How many of you really watch movies on your computer? Maybe I am weird, but I would much rather have the comfort of my couch.
Answer:
I don't watch movies on my computer. I have a DVD player for my Computer that came pre-loaded with Win 98. (I am in the process of setting up Linux on my P75, because I can.) Thus, I could watch them if I wanted to.
In fact, I would never have done anything to aid the DeCSS distribution if the big stink had not been made. I buy movies from vendors, or make video cassette copies in accordance to my legal right to review something in order to determine whether I will buy it. I have no interest in pirating much of anything. I might borrow a copy of software from a friend of mine who has an excessive amount of games, but I return it to him. I fit mostly into the category of people that the DVD industry likes.
I am involved, because this industry is threatening my rights. I have a right to find out information about a pseudo-illegal activity. I have a right to determine for myself whether something is wrong. Had I been in Berlin in 1939, I would have had a right to have Jewish friends just like I have Jewish friends in 1999 America. I strongly object when the Nazi's or the DVD association try to take those rights from people.
The allegations against linking are dangerous and I will not permit them. I agree that people have the right to watch DVD movies on Linux, but I would not take a stand on that issue. When companies start using brute force tactics to curtail my rights, I look at history and see that it is a bad thing. That is why I care.
Personally, if I get a prescription for medicine, I assume my doctor wants me on it as soon as possible.... I'll pay a few extra bucks to get it filled in the store in about 15 minutes.
Not necessarily. Most people who get one set of prescriptions and are done are as likely to just go to the drug store and get it done with, right? What about the people on the long term plan?
My cubicle-mate is on blood pressure medication. He has to take this stuff every day and has been taking it for years. If he can just get it delivered to his house every month a few days before he runs out of medicine, that makes a lot of sense for him, doesn't it? There are other examples, but the online drug stores are very convienent for people who have to take madication for a long time.
Online pharmacies also save a few bucks, so you KNOW what HMO's think about saving money... This could mean that an HMO who didn't do their research could be sending all their clients to that cheap guy who just packs whatever is handy into the little bottle. Government regulations allow those insurance companies to cut another corner without putting Joe-consumer at risk... as much.
They also gave the show a pretty good review, and I must admit I am looking forward to seeing it. This review gives away a little more plot and character information, so beware!
The point of this is that while Washington may be mythologized, he really does have some pretty important accomplishments to his name. Hope this didn't get too far off-topic, but I thought it was worth mentioning since you were comparing Washington and Linus.
I agree with you.
Washington did some very important things for the American Revolution, but I was trying to illustrate that the public faith in him outstripped his actual accomplishments. Similarly, Linus is often credited as if he is solely responsible for everything that Linux has become.
Important figures they both are/were, but their actions did not correlate with the full degree of respect and credit they are given. This is why they are cultural icons. Their great actions inspired further actions that led to a great result. Culturally, they are often creditied with all the results of people who followed their examples. This is also true of Ghandi, Einstein, even Hitler, and countless others, good and bad.
Well, I really had never heard of BSD to any great degree until after I had finished my undergrad degree in computer science. Linux was a topic of discussion amongst undergrads in the first and second years of college.
As self-fufilling prophecies go, this is another one. BSD continues to be less known, because it is less known. Over half of those same college undergrads I knew in computer science and engineering got hands on experience with Linux before they graduated, myself included.
BSD continued to languish in the realms of unknown software.
Many of the undergrads went out into the work force and are now doing jobs where they can at least provide knowledgable input about Linux. Many of them went to find jobs specifically where they could work on Linux systems. There was no similarly large pool of individuals who knew BSD amongst the dozens of fellow students I knew, including the systems operators (I was one) for our UNIX systems, or much in the faculty. Perhaps a few people seemed knowledgable about BSD, but they didn't talk about it much, because people knew more about and were already interested in Linux.
For the most part, colleges provide the ground where our next generations of individuals in the computer industry learn UNIX-based OS's and determine what technologies they will bring to their initial workplaces. If BSD is as absent from most colleges as it was from mine, BSD won't catch on, because many of the people who would use it will not know about it.
If you were to poll the media, I'd say that a good number of them will have heard of Linux, and that the vast majority will have never heard of the GPL.
