Maybe I am unique, but this feels like SCO is talking the law into their own hands somewhat, offering up money so that a criminal can be caught (even though it can be seen as harmless, companies loose a lot of money on this kind of crap). Isn't catching criminals up to the goverment? Or is the SCO mindset that they are suppose to run the show, just like they try to run the UNIX show?
This opens up the market for special ROMs for phones, just like you hack XBoxs and PS2s, you will be able to get your phone modded in the future to resist this kind of crap.
Putting HD content on todays DVDs means that the masterings will go lower bandwidth or have to break the movies onto two discs.
Going with a format which can store more is preferable in every possible way. And since DVD players are cheap as hell today, a new machine shouldn't be much of a problem either.
DVI should by all means be the best of the supplied connections. I am just sad that they didn't include HDMI (including sound) which would have been the absolutley easiest and best.
Let's be honest, a cheap "do everything" product is not going to have high quality D/A converters for picture nor sound. Then it is much better to make use of D/A converters further down the line. This is why cheap DVD players can't compete with expensive ones when it comes to picture quality, although you do need a good display to see it (14" TV nope, good Panasonic 32", could think so, 50" plasma, jupp, 200" expensive projector, you bet).
I'd be happy to see old horrible legacy connectors die. It is bad enough to get par, ser, PS/2, ISA Bios, PATA, PCI, VGA, gamepad, etc on computers when USB2, Firewire 800, DVI, PCI-express, SATA, etc isn't just a whole lot better, but also cheaper (to make) and easier to use.
What happens when all the knowhow has left the company, and the outsourced workers says "screw the americans", quits, and starts their own company instead?
If the US wants to keep their high-tech knowhow, they better make sure to put a fat tax on US companies who outsource... or they'll die.
Not to mention that if you outsource, who is left to improve your software when the people you outsourced to starts their own company and screws you over? All of a sudden you are forced to buy that bug ridden piece of s**t yourself.
Best bet is either to develop in house, or wave some dollars in front of some GPL hippies who then gladly code what you need (in the case where it doesn't matter if someone else also has the software, i.e. you won't go out of business because of it).
Just don't forget the dot com bubble... I am sure a bunch of the ideas where good (even though many more were moronic), but the business side was just plain never-going-to-work.
I think the trick is to find the right businessminded person who wants to build a company with you, not create enormous amounts of buzz, go IPO, sell the stocks and move on...
I have a very hard time ever getting any work done when I am home, so working from home would more than likely end up with playing games, watching TV, and generally not doing work, at home...
Why oh why can't the banks make it safe/safer? I assume that most people having iNet access + a credit card also has internet banking services, or would be willing to get said services. Then it is a simple matter of following this procedure instead:
1. Go to iNet bank, and get one-time number 2. Go to and buy your stuff with said number 3. Processes your order, and then asks the bank for the money. 4. You enter your iNet bank, and confirm that should get from you. 5. sends the merchandise.
Way harder to screw things up this way, and I am sure that even safer and easier ways can be thought up (and patented unfortunatly). Credit card stealing "hackers" (yuck, what a wrong way to use that beautiful word) should be cought and punished after all.
Breaking systems to make them safer is a far different goal, and something tells me that those hackers are far less of a threat after all.
Either that, or AT&T gets all your votes. Good huh?
If I lived in the states, and used AT&T for anything (Mobile, telephone, i-net access), I'd dump their sorry ass and tell all my family and friends to do likewise...
I assume that AMD at this point in time has no plans for any SPARC CPUs, but I wonder how much AMD could do if they got all Sun's SPARC resources and basically bodged together a next gen SPARC from the Opteron. But something tells me that x86-64 is the way of the future if Sun don't want to slip behind more.
Give me a popup saying "do you want to visit our site and get annoyed by gator, or do you want to not be able to view our site". Take one guess which alternative I would go for 99 times out of a hundered...
What the public wants is not some certain way of doing wireless, they just want it wireless. They don't care as long as:
1. it works 2. all the stuff you buy work together 3. it's easy and troublefree 4. it's cheap 5. it's easy to get hold of products that 2. holds true for
Obviously BT hasn't delivered, but I am sure something will deliver (if nothing else, I'm sure some cheap asian firm will steal something together) and the public will love it.
And I wouldn't mind seeing a lot of products using it, for example remote controls, cordless phones, laptops, washers (flash a message on the TV when the washer is done, would be very nice), stoves, and a bunch of stuff which I never could imagine myself.
As always, the system that you can buy in the stores and that are picked up by huge corporations will win;)
* Stable driver API (if the driver was released at x.y.0, it must work at x.y.999 as well)
* Easy for 3rd parties to supply drivers, both binary and source (so hardware manufacturers can release their own drivers easily and not just for Redhat/SuSE with certain kernels).
