PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 688 bob 20 0 483m 88m 26m S 0 2.2 1:47.84 seamonkey-bin 735 bob 20 0 21060 3792 2316 S 0 0.1 0:00.00 lynx
I think that whichever number you take, lynx is the clear winner. Eat your heart out! Though I am a bit at a loss to explain the 21 megabyte virtual image. Maybe it uses that novel hundred-buffering technique...
Aha! Fallout had it right for once! Now all we need is to find a two-headed cow and then the legend of the Vault Dweller will have no doubters ever again!
> Yet you left out the one way the majority of people get cash from open source development. > Open source is a software feature that many companies are willing to fork out cash for. > They do so by hiring coders to write the actual software.
Yes, that has happened occasionally, but for most OSS developers it will not happen. First of all, if you want to be hired in this manner, you will need to make your project sufficiently prominent. Mozilla, the kernel, or MySQL qualify, but a typical small project will not even be noticed. Second, notice that if you are hired, you are not making money from the software. The company is not making money from the software, so your wages are little more than charity. While it can work for a while, just as many artists have produced a lot of works with the benevolence of their wealthy patrons, it is not business, it is not going to happen to you, and it is not sustainable.
> Your bias may be confused because you don't understand that the only people > who need to make cash off it are the people writing the code.
That's not my argument. You can maintain an open source project and still be making money from your day job, but that's not the point. The point is that you are not making money from your open source project. This applies to the above situation as well. When you work for a company, you are not making money from your software. The company is supposed to be making money from the software and you do the same only as a part of the company. If the company makes no money from the software then neither do you.
> That demand is only increasing as we move further into the information age and > more people wise up to the dangers of vendor lock-in.
People have known about vendor lock-in for centuries; it is not a concept unique to software. Nevertheless, most businesses still run Windows and Office, and new businesses still choose Windows and Office for their machines. Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple (who even also have hardware lock-in) are still making lots of money, so you can not deny that it is a viable business model. Conversely, nobody is making much money selling open source software (and by that I mean receiving money for actual software for which the full source code is freely available). There are a few companies, like MySQL, who try the dual-licensing trick, and I don't know how well it works for them. I suspect their revenues are not very high. I would also argue that in this situation the product is not really open source software, since what is being sold is not the open source version.
> Indeed from a programmers perspective open source can liberate us from poor wages delivered by crappy companies
I entirely agree:) Who needs those crappy wages anyway? I'll just pay my rent with lines of code from now on.
> Don't link journals which are archived (and thus unable to accept comments) as the main meat
You are perfectly welcome to reply to the comment rather than the journal, just as you have done now. There is no need to waste more storage space on reposting the entire article just to enable more comments.
> If you have something like that to say have the guts to post it again and take a Karma hit.
What karma hit? Journal entries are not moderated, and having negative comments appear on them does not affect karma either.
> And this point is worth reiterating: open-source software is free. No cost. Zero. Zilch.
Does this mean that the debate on the difference (or the lack thereof) between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech is finally and officially over? It's about time.
Maybe so you'll realize that $20 isn't all that much to pay to register that shareware game you are playing instead of cracking it. This generation has a great difficulty placing a value on anything; thinking that a $60 is outrageously expensive, but a $1000 shirt is not.
120 Mbps? Oh, please! My IDE drive can do 60 Mbps, with moving parts, including that huge "read arm" thingy that actually has to move a few inches to read something. Here you have a piece of pure electronics, with no mechanical parts, and it can only double the transfer rate? I say it's pathetic. An SSD ought to have speeds comparable to RAM, in the Gbps range, and until one does, the rest are just useless ripoffs. But, of course, that's just my opinion.
> the total costs of having a system designed and developed by these "cheap young people" far > outweighs the savings you get from not including at least one or two experience persons in the team.
While I agree with you in principle, I must point out that the total costs are not important. To a manager, the short-term costs are of far greater importance than the long-term costs, since his boss probably does not keep a running total and sees only the former. Thus, doing the cheapest possible thing in the short run is the most advantageous strategy for keeping his job. This is also true for all levels of management in any publicly traded company, because the short-term results are what makes your stock go up.
It means that Wolfram has discovered the simplest (so far) possible computer. This is of purely theoretical significance since nobody actually uses Turing machines or CAs for computation. The reason for that is their extreme inefficiency; a Turing machine program is many many orders of magnitude larger than a comparable i386 program, and so would run slower. Even though the operations are simpler, and so can theoretically be made faster, the sheer volume of them more than makes up for any speed improvements.
> The whole "add-on" 3D support as well as "don't limit my desktop to 5 open applications/processes" seems incredible.
