Assuming that every one of those purchased was lost either to another seller or to some sort of desire-destroying void. I very much doubt either was the case for the vast majority of the "lost" sales.
I'm not sure that I'd call it a templating system (I'd actually say that, against all odds, ASP.NET and it's Master Pages handles that better than anything else I've worked with), but it's certainly not as general purpose as Perl, Python, or Ruby. A web-oriented C of sorts. You can make it sort of a templating system using include but it still doesn't feel too "clean" without a bit of excessive complication (which I usually employ for the sake of file management)
I certainly wish that Twitter didn't use Rails as it clearly can't scale for shit (and this isn't the only example) but it sounds like Ev has no regrets of using it nor does he have plans to shift it to another platform.
Yes, this tends to be the case. However, it seems to be that these complains ARE read by Apple who proceeds to fix them (or at least try) in the next release.
Keep in mind that the same thing tends to be true of Windows releases; they're just much less frequent. However, MS really just seems to do security patches and blame third parties for any software bugs. I have no idea what is true and what's really at fault, but you can't blame Mac users for expecting the computer they paid a premium for to work better when they paid the premium to have it work better. I paid the extra to have things work better and overall they do, but when there's an issue I expect it to be resolved in a reasonable time-frame. Generally it is, and that's why they'll keep getting my money.
10.5 is a fiasco? The people that have problems are going to complain the loudest, but 10.5 has given me identical stability as compared to Tiger at a system level, and improvements in a number of areas that were always problematic in Tiger (network shares, while still not as good as they've been handled in Windows since at least '98, have seem BIG improvements) have kept me quite happy.
That's not to say it doesn't have its flaws, but on the whole I greatly prefer it to Tiger, which itself I greatly prefer to any version of Windows. It had some issues at release but got much more solid at 10.5.2 (I haven't really noticed anything different in 10.5.3).
I'm not at all denying it. I'm no Photoshop expert but can manage better than your typical "I just pirated it to have it" type. OTOH, it took me twenty minutes to figure out how to make a gradient using the pre-made color settings and I couldn't even get a customized one in GIMP.
But had I learned GIMP first, it could well have been the other way around.
I just hate people claiming that Linux with GIMP is a suitable replacement for Win/OSX and PS. Linux with Wine/PS may be (never tried, but assuming it's stable it should be fine), but the difference in the user interface makes switching from one to the other an incredibly painful process.
Funny how that always seems to work. A bit ironic that we're having our asses handed to us with generally the same tactics (adapted to the different terrain) that we used some time ago against England. I eagerly await it happening again on the home front; not that I support nor encourage violence, but better that than a meaningless life living in fear from my own government.
McCain has had the Republican nomination for months. Obama has been fighting tooth and nail against Clinton during that same time period. Between Obama and McCain, guess which one it makes more sense to provide funding for prior to the primaries finishing up?
Which he supports, yes. It doesn't have a damn thing to do with your broadband speed, but it's still a BAD thing if you care about privacy or personal freedoms.
OS X usually takes a couple minutes on my MBP before it's ready for me to use. Of course, I have a ton of crap that I have run at boot time that slows it way down, but it's still a lot slower than I'd care for. Thankfully, my reboots are typically limited to major software updates and dealing with stupid printer drivers that force one every other blue moon (fuck you, Kodak).
The lack of CMYK color is the least of GIMP's problems. I applaud the effort, but I still find it unusable (and that's all that I care about; if you can work with it then you've just saved $600++ but I can't).
Is it as fast (not that Photoshop is fast, but relatively speaking) or as stable? Do all of the features actually work correctly? I've installed plenty of things under Wine, but often times the software wouldn't run properly after the fact.
"Applications" doesn't have to mean software, even if the usual code monkey slashdotter like myself would generally think so.
Having said that, the word is almost never interchangeable with "features" (apps can usually be called features, but it's not so clear-cut the other direction), but not necessarily the reverse), which would have been a much better word to use here.