* More finetuning. I bet one could finetune the network stack better depending on what kind of speed your network is. Would be nice to have it automatic.
But what happens when all the developers sit in India? When they say good bye to the American (and European) companies and start up their own? More than likely stealing everything they can from the original companies.
The more you outsource, the less you can bring back home...
That the state isn't protecting its people from incidents like this. Being scared shitless of what your company might do to you is no better than being scared shitless of what Stasi or the KGB might do to you if you make any mistake.
Who cares if it is over the counter, over the internet, or by having the neighbours kid go buy it. Just put a tax at the place of purchase (i.e. where the company whom are selling the product does business) and be done with it.
And speaking of sales tax, try paying 25% sales tax instead. 6.5% would be great.
And since I have been without internet for a few days, I'm cranky, so why not show prices including the taxes in the states. It's a bugger adding the tax...
Steve Ballmer is my hero. The fact that the same guy (the great John DiMaggio) played both Ballmer (Pirates of Si Valley) and Bender (Futurama, a.k.a. the best TV series, ever.) should clue you guys in.
First: J2ME. Have you tried coding anything on J2ME? The API is horrible and lacks even the most basic features that you must have for games. Then you have the problem that it runs dog slow on a slow 8-bit platform. And not to speak of the memory usage. You have 64kb of memory and the new operator is constantly run even for the most silly little things. The garbage collection is overtaxed to hell.
So I'd rather use the incredibly much faster mophun (http://www.mophun.com) or if I could, pure assembler or C.
Second: Java is an ill designed language, and there is no need to take my word for it. Learn a few languages well and I am sure that you will see how bad it is.
Third: This is my opinion on the other hand, but platform independance is hell. Smalltalk showed this quite well, and is a way better language than Java ever will be. And if you just have to do it, I'd recommend a C++ + QT combination over Java any day (unless your needs are smaller, then there are a few quite good GUI toolkits out there that is X-platform).
First, I'd want the soundtrack (the actual one, not two songs from the movie + 13 stupid crap groups that someone wants to promote) included with the DVD. Preferably in DTS so it sounds good (DTS beats CD-quality after all). I'm not willing to spend $10-$20 on a soundtrack after all.
Second, why isn't music distributed mainly in a high quality format on DVDs with tons of extra goodies (videos of the recording, bios, make up tips, 10,000 things you didn't know about braindead popstar of choice, etc). With today's horribly mixed, massproduced, music I don't get anything better if I buy a CD than if I download mp3s... Companies who build crap cars die, why shouldn't music companies with crap music do the same?
The biggest problem with languages like Java and C# is the fact that they are built for one system (JavaVM and Windows+CLR) by one company (SUN/MS). A language like C++ on the other hand is built to work on any OS and it does (*NIX, Linux, *BSD, Windows, AOS, etc, etc, etc). On top of that it is not owned by one company, nor is it produced for one company.
C++ and C# are great languages, for what they were built to do. I can't stand Java unfortunatly, because it simply isn't good at all. And on top of this we have many different C++ APIs, one great C# one (.NET) and well, there is a Java API as well;)
So if the open source world actually wants a Java/C# class language, I would suggest finding an open patent (I've never used that one before, and if noone else has, I want to (C), (T), patent, and claim it!;)) language or create one. Then build one good API for it.
There are also languages such as D (technically there seems to be many Ds out there), Obj-C (or does it suffer the same problems? I never got sure of that.), and if the problem allows it there is always Ruby and Python.
He is a businessman, not a preacher. Microsoft isn't big enough to remove software patents or other forms of patents. A lot of companies out there wants them after all. So the solution is then to fight within the system.
Blame the goverment if you want to blame anyone, they have the power and are suppose to serve the people.
More likely they will learn their lesson and patent even more stuff, just in case.
For open source (a.k.a. not getting paid for coding) this means that it will be even harder, since there will be even more patents, and for consumers (i.e. those who pay others for their coding) it means higher costs (legal, fighting patents, protecting patents, filing them...).
The only real winners as I see it is the lawyers. I wish I could patent practising law for only monetary gain (I have the utmost respect for the few lawyers who tries to help people from getting undeservingly shafted), because that business makes the software business look puny in comparison.
I never had less money to spend on stuff like CDs than I have now. Unemployed and with a bad job market. I haven't bought myself a CD in ages now, and it has nothing to do with downloading from the net I'm afraid. I just hate it how they only blame downloads, as if that could be the only thing (screw food, car, heat, and shit like that, people just want to listen to music, right?).