This is the very tactic that shareware apps have employed for years. Give away some crippled demo for nothing (as Windows is given away for nothing), and then charge big bucks to "register". Of course, then you have to enforce the registration, with, say, "what's the 5th word on line 14 of page 125 of the manual?", and constantly watching for registration codes for your software on pirate sites. I think that looking at the status of shareware today, we can infer how this new "Windows the Crip" version will fare.
> some of us have better things to do with our lives that spend our money on things we then have to crack.
And don't you have better things to do with your life than spending money on non-prepared foods? On computer system parts? On any DIY projects at all?
> I have better things to do, like the search for and engagement in intimate activity.
Aren't you forgetting that this also requires quite a bit of effort? Maintaining a relationship is a lot of work, and most don't come in "ready-to-use" form.
I think that a few minutes spent searching for a crack on Google does not detract from my enjoyment of the game. It is, after all, something I only need to do once, and if I am buying the game in the first place, I am likely planning to spend much more time playing it than installing it. Sure, it would be nice if game companies just forgot about DRM and let us enjoy a working-out-of-the-box experience, but I rather doubt that would happen any time soon.
It really is the standard procedure these days. Whether you buy the game or not, you have to get the crack to disable the stupid CD check. I own all the games I play (I swear:) and yet they are all cracked because I prefer to keep my CDs securely stored. And then, of course, there is the annoyance of swapping CDs in the first place when you want to play another game. Thank God for alcohol...
What we really need here is the Gowachin Justice system where the winning lawyer kills the losing lawyer. It would certainly help cut down on stupid lawsuits.
> I can write "AI" that will kick your ass every time, even without cheating. > (Mobs have the advantage of being on home turf, and they outnumber you.)
You are assuming that the mob would just sit there and wait for the player, like it usually does in pretty much every game. In reality, a "level" would not necessarily know that Gordon Freeman is on his way. Neither will they have the patience to sit in their assigned ambush places, waiting for him all day long. A better AI would actually "live" in the environment where it is placed, so that it would react to the player instead of waiting for him. It would also be fun to watch. In Half-Life I really enjoyed watching those occasional scenes where monsters are wondering around doing things; like when the bullsquids feed on the headcrabs. I wish there were more things like that, things worth watching.
> would it really make sense for those mobs to learn from your new tactics? > Are they supposed to be smart, or are they just supposed to be an obstacle?
If the AI was smart, you wouldn't need a mob. You would only need a few individuals. It would be like a multiplayer deathmatch, and, judging from the popularity of those, would likely be more fun than the current mob situation.
> As for your dead bodies example: would you really prefer to have an infinite standoff > as the mobs decide it's not worth getting killed, so they go hide somewhere with their > own traps and wait for you to attack?
An infinite standoff will only happen if the game designer makes you kill off the entire mob before setting off some stupid trigger to open some stupid door. Don't program artificial obstacles and the player will be able to ignore the hiding mob and go on, just like in real life.
Am I the only one who find the DX9 version of the pictures more appealing? With the exception of the Bioshock fog examples (which had sharp boundaries in DX9) they just look more "natural" to me.
What it appears they did is create a "field" of single-strand DNA "grass". Then they tethered an enzyme "cow" to a point in the field. The "cow" ate all the "grass" it could reach, creating a visible dot. Unfortunately, they do not yet know how to move the cow so it doesn't starve after that.
> nothing would move because of the height of the horse dung (and no technical > solution to removing it without powered transport.)
Just as cars can be powered by horses, so can the vehicles of the dung sweepers. Horseshit is a valuable fertilizer for the agricultural industry. I am sure someone can make a profit collecting it and selling it. It won't be much, but hey, the shit is free, so there has to be some money there.
> If New York or London had the same horse population as they currently have cars
That is the next problem to tackle; we don't really need Manhattan. In the days of the internet, it is absolutely unnecessary to aggregate thousands of people into a high-rise building just so that they could come there in the morning and go home in the afternoon.
> That's without considering that the entire planet would be given over to growing grass.
We already do. And then we waste gasoline on mowing it.
Let me introduce you to an advanced technology vehicle I've been researching for years. It runs on nothing but pure cellulose in form of grass and so is very environmentally friendly. I call it a "horse". It requires no fossil fuels and is surely the transportation of the future.
Slashdot Mirror
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
688 bob 20 0 483m 88m 26m S 0 2.2 1:47.84 seamonkey-bin
735 bob 20 0 21060 3792 2316 S 0 0.1 0:00.00 lynx
I think that whichever number you take, lynx is the clear winner. Eat your heart out! Though I am a bit at a loss to explain the 21 megabyte virtual image. Maybe it uses that novel hundred-buffering technique...
