There's a notion of punitive damages. Basically, for
suits to be a disincentive to spam, it needs to cost the spammer enough that they lose on average. In other words, unless they get taken to court 100% of the time, by 100% of the recipients, the penalty should exceed compensation. I'm OK about this suit, because the fact is that the firm probably can't and don't sue all spammers, and probably don't make a lot of money on spam overall.
it just goes to show that 99% of the work in creating software is in the design.
you have to try to map out not only what you will need but what you might need in the future.
Not only is this not true, it's impossible to do this in practice. If you do this, you'll find that you still blow a lot of time on design, development takes longer, because your design is unnecessarily abstract, and your design proves inadequate for something that you need to implement further down the road.
Requirements change, and this has consequences for the design. The best one can hope for is that the basic architecture is robust enough that it doesn't require a complete upheaval.
What is necessary is a method for changing design gracefully. "Refactoring" is the best source I've seen that addresses this. Basically, you change methodically, and you test.
pardon my ignorance, but how is this different from previous versions of JPEG ? I heard that JPEG already used discrete cosine transforms, and saved space by doing something along the lines of throwing out some spectral components. Anyway, if you've got some details on the differences between this and the old jpeg, I'd be interested (and I suspect other readers would be)
NO. And there is the classic conceptual error all the IP apologists use. There is no _property_ in the original work, it
cannot be bought or sold.
I didn't say there was "property" in the original work, I said there was economic value in the work. Most work has economic value, and most work is not "property".
The number of copies sold is irrelevant because they have no economic value.
The copies themselves have no economic value, but the sales numbers can be used to appraise the economic value of the work.
If a work is
commissioned, then the original work is paid for. Otherwise the creation of the work is speculation by the artiste,
speculation that they can perform it in concert and get paid,
Clearly, this is not true. The copyright system rewards artists for their work, by allowing a distributed, deferred payment system as financial incentive for their creative efforts.
Economic value is created by scarcity or legal fiction, not demand
This is not true. The work itself is clearly of economic value, because if it was not, then noone would be willing to pay money for the right to enjoy it. There is most definitely demand for it.
The problem is that requiring buyers commission the work, or pay/commit to pay before the work is released, is an obstruction to purchasing it (because it increases the level of risk for the customer)
here is not technical requirement for scarcity and so it is purely
the result of legal fiction.
There's simply a rule saying "no freeloaders". That seems to bug the hell out of the napster freeloaders, but that's the way it is.
a principle that does not apply to infinitely-reproduceable
and infinitely-reusable recorded music.
You make the classic conceptual error all the napster types make, in confusing the recording with the music itself. I suppose this is to be expected from a crowd that by and large don't value creativity.
Of course the recording itself is infinitely reproducible, but the music is not. It takes time and effort to write, produce and record another piece of music.
The initial production of the work is worth something, economically speaking, and that's what I got paid
for. Each subsequent use or copy is not.
They are getting paid for the original work. The amount they get paid depends on the number of copies sold, because this is what is used to determine the economic value of that work.
Wrapping up a "2000+" or "2.0 Ghz" CPU with cheap components, lowspec memory, and some doodads and marketing it as a high end system is the real point of confusion.
AMD and intel build CPUs, not systems.
I think we all know that a much lower-clocked system could beat most of the stuff you find at retail.
Depends on what you're doing with it. Most home users just need a lot of memory and a reasonable amount of disk space.
As you point out, it's risky marketing
I said something slightly different. I said that you need to compare the risks of using PR numbers with the risks of not using them.
Intel funded FUD or not, the thrust of the report is because the PR ratings are based on pseudo-objective measurements, they are ultimately confusing to buyers.
Mhz ratings are not only confusing, they are misleading.
Mhz might be a very poor buying consideration, but at least it's an objective number, unlike AMD's rating system.
AMD no doubt also have an objective formula that they use to acquire their PR rating. It's just a different one from the Mhz rating. Since Joe Sixpack doesn't really understand Mhz or AMDs rating system, both are equally arbitrary.