You are right. When I was writing my comment, I was doing something of a mad lib. People outside of the open source community tend to use the words GPL, Linux, free software movement, and open source VERY interchangably, when they know more than one of the words. I know this, because I spent a while at the outermost fringes of vague knowledge myself. I would still consider myself as a semi-knowledgable observer of the open source community more than a member of it.
I simply used that random lack of knowledge in my comment to place terms where one of these buzzwords would go. I apologize for not making this clear in my original comment. I like to write comments that point out the perspective of those who are less knowledgable than the average/.er, and sometimes forget to document what I am doing.
And for the GPL, the media has selected Linus Torvalds. There are people who have only the vaguest idea of what that free software thingy is, but they have heard of Linus Torvalds to one degree or another. As/. discussion on the TIME POTC pointed out, it is not always the most talented or brilliant who becomes the icon for an ideal, but the one percieved to start things and is known to the people.
Another example of this in American history is General George Washington. He hardly ever won a battle in our Revolutionary War, but was hailed a great leader of men and was pretty much offered the position of King of the United States of America, if he wanted it. (He didn't.) It doesn't matter too much what he did and didn't do, because he was a cultural icon. He symbolized a great freedom in the minds of the residents of a struggling group of colonies, and later in a young nation. Einstien also falls into the category of cultural icons for the twentieth century.
Linus is stepping into the same role (on a smaller scale for now) in the concept of open source. People outside the open source community see him and say, "Oh, that's the guy who wrote Linux. He represents that free software movement." Whether it is good or bad, this is the path that I see before us.
Yep, IBM started that... The whole idea, back when IBM was a monopoly, was that companies would not resort to trivial lawsuits, as IBM had pretty much patented most of the core components of all computers. If you don't hassle me about this, I won't drag you into court for using all this technology I patented.
As m. o said, The real problem started when people began to use the patents in court. So long as the understanding is there and everyone knows not to call the bluffs, work gets done and everyone is at least doing something. When the bluffs start getting called, work grinds to a halt as the legal departments have to wade through all the work different groups were doing. The researchers can't get work done, the products may not be able to be sold, and the engineers are just supposed to fix a problem that is so far out of the specifications of what they are doing that it just isn't even funny. After both companies do this, one has to pay damages and the costs are simply phohibitive. The almost universal answer was to quickly write up an out-of-court agreement as to how things would work. These usually included a price for which the non-patent-holder would purchase the rights to use the patented idea for $X amount. The contract would then stay in effect for Y years. Usually, it was a trade off. Both sides had something patented and the other side got to use the patent that they stole.
Engineers and such had nightmares about patent stuff actually going to court. It was simply understood that you don't do that unless no other options are available. The only case where the threat was not a bluff was where the patent holder was some huge company that could afford the process, and the target was some little company making too much money by breaking the "rules".
You're right, our current classification system does not match nature very well. Some biologists have wanted to throw it out and start over for a long time now. The group would like to reclassify all species along the lines of whether they produce viable, non-sterile offspring, like the different "races" of Homo Sapiens are all the same species.
I understand your point about cats. There is a large social context to which the births must conform. A gorilla mother would care for almost any infant, no matter how strange, but a lioness mother might kill or abandon the "badly deformed" infant. B. Elgin
Since a mule can't breed, it isn't really a species, is it?
No, it isn't. I refer to them as a crossbreed, because I cannot remember the proper scientific name. The funny thing is that the common term used for all sterile crossbreeds is a mule, after the horse - donkey crossbreed.
The problem with something like a cow giving birth to a tiger is that the cow can not teach the tiger how to be a tiger. Only another tiger can, or possibly something else like a jaguar or a leopard, but not a cow. I suspect even if they did perfect this, it would still only be reasonable to do within species of the same genus.
Actually, you mean family (I think)? There is no reason an American bison could not teach a cow to be a Cow/bison and vice versa, yet they are not the same genus (I believe). The same is true of horses and antelope. Creatures with different ancestors, but similar behaviors could work if we ever got good enough to do that. B. Elgin
Now, I've heard occasionally about dogs breeding with wolves. Unless that's an urban legend (quite possibly!), that would be inter-species breeding, I think.
Yes and no. While they are classified as different species, dogs and wolves are descended from the exact same set of creatures. They are fully interbreedable, and I have met half and quarter wolves. I live less than an hour's drive away from a wolf breeder who breeds arctic wolves, and they were all raised by his old female husky after being bottle fed by him to make them used to humans. According to one camp amongst biologists, all of the Canis genus that is the domestic and wild dogs, plus wolves, should be one species, since they are interbreedable and simply adapted for different environments.