I came in to work a couple days ago with my copy of FF3RC1 consuming ~1.25GB, of 4GB (Err... 3.2GB - WinXP). Similar results, though not quite as bad, on my about-equivalent spec MBP at home.
RC2 has been far kinder to me - so far it's hovered around 200MB (down from an average of 350MB on the same system with RC1) and doesn't explode when Flash usage.
If you're seeing FF suck down "all available memory" then there's obviously a serious problem, especially on a system with that much available. Tried reinstalling? I find that on most systems, Firefox tends to take about 5-10% of my installed RAM, which is fair for a program that's in use 80% of my day.
This doesn't mean that people like XP, it just means that they prefer it to Vista. I'm a Mac guy and I have no beef with Vista (I somewhat prefer it to XP, not that I really care for either) and honestly think a lot of the hate just comes from the people doing the sheep thing, though HP and the like feeding it the crappiest hardware money can buy certainly doesn't help.
Especially in the context of software, the negative feedback towards the newer product puts MS in a very awkward position. Aside from security patches and trying to edge out a bit more performance, there's not a whole lot that can be done with XP. And given its lifespan, three major service packs, and hundreds of hotfixes and patches, the codebase is probably a nightmare to maintain as far as operating systems go. Furthermore, it gets them labeled with a lack of innovation right when their competition is really starting to gain on them (baby steps certainly, but look at monthly numbers rather than total market share and it's much more significant) - and the longer that XP lives on, the more trouble you'll cause when you try to get people to move to the latest and greatest. Vista could be lighting-fast and have a perfect UI and you'd still get people freaking out because they've learned and grown accustomed to the stupid quirks of XP over the past seven or so years. Despite what they say to the contrary, most people hate dealing with change so the longer you give them to get used to something, the more aggressively they'll reject the "latest and greatest".
I expect it would be much harder to sneak something evil into a large-scale, high-profile project than some few-person svn repo on Sourceforge. Something like a Linux distro has enough eyeballs looking at the code that a backdoor would be relatively easily spotted (especially when comparing versions of a file), where with a small tool it's not unlikely for code to never get looked at again so long as it's still functioning properly.
First off remember that all closed shops utterly depend on the government to grant and enforce the monopoly they depend upon for their revenue.
I currently work for a non-Free software company (not as a developer though), and want to point out that as not entirely true. It depends very highly on the industry and the customer. Being an employee I could get a copy of our software at no cost or close enough that it wouldn't matter (or so I assume; worse-case scenario, I re-generate myself a temporary key once a month). However I still choose to write my own applications where I could use our pre-built tool. Cost is not the issue: it's a combination of (my general lack of) experience with the.net platform, a dislike of said platform, the software generally being overkill for what I'd be doing, and my obsession with specialized tools that do one thing really well than general tools that do a lot of stuff reasonably well.
Back on topic though, we could still sell our software even if copyright law didn't exist or if it was open source. Why? We have a support department. Not a forum, but a department. When you're selling to companies, there's tremendous value to them to be able to pick up a phone and call someone when something's not working. Consider the paid versions of MySQL, for example. I'm not at all knocking FOSS for this approach to support, but rather pointing out that if your target audience consists primarily of large businesses, the ability to get in direct contact with someone who's paid to troubleshoot or walk across the building to find the developer who wrote the problematic code is a BIG selling point.
For software that costs under a couple hundred bucks, this isn't so much of an issue. However when companies are going to be making an investment in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on software, you can bet your ass that the support and maintenance of that software is very important. Don't get me wrong - we've lost deals to Drupal and Joomla probably as often as we've lost deals to our "real" competition, but more often than not those were very unqualified leads anyways.
I work in sales, so take it with a grain of salt if you will. But I'm not saying that commercial/closed-source software is better than free or open-source software (it goes both ways all the time and often is a matter of opinion), just that it's more than the existence of IP laws that keep us in business.