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Maybe I am unique, but this feels like SCO is talking the law into their own hands somewhat, offering up money so that a criminal can be caught (even though it can be seen as harmless, companies loose a lot of money on this kind of crap). Isn't catching criminals up to the goverment? Or is the SCO mindset that they are suppose to run the show, just like they try to run the UNIX show?
Call me crazy, but I just plain don't like SCO.
This opens up the market for special ROMs for phones, just like you hack XBoxs and PS2s, you will be able to get your phone modded in the future to resist this kind of crap.
Putting HD content on todays DVDs means that the masterings will go lower bandwidth or have to break the movies onto two discs.
Going with a format which can store more is preferable in every possible way. And since DVD players are cheap as hell today, a new machine shouldn't be much of a problem either.
DVI should by all means be the best of the supplied connections. I am just sad that they didn't include HDMI (including sound) which would have been the absolutley easiest and best.
Let's be honest, a cheap "do everything" product is not going to have high quality D/A converters for picture nor sound. Then it is much better to make use of D/A converters further down the line. This is why cheap DVD players can't compete with expensive ones when it comes to picture quality, although you do need a good display to see it (14" TV nope, good Panasonic 32", could think so, 50" plasma, jupp, 200" expensive projector, you bet).
I'd be happy to see old horrible legacy connectors die. It is bad enough to get par, ser, PS/2, ISA Bios, PATA, PCI, VGA, gamepad, etc on computers when USB2, Firewire 800, DVI, PCI-express, SATA, etc isn't just a whole lot better, but also cheaper (to make) and easier to use.
What happens when all the knowhow has left the company, and the outsourced workers says "screw the americans", quits, and starts their own company instead?
If the US wants to keep their high-tech knowhow, they better make sure to put a fat tax on US companies who outsource... or they'll die.
Not to mention that if you outsource, who is left to improve your software when the people you outsourced to starts their own company and screws you over? All of a sudden you are forced to buy that bug ridden piece of s**t yourself.
Best bet is either to develop in house, or wave some dollars in front of some GPL hippies who then gladly code what you need (in the case where it doesn't matter if someone else also has the software, i.e. you won't go out of business because of it).
Just don't forget the dot com bubble... I am sure a bunch of the ideas where good (even though many more were moronic), but the business side was just plain never-going-to-work.
I think the trick is to find the right businessminded person who wants to build a company with you, not create enormous amounts of buzz, go IPO, sell the stocks and move on...
I have a very hard time ever getting any work done when I am home, so working from home would more than likely end up with playing games, watching TV, and generally not doing work, at home...
Why oh why can't the banks make it safe/safer? I assume that most people having iNet access + a credit card also has internet banking services, or would be willing to get said services. Then it is a simple matter of following this procedure instead:
1. Go to iNet bank, and get one-time number
2. Go to and buy your stuff with said number
3. Processes your order, and then asks the bank for the money.
4. You enter your iNet bank, and confirm that should get from you.
5. sends the merchandise.
Way harder to screw things up this way, and I am sure that even safer and easier ways can be thought up (and patented unfortunatly). Credit card stealing "hackers" (yuck, what a wrong way to use that beautiful word) should be cought and punished after all.
Breaking systems to make them safer is a far different goal, and something tells me that those hackers are far less of a threat after all.
Either that, or AT&T gets all your votes. Good huh?
If I lived in the states, and used AT&T for anything (Mobile, telephone, i-net access), I'd dump their sorry ass and tell all my family and friends to do likewise...
I assume that AMD at this point in time has no plans for any SPARC CPUs, but I wonder how much AMD could do if they got all Sun's SPARC resources and basically bodged together a next gen SPARC from the Opteron. But something tells me that x86-64 is the way of the future if Sun don't want to slip behind more.
Give me a popup saying "do you want to visit our site and get annoyed by gator, or do you want to not be able to view our site". Take one guess which alternative I would go for 99 times out of a hundered...
What the public wants is not some certain way of doing wireless, they just want it wireless. They don't care as long as:
1. it works
2. all the stuff you buy work together
3. it's easy and troublefree
4. it's cheap
5. it's easy to get hold of products that 2. holds true for
Obviously BT hasn't delivered, but I am sure something will deliver (if nothing else, I'm sure some cheap asian firm will steal something together) and the public will love it.
And I wouldn't mind seeing a lot of products using it, for example remote controls, cordless phones, laptops, washers (flash a message on the TV when the washer is done, would be very nice), stoves, and a bunch of stuff which I never could imagine myself.
As always, the system that you can buy in the stores and that are picked up by huge corporations will win;)
* Stable driver API (if the driver was released at x.y.0, it must work at x.y.999 as well)
* Easy for 3rd parties to supply drivers, both binary and source (so hardware manufacturers can release their own drivers easily and not just for Redhat/SuSE with certain kernels).
