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GNU is Not Unix

Why Making Money From Free Software Matters 224

Glyn Moody sends in what could be a watershed article, if the recording and movie industries are paying attention. "People have been making money from free software ever since Richard Stallman started selling GNU Emacs on tapes for $150 a pop. That's been good for hackers, who have often managed to make a living from their coding by working for one of the startups based around free software. And as companies like Red Hat and Google have grown in size and profitability, so have the credibility and clout of free software. But there is another reason why the success of these new kinds of businesses is so crucial: in many respects they offer a glimpse of coming shifts in other industries that need to grapple with the conundrum of how to make money from goods that are freely available. In particular, they offer the music and film industries an example of an alternative to fighting people's natural instinct to share digital abundance, by making money from new scarcities."
The Internet

Several Link-Spam Architectures Revealed 38

workie writes "Using data derived from website infections, RescueTheWeb.org has found several interesting link-spam architectures. One architecture is where concentric layers of hijacked websites are used to increase the page rank and breadth of reach (within search engine search results) of scam sites. The outer layers link to the inner layers, eventually linking to a site that redirects the user to the scam site. Another architecture involves hijacked sites that redirect the user to fake copies of Google, having the appearance that the visitor is still within Google, but in reality they are on a Google lookalike that contains only nefarious links."

Comment Re:A cross with medium height partitions (Score 1) 520

Yup - that is exactly what I have got at work as well. I think the half-height walls are great cos they give you your own private area where you can zone out just code - but you still have the options of standing up to have a chat with anyone else on the team.

The only problem I have with it are the L-shaped desks. These are problematic when two or more developers are looking at the same screen - which I find happens quite often, especially when making architectural decisions about the software, and when one dev is showing another dev how to do ${programmingTask}. What tends to happen is we push the chair out of the corner of the L, and both of us sit on the table, which is not ideal.

I think the best desk configuration would be a cross shape, with half height walls, and straight (not L-shaped) desks.

Oh, and throw in one pair of noise-cancelling headphones for each dev. Those are worth their weight in gold in increasing productivity.

Java

Thoughts On the State of Web Development 253

rmoskal recommends his blog post up at Most Media on finding the right level of abstraction, Grails, and SOFEA. "[Three years ago] I was very excited about Apache Wicket as the way to develop line of business applications with a domain model, CRUD [create-read-update-delete] screens for maintaining the model, and in the most interesting cases, doing something else useful besides. I still like Wicket. It has, as its website says, a small conceptual surface area.' It reminds me of Python in that 'You try something it usually just works.' In many respects, though, Wicket seems to be at the wrong level of abstraction for the for the sorts of line-of-business applications described above. If your team is spending any time at all writing code to produce listing, filtering, and sorting behavior, not to mention creating CRUD screens and the back-end logic for these operations, they are probably working at the wrong level of abstraction. ... Recently I did a small project using Grails and was quite pleased. Grails uses groovy, a dynamic language compatible with Java, and is based on the proven technologies that I know and love well: Spring, Hibernate, SiteMesh, Maven, etc. ... I get all the power of the Java ecosystem without the fustiness and lack of expressivity of the core language (no more getters and setters, ever!)."

Comment Re:Justice (Score 1) 353

a) Functions that any reasonable person would expect the product to have, based on the advertising but also on similar products on the market. This doesn't obviate the customer's responsibility to do some research, just covers too-obvious-to-check things like if your brand new DVD recorder didn't include a DVD playback function

I returned an Iphone 3G in this spirit. "I don't know any other phone were I can't resent or forward a text message".

Comment Re:True story... No lie (Score 1) 204

And why exactly do you think the explosion was in any way related to your wi-fi?

Point 1 - I bet that a good percentage of people that use their electronic devices on airplanes do not consciously turn off wi-fi.So far I haven't heard of any plane accidents that were attributed to wi-fi transmissions.
Point 2 - Lufhtansa for a while actually advertised wireless connectivity on their airplanes for web surfing during long-haul flights. At the time it was a bit expensive and extremely laggy so I only used it once. But they definitely didn't discourage it.

Comment Re:What can be done? Nothing. (Score 0, Troll) 511

checking your account every few days is only prudent.

Not unless you're unemployed and therefore have a lot of extra time on your hands...

Honestly, if I have to watch my bank account like a hawk to have a debit or credit card, I'd stick to cash exclusively, and the good old monthly statement... I don't know about anyone else, but the "convenience" of a credit/debit card is pretty damn small to me.

Comment Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score 1) 432

You are confusing programming language and OS - If I were to code an app in Java or Python or C or C++, it can compile and run/interpret in Linux, Windows and Mac.

Would you be happy if another OS, let's say Linux, decided that they will only let apps written in C run in the OS? (I know this will never happen, it's a hypothetical)

Or another scenario: If you were a developer who currently develops apps for Windows, and one day Microsoft announced that from Windows 8 onwards, only apps written using Visual Studio are allowed to run on the OS, would you be happy?

In each of the above hypothetical scenarios, sure some of the developers who are unaffected by the change will be content, as they have been using the officially "blessed" programming language for the OS all along.

OTOH, there will be a boatload of developers who are not, and they will be fuming because they are faced with an ultimatum: drop support for this OS entirely or invest considerable time and energy to rewrite your applications in a different language?

the bellyachers that want to develop for the platform... by not developing for the platform. They need their logic adjusted.

These developers were indeed developing for iPhone OS 3.x. They then find out that their apps are illegal in iPhone OS 4.x. That is not very friendly to them is it? It really is a slap in the face for these developers.

Disclaimer: Do not own or develop for the iPhone – my stand on the matter is based purely on moral grounds, as well as the freedoms and rights I believe I should be entitled to when developing software.

Comment Re:Doesn't account for all the wording (Score 2) 432

This writer is just a total and utter wanker

Mod parent +1 insightful (not sarcastic) - All you have to do is read the comments on his post so far and they tell you that -

1. That he is rehashing someone else's ideas from a day earlier:
http://sachin.posterous.com/ie6-caused-the-web-to-mature-slower-than-it-w

2. That his central point is moot:
"They are not telling people to use Xcode, they are telling people they can only publish application 'originally written' in Objective C. This is quite different."

Comment Re:Office space (Score 1) 547

I'm often still in bed at 8:30 am :-(

But yeah, so true.

Generally some days I feel like I do around one hour of actual work, and others up to four hours. Of course you can tack on an hour or two of meetings on top of that. And, of course, browsing the web is actually just a way to sharpen your mind as you think about your current task.

Comment Re:Call me bizarre but theory sounds backwards (Score 1) 496

This theory that aliens are highly evolved and addicted to electronic entertainment is backwards because we know better than to end up sitting in Plato's Cave staring at flickering images when there is a marvelous world waiting to be viewed and humans, fattened in caves while watching flickering images, waiting to be devoured.

Uh huh (that's mystical humanspeak for sarcastic agreement). And you just happened to be on Slashdot to tell us about it. Don't forget your free federal converter box so you can pick up HDTV!

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