Even Gaius Baltar is going to start farming... did anyone catch that?
It's worse than that. Baltar wants to become a farmer because he's finally made peace with his father, a character introduced for a storyline only present in the finale itself.
That would have been a lovely character moment if there'd been any character progression along that point in any of the previous four years. (Yes, there was a reference in a scene in the brig before his trial, but if that counts as a reference for a major ending point, why was there no resolution of the populism which he brought up much more often?)
GPL requires anyone who uses their code to open their own code.
Untrue. The GPL requires anyone who distributes a derivative work of GPLd code to provide the source code of the derivative work to recipients of the derivative work.
[Your] code, which you wrote, suddenly becomes a "derivative work" because you happened to link it against a GPLed library (which is what happened with Microsoft's drivers in this case).
Your code doesn't become a derived work. The resulting binary becomes a derived work.
Are you actually saying there's no difference in readability?
You said "understandability", which in my experience depends more on the choice of appropriate identifiers, domain knowledge, encapsulation, appropriate factoring, documentation, testability, adherence to local coding standards, the use of appropriate libraries, design patterns, organization, tool support, familiarity with data structures and algorithms, and use of language idioms than it does on the use of whitespace versus braces, the presence or absence of sigils, or first-class support for lambdas or regular expressions.
As another poster wrote, syntactical considerations are superficial concerns.
The Catholic Church decided the canon of the bible.
If you believe the Roman Catholic church existed at the time of the Council of Nicea, this is possible. Not everyone believes this, seeing as how Gregory I was born over two centuries later.
The GP was apparently talking about PERL, which is a joke programming language in which it's impossible to write maintainable code. You're thinking of the Perl programming language, which allows untrained novices to do useful things while not preventing diligent and careful programmers from writing effective and maintainable code.
You can safely ignore the opinion of anyone who spells the latter PERL.
The price drop would actually not mean fully half revenue loss for the publishers because they would sell more games.
I was just thinking the same thing. The presence of a used games market demonstrates that there are customers who prefer to buy games at a lower price. The real question is whether they would buy the game at the higher price if there were no used market (that is, they're out for a bargain) or whether the lower price convinced them to buy something they wouldn't buy normally.
If there are enough of the latter, it's worth doing.
MySQL did the same thing for years too. I don't think Brian would claim to have invented a lot of these things, but he definitely deserves credit for shepherding the project to take advantage of them.
This attitude of sneering condescension towards your meal-ticket is inexcusable in any industry.
Precisely what sneering condescension?
An author writes a book. You buy the book. There's your transaction. If you pay the author to write another book, there's your obligation. If the author never writes another book, you don't buy it. That'll teach him.
Have you ever written a novel? I'm on my third (my ninth book overall). Some days, it's easy to write a couple of thousand words. Some months, it's impossible, so you go on and write something else. Sometimes a novel has to sit around for days or weeks or months or years before you figure out where things went wrong and the new scene to add or the character to change or one crucial plot point that releases the floodgates and gets you back to the point where you can write a couple of thousand words every day until you finish.
Now I agree that promising release dates and blowing past them is bad policy (and bad publicity), but my obligation as a writer is to tell an honest story the best way I know how. My obligation to my readers is to give them a story worth their money when they pay for a book.
If I haven't finished the book, I don't get paid. If you don't buy my book (or can't buy my book), I don't work for you. Where's my obligation to you then?
I have an account to O'Reilly's Safari - I don't know how authors are compensated....
Poorly. I remember reading (but can't find a link at the moment) that the main reason the Pragmatic Programmers have no books on Safari is because they believe the compensation scheme is unfair. I've received negligible royalties from Safari myself -- and they're poorly reported and incomprehensible.
Unless you're his publisher, you don't pay for a book until the writer finishes that book. Any other feelings of obligation you have are your problem, not the writer's.
What exactly is the value add of the publishers, distributors, and retailers?
For distributors and retailers, somewhere around 50% of the cover price, less any discount they offer.
For publishers... the value of a good editor is difficult to estimate. The same goes for a copyeditor and indexer.
As for the rest, I calculated that my publisher earned seven times as much as I did from my previous two books. This is after taking out the per-unit cost. Given that there was little editorial support, little marketing support, and production was a fiasco of heroics, confusion, and impossible deadlines, I'm not sure that said publisher provided seven times as much value as I did.
I'm not going to work with that publisher again. Now I have my own publishing company instead.
Slashdot Mirror
How would Eiffel, Cobol, Ada, AppleScript compare?
What makes you think spammers care about repeat business?
It's worse than that. Baltar wants to become a farmer because he's finally made peace with his father, a character introduced for a storyline only present in the finale itself.
