this may only be viewed on computers whose operating system conforms with the Free Software Foundation licenses.
the intellectual property embodied in the submission may be used freely by Microsoft if only if images of Bill Gates and the image formerly displayed at www.goatse.cx are displayed side by side in a prominent place.
Microsoft agrees to make all specifications of Office formats available to the public free of charge in usable form in perpetuity. Final determination of usability to be made by Linus Torvalds or any successor designated by him.
Microsoft agrees that these terms override any terms of any "click-through" EULAs accompanying this submission.
Teaching children GNU/Linux and other free software exclusively will merely limit their employment opportunities.
Right.
It'll lock kids out of the business world because kids who can point and click around an Open Office GUI won't have a clue when they're faced with a Microsoft Office GUI.
It'll lock kids who want go into CS out of these programs, because there aren't any colleges where CS classes are taught around Linux.
It'll lock kids out of IT in the business and enterprise world because the use of Windows servers is universal.
And any kids who find themselves going from a Linux environment to an all-OSX (as in Unix) shop will sit with blank, traumatized looks with tears rolling down their faces because they won't have a clue as to what to do with a Mac GUI.
I don't blame you for not signing your post, I wouldn't want to have my own name attached to anything that stupid, either.
If I had a few thousand workstation seats, some reason for wanting to stay in Windows, and were negotiating with an MS sales rep, I'd simply have a box of Red Hat Enterprise and of SUSE sitting on my desk where it couldn't be missed and let the sales rep bring up discounts.
Afraid to upset MS? What have they got against saving money? Sounds like some people in education need to get their asses fired.
While at 4 layer, CAD/CAM can be assumed for PCB fab only in the 1980s, probably running on a Compuvision or Racal-Vadic system (I was fixing them, I didn't wind up in engineering until years later), we were making systems by the handful (68000-based dedicated SBCs for voice processing), our assembly vendor was a prototype shop somewhere else in Silicon Valley.
I never heard of Third World offshoring until a different employer years later asked me to do an analysis of the idea and whether or not it was practical for them to do so.
My answer was NO... not with automated assembly plants within easy driving distance.
try that "smoke grenade" on a multilayer printed circuit board.
Way the hell back when multilayer PC boards were so expensive that technicians had to fix them instead of tossing them (1980s), an human PCB assembler put one in backwards and it exploded on first powerup. I suppose I should count myself lucky that it only destroyed about a square inch of printed circuit board.
Had to rewire all the burned traces by hand over a couple or 3 unpleasant hours.
start a new account, and mention your position at whichever PR agency or scientific publisher you are currently astroturfing for in your sig.
You've obviously got an axe to grind, and it obviously isn't in favor of public access to publically funded research.
Tell us who you're working for and your part in the process of producing scientific journals, and your explaining what your company's value-add to the process is might actually be worthy of discussion.
It just means that you (or your university, company etc.) need to contribute a small amount to part of the scientific process in order to access it.
You obviously have either never priced the "small" contribution required to get to some of these scientific journal or get free access as one of the perks of your job at Elsevier or PR agencies you're astroturfing for on the company payroll.
The research covered in these pay-for-play journals is by and large, publically funded. Why should we have to pay a second time for access to the results?
Somebody might come up with a mobile solution that integrates "best of breed" functionality from a phone, PDA, digicam, and music player. It does sound like an interesting challenge, doesn't it? Perhaps Apple's hardware h4xx0rs might agree with me.
However, if I were Gates, I wouldn't exactly want to bet that it'll be running any kind of MS OS, embedded or otherwise.
Sure, convergence can be convenient and the above product done right would be more than the sum of its parts.
However, the bottom line function for a mobile is that it damned well works as a phone ALL the time.
If you want to your ability to recieve make emergency phone calls on any Microsoft OS, "Want to buy some land?".
If that's not the word you meant to use, it should have been.
My use of "piratize" was the most deliberate word choice I've made since I joined slashdot.
Either way, it's a joke I'm going to steal.
Feel free. I stole "piratize", too.
I also was not joking.