It doesn't seem to be in the free accounts (at least I don't see it anywhere), but it sounds like some sort of extension to Google Gears. How well does it work? I'd very much like to see at least an AIR version for local offline work, though it's not as if Google doesn't have the resources to create a very basic word processor for each Win/Mac/Linux that syncs with your Google docs when a connection is available even if it doesn't do the live collaboration.
For the most part I agree with you. However, remote access doesn't offer the realtime multi-user collaboration that's a part of Google's online office tools. Setting up centralized documents on the cheap is quite possible these days - I work for a company that sells that kind of thing, but for all intents and purposes it's an interface wrapped around a glorified subversion repository with some unrelated features that deal with the rest of that whole intranet thing. Hell, truly dumb it down and just have an FTP server. DropBox is one of those newer Web2.0 things that's basically a fancy wrapper around FTP (once again, we're starting to realize that user interface and ease of use is key to adoption); it's only meant for one user at a time and is more of a personal cross-computer document syncing tool. However, none of those to my knowledge deal with what happens when two people want to work on the same document at the same time. What we have at work has a check-in/check-out system, and DropBox would probably just give one user a read-only copy (since it treats it more like a network drive than an ftp server, and that's what happens on a local network). Google Docs/Spreadsheets, on the other hand, allows multiple users to edit the same document in real time and have each other's changes pushed to all other editors as they're being made, much more along the lines of SubEthaEngine.
Granted, not a whole lot of people need that kind of functionality most of the time. For what I do, it's actually a great asset - it sure beats the hell out of emailing a document back and forward a dozen times over the space of ten minutes. And the functionality, again for what I do, is plenty - I'm just sharing lists of ideas with colleagues and clients 95% of the time. All of your points against Google Docs are very much valid, and I was going to point them out myself. The accessibility during offline time is the real killer for me, as I don't have a cellular card for my laptop and can't be bothered to pay for wifi at hotspots, so it certainly can't replace a desktop text editor. Some combination of a desktop editor, the "push FTP" of DropBox, and the realtime collaboration of Google Docs would be THE winner, but that's asking for a lot.
At the end of the day, there's no one tool that's right for everyone right now. OOo is free, functional, and will get the job done for most people. Word is expensive, more functional and stable, somewhat faster, and has advanced features for power users that most people will never go near. Google Docs is free, limited in functionality, but doesn't require installation or local storage.
(Yes, I know I didn't really address the whole Word/Citrix thing; however, assuming you have VPN access then you're already able to get to the central repository and then there should be no reason to bother with the published web app through Citrix thing since you could just locally install OOo/Word - the file access is the crucial thing there more so than the app itself. Yes, this still isn't quite what you meant, but humor me)
Unfortunately, no. You're buying a limited-time license to view a movie, and the self-destruction is the enabler to enforce the time constraints of the license. You no more own a defective copy of the movie with this than you own a working copy of the movie with a normal DVD.
Nobody owns anything any more, thanks to implied shrink-wrap EULAs and the like. DVDs are not only not the exception, but started the trend - at least with software you're presented with and have to click through the "fuck you" warning.
Seriously, if you're going to rent and rip (or just download), just do it. I used to work at a video store and often did it with a couple movies a night. So long as my free rental wasn't stopping a customer from getting a copy (and paying for their rental), nobody cared. It's still pirating and everyone knows it. So long as they are trying to screw me, I can't feel bad about actually screwing them. At least with software it provides me some sort of actual value and tends to get improved over time at no cost to me.
Presumably because the one-time pad is your decryption key. Encryption wouldn't be especially useful if you could just put in a password (not "the" password, but "a" password) and unlock the secrets, would it?
That's my best guess, I've never really understood the theory either. It IS quantum physics, after all.
Presumably you could write a little bot that scrapes the page (or uses their API if they provide one) every 30 seconds or so. It's not perfect but it should get the job done well enough.
Because people don't store random garbage on their drives. "Oh yeah, that's just a 50GB bitmap file that got corrupted and I never bothered deleting it". Come on.