Thus AMD has put the informed buyer (such as yourself) in the position where you need to independently "conclude" whether it's fair or not.
No, he doesn't. The industry did most of the concluding for him. If the PR numbers were not fair, the press would have been howling about them.
If I was them, I'd be very worried about the perception that they over-speced the PR numbers -- if the "2500+" chip benchmarks slower than a P4 2.5Ghz, they are going to be blasted to high heaven -- even it's supposedly not a directly comparsion.
That's a risk that needs to be weighed against a policy of not using PR numbers.
And Dell still sells Linux systems (http://www.dell.com/us/en/esg/topics/linux_003_pr oducts.htm).
They won't sell consumer lines with Linux installed. Last I checked, you couldn't even get an optiplex with Linux, you had to go with a server or precision workstation. Their Linux support is spotty at best.
The problem is that for an application as complex as an office suite, you need a whole bunch of people to do things like documentation, QA, build management, project management, etc.
A lot of these extra jobs are created by the overhead of managing several developers. For example, you don't need a special "project manager" if you only have a few developers, but if you have a large number of developers, you obviously do. The same is true for build management. Documentation and QA are important, but they're of limited utility until the code is mature enough that the blatantly obvious bugs have all been fixed.
I fucking hate the hypocrisy around here. The mono and dotgnu projects are competeing with.NET with small numbers of people generating huge amounts of uber-technical high quality code. Result: endless craploads of KDE fuckwads slagging them off.
I disagree. I'm a Qt user, and I also use KDE as my desktop. I'm also a big fan of the Mono project, and IMO, it's a far-sighted and bold move on Miguels part. I don't think the people bashing Mono are the KDE fans. Most of the Mono bashers are ill-informed zealots who mistakenly believe that Mono is "Microsoft", therefore "bad".
As for Koffice, I wouldn't say they're doing badly in terms of results. Some of the components are doing very well, some aren't. Developing an office suite is an enormous undertaking, and so it's taking time for both the GNOME and KDE projects. As for OpenOffice, it's based on a mature codebase that's been around for years. StarOffice was a usable product before Qt had a public release.
These machines are not the same as the blade 100 toys. Apart from a factor of 10 difference in price, the Blade 1k and 2k machines have the newer generation CPUs, gobs of L2 cache, and a fast IO subsystem.
I can still run versions of Applix that use libc 5 (which shipped with Redhat 4). You just need to use either a static binary, or install the old libraries in a seperate directory, and use a shellsscript to set the environment up for the application. Your existing glibc isn't going to bite you like some sort of hostile cobra or something. It's true that new versions will be released, but this isn't really a problem.
Which is virtually impossible to do in the digital realm. (Unless you're willing to throw out both the general purpose PC and the Constitution, and you'll probably fail even then.)
You don't have to throw out the constitution. They already have copyright laws, and have for a long time. You can't catch everyone, but you don't have to. You catch some of them, and shoot for a situation where most people play by the rules.
PBS. Any charity.
Treating the high tech business like a charity is not a good economic strategy. Programmers are productive people, and shouldn't have to panhandle for donations.
In fact I've pointed to PBS as the kind of thing this model is suited for, but this is not the same, because PBS don't do this on a per-work basis. In other words, the audience for PBS is the union of the audiences for each PBS show. Different shows target different audiences. With a music or software CD, it doesn't work like this.
Not necessarily. The ransom that you pay can be held in an escrow account, to be returned to you (possibly with interest) if sufficient funds aren't raised by a specified date. Now you're risking very little by paying
You still have a prisoners dilemma-- the person who always decides not to pay never loses, and they win on average. This is why the most outspoken advocates of this approach are freeloaders -- freeloaders are the winners under this system.
If you assume these two items, the only way it seems artists will be able to gaurantee a certain amount of compensation for
their efforts (something almost everyone unanimously agrees is necessary for w/out it we would see a great deal less effort
invested in creating good art) is the ransom model.