That would have been a lovely character moment if there'd been any character progression along that point in any of the previous four years. (Yes, there was a reference in a scene in the brig before his trial, but if that counts as a reference for a major ending point, why was there no resolution of the populism which he brought up much more often?)
Your logic only works if you assume spammers care if the messages they send on behalf of other people reach potential customers. I don't assume that.
That's easy; someone's willing to pay for my work. Filesharing demonstrate that many people are not willing to pay for the work of others.
Untrue. The GPL requires anyone who distributes a derivative work of GPLd code to provide the source code of the derivative work to recipients of the derivative work.
Except for the work of people such as John Wycliffe and Martin Luther, for example, both of whom preceded James I of England.
I'm a professional writer and a publisher. I would never use a word processor for anything I cared about seeing in print.
Your code doesn't become a derived work. The resulting binary becomes a derived work.
You said "understandability", which in my experience depends more on the choice of appropriate identifiers, domain knowledge, encapsulation, appropriate factoring, documentation, testability, adherence to local coding standards, the use of appropriate libraries, design patterns, organization, tool support, familiarity with data structures and algorithms, and use of language idioms than it does on the use of whitespace versus braces, the presence or absence of sigils, or first-class support for lambdas or regular expressions.
As another poster wrote, syntactical considerations are superficial concerns.
I hope you intended that as satire.
The GPL neither suggests nor says that this is the case. Why would it be?
Perhaps so, and that's nonsense. Copyright disallows coders to do whatever they want with someone else's code.
If you believe the Roman Catholic church existed at the time of the Council of Nicea, this is possible. Not everyone believes this, seeing as how Gregory I was born over two centuries later.
The GP was apparently talking about PERL, which is a joke programming language in which it's impossible to write maintainable code. You're thinking of the Perl programming language, which allows untrained novices to do useful things while not preventing diligent and careful programmers from writing effective and maintainable code.
You can safely ignore the opinion of anyone who spells the latter PERL.
While you're at it, call out Sam Ramji too. He's very good at offering weasel words with regard to Microsoft's free software patent intentions.
It's in the DVD version, but was it in the version originally aired? I wish I had a videotape of that.
I was just thinking the same thing. The presence of a used games market demonstrates that there are customers who prefer to buy games at a lower price. The real question is whether they would buy the game at the higher price if there were no used market (that is, they're out for a bargain) or whether the lower price convinced them to buy something they wouldn't buy normally.
If there are enough of the latter, it's worth doing.
MySQL did the same thing for years too. I don't think Brian would claim to have invented a lot of these things, but he definitely deserves credit for shepherding the project to take advantage of them.
People still listen to Liszt, though. Yuck.
Precisely what sneering condescension?
An author writes a book. You buy the book. There's your transaction. If you pay the author to write another book, there's your obligation. If the author never writes another book, you don't buy it. That'll teach him.
Have you ever written a novel? I'm on my third (my ninth book overall). Some days, it's easy to write a couple of thousand words. Some months, it's impossible, so you go on and write something else. Sometimes a novel has to sit around for days or weeks or months or years before you figure out where things went wrong and the new scene to add or the character to change or one crucial plot point that releases the floodgates and gets you back to the point where you can write a couple of thousand words every day until you finish.
Now I agree that promising release dates and blowing past them is bad policy (and bad publicity), but my obligation as a writer is to tell an honest story the best way I know how. My obligation to my readers is to give them a story worth their money when they pay for a book.
If I haven't finished the book, I don't get paid. If you don't buy my book (or can't buy my book), I don't work for you. Where's my obligation to you then?
I spent several years as a professional editor. You'd be surprised at the before and after.
(I do agree that a lot of books have very poor editing, however.)
Poorly. I remember reading (but can't find a link at the moment) that the main reason the Pragmatic Programmers have no books on Safari is because they believe the compensation scheme is unfair. I've received negligible royalties from Safari myself -- and they're poorly reported and incomprehensible.
Unless you're his publisher, you don't pay for a book until the writer finishes that book. Any other feelings of obligation you have are your problem, not the writer's.
For distributors and retailers, somewhere around 50% of the cover price, less any discount they offer.
For publishers... the value of a good editor is difficult to estimate. The same goes for a copyeditor and indexer.
As for the rest, I calculated that my publisher earned seven times as much as I did from my previous two books. This is after taking out the per-unit cost. Given that there was little editorial support, little marketing support, and production was a fiasco of heroics, confusion, and impossible deadlines, I'm not sure that said publisher provided seven times as much value as I did.
I'm not going to work with that publisher again. Now I have my own publishing company instead.