Aha! Fallout had it right for once! Now all we need is to find a two-headed cow and then the legend of the Vault Dweller will have no doubters ever again!
> Yet you left out the one way the majority of people get cash from open source development.
:) Who needs those crappy wages anyway? I'll just pay my rent with lines of code from now on.
> Open source is a software feature that many companies are willing to fork out cash for.
> They do so by hiring coders to write the actual software.
Yes, that has happened occasionally, but for most OSS developers it will not happen. First of all, if you want to be hired in this manner, you will need to make your project sufficiently prominent. Mozilla, the kernel, or MySQL qualify, but a typical small project will not even be noticed. Second, notice that if you are hired, you are not making money from the software. The company is not making money from the software, so your wages are little more than charity. While it can work for a while, just as many artists have produced a lot of works with the benevolence of their wealthy patrons, it is not business, it is not going to happen to you, and it is not sustainable.
> Your bias may be confused because you don't understand that the only people
> who need to make cash off it are the people writing the code.
That's not my argument. You can maintain an open source project and still be making money from your day job, but that's not the point. The point is that you are not making money from your open source project. This applies to the above situation as well. When you work for a company, you are not making money from your software. The company is supposed to be making money from the software and you do the same only as a part of the company. If the company makes no money from the software then neither do you.
> That demand is only increasing as we move further into the information age and
> more people wise up to the dangers of vendor lock-in.
People have known about vendor lock-in for centuries; it is not a concept unique to software. Nevertheless, most businesses still run Windows and Office, and new businesses still choose Windows and Office for their machines. Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple (who even also have hardware lock-in) are still making lots of money, so you can not deny that it is a viable business model. Conversely, nobody is making much money selling open source software (and by that I mean receiving money for actual software for which the full source code is freely available). There are a few companies, like MySQL, who try the dual-licensing trick, and I don't know how well it works for them. I suspect their revenues are not very high. I would also argue that in this situation the product is not really open source software, since what is being sold is not the open source version.
> Indeed from a programmers perspective open source can liberate us from poor wages delivered by crappy companies
I entirely agree
> Don't link journals which are archived (and thus unable to accept comments) as the main meat
You are perfectly welcome to reply to the comment rather than the journal, just as you have done now. There is no need to waste more storage space on reposting the entire article just to enable more comments.
> If you have something like that to say have the guts to post it again and take a Karma hit.
What karma hit? Journal entries are not moderated, and having negative comments appear on them does not affect karma either.
> And this point is worth reiterating: open-source software is free. No cost. Zero. Zilch.
Does this mean that the debate on the difference (or the lack thereof) between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech is finally and officially over? It's about time.
Maybe so you'll realize that $20 isn't all that much to pay to register that shareware game you are playing instead of cracking it. This generation has a great difficulty placing a value on anything; thinking that a $60 is outrageously expensive, but a $1000 shirt is not.
120 Mbps? Oh, please! My IDE drive can do 60 Mbps, with moving parts, including that huge "read arm" thingy that actually has to move a few inches to read something. Here you have a piece of pure electronics, with no mechanical parts, and it can only double the transfer rate? I say it's pathetic. An SSD ought to have speeds comparable to RAM, in the Gbps range, and until one does, the rest are just useless ripoffs. But, of course, that's just my opinion.
> the total costs of having a system designed and developed by these "cheap young people" far
> outweighs the savings you get from not including at least one or two experience persons in the team.
While I agree with you in principle, I must point out that the total costs are not important. To a manager, the short-term costs are of far greater importance than the long-term costs, since his boss probably does not keep a running total and sees only the former. Thus, doing the cheapest possible thing in the short run is the most advantageous strategy for keeping his job. This is also true for all levels of management in any publicly traded company, because the short-term results are what makes your stock go up.
Today is the perfect time to discover enigmail!
> then you get into your car to drive home, and this robot goes "Hi! The sun is shining!"
And now imagine how great it would feel to slug it.
Let's just put everyone on the terror watch list and dispense with the mind games.
It means that Wolfram has discovered the simplest (so far) possible computer. This is of purely theoretical significance since nobody actually uses Turing machines or CAs for computation. The reason for that is their extreme inefficiency; a Turing machine program is many many orders of magnitude larger than a comparable i386 program, and so would run slower. Even though the operations are simpler, and so can theoretically be made faster, the sheer volume of them more than makes up for any speed improvements.
No, no, no. You don't need to make it wider. Just twist an end and glue it to the other, making a Moebius tape.