Doesn't follow. You might as well argue that no-one should sell via retail because people shoplift. There's a perfectly sensible solution to problems with criminals -- lock up the criminals, or better, fine them to an extent where the fines make up for their theft. And charge enough that you can make enough money on the non-criminals.
The ransom model doesn't work. Nobody wants to pay for vapor. If it was really a viable model, people would use it now. It isn't viable, it isn't what consumers want which is why it isn't used. The problem with the ransom model is that the only people who like it are those who don't want to pay anything. The problem is that the ransom model provides a disincentive to put money in. It's like a prisoners dilemma game. If you don't put money in, you always win, in all but the highly improbable case where your money makes the difference between meeting and not meeting the ransom.
Pandering to freeloaders is not a good business model. No amount of wishful thinking on the part of the freeloaders is going to change the fact that the only good business strategies are the ones that ignore them.
However, software don't cost anything to produce (ok, if you produce physical package to distribute your software it does cost something). Because it's only information, you can reproduce it at no cost.
You're confusing production with reproduction. Of course it doesn't cost anything to copy CDs. But the CD is not the product, the software is. And the software is horribly expensive to produce. Just ask any of the failed software businesses out there.
How is value of a good determined. In general, R&D is not a big factor
It depends on how much money went into the R&D, doesn't it ? Of course, software development is not the same as R&D anyway.
Because software cost 0 to produce,
No, it doesn't. It costs a lot of money to produce. Copying CDs should not be confused with creating software.
As we transition in a new kind of economy (note that we will, probably, never completly leave the current economy behind), new laws and new economic rules should be created.
In case you haven't noticed, they are. For example, the notion that copying media is as productive an activity as authoring software has been dispensed with, because authoring software is a more productive activity than copying CDs.
You can wish for "new rules" that favour freeloaders all you like, but you're just not going to see them. Writing software is expensive, and the people who do it are worthy of compensation, and this is reflected in the law.
Uhhh...Because my tax dollars went towards it and since I paid for it, I should be able to have the source and do what ever I want with it.
I agree entirely with this sentiment -- except that the conclusion that taxpayer funded projects should be GPL'd doesn't follow, because you can't do anything you like with GPL software. IMO, the MIT license (or BSD) is ideal.
They also seem to misunderstand the laffer curve component of software economics - e.g. you'll never have 100% compliance, and if you push to enforce 100% compliance to maximize revenues, you'll actually end up with less revenues.
I think they understand it very well.
Accepting Noncomplaince: This involves realizing that some people will never become paying customers in their present status
But they do this (and slashdotters bitch about it). Piracy suits them under some circumstances, and in such cases, they turn a blind eye to it. Their enforcement is fairly selective, and they tend to only go after parties who can cough up a reasonable amount of money (eg businesses) or major infringers (warez sites, shops distributing illegal copies)
Promote Compliance by lowering barriers: Borland's done a great job with this by creating single-user versions of their products to allow people to get their feet wet. Free home use, free college student use, etc.
Microsofts curve is different to Borlands. IOW, that Borland are cheaper is a reflection of the fact that they are struggling. MS do have student pricing. I purchased VC++ with a bundled NT for $100-, and I was able to pick up VS pro for $100- at the campus store. (I think the boneheads at the shop didn't realise it was a very different product to VB, VC++, etc) On top of that, MS also have bundleware deals with OEMs like Dell.
Businesses will continue to purchase and implement M$ products because they have been used for so long. (Don't flame for this) They are a proven technology.
Works both ways. Businesses are pragmatic. They aren't going to cheerlead the losing side, ideologically superior or otherwise. On the other hand, availability of a lot of great Linux programmers is a factor that appeals to pragmatists.
If they can hire good Linux people, but all the Windows people are drooling morons, that makes Linux a more appealing platform.