To further emphacize how difficult this is, did you notice that EIGHT embryos were inserted and only ONE was carried to term?
My fiance is a biologist who works on DNA analysis of plants and she could explain this much better than I ever could, but I will try to phrase this in a way for those of us who don't know much biochemistry to understand. The body reacts to foreign objects by getting rid of them. It does not accept them and give them nutrients they need to grow into living creatures. The body has to be tricked into believing that the foreign object belongs there before it will naturally incorporate it. The more different the object is from what should naturally be there, the more the body rejects it. In the case of embryos, the slightest rejection can destroy them outright.
Also, Tiger Haven has a liger, a lion bred with a tiger. Like a mule, it is also a mutation and not a survivable species on it's own.. But having one species give birth to another or a hybrid is not that far fetched.. It was just a matter of somebody doing it.
Actually, ligers and tigons are not sterile, they just look stupid. Crossbreeds like the mule are NOT mutations at all. The lion and the tiger are as interbreedable as your average native African human and your average native Asian human. Some biologists regard them as different societies within the same species. They have specialized to different environments, physically and socially, but they are basically the same species.
The article has nothing to do with crossbreeds, however. The important part is that an African wildcat (a very rare animal) was brought to term by a common housecat. This means that very rare animals can be born without risking the mother in a pregnancy if the population is sufficiently threatened.
There are many possible misuses of this technology, but lets actually focus on the good for a little while first, OK?
Well said! I actually used the car metaphor on some other post today, but I had not thought it through to this level of detail.
I just have to add though: P-II Xeon = Quad-4 turbo burning diesel P-III Xeon = V6 turbo burning diesel
No, those shouldn't work...
On the other hand, however, how many people are there who can really comprehend the differences in RPM without an example such as the one you gave? The problem still exists that there is not a metric that gives people a feel for what a computer IS capable of. As the computers become more complex, and the computer manufacturers continue to try to differentiate themselves while maintaining all the standards, the number of people who really know how to judge the worth of a given computer continue to dwindle... Your average person selling the computer at a brick and mortar establishment cannot help an unknowledgable consumer. (Or a knowledgable one for that matter.)
It has been this way for a while... The pundits are to blame.
When you really don't know where to look to find out what empowers your computer to actually do what you want it to, you go to salespeople and advertising. The industry ads would like to convice everyone that this or that "wonderful invention" is necessary or the tool is garbage. Most people don't know how to upgrade their car, why should they know how to upgrade a computer? If you talk to salespeople, they want to sell you the most expensive item you will buy!
As is the case with cars (my metaphor for the hour), people will buy features they will not need (like six cupholders for a two seated car...), simply because they are convinced that the features are useful or they want what comes with the package. How many people actually compare the horsepower of the cars they look at? Not that many. They go for the name brand of the hour. It will continue to be the same way with processors: "I don't really know why it is better, but the salesman told me it was."
The P4 will be bought. People will not understand. People will be satisfied / dissappointed / upset / resigned / utterly confused. That is just the way things are likely to flow.
I REALLY wish I could convey to more consumers out there that MHz is not a true metric. I have seen friends and family wander down the path of: "I don't know what this means, but the numbers sound high and the price is good..."
It is going to get really interesting soon even for the people who understand computers better, as we will find that are choices are opening up. How are we, the folks in the "know" going to convey to those not so technically minded what all of this really means? The human mind tends to grasp 5 plus or minus 2 strange things before it starts to overload. There was once a time (1992 or thereabouts) when I could fit advice in the form of: 1) High MHz 2) Intel-based CPU 3) not Packard-Bell 4) high RAM 5) more hard-drive space is good 6) get CD-Rom 7) latest version of DOS/Windows
Now there are so many factors to take into account that I almost have to walk my computer-illiterate friends through the process of buying a computer. It doesn't look like this is getting any easier either. In the "old days", the person usually got at least 4 of the above criteria right, and was OK. *Sigh*
As we continue along this path, it is great for optimizing our tools, but we leave the general populace farther and farther behind. If only there WERE an unbiased metric that people could use to diagnose their needs compared to the products offerings... Maybe there is and I am simply not aware of it.
