Defective by design! Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!
STOP IT STOP IT It's not that clever! It's a play off of the old saying "Deficient by Design" -- and that referred to UNIX!
Roughly Drafted != News Source
It's the most whiny flame blog on earth- stop punishing slashdot readers with it.
I would agree in saying that Gnome is simply taking on the engineering challenge of paving the road for implementations for a growing standard- whether or not it becomes canon, it will be widely popular due to its use in Microsoft Office. I support gnome in continuing the spirit of open source by choosing engineering solutions and support over choosing sides and making this issue into a soap opera drama.
This will help linux to continue its growth as a viable alternative platform for home users and businesses- as a growing platform it needs to SUPPORT MORE FORMATS instead of trying to throw its limited weight around and "make the rules". This will make it easier on mixed OS environments.
Gnome is the only serious desktop environment for linux anyway. I mean, KDE is sort of *rough*.
And, if single precision is OK, $2400 will get you 900 "gig-flops" worth of PS3s. Agreed. I am very surprised that they're not using PS3's for this task like Iraq used PS2's for guided missiles. They're simply ideal for supercomputing applications and beating embargoes. They're the ultimate DIY supercomputer kit for dictators.
As opposed to hefty upfront costs upgrading hardware and troubleshooting software-related issues on a poorly supported and performing operating system? I thought they were talking about Windows, not linux. It sounds like you're talking about an operating system that's been hacked up by hobbyists and CS undergrads based on 30 year old computing dead end that never really worked right to begin with.
Their security infrastructure did move ahead from XP, so it's the same as when Apple says "Mac OS 9 was a great operating system a few years ago, but (something about Mac OS X)", an operating system that runs *slower* and has *more features*. It's like how Ubuntu 7.10 runs slower and has more features than 7.04. Unfortunately, what's working against them is their robust support cycle for XP. They will not let go of that, even if it chokes their Vista sales.
That is bullshit. The OLPC project includes Squeak, a Smalltalk programming language... You're right. Like Zebu can be programming himself a ham sandwich in no time. Just look at Second Life! Wait... wait.. they need food and clothing before they can enter the global market in white collar professions. They've got a better chance of attracting sweat shops if they can first feed their populace- which is what they need by your model.
This is more of a solution for American schools than African schools. I don't think the kids are craving Wifi so much as food. I think Dvorak is right and you people are no better than missionaries feeding children your inedible religion (linux) instead of teaching them to fish or farm. And no, they can't just look it up on wikipedia- their needs are much more basic than that.
In the case of "second-world" nations that can be wasting their time on such things, maybe we should give them a laptop loaded with more standard Microsoft software so they can train to work tech support. Globalization 101. If these children are working white collar jobs in the future, who will weave your wind socks and witty Think Geek t-shirts for 10 cents an hour? If we educate our workforce, we'll have to sacrifice the retarded consumer culture that allows you to see the OLPC as a viable solution to hunger.
Pirated Windows is a nightmare, Doc Holiday. It's only for masochists. If someone doesn't feel like paying I insist they use linux. Statistically speaking, more people switch to Mac by far. You know, professional software.
Well, yes. I personally admire Apple's approach to the problem- rather than getting involved in Sun's worldwide battle to push a new format on the world that is not fully compatible for conversion, they just silently made TextEdit support ODF and MS-OOXML.
My preduction is that anyone using ODF has to be consciously aware that they're making a decision to do so, so they will download Sun's plugin for MS Office- and OpenOffice will soon support MS-OOXML quite natively, making office formats again a non-issue.
I think the entire war started when they realized MS-OOXML was hard to implement. Microsoft tends to take on these technical hurdles by creating a new format, such as xps (is that is?), where they have control of the technology, and they hold the licenses, and they can just distribute viewers/interpreters/specifications for free rather than getting involved in something like ODF, that moreso depends on OpenOffice features. It would be like accepting a lowest common denominator with their competition if they used ODF primarily. One of the biggest reasons for not supporting MS-OOXML is that its difficulty to implement is hardest on products that rely on weekend warriors to maintain instead of paid developers.
