I wasn't criticizing people working on Wine or for CodeWeavers for the lack of support for Photoshop. The CW policy is to work on stuff people paid for first and get other programs working as a side effect. It makes plenty of sense and this is what enables them to continue their work.

I blame Adobe. The costs of paying to get that compatibility given the new market it would open to them is peanuts.

It exists. It's called libwine. It's among others how Picasa and Google Earth work on Linux.

Also, if Wine isn't very compatible with your app, you can pay CodeWeaver to make it compatible, they are very cheap. Given this, it's surprising that apps like for instance Photoshop aren't available for Linux already (Photoshop CS2 do work on Wine but only because Google paid CodeWeavers to make it compatible).

Why is it that so many people feel the need to give people some kneejerk economics lesson. Nothing in the original post indicates the person doesn't understand basic economics.

The post I answered to was written by the OP and it indicates he does not in fact understand basic economics. He states he has to sell it at $50 because he can't sell as many as romance novels. This does not make any sense, the price you set your book as to be the one that maximizes the profit margin * books sold equation. The fact that the book took lots of resources to create or targets a niche is irrelevant to this equation.

Sure, writing the book was a sunk cost, but that doesn't make it completely unethical for others to be stealing the product of all the hours he put in writing that book.

I didn't consider the ethical implications, I just talked about how things work in reality: if you price is above people's threshold, they will pirate it.

And the prospect of working several hundred or a thousand hours writing a technical book in a subject where you are a highly educated expert, to make the equivalent of McDonalds wages, is probably not going to encourage people to write books.

If the writing of some books is not economically viable then there is not much we can do beside grants. I still believe that meeting pirates half-way by asking them to donate what they consider fair is a good compromise. After all, even if he wishes people to pay the full price, the money he'd get from pirates paying what they want is money he'd not get at all otherwise.

I didn't specifically make an argument for an economic position,

Well, I am.

The real cost is in the time it takes to prepare the book. It's not fair to compare the cost of a data compression book with, say, a romance title. The size of the markets is vastly different. I would be happy to sell my data compression book at the price of a romance novel if I could sell as many copies.

The money and time it took to prepate the book is called a sunk cost. The market does not care one bit about sunk costs. Apparently, people will not buy it at the price you asked, they either have a choice of doing away with the information or pirate the book. Maybe you could invite people who do that to give you what they feel is fair? If I only need one or two chapters from your book and send you five bucks, it's five bucks you would never get if you stuck to $41 or nothing.

Oh and you should read this article about setting prices.

It wouldn't work, teachers hate Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is more than reliable enough for homework needs but it makes the information way to easy to reach for the teachers to be comfortable. They don't really care about what you learn or produce, they care about how much you worked for it. Wikipedia means you don't have to jump through as many hoops and they really hate that.

Good luck with that. The last time someone tried that, they slowed Python down by half.

Only because Python uses a refcounting garbage collector. When you get many threads, you need to lock all your data structures because otherwise you might collect them when they are still reachable. This project plans to change the garbage collection strategy first. Once it's done, killing the GIL is easy.

I agree... it just plain scares me that so many large systems don't even bother with such trivial precautions as hashing. It's even more trivial than sql injections. Up until it happened, I would have _never_ guessed myspace & phpbb stored plaintext. It seems borderline incompetent.

MySpace is actually innocent here. The password were found in a phishing attack, people thought they were login to MySpace. The real database was not compromised.

given these assumtions i cant think of a saner numbering scheme (i can however think of saner assumptions)

What about 4.0alpha, 4.1beta and 4.2? Or 4.-2, 4.-1 and 4.0?