I believe that we should look carefully about all these recent funding sources and see what is in it for the providers.
Simple. The corporations get to sell services. Selling a service is usually much more lucrative than selling software. If you have a person charging $100 an hour to troubleshoot other people's problems with setting up Linux, or maintaining Linux, you make a pretty good chunk of change. People who really understand a given piece of software are more rare than many/.ers tend to remember. The Total Cost of Ownership is what we are talking about here, not the cost of initially buying into the software.
When IBM has Linuxcare answer someone's questions, that someone pays IBM $X, and IBM gives Linuxcare ($X - $Y).
I found some of the comments about Linuxcare alternately humorous and very interesting. One point that should be noted is the fact that some very heavy hitters in the industry are placing a lot of trust in this company. IBM does NOT farm out support to any group that does not know what it is doing. (At least, not for very long.) Michael Dell investing in the company is also interesting.
I found it humorous the way that employees of Linuxcare were listed as "contributors to Linux". With the exception of Samba, nothing seemed to be said about what they contributed. Is there any serious Linux company that doesn't employ at least a couple of people who have contributed to Linux and other GPL'd software?
I don't know too much about Linuxcare, but it might bear watching in the future. The industry is currently watching to see which Linux distributor "wins" the market...
Unless the stock market comes to its senses in the next few months, I rather suspect they'll get a little more than $100 million (given absurdly high IPOs we've been seeing)!
The stock market has never lost its senses! It can see just as well now as it could two years ago, when I enjoyed the little scrapings of fat left on its plate after it had good prime rib!
Seriously, though. I expect that the market capitalization on Palm will go right into the absurd levels within one month. Over time, that phantom stock value will slowly come to reflect something more realstic.
I was greatly amused by how they compared it to Linux in the article, because I know some friends who are Linux champions that will pay ridiculous prices for a share of Palm stock for the same reason they would for a share of Red Hat. They will pay any price to support "cool" technology. I have to admit that it is an attractive viewpoint if one can afford to hold it. (I am not a Linux crusader, sorry. I like it, but I accept that I cannot get the work I need to do done in a non-windows environment without putting in a lot more work than I currently do.)
Heh, the {Score: 3, Interesting} was cut off after the {. So I am doing one more test to see if it allows "[Score: }", or if we can reliably say that the string "Score: " causes everything after to be cut off.
Three Ply Reply If you can't get the first post (there's lots of 1337 competition y'know), or come in a little too late, another way to get fairly visible to threaded viewers, is to reply, as offtopic as necessary, to the highest scoring post. Yes, there's a chance that that post could be moderated back down, or another be moderated above it, but all the 1337357 know that all the REAL moderation is done within the first 5 minutes or so.
I wish that this were not so true. I am as guilty of it as anyone else, but the moderators do not usually wait more than half an hour before the topic is "dead". If you don't read the article, make a brilliant post and generally get to the top of the view at the start, you get no karma. Even if a moderator does check the thing "later in the day", (s)he rarely seems to note anything below the top 20-30 articles, so your only prayer of really accumulating karma is to be an obsessive reloader who has on-topic, insightful and witty posts prepared for every possible article on the net.
I don't like it because I have a job that I try to do too...
Oh... Wait... Obsessive reloaders aren't supposed to be moderators...
Here in Boston, there's DeathWish piano movers and Bunghole Liquors
OK, DeathWish is really bad, but Bunghole makes sense. A bunghole was the hole where the cork went in an old, cheap barrel of alcohol, be it beer, ale, whisky, cheap wine, whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
Answer:
I don't watch movies on my computer. I have a DVD player for my Computer that came pre-loaded with Win 98. (I am in the process of setting up Linux on my P75, because I can.) Thus, I could watch them if I wanted to.
In fact, I would never have done anything to aid the DeCSS distribution if the big stink had not been made. I buy movies from vendors, or make video cassette copies in accordance to my legal right to review something in order to determine whether I will buy it. I have no interest in pirating much of anything. I might borrow a copy of software from a friend of mine who has an excessive amount of games, but I return it to him. I fit mostly into the category of people that the DVD industry likes.
I am involved, because this industry is threatening my rights. I have a right to find out information about a pseudo-illegal activity. I have a right to determine for myself whether something is wrong. Had I been in Berlin in 1939, I would have had a right to have Jewish friends just like I have Jewish friends in 1999 America. I strongly object when the Nazi's or the DVD association try to take those rights from people.