The reality is that new office products should continue to support legacy formats, or face not getting purchased by government and corporate buyers. The idea of converting all the world's documents into another semi-proprietary workstation format is nothing but silly.
That's perhaps the most sensible thing I've ever heard on Slashdot.
You see, I find that most arguments on slashdot about DRM, ODF, Linux v. Windows, etc. just all break down to people not wanting to spend a couple dollars to get something. If you read it with that lens, you will be amazed how little anyone says here is relevant.
Microsoft is a text-book example of a market failure. Nearly every other browser has Internet Explorer boxed off in terms of functionality, security and speed. The only reason it is the world's number one browser is because it comes pre-installed with WIndows. Do you know what market means? What you're describing is a market success- they LEAD the market. You could call it a technical failure, or an engineering failure. Not a market failure.
Why don't you just head over to MSDN, code your webpages for IE specifically and let Mozilla, Apple, and Opera deal with supporting compatibility issues, since they're the ones competing for scraps of the market.
If firefox was the #1 browser- wait, forget that, Opera or Webkit- firefox only loosely follows standards and has numerous quirks of its own-, your argument would be valid. Since IE is #1, it's a chicken/egg debate. The Open source community makes their own standards, then gets pissed when people don't follow them. Use Microsoft's standards- they're just as valid- moreso, even. It's all based on perspective.
How is this any different any linux-based phone? Is Ubuntu GPLv3 licensed? If you're using the GPL in order to enforce the character of the usage based on your own moral compass-- doesn't that make F/OSS way "worse" than Microsoft?
This may be really pwnz0rz on slashdot, but it's probably hurting credibility for businesses that occasionally need to use binaries (see: almost all).
Who says the MPAA's release is even remotely commercial, anyway? It's freely available and just happens to be useful for their insidious purposes. Any money changing hands? No. The MPAA, if it's a corporation, is legally an individual- so they're allowed to create a non-commercial product, the same way Canonical is.
Yeah, for being so pro-open source, slashdot sure is pretty gay for apple. I have a Zune as well, and I love it. It's sturdier and overall just smoother and sweeter than the ipod. The new client is nice, too. It came to a rough start, for sure, but I was thrilled when it went to its 2.x firmware. I'm certainly not going back to the ipod. I'll go with Microsoft's proprietary platform instead of Apple's. How is that any different when you're a linux geek?!
I'm sorry slashdot, but the Zune is just awesome. Deal with it.
I have dropped the zune so many times on hard surfaces, etc- and it's been rock solid. I was especially thrilled when the new Zune's came out and my current one just firmware-upgraded and adapted all the features. I don't know what my warranty looks like on the Zune- That should be a good sign.
Oh yes, and its battery life is very decent. It retains it charge very well in sleep mode, so you can ignore it for days and have full battery.
I'll put it this way- I bought it because I expected that Microsoft would put a lot of work in a product meant to compete with the iPod, and they certainly did. If the Zune had any hardware problems, they'd be all over slashdot.
I haven't had a single problem with Vista. It's never crashed for anything- and upgraded smoothly and painlessly. I've had no application compatibility issues, even with games. Same with the Zune- stellar performance, reliability, and all around great experience.
I am also just one guy, though.
I hear ya, buddy. It's a weird world on slashdot for those of us for whom the seas of technology merely part and allow us safe passage. Maybe we just don't compute "as hard".
The proof seems pretty haphazard. I don't see where he proves that they're not simply using their own zlib-based function. They produce similiar output, right? What proof is that if libarc evokes zlib? Ico came out in 2001, so the chances of them using a really old version of zlib are quite high- development for the game could have started a couple years earlier, possibly with an early devkit, or even an original playstation development environment.
This could be a coincidence easily, considering the names are so standard and dry- they could easily be almost the same function or whomever wrote this blarg simply misinterpreted the assembly and found a coincidence connected to similiar functions.
At very worst, a japanese engineer thought it was an lgpl-based file, since it started with lib and just messed up. who's going to care?