What ends up making the big difference will be if CS students who love their Linux (bless em) get into senior management positions in fortune 500 companies.
It won't make a big difference, and it's unlikely to happen. Advocates and idealists don't fit the profile of a manager.
Can anyone honestly say that if M$ offered them financial security for your work, you would really turn them down?
A number of prominent Linux developers have already said precisely that -- to Microsofts recruiters.
I'm not convinced either. However, AOL are getting what's coming to them, IMO. When you push customers like that, you'll get the odd customer who's tired or drunk at the time, and when they sober/wake up, they'll be unhappy about it. Push-marketting is inevitably going to create a lot of unhappy "customers" who will go after the vendor.
However, the RIAA is far from being a good neighbor itself.
He didn't say that they were.
The artist ends up with more money, and the record label gets fucked.
Maybe, maybe not. Tours aren't always a winning proposition, and a lot of the revenue pays people other than the band (the venue itself, promoters, etc etc)
In my opinion, I'd like to see music move away from the whole MTV teen-pop stardom thing and allow more talented artists to be heard on the airwaves.
Well start your own radio station or something. There are plenty of non-profit radio stations that do a great job of giving air time to "talented artists". However, you won't get "talented" musicians on mainstream radio, because most people don't want to hear it.
f the RIAA had any foresight, they'd move away from the MTV generation, and actually put out quality music.
This idea that RIAA labels just produce cheesy pop-tunes is a popular slashdot myth. Actually, for the most part it's the napster scum who go for the cheesy pop tunes. I'm a jazz fan, and nearly all of the music I listen to (some of which is pretty far out) is on RIAA labels. The RIAA labels produce and promote all kinds of music, and the public buys what the public buys.
Is it really necessary to spend millions of dollars promoting an artist? Couldn't less money be put to equal or better use?
They choose the strategy they think will be the most profitable.
On what basis do you consider this "bad use" ?
The record company spends millions on its artist,
Not on all artists, they don't. They only spend millions if they think it will help sell albums.
If the vast majority of your signed artists are actually talented, and have an actual fan following that persists (like Phish and much unlike this week's boy band), the odds dictate you will make money on your investments the majority of the time.
You're going to have a lower sales volume, so no, you won't necessarily make a lot of money. Look, if you think this is an easy way to make money, start your own business or something. It's kind of amusing how many armchair business experts there are on slashdot.
We've found a much better way to filter through the crap and only support the artists we want to.
Cut the rubbish about "supporting artists". You may care about "supporting artists", but the vast majority of napster users do not.
Do you like buying a CD only to find out that it only has one good song and the rest are pure crap? I don't.
Then don't buy CDs made by one hit wonders. I've never had this problem with my John Coltrane or Miles Davis CDs (-;
Sure, you can make as much money as you are determined to make, but only if you can convince people to give it to you willingly.
No one "gives away money willingly". Relying on the customers generosity is not a business model.
That's a valid point. I'm not talking about in-house software carrying trade secrets. I'm talking about software that is
normally licensed to many customers with nearly identical needs.
With this type of software, the copyright model makes a lot of sense. It's cheaper to pay a copyright holder than it is to pay the salaries of the developers you'd need to write it.
However, if the improvements could help other people who need
accounting software,
If a feature is useful to a lot of people, it will be implemented in the main software package.
It's usually too expensive to pay developers to implement core functionality in a piece of software.
will most definitely be re-released into the GPL codebase.
But why should they pay you to develop something that should be a core feature of the application ? From their standpoint, the copyright model makes more sense. Features that are widely needed can be added to the software. You only need in-house developers to add fairly specific "once-off" hacks.
This argument makes absolutely no sense whatsoever
It's not the clients job to explain themselves to a free software zealot. They'll just hire someone else.
I'm not at all suggesting living outside the capitalist system. Writing software as a service rather than charging licensing fees makes it a labor market. Labor markets are a far purer form of capitalism than government-enabled monopolies (copyright, etc).