The allegations against linking are dangerous and I will not permit them. I agree that people have the right to watch DVD movies on Linux, but I would not take a stand on that issue. When companies start using brute force tactics to curtail my rights, I look at history and see that it is a bad thing. That is why I care.
B. Elgin
Not necessarily. Most people who get one set of prescriptions and are done are as likely to just go to the drug store and get it done with, right? What about the people on the long term plan?
My cubicle-mate is on blood pressure medication. He has to take this stuff every day and has been taking it for years. If he can just get it delivered to his house every month a few days before he runs out of medicine, that makes a lot of sense for him, doesn't it? There are other examples, but the online drug stores are very convienent for people who have to take madication for a long time.
Online pharmacies also save a few bucks, so you KNOW what HMO's think about saving money... This could mean that an HMO who didn't do their research could be sending all their clients to that cheap guy who just packs whatever is handy into the little bottle. Government regulations allow those insurance companies to cut another corner without putting Joe-consumer at risk... as much.
B. Elgin
scifi.ign.com/movies/3408.html
They also gave the show a pretty good review, and I must admit I am looking forward to seeing it. This review gives away a little more plot and character information, so beware!
B. Elgin
I agree with you.
Washington did some very important things for the American Revolution, but I was trying to illustrate that the public faith in him outstripped his actual accomplishments. Similarly, Linus is often credited as if he is solely responsible for everything that Linux has become.
Important figures they both are/were, but their actions did not correlate with the full degree of respect and credit they are given. This is why they are cultural icons. Their great actions inspired further actions that led to a great result. Culturally, they are often creditied with all the results of people who followed their examples. This is also true of Ghandi, Einstein, even Hitler, and countless others, good and bad.
B. Elgin
As self-fufilling prophecies go, this is another one. BSD continues to be less known, because it is less known. Over half of those same college undergrads I knew in computer science and engineering got hands on experience with Linux before they graduated, myself included.
BSD continued to languish in the realms of unknown software.
Many of the undergrads went out into the work force and are now doing jobs where they can at least provide knowledgable input about Linux. Many of them went to find jobs specifically where they could work on Linux systems. There was no similarly large pool of individuals who knew BSD amongst the dozens of fellow students I knew, including the systems operators (I was one) for our UNIX systems, or much in the faculty. Perhaps a few people seemed knowledgable about BSD, but they didn't talk about it much, because people knew more about and were already interested in Linux.
For the most part, colleges provide the ground where our next generations of individuals in the computer industry learn UNIX-based OS's and determine what technologies they will bring to their initial workplaces. If BSD is as absent from most colleges as it was from mine, BSD won't catch on, because many of the people who would use it will not know about it.
B. Elgin
You are right. When I was writing my comment, I was doing something of a mad lib. People outside of the open source community tend to use the words GPL, Linux, free software movement, and open source VERY interchangably, when they know more than one of the words. I know this, because I spent a while at the outermost fringes of vague knowledge myself. I would still consider myself as a semi-knowledgable observer of the open source community more than a member of it.
I simply used that random lack of knowledge in my comment to place terms where one of these buzzwords would go. I apologize for not making this clear in my original comment. I like to write comments that point out the perspective of those who are less knowledgable than the average /.er, and sometimes forget to document what I am doing.
B. Elgin
Another example of this in American history is General George Washington. He hardly ever won a battle in our Revolutionary War, but was hailed a great leader of men and was pretty much offered the position of King of the United States of America, if he wanted it. (He didn't.) It doesn't matter too much what he did and didn't do, because he was a cultural icon. He symbolized a great freedom in the minds of the residents of a struggling group of colonies, and later in a young nation. Einstien also falls into the category of cultural icons for the twentieth century.
Linus is stepping into the same role (on a smaller scale for now) in the concept of open source. People outside the open source community see him and say, "Oh, that's the guy who wrote Linux. He represents that free software movement." Whether it is good or bad, this is the path that I see before us.