Im Daniel Eran Dilger, and I write about technology, Apple, motorcycles and the place I call home: San Francisco. This is a work in progress. Ive done RoughlyDrafted for a few years, but my site was so much work that it kept me from writing. Im attempted to simplify things using iWeb, but outgrew the both the use of static pages and the bandwidth allowed by Apple when using.Mac. The guy even has a section on his page called the Zoon Awards (inspired by the Zune!). When you look at the site archives, he's mostly just talking about pro-apple, pro-iphone masturbation and occasionally writes intricate hate articles about Microsoft products- namely the Zune. So, more specifically- it's a Zune hate site. So if Microsoft pulls an "Xbox" and starts gaining market share, he's going to respond with fanboy anger. This is what we call a biased opinion, or invalid. If you analyze the consumer market from the one dimensional hate-prism perspective, you're going to be plainly shocked or even cry conspiracy whenever Microsoft makes a good design decision.
This guy needs to keep these things in the comment section and out of the news article section.
oh yes, *written on a mac* but I still know a logical fallacy when I see one.
Roughly Drafted or "RDM" is just an anti-microsoft FUD/hate site- and not a very good one. Maybe while we are treating this like a legitimate news source on market share and consumer product succes, we should also get our racial demographic data from the Ku Klux Klan.
I don't care where you stand on Microsoft, legitimate news sources or experts only please.
I wouldn't be surprised if this article was written by someone at Apple. "Oh my god, the new Christian Evangelist Monthly is in and gay people are STILL going to Hell! Who would've thought??!"
Writers live off of royalties- unless they're on a full time writing staff job, such as those who work in television writing teams, they're completely dependent on royalties to survive. Writing movies would not be a sustainable way to make a living if not for royalties.
So, this has EVERYTHING to do with the WGA strike, because they're striking based on lack of royalties from new media distribution.
Programming is a 9-5 kind of job- writing is not- good movie scripts don't happen just day after day on a mechanical work schedule like code- they spend months working on a piece of work, if not longer, then submit it for a sale price, and rely on royalties from their work thereafter. Scripts only sell for 10's of thousands in most cases. It's the same way novel writers sustain themselves.
These simply aren't salaried positions. The writing market depends on manic depression and torrential bursts of talent!
Payment per copy sold of an infinitely duplicable product isn't a stable way of doing business these days. Notice that writing jobs aren't farmed out to developing companies like programming jobs.
Well, we all know that Windows is the only proprietary operating system. Right?
LOTS of people need general-purpose computers for data-processing, and that need will not be filled by shiny single-purpose gizmos. Things like cell phones and PDA's can do more than one thing- they are simply smaller computers. I believe that the interfaces may not change in the business world(keyboards, monitors), but the systems will. In the consumer world, both will change.
I think of Windows as a desktop operating system- you've got an IT enterprise server view of it- which is simply inapplicable to what it does best, which is run client userland applications. Your description of superior open source applications more or less describes applications that are better at being unix, which windows is not. It's not unix. Microsoft may be trying to pretend it is- but it is not.
Windows can completely waste x11 in performance and usability any day, because x11 was built with network transparency in mind- which is basically useless to most anyone who's not running a remote terminal. Why worry about Windows' 1980's problems when you're wrestling with Linux's problems from the 1970's?
I don't remember my system crashing on account of a program in the last several years with my Windows system- and most people refer to programs crashing when they're talking about a system crash. On linux, my system might not break into an exception handler (or BSOD), but it sure launches out of X and gnome at the drop of a hat. But we should all be doing everything in text mode, right?
Let me lay this out for you-- graphics are important. Everyone uses Linux and Mac because they are completely graphical.
Now, onto my original point: Linux is a terrible embedded OS. It's only application in embedded-space is as a cheap userland layer- this is what I was talking about, not servers. Get your mind out of the server, sir. Linux is a passable server system, and I was not knocking it in that role.
Microsoft is not a contender in the desktop market- they do userspace solutions, at best.
WindRiver dropped VxWorks because linux was cheaper and they couldn't compete with more solid embedded players like Green Hills Software. Linux is crap compared to what companies like GHS, Raytheon, and Boeing are able to hammer out internally- becoming an embedded linux vendor is a sign of failure amongst embedded companies.