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Assuming that every one of those purchased was lost either to another seller or to some sort of desire-destroying void. I very much doubt either was the case for the vast majority of the "lost" sales.
I'm not sure that I'd call it a templating system (I'd actually say that, against all odds, ASP.NET and it's Master Pages handles that better than anything else I've worked with), but it's certainly not as general purpose as Perl, Python, or Ruby. A web-oriented C of sorts. You can make it sort of a templating system using include but it still doesn't feel too "clean" without a bit of excessive complication (which I usually employ for the sake of file management)
I certainly wish that Twitter didn't use Rails as it clearly can't scale for shit (and this isn't the only example) but it sounds like Ev has no regrets of using it nor does he have plans to shift it to another platform.
Yes, this tends to be the case. However, it seems to be that these complains ARE read by Apple who proceeds to fix them (or at least try) in the next release.
Keep in mind that the same thing tends to be true of Windows releases; they're just much less frequent. However, MS really just seems to do security patches and blame third parties for any software bugs. I have no idea what is true and what's really at fault, but you can't blame Mac users for expecting the computer they paid a premium for to work better when they paid the premium to have it work better. I paid the extra to have things work better and overall they do, but when there's an issue I expect it to be resolved in a reasonable time-frame. Generally it is, and that's why they'll keep getting my money.
10.5 is a fiasco? The people that have problems are going to complain the loudest, but 10.5 has given me identical stability as compared to Tiger at a system level, and improvements in a number of areas that were always problematic in Tiger (network shares, while still not as good as they've been handled in Windows since at least '98, have seem BIG improvements) have kept me quite happy.
That's not to say it doesn't have its flaws, but on the whole I greatly prefer it to Tiger, which itself I greatly prefer to any version of Windows. It had some issues at release but got much more solid at 10.5.2 (I haven't really noticed anything different in 10.5.3).
I'm not at all denying it. I'm no Photoshop expert but can manage better than your typical "I just pirated it to have it" type. OTOH, it took me twenty minutes to figure out how to make a gradient using the pre-made color settings and I couldn't even get a customized one in GIMP.
But had I learned GIMP first, it could well have been the other way around.
I just hate people claiming that Linux with GIMP is a suitable replacement for Win/OSX and PS. Linux with Wine/PS may be (never tried, but assuming it's stable it should be fine), but the difference in the user interface makes switching from one to the other an incredibly painful process.
Funny how that always seems to work. A bit ironic that we're having our asses handed to us with generally the same tactics (adapted to the different terrain) that we used some time ago against England. I eagerly await it happening again on the home front; not that I support nor encourage violence, but better that than a meaningless life living in fear from my own government.
Wait, who's that knocking? Let me go grab that...
McCain has had the Republican nomination for months. Obama has been fighting tooth and nail against Clinton during that same time period. Between Obama and McCain, guess which one it makes more sense to provide funding for prior to the primaries finishing up?
Which he supports, yes. It doesn't have a damn thing to do with your broadband speed, but it's still a BAD thing if you care about privacy or personal freedoms.
OS X usually takes a couple minutes on my MBP before it's ready for me to use. Of course, I have a ton of crap that I have run at boot time that slows it way down, but it's still a lot slower than I'd care for. Thankfully, my reboots are typically limited to major software updates and dealing with stupid printer drivers that force one every other blue moon (fuck you, Kodak).
The lack of CMYK color is the least of GIMP's problems. I applaud the effort, but I still find it unusable (and that's all that I care about; if you can work with it then you've just saved $600++ but I can't).
Is it as fast (not that Photoshop is fast, but relatively speaking) or as stable? Do all of the features actually work correctly? I've installed plenty of things under Wine, but often times the software wouldn't run properly after the fact.
"Applications" doesn't have to mean software, even if the usual code monkey slashdotter like myself would generally think so.
Having said that, the word is almost never interchangeable with "features" (apps can usually be called features, but it's not so clear-cut the other direction), but not necessarily the reverse), which would have been a much better word to use here.
