the project. This sounds reasonable to me.
You're out of context. He wanted $49k total and he lives in Los Angeles. That's barely a down payment on a small condo on the outskirts of town. I don't know about the staffer-job request, but more importantly did Obama's campaign managers even counter his offer or did they just go into "shut him down" mode? If I read anywhere that they said "no, but we'll give you $25k and a picture with him if he's elected" I could respect them more...
As opposed to the overwhelming evidence that he did say it? There's no evidence either way and the man himself denies it, we don't have much else to go on.
NO! Gaming the system is the same as killing babies. And not just ugly babies, cute babies!
Just kidding (do I really have to say that?) Serious question though:
Searching for "mysolitaire" fetched 0 results. Searching for "link:mysolitaire.com" brought about 5 results, one of which was http://directory.iserv.com.au/?sub=Jewellery&in=bu siness_shopping which looks link-farmish to me. The weird thing is that 5 minutes later I searched the same phrases and received 28.9k and 0 results, respectively, and a AdSense ad for MySolitaire. Wtf? Has anyone else had something like this happen?
It doesn't repeat itself so much as it gets extremely off-topic mid-article and then tries to bring things home again at the end. Race relations and Crazy Horse Malt Liquor have absolutely nothing to do with the original thesis.