Linux-based vendors are just cashing in on their name and more or less giving up on innovation. Linux does not innovate, it equates- at best.
Besides, embedded linux is a myth. You can't run linux on systems with much less than 2-8 mb of RAM, right?
How is the latest version of Ubuntu or OS X not like Vista? The whole lot of them are becoming bloated- and linux is largely suffering from a lack of commercial software support, which they shun.
Open source code works, for the most part, but is extremely shoddy when compared to professional software- although some open source software is professional (like Sun Microsystem's OpenOffice) When is Windows not stable when you're running a pretty much first party run of software? I've found it's usually some weak 3rd party app that crashes me, if ever.
Linux, Vista, and OS X can be run in a more minimal way- with a lot of the junk disabled. They all pretty much suffer from the same crap and crash in the same instances. We can pretend that this is the end-all race in consumer computing, but in all reality the embedded device market is going to kill the classic PC market off within the next generation. It's silly, inefficient, and unnecessary as it stands.
I think the PC market is moving out of the home and shrinking in the business. Why compute on a massive energy wasting box when you can accomplish everything with a terminal-esque(monitor, keyboard, mouse, w/gui) workstation where you dock something resembling a PDA?- Or perhaps you just use google-fied thin clients? How much longer can we hold on to this 1980's-90's technology?
Of course, the danger is piracy getting quicker and more convenient than people simply purchasing goods. Once it's more trouble to buy something than pirate it, you will have a crisis in paid talent.
Like... the WGA strike.
I don't believe in the RIAA's court cases- but I think an open, interoperable DRM could be beneficial to the industry.
And this isn't a sign that the music and movie industries need to "adapt"-- because in all reality you simply can't beat instant downloads of any song or video at no charge. The real war against piracy has come in the form of HD video content- they're trying to create formats where there's too much data involved to be compressed and transferred efficiently.
We don't need lawsuits against mothers and the elderly, we need social stigma against piracy.
I hope my love of middle eastern food doesn't get me deported.
I would be okay with this profiling, if they would be so kind as to simply publish the name of every falafil consumer in the country on a website known only as "The Falafil List". I would like this to come up in every day life. "I'm sorry, you can no longer fly on airplanes anymore because you are on The Falafil List."
Maybe they should make these people wear a band around their arm with a golden pita.
I wonder if they're able to track the purchase of tahini, garbanzo beans, chick peas, and lemons into a could-be hummos? I hope their datamining skills are complete enough to track those terrorists who know how to throw together a quick and delicious party snack.
Java's slow- and its development tools sort of suck. It's like my cell phone is living in the rich media world of the late 90's internet. It's barely crawling forward, as well. When you use Java, you're always trapped in the constraints of Sun's aging JVM. They're only recently adding rich application capabilities, and half the language is deprecated.
C# is more of a marriage between the better points of C++, Java, Delphi, and Smalltalk- it's gaining popularity with good cause- even in Mono- it's not just.NET.
Slashdot Mirror
Download a new one.
Defective by design! Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!Defective by design!
STOP IT STOP IT It's not that clever! It's a play off of the old saying "Deficient by Design" -- and that referred to UNIX!
Roughly Drafted != News Source
It's the most whiny flame blog on earth- stop punishing slashdot readers with it.
I would agree in saying that Gnome is simply taking on the engineering challenge of paving the road for implementations for a growing standard- whether or not it becomes canon, it will be widely popular due to its use in Microsoft Office. I support gnome in continuing the spirit of open source by choosing engineering solutions and support over choosing sides and making this issue into a soap opera drama.
This will help linux to continue its growth as a viable alternative platform for home users and businesses- as a growing platform it needs to SUPPORT MORE FORMATS instead of trying to throw its limited weight around and "make the rules". This will make it easier on mixed OS environments.
Gnome is the only serious desktop environment for linux anyway. I mean, KDE is sort of *rough*.