> why on earth do you think a computer science degree should cover commodity PC
For the same reason a civil engineer should learn about concrete and steel.
> The whole "add-on" 3D support as well as "don't limit my desktop to 5 open applications/processes" seems incredible.
This is the very tactic that shareware apps have employed for years. Give away some crippled demo for nothing (as Windows is given away for nothing), and then charge big bucks to "register". Of course, then you have to enforce the registration, with, say, "what's the 5th word on line 14 of page 125 of the manual?", and constantly watching for registration codes for your software on pirate sites. I think that looking at the status of shareware today, we can infer how this new "Windows the Crip" version will fare.
Wow! It really works!
> some of us have better things to do with our lives that spend our money on things we then have to crack.
And don't you have better things to do with your life than spending money on non-prepared foods? On computer system parts? On any DIY projects at all?
> I have better things to do, like the search for and engagement in intimate activity.
Aren't you forgetting that this also requires quite a bit of effort? Maintaining a relationship is a lot of work, and most don't come in "ready-to-use" form.
I think that a few minutes spent searching for a crack on Google does not detract from my enjoyment of the game. It is, after all, something I only need to do once, and if I am buying the game in the first place, I am likely planning to spend much more time playing it than installing it. Sure, it would be nice if game companies just forgot about DRM and let us enjoy a working-out-of-the-box experience, but I rather doubt that would happen any time soon.
It really is the standard procedure these days. Whether you buy the game or not, you have to get the crack to disable the stupid CD check. I own all the games I play (I swear :) and yet they are all cracked because I prefer to keep my CDs securely stored. And then, of course, there is the annoyance of swapping CDs in the first place when you want to play another game. Thank God for alcohol...
What we really need here is the Gowachin Justice system where the winning lawyer kills the losing lawyer. It would certainly help cut down on stupid lawsuits.
> I can write "AI" that will kick your ass every time, even without cheating.
> (Mobs have the advantage of being on home turf, and they outnumber you.)
You are assuming that the mob would just sit there and wait for the player, like it usually does in pretty much every game. In reality, a "level" would not necessarily know that Gordon Freeman is on his way. Neither will they have the patience to sit in their assigned ambush places, waiting for him all day long. A better AI would actually "live" in the environment where it is placed, so that it would react to the player instead of waiting for him. It would also be fun to watch. In Half-Life I really enjoyed watching those occasional scenes where monsters are wondering around doing things; like when the bullsquids feed on the headcrabs. I wish there were more things like that, things worth watching.
> would it really make sense for those mobs to learn from your new tactics?
> Are they supposed to be smart, or are they just supposed to be an obstacle?
If the AI was smart, you wouldn't need a mob. You would only need a few individuals. It would be like a multiplayer deathmatch, and, judging from the popularity of those, would likely be more fun than the current mob situation.
> As for your dead bodies example: would you really prefer to have an infinite standoff
> as the mobs decide it's not worth getting killed, so they go hide somewhere with their
> own traps and wait for you to attack?
An infinite standoff will only happen if the game designer makes you kill off the entire mob before setting off some stupid trigger to open some stupid door. Don't program artificial obstacles and the player will be able to ignore the hiding mob and go on, just like in real life.
Am I the only one who find the DX9 version of the pictures more appealing? With the exception of the Bioshock fog examples (which had sharp boundaries in DX9) they just look more "natural" to me.
What it appears they did is create a "field" of single-strand DNA "grass". Then they tethered an enzyme "cow" to a point in the field. The "cow" ate all the "grass" it could reach, creating a visible dot. Unfortunately, they do not yet know how to move the cow so it doesn't starve after that.
> nothing would move because of the height of the horse dung (and no technical
> solution to removing it without powered transport.)
Just as cars can be powered by horses, so can the vehicles of the dung sweepers. Horseshit is a valuable fertilizer for the agricultural industry. I am sure someone can make a profit collecting it and selling it. It won't be much, but hey, the shit is free, so there has to be some money there.
> If New York or London had the same horse population as they currently have cars
That is the next problem to tackle; we don't really need Manhattan. In the days of the internet, it is absolutely unnecessary to aggregate thousands of people into a high-rise building just so that they could come there in the morning and go home in the afternoon.
> That's without considering that the entire planet would be given over to growing grass.
We already do. And then we waste gasoline on mowing it.
Let me introduce you to an advanced technology vehicle I've been researching for years. It runs on nothing but pure cellulose in form of grass and so is very environmentally friendly. I call it a "horse". It requires no fossil fuels and is surely the transportation of the future.
"Die, spammer, die!"
It's only funny when you are not in the minority.