The Brits tried what the Bushmen are pushing under Thatcher, and are now trying to bail out their failed old-age pension system. The UK is now discussing replace their private system with a US-style Social Security.
their CD pressing plants if this isn't all outsourced.
Their management adds negative value.
Unfortunately, Steve Jobs had a chance to buy Universal and turn access to their catalogue into a profit center for Apple by running it like a real business and instead, chose to reinforce the RIAA business model by paying them by the track and cross-subsidizing iTunes with iPod sales, increasing the market cap of all the RIAA labels in the process.
What was he thinking? I think it was a short-sighted decision to make the price of profitable entry to the "sell by the track" market unviable for anyone not already in the music hardware business.
Sony hasn't been able to take advantage of this because their in-house RIAA label has been pushing "screw the user" DRM into their music hardware... that's why their interesting minidisc format was essentially DOA.
Sooner or later, I think some hardware company will bite the bullet, buy a record label, and bundle 50-100 free tracks from their own catalogue with an iPod killer with a comparable UI and better bells and whistles than the iPod. That'll also have a negative effect on the value of digital tracks from major labels as a whole. There are plenty of other possibilities for an consumer technology company that's decided to do its own thing in the music market.
Apple had better have something new and better at that point if Steve Jobs wants to continue looking like a genius instead of a goat.
The article is Business Week's attempt to explain why Bush and the GOP's polling numbers drop into the toilet even further every time they try to push piratizing Social Security.
What the major non-US holders of US currencies have in common is that they're trying to unwind their dollar holdings, moving into Euros and other currencies.
That's one reason why the EU and other world currencies are appreciating against the dollar.
If you'd like to tell the Indians and the Chinese and the Middle East oil producers that they're wrong, go ahead.
If your responses include "tinfoil hat", don't assume this is a translation error.
to disagree with this is to assert that the strategic interests of China and India will always be identical to that of the USA.
Even assuming that we actually put into production renewable energy systems that mean that we aren't competing with them on the oil market anymore, they aren't going to be and they really aren't supposed to be.
11 cents isn't so bad, considering that the alternative is to build a site, set up for pay-per-download and a third-party credit card merchant account and eat any chargebacks due to consumers deciding that after delivery, they'd rather not pay and, after doing all that, you still don't have access to the Apple iTunes system for delivering music into iPods and their search setup for getting customers to find your music to be able to buy it.
And how much is DIY going to cost up-front? How much more if one has to pay somebody else to set it up? And... if nobody buys, the musician gets to eat the business loss.
Also, this is money a musician doesn't have to work for over and above uploading the track. No inventory hassles, no worries about bandwidth.
11 cents is also comparable to the 25 cent/album royalties which a band can expect for it's label.
I tell musicians to pick up on this via http://www.cdbaby.net/dd?f=1, they handle CD and digital distribution for musicians. IIRC, iTunes doesn't deal direct with non-RIAA labels.
BTW, CDBaby's numbers don't match yours, they's suggesting a musician is more likely to clear around 50 cents/track sale.
Does Yahoo have the cash or sufficient stock value to swap to buy a major RIAA label? (Not a rhetorical question, I actually don't know, haven't had occasion to look.)
Reducing the value of a college degree in a specific discipline by reducing entry-level salaries and/or exporting entry-level CS gigs is a wonderful way to persuade kids smart enough to get them to look for a different degree.
That's what's going on, and that's why Bill Gates and others are screaming that "kids are deciding computer science and math and technology are too hard."
Sure, man. And then, the price will rise high because of high demand and lack of parts.
They should forbid the exportation of the device for an initial amount of time, to avoid this. The other solution is not to forbid, and at the beggining the price will be so high that nobody in India would be able to afford it, but eventually it would drop to a reasonable price...
Doesn't work that way. There might be an initial price spike, but once the supply chain problems get worked out (remember, the vendors WANT to sell people lots of identical parts), the cost of parts drops way down (price hardware components in 1M vs thousands to see why), the manufacturing process may drop in per-unit cost (end-to-end hard automation), and then, the profit margins go up and/or everybody gets lower prices.
we need tens of dollars a pound for shipping freight to orbit, not thousands or even hundreds. What's the price point where we can start putting semiconductor growing facilities in orbit cost-effectively? I think silicon wafers the size of basketballs might do some interesting things to semiconductor pricing.