If I was Iran, I'd have used PS3's'all I'm sayin'
Their security infrastructure did move ahead from XP, so it's the same as when Apple says "Mac OS 9 was a great operating system a few years ago, but (something about Mac OS X)", an operating system that runs *slower* and has *more features*. It's like how Ubuntu 7.10 runs slower and has more features than 7.04. Unfortunately, what's working against them is their robust support cycle for XP. They will not let go of that, even if it chokes their Vista sales.
This is more of a solution for American schools than African schools. I don't think the kids are craving Wifi so much as food. I think Dvorak is right and you people are no better than missionaries feeding children your inedible religion (linux) instead of teaching them to fish or farm. And no, they can't just look it up on wikipedia- their needs are much more basic than that.
Here's a wikipedia article that can educate YOU:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_Hierarchy
HINT: They live somewhere on the bottom.
In the case of "second-world" nations that can be wasting their time on such things, maybe we should give them a laptop loaded with more standard Microsoft software so they can train to work tech support. Globalization 101. If these children are working white collar jobs in the future, who will weave your wind socks and witty Think Geek t-shirts for 10 cents an hour? If we educate our workforce, we'll have to sacrifice the retarded consumer culture that allows you to see the OLPC as a viable solution to hunger.
Pirated Windows is a nightmare, Doc Holiday. It's only for masochists. If someone doesn't feel like paying I insist they use linux. Statistically speaking, more people switch to Mac by far. You know, professional software.
Well, yes. I personally admire Apple's approach to the problem- rather than getting involved in Sun's worldwide battle to push a new format on the world that is not fully compatible for conversion, they just silently made TextEdit support ODF and MS-OOXML.
My preduction is that anyone using ODF has to be consciously aware that they're making a decision to do so, so they will download Sun's plugin for MS Office- and OpenOffice will soon support MS-OOXML quite natively, making office formats again a non-issue.
I think the entire war started when they realized MS-OOXML was hard to implement. Microsoft tends to take on these technical hurdles by creating a new format, such as xps (is that is?), where they have control of the technology, and they hold the licenses, and they can just distribute viewers/interpreters/specifications for free rather than getting involved in something like ODF, that moreso depends on OpenOffice features. It would be like accepting a lowest common denominator with their competition if they used ODF primarily. One of the biggest reasons for not supporting MS-OOXML is that its difficulty to implement is hardest on products that rely on weekend warriors to maintain instead of paid developers.
The reality is that new office products should continue to support legacy formats, or face not getting purchased by government and corporate buyers. The idea of converting all the world's documents into another semi-proprietary workstation format is nothing but silly.
I miss paper.
That's perhaps the most sensible thing I've ever heard on Slashdot.
You see, I find that most arguments on slashdot about DRM, ODF, Linux v. Windows, etc. just all break down to people not wanting to spend a couple dollars to get something. If you read it with that lens, you will be amazed how little anyone says here is relevant.
Why don't you just head over to MSDN, code your webpages for IE specifically and let Mozilla, Apple, and Opera deal with supporting compatibility issues, since they're the ones competing for scraps of the market.
If firefox was the #1 browser- wait, forget that, Opera or Webkit- firefox only loosely follows standards and has numerous quirks of its own-, your argument would be valid. Since IE is #1, it's a chicken/egg debate. The Open source community makes their own standards, then gets pissed when people don't follow them. Use Microsoft's standards- they're just as valid- moreso, even. It's all based on perspective.
How is this any different any linux-based phone? Is Ubuntu GPLv3 licensed? If you're using the GPL in order to enforce the character of the usage based on your own moral compass-- doesn't that make F/OSS way "worse" than Microsoft?
This may be really pwnz0rz on slashdot, but it's probably hurting credibility for businesses that occasionally need to use binaries (see: almost all).
Who says the MPAA's release is even remotely commercial, anyway? It's freely available and just happens to be useful for their insidious purposes. Any money changing hands? No. The MPAA, if it's a corporation, is legally an individual- so they're allowed to create a non-commercial product, the same way Canonical is.
Does this make Freespire illegal?
Did anyone try requesting the source code?