Software as a service is fine, but don't expect your clients to let you open-source it. Do you think GE wants you posting the specs to their latest and greatest medical equipment on the internet, for the benefit of their competitors ? Think again. In the service model, you're most likely going to be writing software that is strictly for use in-house, and either not available to customers, or available on an NDA basis.
As for copyright, it's a perfectly fine form of capitalism. Service vs licensing is not an either-or proposition. The different models have different costs and benefits, and both are useful in their own right. Copyright serves well if the work is to be shared among several customers (because it's a workable means for the cost of development to be shared by several parties with little money) and software-as-a-service works well if the work is for exclusive use of a corporate customer (ie the cost of development is paid for by one party who has a lot of money, and doesn't want to share)
Maybe in a large city, being a strict programmer will get you somewhere, but in a rural/suburban area, C++ and intense math are about as useful as underwater basketweaving.
I hope they teach you more than "C++". Schools are not supposed to be C++ trade schools. A good understanding of concepts related to C++ goes a long way. If you want to write perl and design webpages, it should be a piece of cake.
As for calc and C++ being useless, that's laughable in the extreme. Computer graphics ? Need math. Numerical programming ? Need math. Financial applications ? You'll also need some math. If you want to be anything besides a script monkey, you're going to need to understand advanced programming concepts, and be mathematically literate.
There are two types of people, the ones that work for themselves, the ones that work constantly to increase the stock in their "personal toolbox" and the kind that just figure out how to do the job at hand. IMO, the former has a much better chance at really getting things done, and usually higher education is a total waste of time for those types. Me included.
Those who do develop their "personal toolbox" are IMO showing a more long-term mentality. Those who are completely absorbed by immediate goals are on a treadmill of sorts, and they miss out on a lot of important stuff, because it isn't "on the exam".
However, I dispute your contention that higher education is a "waste of time" for self-motivators. A good school will facilitate independent thinking, not stifle it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only is this not true, it's impossible to do this in practice. If you do this, you'll find that you still blow a lot of time on design, development takes longer, because your design is unnecessarily abstract, and your design proves inadequate for something that you need to implement further down the road. Requirements change, and this has consequences for the design. The best one can hope for is that the basic architecture is robust enough that it doesn't require a complete upheaval.
What is necessary is a method for changing design gracefully. "Refactoring" is the best source I've seen that addresses this. Basically, you change methodically, and you test.
I didn't say there was "property" in the original work, I said there was economic value in the work. Most work has economic value, and most work is not "property".
The number of copies sold is irrelevant because they have no economic value.
The copies themselves have no economic value, but the sales numbers can be used to appraise the economic value of the work.
If a work is commissioned, then the original work is paid for. Otherwise the creation of the work is speculation by the artiste, speculation that they can perform it in concert and get paid,
Clearly, this is not true. The copyright system rewards artists for their work, by allowing a distributed, deferred payment system as financial incentive for their creative efforts.
Economic value is created by scarcity or legal fiction, not demand
This is not true. The work itself is clearly of economic value, because if it was not, then noone would be willing to pay money for the right to enjoy it. There is most definitely demand for it. The problem is that requiring buyers commission the work, or pay/commit to pay before the work is released, is an obstruction to purchasing it (because it increases the level of risk for the customer)
here is not technical requirement for scarcity and so it is purely the result of legal fiction.
There's simply a rule saying "no freeloaders". That seems to bug the hell out of the napster freeloaders, but that's the way it is.
You make the classic conceptual error all the napster types make, in confusing the recording with the music itself. I suppose this is to be expected from a crowd that by and large don't value creativity.
Of course the recording itself is infinitely reproducible, but the music is not. It takes time and effort to write, produce and record another piece of music.
The initial production of the work is worth something, economically speaking, and that's what I got paid for. Each subsequent use or copy is not.
They are getting paid for the original work. The amount they get paid depends on the number of copies sold, because this is what is used to determine the economic value of that work.
