IT

Imagine you want to check for the German words with the most occurrences of the letters u,f,s.

No, you may not ask why.

Erst wenn man keinen Netzzugang hat (oder nur den Android-Notnagel, wo "Hotlinenummer der Störungsstelle raussuchen" schon eine nichttriviale Aufgabe ist), merkt man erst, wie always-on man doch eigentlich ist.

• Dinge im Autostart: Pidgin, Pageant
• Dinge im Autostart, die Fehlermeldungen zeigen: Pidgin
• Dinge im Autostart, die sinnfrei sind ohne Netz: Pageant
• Dinge im Autostart, die offline sinnvoll zu nutzen sind: -

• Icons in der Win7-Startleiste: Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, KVIrc, TweetDeck, TeamSpeak2, TeamSpeak3, WoW, Curse Client, PuTTY, foobar2000, FileZilla, Notepad2
• Tools, die Fehlermeldungen zeigen beim Starten: Firefox, Chrome (beide saved open tabs), Thunderbird, KVIrc, TweetDeck, TS2, TS3, WoW, Curse Client, FileZilla (alle nach Klick auf "Connect")
• Tools, die offline sinnvoll zu nutzen sind: foobar2000 (läuft), Notepad2 (in dem ich gerade das hier tippe), PuTTY (Connection zum OpenWRT-Router offen zwecks Troubleshooting :P)
• Bonuspunkte für "Offlinenutzung manchmal möglich": Firefox+Chrome (aber viele HTML-Dateien hab ich nicht lokal...)

Traurig aber wahr.

Auf zum Atomr Xbox.

PS: Verhältnis installierte Spiele offline:online ist 4:4

About a week ago I stumbled upon this post by Syp about the reception of betas in gaming.

It sums it up quite clearly, when you release a new game (especially, but not limited to MMOs) - the beta phase has to be awesome. Unless you're working on a major intellectual property (like Warhammer Online) or got a huge fan base (Blizzard) you can make or break your influx of users with the beta of your shiny new game.

Now where's the point for software developers, and especially open source developers?
Ever heard "Release early, release often."? - bet you did.

I'm not really seeing this in open source development. OK, some people don't really want to make money with their disclosure and free licensing of their code, they're happy about any feedback and just hope for a patch or bug report by people playing around with it.
Still many of those people then offer the product in any way or consulting/paid feature implementation - they get real benefits by short release cycles, even if it's only to be present in the news and not amass too many security holes by years-old installations. (Yes, that's speculation and a bit of faith in humanity...)

Bzt the same case stands for software-as-a-service vs. games with subscription costs. You're not making any big shots with the original software package or the game box (if it costs something at all) - no, you're relying on recurring payments by (hopefully happy and not disgruntled) customers.

So, where's the difference?
Is it because you're not making your money by selling the box and then forgetting about it?.
Is it because people using open source software are less demanding (i.e. happy something fixes half of their problems and they only need to solve the other half) than gamers who get to use the beta for free?
Are gamers in the hopes they can make an impact by reporting bugs in the beta so those might be fixed at release?

2006: Results showed the most common refactorings of the fifteen coined a 'Gang of Six', to be generally those with a high in-degree and low out-degree when mapped on a dependency graph; the same refactorings also featured strongly in the remedying of bad code smells. (S. Counsell et al.)

2009: The fate of health care reform may well now rest in the hands of a small group of Senators, three Republicans and three Democrats, who have come to be called the Gang of Six. (Jerome Karabel)

Or am I missing some "Gang of xyz" reference besides Gang of Four?

Can't stop watching it...



eeePC + LineIn = murks, aber noch nicht grossartig recherchiert