Yeah, for being so pro-open source, slashdot sure is pretty gay for apple. I have a Zune as well, and I love it. It's sturdier and overall just smoother and sweeter than the ipod. The new client is nice, too. It came to a rough start, for sure, but I was thrilled when it went to its 2.x firmware. I'm certainly not going back to the ipod. I'll go with Microsoft's proprietary platform instead of Apple's. How is that any different when you're a linux geek?!
I'm sorry slashdot, but the Zune is just awesome. Deal with it.
I have dropped the zune so many times on hard surfaces, etc- and it's been rock solid. I was especially thrilled when the new Zune's came out and my current one just firmware-upgraded and adapted all the features. I don't know what my warranty looks like on the Zune- That should be a good sign.
Oh yes, and its battery life is very decent. It retains it charge very well in sleep mode, so you can ignore it for days and have full battery.
I'll put it this way- I bought it because I expected that Microsoft would put a lot of work in a product meant to compete with the iPod, and they certainly did. If the Zune had any hardware problems, they'd be all over slashdot.
I haven't had a single problem with Vista. It's never crashed for anything- and upgraded smoothly and painlessly. I've had no application compatibility issues, even with games. Same with the Zune- stellar performance, reliability, and all around great experience.
I am also just one guy, though.
I hear ya, buddy. It's a weird world on slashdot for those of us for whom the seas of technology merely part and allow us safe passage. Maybe we just don't compute "as hard".
The proof seems pretty haphazard. I don't see where he proves that they're not simply using their own zlib-based function. They produce similiar output, right? What proof is that if libarc evokes zlib? Ico came out in 2001, so the chances of them using a really old version of zlib are quite high- development for the game could have started a couple years earlier, possibly with an early devkit, or even an original playstation development environment.
This could be a coincidence easily, considering the names are so standard and dry- they could easily be almost the same function or whomever wrote this blarg simply misinterpreted the assembly and found a coincidence connected to similiar functions.
At very worst, a japanese engineer thought it was an lgpl-based file, since it started with lib and just messed up. who's going to care?
Where's the beef? Am I missing something?
This guy needs to keep these things in the comment section and out of the news article section.
oh yes, *written on a mac* but I still know a logical fallacy when I see one.
Roughly Drafted or "RDM" is just an anti-microsoft FUD/hate site- and not a very good one. Maybe while we are treating this like a legitimate news source on market share and consumer product succes, we should also get our racial demographic data from the Ku Klux Klan.
I don't care where you stand on Microsoft, legitimate news sources or experts only please.
I wouldn't be surprised if this article was written by someone at Apple. "Oh my god, the new Christian Evangelist Monthly is in and gay people are STILL going to Hell! Who would've thought??!"
I think the AMPTP would love your approach.
This covers it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI3Ek8N1VsM
Writers live off of royalties- unless they're on a full time writing staff job, such as those who work in television writing teams, they're completely dependent on royalties to survive. Writing movies would not be a sustainable way to make a living if not for royalties.
So, this has EVERYTHING to do with the WGA strike, because they're striking based on lack of royalties from new media distribution.
Programming is a 9-5 kind of job- writing is not- good movie scripts don't happen just day after day on a mechanical work schedule like code- they spend months working on a piece of work, if not longer, then submit it for a sale price, and rely on royalties from their work thereafter. Scripts only sell for 10's of thousands in most cases. It's the same way novel writers sustain themselves.
These simply aren't salaried positions. The writing market depends on manic depression and torrential bursts of talent! Payment per copy sold of an infinitely duplicable product isn't a stable way of doing business these days. Notice that writing jobs aren't farmed out to developing companies like programming jobs.
I think of Windows as a desktop operating system- you've got an IT enterprise server view of it- which is simply inapplicable to what it does best, which is run client userland applications. Your description of superior open source applications more or less describes applications that are better at being unix, which windows is not. It's not unix. Microsoft may be trying to pretend it is- but it is not.