AMD and intel build CPUs, not systems.
I think we all know that a much lower-clocked system could beat most of the stuff you find at retail.
Depends on what you're doing with it. Most home users just need a lot of memory and a reasonable amount of disk space.
As you point out, it's risky marketing
I said something slightly different. I said that you need to compare the risks of using PR numbers with the risks of not using them.
And what system should that be ? Mhz on an AMD CPU are not "the same" as Mhz on an intel CPU. This is precisely the problem.
Mhz ratings are not only confusing, they are misleading.
Mhz might be a very poor buying consideration, but at least it's an objective number, unlike AMD's rating system.
AMD no doubt also have an objective formula that they use to acquire their PR rating. It's just a different one from the Mhz rating. Since Joe Sixpack doesn't really understand Mhz or AMDs rating system, both are equally arbitrary.
Thus AMD has put the informed buyer (such as yourself) in the position where you need to independently "conclude" whether it's fair or not.
No, he doesn't. The industry did most of the concluding for him. If the PR numbers were not fair, the press would have been howling about them.
If I was them, I'd be very worried about the perception that they over-speced the PR numbers -- if the "2500+" chip benchmarks slower than a P4 2.5Ghz, they are going to be blasted to high heaven -- even it's supposedly not a directly comparsion.
That's a risk that needs to be weighed against a policy of not using PR numbers.
They won't sell consumer lines with Linux installed. Last I checked, you couldn't even get an optiplex with Linux, you had to go with a server or precision workstation. Their Linux support is spotty at best.
A lot of these extra jobs are created by the overhead of managing several developers. For example, you don't need a special "project manager" if you only have a few developers, but if you have a large number of developers, you obviously do. The same is true for build management. Documentation and QA are important, but they're of limited utility until the code is mature enough that the blatantly obvious bugs have all been fixed.
I disagree. I'm a Qt user, and I also use KDE as my desktop. I'm also a big fan of the Mono project, and IMO, it's a far-sighted and bold move on Miguels part. I don't think the people bashing Mono are the KDE fans. Most of the Mono bashers are ill-informed zealots who mistakenly believe that Mono is "Microsoft", therefore "bad".
As for Koffice, I wouldn't say they're doing badly in terms of results. Some of the components are doing very well, some aren't. Developing an office suite is an enormous undertaking, and so it's taking time for both the GNOME and KDE projects. As for OpenOffice, it's based on a mature codebase that's been around for years. StarOffice was a usable product before Qt had a public release.
I can still run versions of Applix that use libc 5 (which shipped with Redhat 4). You just need to use either a static binary, or install the old libraries in a seperate directory, and use a shellsscript to set the environment up for the application. Your existing glibc isn't going to bite you like some sort of hostile cobra or something. It's true that new versions will be released, but this isn't really a problem.
You don't have to throw out the constitution. They already have copyright laws, and have for a long time. You can't catch everyone, but you don't have to. You catch some of them, and shoot for a situation where most people play by the rules.
PBS. Any charity.
Treating the high tech business like a charity is not a good economic strategy. Programmers are productive people, and shouldn't have to panhandle for donations.
In fact I've pointed to PBS as the kind of thing this model is suited for, but this is not the same, because PBS don't do this on a per-work basis. In other words, the audience for PBS is the union of the audiences for each PBS show. Different shows target different audiences. With a music or software CD, it doesn't work like this.
Not necessarily. The ransom that you pay can be held in an escrow account, to be returned to you (possibly with interest) if sufficient funds aren't raised by a specified date. Now you're risking very little by paying
You still have a prisoners dilemma-- the person who always decides not to pay never loses, and they win on average. This is why the most outspoken advocates of this approach are freeloaders -- freeloaders are the winners under this system.
Doesn't follow. You might as well argue that no-one should sell via retail because people shoplift. There's a perfectly sensible solution to problems with criminals -- lock up the criminals, or better, fine them to an extent where the fines make up for their theft. And charge enough that you can make enough money on the non-criminals.