Rockets aren't good enough.
That leaves rail/coilguns, JP Aerospace (BTW, I've heard there are other blimp-to-orbit projects), and the Space Elevator.
a one shot expenditure of resources to make solar cells vs how many gigatons of CO2 will be dumped into the atmosphere by the "clean coal" burning electric plants you would prefer to see built?
The size of the launcher becomes a lot more workable that way.
While it's a ride an astronaut wouldn't be happy about taking, most items we'd want to put into orbit can either handle the trip or can be disassembled into chunks that can.
Slashdot Mirror
- this may only be viewed on computers whose operating system conforms with the Free Software Foundation licenses.
- the intellectual property embodied in the submission may be used freely by Microsoft if only if images of Bill Gates and the image formerly displayed at www.goatse.cx are displayed side by side in a prominent place.
- Microsoft agrees to make all specifications of Office formats available to the public free of charge in usable form in perpetuity. Final determination of usability to be made by Linus Torvalds or any successor designated by him.
- Microsoft agrees that these terms override any terms of any "click-through" EULAs accompanying this submission.
Seems fair enough to me.Regardless of politics, this post is just plain incorrect in a number of areas.
I went to a good deal of trouble to write it that way. The mods got it right when it was modded as funny.
What?! Are you kidding me?
Yep. Though I was hoping that the Microtroll was the one who'd fall for it.
But in reality, unless you are using some weird-ass window manager, all GUIs are pretty much the same.
And that was the substantive point my post was intended to make.
Was it you that decided to blow off a company with only a few thousand workstation seats? or
Right.
It'll lock kids out of the business world because kids who can point and click around an Open Office GUI won't have a clue when they're faced with a Microsoft Office GUI.
It'll lock kids who want go into CS out of these programs, because there aren't any colleges where CS classes are taught around Linux.
It'll lock kids out of IT in the business and enterprise world because the use of Windows servers is universal.
And any kids who find themselves going from a Linux environment to an all-OSX (as in Unix) shop will sit with blank, traumatized looks with tears rolling down their faces because they won't have a clue as to what to do with a Mac GUI.
I don't blame you for not signing your post, I wouldn't want to have my own name attached to anything that stupid, either.
Afraid to upset MS? What have they got against saving money? Sounds like some people in education need to get their asses fired.
Though if I were the "MS" AC, I'd want that order in writing.
I never heard of Third World offshoring until a different employer years later asked me to do an analysis of the idea and whether or not it was practical for them to do so.
My answer was NO... not with automated assembly plants within easy driving distance.
Way the hell back when multilayer PC boards were so expensive that technicians had to fix them instead of tossing them (1980s), an human PCB assembler put one in backwards and it exploded on first powerup. I suppose I should count myself lucky that it only destroyed about a square inch of printed circuit board.
Had to rewire all the burned traces by hand over a couple or 3 unpleasant hours.
what does this do for the rest of us?
You've obviously got an axe to grind, and it obviously isn't in favor of public access to publically funded research.
Tell us who you're working for and your part in the process of producing scientific journals, and your explaining what your company's value-add to the process is might actually be worthy of discussion.
You obviously have either never priced the "small" contribution required to get to some of these scientific journal or get free access as one of the perks of your job at Elsevier or PR agencies you're astroturfing for on the company payroll.
The research covered in these pay-for-play journals is by and large, publically funded. Why should we have to pay a second time for access to the results?
However, if I were Gates, I wouldn't exactly want to bet that it'll be running any kind of MS OS, embedded or otherwise.
Sure, convergence can be convenient and the above product done right would be more than the sum of its parts.
However, the bottom line function for a mobile is that it damned well works as a phone ALL the time.
If you want to your ability to recieve make emergency phone calls on any Microsoft OS, "Want to buy some land?".
But I think it's a bug, not a feature. Haven't you ever tried opening a Windows program and had the screen go black or the computer reboot?
I think even the average user takes this as a "something is REALLY wrong" hint.