B. Elgin
As m. o said, The real problem started when people began to use the patents in court. So long as the understanding is there and everyone knows not to call the bluffs, work gets done and everyone is at least doing something. When the bluffs start getting called, work grinds to a halt as the legal departments have to wade through all the work different groups were doing. The researchers can't get work done, the products may not be able to be sold, and the engineers are just supposed to fix a problem that is so far out of the specifications of what they are doing that it just isn't even funny. After both companies do this, one has to pay damages and the costs are simply phohibitive. The almost universal answer was to quickly write up an out-of-court agreement as to how things would work. These usually included a price for which the non-patent-holder would purchase the rights to use the patented idea for $X amount. The contract would then stay in effect for Y years. Usually, it was a trade off. Both sides had something patented and the other side got to use the patent that they stole.
Engineers and such had nightmares about patent stuff actually going to court. It was simply understood that you don't do that unless no other options are available. The only case where the threat was not a bluff was where the patent holder was some huge company that could afford the process, and the target was some little company making too much money by breaking the "rules".
B. Elgin
I understand your point about cats. There is a large social context to which the births must conform. A gorilla mother would care for almost any infant, no matter how strange, but a lioness mother might kill or abandon the "badly deformed" infant.
B. Elgin
No, it isn't. I refer to them as a crossbreed, because I cannot remember the proper scientific name. The funny thing is that the common term used for all sterile crossbreeds is a mule, after the horse - donkey crossbreed.
B. Elgin
Actually, you mean family (I think)? There is no reason an American bison could not teach a cow to be a Cow/bison and vice versa, yet they are not the same genus (I believe). The same is true of horses and antelope. Creatures with different ancestors, but similar behaviors could work if we ever got good enough to do that.
B. Elgin
Yes and no. While they are classified as different species, dogs and wolves are descended from the exact same set of creatures. They are fully interbreedable, and I have met half and quarter wolves. I live less than an hour's drive away from a wolf breeder who breeds arctic wolves, and they were all raised by his old female husky after being bottle fed by him to make them used to humans. According to one camp amongst biologists, all of the Canis genus that is the domestic and wild dogs, plus wolves, should be one species, since they are interbreedable and simply adapted for different environments.
B. Elgin
My fiance is a biologist who works on DNA analysis of plants and she could explain this much better than I ever could, but I will try to phrase this in a way for those of us who don't know much biochemistry to understand. The body reacts to foreign objects by getting rid of them. It does not accept them and give them nutrients they need to grow into living creatures. The body has to be tricked into believing that the foreign object belongs there before it will naturally incorporate it. The more different the object is from what should naturally be there, the more the body rejects it. In the case of embryos, the slightest rejection can destroy them outright.
B. Elgin
Actually, ligers and tigons are not sterile, they just look stupid. Crossbreeds like the mule are NOT mutations at all. The lion and the tiger are as interbreedable as your average native African human and your average native Asian human. Some biologists regard them as different societies within the same species. They have specialized to different environments, physically and socially, but they are basically the same species.
The article has nothing to do with crossbreeds, however. The important part is that an African wildcat (a very rare animal) was brought to term by a common housecat. This means that very rare animals can be born without risking the mother in a pregnancy if the population is sufficiently threatened.
There are many possible misuses of this technology, but lets actually focus on the good for a little while first, OK?
B. Elgin
I just have to add though:
P-II Xeon = Quad-4 turbo burning diesel
P-III Xeon = V6 turbo burning diesel
No, those shouldn't work...
On the other hand, however, how many people are there who can really comprehend the differences in RPM without an example such as the one you gave? The problem still exists that there is not a metric that gives people a feel for what a computer IS capable of. As the computers become more complex, and the computer manufacturers continue to try to differentiate themselves while maintaining all the standards, the number of people who really know how to judge the worth of a given computer continue to dwindle... Your average person selling the computer at a brick and mortar establishment cannot help an unknowledgable consumer. (Or a knowledgable one for that matter.)
B. Elgin
When you really don't know where to look to find out what empowers your computer to actually do what you want it to, you go to salespeople and advertising. The industry ads would like to convice everyone that this or that "wonderful invention" is necessary or the tool is garbage. Most people don't know how to upgrade their car, why should they know how to upgrade a computer? If you talk to salespeople, they want to sell you the most expensive item you will buy!
As is the case with cars (my metaphor for the hour), people will buy features they will not need (like six cupholders for a two seated car...), simply because they are convinced that the features are useful or they want what comes with the package. How many people actually compare the horsepower of the cars they look at? Not that many. They go for the name brand of the hour. It will continue to be the same way with processors: "I don't really know why it is better, but the salesman told me it was."