The ransom model doesn't work. Nobody wants to pay for vapor. If it was really a viable model, people would use it now. It isn't viable, it isn't what consumers want which is why it isn't used. The problem with the ransom model is that the only people who like it are those who don't want to pay anything. The problem is that the ransom model provides a disincentive to put money in. It's like a prisoners dilemma game. If you don't put money in, you always win, in all but the highly improbable case where your money makes the difference between meeting and not meeting the ransom. Pandering to freeloaders is not a good business model. No amount of wishful thinking on the part of the freeloaders is going to change the fact that the only good business strategies are the ones that ignore them.
You're confusing production with reproduction. Of course it doesn't cost anything to copy CDs. But the CD is not the product, the software is. And the software is horribly expensive to produce. Just ask any of the failed software businesses out there.
How is value of a good determined. In general, R&D is not a big factor
It depends on how much money went into the R&D, doesn't it ? Of course, software development is not the same as R&D anyway.
Because software cost 0 to produce,
No, it doesn't. It costs a lot of money to produce. Copying CDs should not be confused with creating software.
As we transition in a new kind of economy (note that we will, probably, never completly leave the current economy behind), new laws and new economic rules should be created.
In case you haven't noticed, they are. For example, the notion that copying media is as productive an activity as authoring software has been dispensed with, because authoring software is a more productive activity than copying CDs. You can wish for "new rules" that favour freeloaders all you like, but you're just not going to see them. Writing software is expensive, and the people who do it are worthy of compensation, and this is reflected in the law.
I agree entirely with this sentiment -- except that the conclusion that taxpayer funded projects should be GPL'd doesn't follow, because you can't do anything you like with GPL software. IMO, the MIT license (or BSD) is ideal.
I think they understand it very well.
Accepting Noncomplaince: This involves realizing that some people will never become paying customers in their present status
But they do this (and slashdotters bitch about it). Piracy suits them under some circumstances, and in such cases, they turn a blind eye to it. Their enforcement is fairly selective, and they tend to only go after parties who can cough up a reasonable amount of money (eg businesses) or major infringers (warez sites, shops distributing illegal copies)
Promote Compliance by lowering barriers: Borland's done a great job with this by creating single-user versions of their products to allow people to get their feet wet. Free home use, free college student use, etc.
Microsofts curve is different to Borlands. IOW, that Borland are cheaper is a reflection of the fact that they are struggling. MS do have student pricing. I purchased VC++ with a bundled NT for $100-, and I was able to pick up VS pro for $100- at the campus store. (I think the boneheads at the shop didn't realise it was a very different product to VB, VC++, etc) On top of that, MS also have bundleware deals with OEMs like Dell.
Works both ways. Businesses are pragmatic. They aren't going to cheerlead the losing side, ideologically superior or otherwise. On the other hand, availability of a lot of great Linux programmers is a factor that appeals to pragmatists. If they can hire good Linux people, but all the Windows people are drooling morons, that makes Linux a more appealing platform.
What ends up making the big difference will be if CS students who love their Linux (bless em) get into senior management positions in fortune 500 companies.
It won't make a big difference, and it's unlikely to happen. Advocates and idealists don't fit the profile of a manager.
Can anyone honestly say that if M$ offered them financial security for your work, you would really turn them down?
A number of prominent Linux developers have already said precisely that -- to Microsofts recruiters.
He didn't say that they were.
The artist ends up with more money, and the record label gets fucked.
Maybe, maybe not. Tours aren't always a winning proposition, and a lot of the revenue pays people other than the band (the venue itself, promoters, etc etc)
In my opinion, I'd like to see music move away from the whole MTV teen-pop stardom thing and allow more talented artists to be heard on the airwaves.