Windows can completely waste x11 in performance and usability any day, because x11 was built with network transparency in mind- which is basically useless to most anyone who's not running a remote terminal. Why worry about Windows' 1980's problems when you're wrestling with Linux's problems from the 1970's?
I don't remember my system crashing on account of a program in the last several years with my Windows system- and most people refer to programs crashing when they're talking about a system crash. On linux, my system might not break into an exception handler (or BSOD), but it sure launches out of X and gnome at the drop of a hat. But we should all be doing everything in text mode, right?
Let me lay this out for you-- graphics are important. Everyone uses Linux and Mac because they are completely graphical.
Now, onto my original point: Linux is a terrible embedded OS. It's only application in embedded-space is as a cheap userland layer- this is what I was talking about, not servers. Get your mind out of the server, sir. Linux is a passable server system, and I was not knocking it in that role.
I was implying in the desktop market.
Microsoft is not a contender in the desktop market- they do userspace solutions, at best.
WindRiver dropped VxWorks because linux was cheaper and they couldn't compete with more solid embedded players like Green Hills Software. Linux is crap compared to what companies like GHS, Raytheon, and Boeing are able to hammer out internally- becoming an embedded linux vendor is a sign of failure amongst embedded companies.
Linux-based vendors are just cashing in on their name and more or less giving up on innovation. Linux does not innovate, it equates- at best.
Besides, embedded linux is a myth. You can't run linux on systems with much less than 2-8 mb of RAM, right?
How is the latest version of Ubuntu or OS X not like Vista? The whole lot of them are becoming bloated- and linux is largely suffering from a lack of commercial software support, which they shun.
Open source code works, for the most part, but is extremely shoddy when compared to professional software- although some open source software is professional (like Sun Microsystem's OpenOffice) When is Windows not stable when you're running a pretty much first party run of software? I've found it's usually some weak 3rd party app that crashes me, if ever.
Linux, Vista, and OS X can be run in a more minimal way- with a lot of the junk disabled. They all pretty much suffer from the same crap and crash in the same instances. We can pretend that this is the end-all race in consumer computing, but in all reality the embedded device market is going to kill the classic PC market off within the next generation. It's silly, inefficient, and unnecessary as it stands.
I think the PC market is moving out of the home and shrinking in the business. Why compute on a massive energy wasting box when you can accomplish everything with a terminal-esque(monitor, keyboard, mouse, w/gui) workstation where you dock something resembling a PDA?- Or perhaps you just use google-fied thin clients? How much longer can we hold on to this 1980's-90's technology?
Of course, the danger is piracy getting quicker and more convenient than people simply purchasing goods. Once it's more trouble to buy something than pirate it, you will have a crisis in paid talent.
Like... the WGA strike.
I don't believe in the RIAA's court cases- but I think an open, interoperable DRM could be beneficial to the industry.
And this isn't a sign that the music and movie industries need to "adapt"-- because in all reality you simply can't beat instant downloads of any song or video at no charge. The real war against piracy has come in the form of HD video content- they're trying to create formats where there's too much data involved to be compressed and transferred efficiently.
We don't need lawsuits against mothers and the elderly, we need social stigma against piracy.
I hope my love of middle eastern food doesn't get me deported.
I would be okay with this profiling, if they would be so kind as to simply publish the name of every falafil consumer in the country on a website known only as "The Falafil List". I would like this to come up in every day life. "I'm sorry, you can no longer fly on airplanes anymore because you are on The Falafil List."
Maybe they should make these people wear a band around their arm with a golden pita.
I wonder if they're able to track the purchase of tahini, garbanzo beans, chick peas, and lemons into a could-be hummos? I hope their datamining skills are complete enough to track those terrorists who know how to throw together a quick and delicious party snack.
Java's slow- and its development tools sort of suck. It's like my cell phone is living in the rich media world of the late 90's internet. It's barely crawling forward, as well. When you use Java, you're always trapped in the constraints of Sun's aging JVM. They're only recently adding rich application capabilities, and half the language is deprecated.
.NET.
C# is more of a marriage between the better points of C++, Java, Delphi, and Smalltalk- it's gaining popularity with good cause- even in Mono- it's not just