I came in to work a couple days ago with my copy of FF3RC1 consuming ~1.25GB, of 4GB (Err... 3.2GB - WinXP). Similar results, though not quite as bad, on my about-equivalent spec MBP at home.
RC2 has been far kinder to me - so far it's hovered around 200MB (down from an average of 350MB on the same system with RC1) and doesn't explode when Flash usage.
If you're seeing FF suck down "all available memory" then there's obviously a serious problem, especially on a system with that much available. Tried reinstalling? I find that on most systems, Firefox tends to take about 5-10% of my installed RAM, which is fair for a program that's in use 80% of my day.
This doesn't mean that people like XP, it just means that they prefer it to Vista. I'm a Mac guy and I have no beef with Vista (I somewhat prefer it to XP, not that I really care for either) and honestly think a lot of the hate just comes from the people doing the sheep thing, though HP and the like feeding it the crappiest hardware money can buy certainly doesn't help.
Especially in the context of software, the negative feedback towards the newer product puts MS in a very awkward position. Aside from security patches and trying to edge out a bit more performance, there's not a whole lot that can be done with XP. And given its lifespan, three major service packs, and hundreds of hotfixes and patches, the codebase is probably a nightmare to maintain as far as operating systems go. Furthermore, it gets them labeled with a lack of innovation right when their competition is really starting to gain on them (baby steps certainly, but look at monthly numbers rather than total market share and it's much more significant) - and the longer that XP lives on, the more trouble you'll cause when you try to get people to move to the latest and greatest. Vista could be lighting-fast and have a perfect UI and you'd still get people freaking out because they've learned and grown accustomed to the stupid quirks of XP over the past seven or so years. Despite what they say to the contrary, most people hate dealing with change so the longer you give them to get used to something, the more aggressively they'll reject the "latest and greatest".
I expect it would be much harder to sneak something evil into a large-scale, high-profile project than some few-person svn repo on Sourceforge. Something like a Linux distro has enough eyeballs looking at the code that a backdoor would be relatively easily spotted (especially when comparing versions of a file), where with a small tool it's not unlikely for code to never get looked at again so long as it's still functioning properly.
I currently work for a non-Free software company (not as a developer though), and want to point out that as not entirely true. It depends very highly on the industry and the customer. Being an employee I could get a copy of our software at no cost or close enough that it wouldn't matter (or so I assume; worse-case scenario, I re-generate myself a temporary key once a month). However I still choose to write my own applications where I could use our pre-built tool. Cost is not the issue: it's a combination of (my general lack of) experience with the
Back on topic though, we could still sell our software even if copyright law didn't exist or if it was open source. Why? We have a support department. Not a forum, but a department. When you're selling to companies, there's tremendous value to them to be able to pick up a phone and call someone when something's not working. Consider the paid versions of MySQL, for example. I'm not at all knocking FOSS for this approach to support, but rather pointing out that if your target audience consists primarily of large businesses, the ability to get in direct contact with someone who's paid to troubleshoot or walk across the building to find the developer who wrote the problematic code is a BIG selling point.
For software that costs under a couple hundred bucks, this isn't so much of an issue. However when companies are going to be making an investment in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on software, you can bet your ass that the support and maintenance of that software is very important. Don't get me wrong - we've lost deals to Drupal and Joomla probably as often as we've lost deals to our "real" competition, but more often than not those were very unqualified leads anyways.
I work in sales, so take it with a grain of salt if you will. But I'm not saying that commercial/closed-source software is better than free or open-source software (it goes both ways all the time and often is a matter of opinion), just that it's more than the existence of IP laws that keep us in business.
It doesn't seem to be in the free accounts (at least I don't see it anywhere), but it sounds like some sort of extension to Google Gears. How well does it work? I'd very much like to see at least an AIR version for local offline work, though it's not as if Google doesn't have the resources to create a very basic word processor for each Win/Mac/Linux that syncs with your Google docs when a connection is available even if it doesn't do the live collaboration.