My use of "piratize" was the most deliberate word choice I've made since I joined slashdot.
Either way, it's a joke I'm going to steal.
Feel free. I stole "piratize", too.
I also was not joking.
The Brits tried what the Bushmen are pushing under Thatcher, and are now trying to bail out their failed old-age pension system. The UK is now discussing replace their private system with a US-style Social Security.
- their catalogues
- current artist contracts
- distribution networks (which are IMO, obsolete)
- their better producers and technical people
- their CD pressing plants if this isn't all outsourced.
Their management adds negative value.Unfortunately, Steve Jobs had a chance to buy Universal and turn access to their catalogue into a profit center for Apple by running it like a real business and instead, chose to reinforce the RIAA business model by paying them by the track and cross-subsidizing iTunes with iPod sales, increasing the market cap of all the RIAA labels in the process.
What was he thinking? I think it was a short-sighted decision to make the price of profitable entry to the "sell by the track" market unviable for anyone not already in the music hardware business.
Sony hasn't been able to take advantage of this because their in-house RIAA label has been pushing "screw the user" DRM into their music hardware... that's why their interesting minidisc format was essentially DOA.
Sooner or later, I think some hardware company will bite the bullet, buy a record label, and bundle 50-100 free tracks from their own catalogue with an iPod killer with a comparable UI and better bells and whistles than the iPod. That'll also have a negative effect on the value of digital tracks from major labels as a whole. There are plenty of other possibilities for an consumer technology company that's decided to do its own thing in the music market.
Apple had better have something new and better at that point if Steve Jobs wants to continue looking like a genius instead of a goat.
The article is Business Week's attempt to explain why Bush and the GOP's polling numbers drop into the toilet even further every time they try to push piratizing Social Security.
That's one reason why the EU and other world currencies are appreciating against the dollar.
If you'd like to tell the Indians and the Chinese and the Middle East oil producers that they're wrong, go ahead.
If your responses include "tinfoil hat", don't assume this is a translation error.
Even assuming that we actually put into production renewable energy systems that mean that we aren't competing with them on the oil market anymore, they aren't going to be and they really aren't supposed to be.
And how much is DIY going to cost up-front? How much more if one has to pay somebody else to set it up? And ... if nobody buys, the musician gets to eat the business loss.
Also, this is money a musician doesn't have to work for over and above uploading the track. No inventory hassles, no worries about bandwidth.
11 cents is also comparable to the 25 cent/album royalties which a band can expect for it's label.
I tell musicians to pick up on this via http://www.cdbaby.net/dd?f=1, they handle CD and digital distribution for musicians. IIRC, iTunes doesn't deal direct with non-RIAA labels.
BTW, CDBaby's numbers don't match yours, they's suggesting a musician is more likely to clear around 50 cents/track sale.
Does Yahoo have the cash or sufficient stock value to swap to buy a major RIAA label? (Not a rhetorical question, I actually don't know, haven't had occasion to look.)
That's what's going on, and that's why Bill Gates and others are screaming that "kids are deciding computer science and math and technology are too hard."
They should forbid the exportation of the device for an initial amount of time, to avoid this. The other solution is not to forbid, and at the beggining the price will be so high that nobody in India would be able to afford it, but eventually it would drop to a reasonable price... Doesn't work that way. There might be an initial price spike, but once the supply chain problems get worked out (remember, the vendors WANT to sell people lots of identical parts), the cost of parts drops way down (price hardware components in 1M vs thousands to see why), the manufacturing process may drop in per-unit cost (end-to-end hard automation), and then, the profit margins go up and/or everybody gets lower prices.
Rockets aren't good enough.
That leaves rail/coilguns, JP Aerospace (BTW, I've heard there are other blimp-to-orbit projects), and the Space Elevator.
a one shot expenditure of resources to make solar cells vs how many gigatons of CO2 will be dumped into the atmosphere by the "clean coal" burning electric plants you would prefer to see built?
While it's a ride an astronaut wouldn't be happy about taking, most items we'd want to put into orbit can either handle the trip or can be disassembled into chunks that can.