The P4 will be bought. People will not understand. People will be satisfied / dissappointed / upset / resigned / utterly confused. That is just the way things are likely to flow.
B. Elgin
It is going to get really interesting soon even for the people who understand computers better, as we will find that are choices are opening up. How are we, the folks in the "know" going to convey to those not so technically minded what all of this really means? The human mind tends to grasp 5 plus or minus 2 strange things before it starts to overload. There was once a time (1992 or thereabouts) when I could fit advice in the form of:
1) High MHz
2) Intel-based CPU
3) not Packard-Bell
4) high RAM
5) more hard-drive space is good
6) get CD-Rom
7) latest version of DOS/Windows
Now there are so many factors to take into account that I almost have to walk my computer-illiterate friends through the process of buying a computer. It doesn't look like this is getting any easier either. In the "old days", the person usually got at least 4 of the above criteria right, and was OK. *Sigh*
As we continue along this path, it is great for optimizing our tools, but we leave the general populace farther and farther behind. If only there WERE an unbiased metric that people could use to diagnose their needs compared to the products offerings... Maybe there is and I am simply not aware of it.
B. Elgin
Simple. The corporations get to sell services. Selling a service is usually much more lucrative than selling software. If you have a person charging $100 an hour to troubleshoot other people's problems with setting up Linux, or maintaining Linux, you make a pretty good chunk of change. People who really understand a given piece of software are more rare than many /.ers tend to remember. The Total Cost of Ownership is what we are talking about here, not the cost of initially buying into the software.
When IBM has Linuxcare answer someone's questions, that someone pays IBM $X, and IBM gives Linuxcare ($X - $Y).
B. Elgin
I found it humorous the way that employees of Linuxcare were listed as "contributors to Linux". With the exception of Samba, nothing seemed to be said about what they contributed. Is there any serious Linux company that doesn't employ at least a couple of people who have contributed to Linux and other GPL'd software?
I don't know too much about Linuxcare, but it might bear watching in the future. The industry is currently watching to see which Linux distributor "wins" the market...
B. Elgin
"One for you... Ten for me. One for you... Ten for me." -- 3Com at the Palm IPO
B. Elgin
The stock market has never lost its senses! It can see just as well now as it could two years ago, when I enjoyed the little scrapings of fat left on its plate after it had good prime rib!
Seriously, though. I expect that the market capitalization on Palm will go right into the absurd levels within one month. Over time, that phantom stock value will slowly come to reflect something more realstic.
I was greatly amused by how they compared it to Linux in the article, because I know some friends who are Linux champions that will pay ridiculous prices for a share of Palm stock for the same reason they would for a share of Red Hat. They will pay any price to support "cool" technology. I have to admit that it is an attractive viewpoint if one can afford to hold it.
(I am not a Linux crusader, sorry. I like it, but I accept that I cannot get the work I need to do done in a non-windows environment without putting in a lot more work than I currently do.)
B. Elgin
Heh, the {Score: 3, Interesting} was cut off after the {. So I am doing one more test to see if it allows "[Score: }", or if we can reliably say that the string "Score: " causes everything after to be cut off.
B. Elgin
I was testing to see if the Score trick would work if you had a subject.
B. Elgin
If you can't get the first post (there's lots of 1337 competition y'know), or come in a little too late, another way to get fairly visible to threaded viewers, is to reply, as offtopic as necessary, to the highest scoring post. Yes, there's a chance that that post could be moderated back down, or another be moderated above it, but all the 1337357 know that all the REAL moderation is done within the first 5 minutes or so.
I wish that this were not so true. I am as guilty of it as anyone else, but the moderators do not usually wait more than half an hour before the topic is "dead". If you don't read the article, make a brilliant post and generally get to the top of the view at the start, you get no karma. Even if a moderator does check the thing "later in the day", (s)he rarely seems to note anything below the top 20-30 articles, so your only prayer of really accumulating karma is to be an obsessive reloader who has on-topic, insightful and witty posts prepared for every possible article on the net.
I don't like it because I have a job that I try to do too...
Oh... Wait... Obsessive reloaders aren't supposed to be moderators...
B. Elgin
OK, DeathWish is really bad, but Bunghole makes sense. A bunghole was the hole where the cork went in an old, cheap barrel of alcohol, be it beer, ale, whisky, cheap wine, whatever.
B. Elgin