On the other hand, you know that governments will take that as "at least 11% of our citizens have something to hide". It's all in the spin.
For the most part I agree with you. However, remote access doesn't offer the realtime multi-user collaboration that's a part of Google's online office tools. Setting up centralized documents on the cheap is quite possible these days - I work for a company that sells that kind of thing, but for all intents and purposes it's an interface wrapped around a glorified subversion repository with some unrelated features that deal with the rest of that whole intranet thing. Hell, truly dumb it down and just have an FTP server. DropBox is one of those newer Web2.0 things that's basically a fancy wrapper around FTP (once again, we're starting to realize that user interface and ease of use is key to adoption); it's only meant for one user at a time and is more of a personal cross-computer document syncing tool. However, none of those to my knowledge deal with what happens when two people want to work on the same document at the same time. What we have at work has a check-in/check-out system, and DropBox would probably just give one user a read-only copy (since it treats it more like a network drive than an ftp server, and that's what happens on a local network). Google Docs/Spreadsheets, on the other hand, allows multiple users to edit the same document in real time and have each other's changes pushed to all other editors as they're being made, much more along the lines of SubEthaEngine.
Granted, not a whole lot of people need that kind of functionality most of the time. For what I do, it's actually a great asset - it sure beats the hell out of emailing a document back and forward a dozen times over the space of ten minutes. And the functionality, again for what I do, is plenty - I'm just sharing lists of ideas with colleagues and clients 95% of the time. All of your points against Google Docs are very much valid, and I was going to point them out myself. The accessibility during offline time is the real killer for me, as I don't have a cellular card for my laptop and can't be bothered to pay for wifi at hotspots, so it certainly can't replace a desktop text editor. Some combination of a desktop editor, the "push FTP" of DropBox, and the realtime collaboration of Google Docs would be THE winner, but that's asking for a lot.
At the end of the day, there's no one tool that's right for everyone right now. OOo is free, functional, and will get the job done for most people. Word is expensive, more functional and stable, somewhat faster, and has advanced features for power users that most people will never go near. Google Docs is free, limited in functionality, but doesn't require installation or local storage.
(Yes, I know I didn't really address the whole Word/Citrix thing; however, assuming you have VPN access then you're already able to get to the central repository and then there should be no reason to bother with the published web app through Citrix thing since you could just locally install OOo/Word - the file access is the crucial thing there more so than the app itself. Yes, this still isn't quite what you meant, but humor me)
Unfortunately, no. You're buying a limited-time license to view a movie, and the self-destruction is the enabler to enforce the time constraints of the license. You no more own a defective copy of the movie with this than you own a working copy of the movie with a normal DVD.
Nobody owns anything any more, thanks to implied shrink-wrap EULAs and the like. DVDs are not only not the exception, but started the trend - at least with software you're presented with and have to click through the "fuck you" warning.
Seriously, if you're going to rent and rip (or just download), just do it. I used to work at a video store and often did it with a couple movies a night. So long as my free rental wasn't stopping a customer from getting a copy (and paying for their rental), nobody cared. It's still pirating and everyone knows it. So long as they are trying to screw me, I can't feel bad about actually screwing them. At least with software it provides me some sort of actual value and tends to get improved over time at no cost to me.
Presumably because the one-time pad is your decryption key. Encryption wouldn't be especially useful if you could just put in a password (not "the" password, but "a" password) and unlock the secrets, would it?
That's my best guess, I've never really understood the theory either. It IS quantum physics, after all.
Presumably you could write a little bot that scrapes the page (or uses their API if they provide one) every 30 seconds or so. It's not perfect but it should get the job done well enough.
Wow. That was fucked up. Like, really fucked up. I know that I should have known better, but... wow.
Because people don't store random garbage on their drives. "Oh yeah, that's just a 50GB bitmap file that got corrupted and I never bothered deleting it". Come on.