* More finetuning. I bet one could finetune the network stack better depending on what kind of speed your network is. Would be nice to have it automatic.
But what happens when all the developers sit in India? When they say good bye to the American (and European) companies and start up their own? More than likely stealing everything they can from the original companies.
The more you outsource, the less you can bring back home...
That the state isn't protecting its people from incidents like this. Being scared shitless of what your company might do to you is no better than being scared shitless of what Stasi or the KGB might do to you if you make any mistake.
Who cares if it is over the counter, over the internet, or by having the neighbours kid go buy it. Just put a tax at the place of purchase (i.e. where the company whom are selling the product does business) and be done with it.
And speaking of sales tax, try paying 25% sales tax instead. 6.5% would be great.
And since I have been without internet for a few days, I'm cranky, so why not show prices including the taxes in the states. It's a bugger adding the tax...
And just a random little tidbit I found. Open Office is DOG slow to start, with KWord isn't.
And this is a good idea, gives people something to try out without having to install and mukk about.
Steve Ballmer is my hero. The fact that the same guy (the great John DiMaggio) played both Ballmer (Pirates of Si Valley) and Bender (Futurama, a.k.a. the best TV series, ever.) should clue you guys in.
First: J2ME. Have you tried coding anything on J2ME? The API is horrible and lacks even the most basic features that you must have for games. Then you have the problem that it runs dog slow on a slow 8-bit platform. And not to speak of the memory usage. You have 64kb of memory and the new operator is constantly run even for the most silly little things. The garbage collection is overtaxed to hell.
So I'd rather use the incredibly much faster mophun (http://www.mophun.com) or if I could, pure assembler or C.
Second: Java is an ill designed language, and there is no need to take my word for it. Learn a few languages well and I am sure that you will see how bad it is.
Third: This is my opinion on the other hand, but platform independance is hell. Smalltalk showed this quite well, and is a way better language than Java ever will be. And if you just have to do it, I'd recommend a C++ + QT combination over Java any day (unless your needs are smaller, then there are a few quite good GUI toolkits out there that is X-platform).
First, I'd want the soundtrack (the actual one, not two songs from the movie + 13 stupid crap groups that someone wants to promote) included with the DVD. Preferably in DTS so it sounds good (DTS beats CD-quality after all). I'm not willing to spend $10-$20 on a soundtrack after all.
Second, why isn't music distributed mainly in a high quality format on DVDs with tons of extra goodies (videos of the recording, bios, make up tips, 10,000 things you didn't know about braindead popstar of choice, etc). With today's horribly mixed, massproduced, music I don't get anything better if I buy a CD than if I download mp3s... Companies who build crap cars die, why shouldn't music companies with crap music do the same?
The biggest problem with languages like Java and C# is the fact that they are built for one system (JavaVM and Windows+CLR) by one company (SUN/MS). A language like C++ on the other hand is built to work on any OS and it does (*NIX, Linux, *BSD, Windows, AOS, etc, etc, etc). On top of that it is not owned by one company, nor is it produced for one company.
C++ and C# are great languages, for what they were built to do. I can't stand Java unfortunatly, because it simply isn't good at all. And on top of this we have many different C++ APIs, one great C# one (.NET) and well, there is a Java API as well;)
So if the open source world actually wants a Java/C# class language, I would suggest finding an open patent (I've never used that one before, and if noone else has, I want to (C), (T), patent, and claim it!;)) language or create one. Then build one good API for it.
There are also languages such as D (technically there seems to be many Ds out there), Obj-C (or does it suffer the same problems? I never got sure of that.), and if the problem allows it there is always Ruby and Python.
He is a businessman, not a preacher. Microsoft isn't big enough to remove software patents or other forms of patents. A lot of companies out there wants them after all. So the solution is then to fight within the system.
Blame the goverment if you want to blame anyone, they have the power and are suppose to serve the people.
More likely they will learn their lesson and patent even more stuff, just in case.
For open source (a.k.a. not getting paid for coding) this means that it will be even harder, since there will be even more patents, and for consumers (i.e. those who pay others for their coding) it means higher costs (legal, fighting patents, protecting patents, filing them...).
The only real winners as I see it is the lawyers. I wish I could patent practising law for only monetary gain (I have the utmost respect for the few lawyers who tries to help people from getting undeservingly shafted), because that business makes the software business look puny in comparison.
I never had less money to spend on stuff like CDs than I have now. Unemployed and with a bad job market. I haven't bought myself a CD in ages now, and it has nothing to do with downloading from the net I'm afraid. I just hate it how they only blame downloads, as if that could be the only thing (screw food, car, heat, and shit like that, people just want to listen to music, right?).