Well start your own radio station or something. There are plenty of non-profit radio stations that do a great job of giving air time to "talented artists". However, you won't get "talented" musicians on mainstream radio, because most people don't want to hear it.
f the RIAA had any foresight, they'd move away from the MTV generation, and actually put out quality music.
This idea that RIAA labels just produce cheesy pop-tunes is a popular slashdot myth. Actually, for the most part it's the napster scum who go for the cheesy pop tunes. I'm a jazz fan, and nearly all of the music I listen to (some of which is pretty far out) is on RIAA labels. The RIAA labels produce and promote all kinds of music, and the public buys what the public buys.
Is it really necessary to spend millions of dollars promoting an artist? Couldn't less money be put to equal or better use?
They choose the strategy they think will be the most profitable. On what basis do you consider this "bad use" ?
The record company spends millions on its artist,
Not on all artists, they don't. They only spend millions if they think it will help sell albums.
If the vast majority of your signed artists are actually talented, and have an actual fan following that persists (like Phish and much unlike this week's boy band), the odds dictate you will make money on your investments the majority of the time.
You're going to have a lower sales volume, so no, you won't necessarily make a lot of money. Look, if you think this is an easy way to make money, start your own business or something. It's kind of amusing how many armchair business experts there are on slashdot.
We've found a much better way to filter through the crap and only support the artists we want to.
Cut the rubbish about "supporting artists". You may care about "supporting artists", but the vast majority of napster users do not.
Do you like buying a CD only to find out that it only has one good song and the rest are pure crap? I don't.
Then don't buy CDs made by one hit wonders. I've never had this problem with my John Coltrane or Miles Davis CDs (-;
Sure, you can make as much money as you are determined to make, but only if you can convince people to give it to you willingly.
No one "gives away money willingly". Relying on the customers generosity is not a business model.
With this type of software, the copyright model makes a lot of sense. It's cheaper to pay a copyright holder than it is to pay the salaries of the developers you'd need to write it.
However, if the improvements could help other people who need accounting software,
If a feature is useful to a lot of people, it will be implemented in the main software package. It's usually too expensive to pay developers to implement core functionality in a piece of software.
will most definitely be re-released into the GPL codebase.
But why should they pay you to develop something that should be a core feature of the application ? From their standpoint, the copyright model makes more sense. Features that are widely needed can be added to the software. You only need in-house developers to add fairly specific "once-off" hacks.
This argument makes absolutely no sense whatsoever
It's not the clients job to explain themselves to a free software zealot. They'll just hire someone else.
Software as a service is fine, but don't expect your clients to let you open-source it. Do you think GE wants you posting the specs to their latest and greatest medical equipment on the internet, for the benefit of their competitors ? Think again. In the service model, you're most likely going to be writing software that is strictly for use in-house, and either not available to customers, or available on an NDA basis.
As for copyright, it's a perfectly fine form of capitalism. Service vs licensing is not an either-or proposition. The different models have different costs and benefits, and both are useful in their own right. Copyright serves well if the work is to be shared among several customers (because it's a workable means for the cost of development to be shared by several parties with little money) and software-as-a-service works well if the work is for exclusive use of a corporate customer (ie the cost of development is paid for by one party who has a lot of money, and doesn't want to share)
I hope they teach you more than "C++". Schools are not supposed to be C++ trade schools. A good understanding of concepts related to C++ goes a long way. If you want to write perl and design webpages, it should be a piece of cake.
As for calc and C++ being useless, that's laughable in the extreme. Computer graphics ? Need math. Numerical programming ? Need math. Financial applications ? You'll also need some math. If you want to be anything besides a script monkey, you're going to need to understand advanced programming concepts, and be mathematically literate.
Those who do develop their "personal toolbox" are IMO showing a more long-term mentality. Those who are completely absorbed by immediate goals are on a treadmill of sorts, and they miss out on a lot of important stuff, because it isn't "on the exam".
However, I dispute your contention that higher education is a "waste of time" for self-motivators. A good school will facilitate independent thinking, not stifle it.