"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years."
That's what's already happening. Even if a standard is published it's usually ignored. The problem is that Microsoft now has the huge majority and can do pretty much whatever they want. If my web app breaks when the next IE comes out you better believe the site will be made compatible, whether I like it or not.
So your plan for winner-take-all is nice in theory, so long as you don't complain when Microsoft wins because they can muscle their way into a de-facto standard.
Using the nicknames very effective in "demystifying" the whole experience.
I've been using Linux and Unix for a long time. One thing it's never been is friendly to outsiders. Ubuntu excels at making the Linux experience seem simple and clean. The documentation, installation, desktop, even the web site is simplified and unified. Attaching an easy to remember nickname to the release is part of that plan. It humanizes the product. Techies may be chapped over it, but realize the cute nickname isn't for you. It's for people who are scared of the word "kernel."
Shouldn't the first question be: does it make business sense? Do both companies benefit from a merger?
I can think of a lot of companies that can merge just because they make products that seem to go together. Does it mean they should do so, just because I think it'd be a neat idea?
They weren't going to sue, but their CEO was up late watching Nick at Night and saw an ad to call for a free no-risk consultation.
Really though, I think the patent law suits are just another piece of ammo that companies can use to squash competition. The risk of an ongoing legal battle, no matter how ridiculous, is enough to kill some companies.
Apple won big on this. They receive a kickback from AT&T for the locked phones, and they also make profit on sale of the UNlocked phones - some of which they sold at full retail, not wholesale to AT&T.
I have to suspect Apple knew this would happen, but probably not at this scale. Obviously there's a demand, so industrious people are buying up iPhones, unlocking them, then selling them on Ebay (or wherever) at a markup.
My 3-minute research on Ebay shows: 6693 iPhones on Ebay, $500 average price for an unlocked 8gb model ($399 direct from Apple)
So people are willing to pay a $100+ premium for an unlocked iPhone even though it voids the warranty.
But it wasn't Vista who won, it was Ubuntu. While I was waiting for Leopard to come out to make my first Mac purchase in 10 years, I tried Ubuntu and stuck with it. Ubuntu somehow became a buzzword at exactly the right time.
However, I did get my wife a Macbook this summer and honestly Tiger is still a big upgrade from XP. It works great! I'm going to upgrade to Leopard just to see the new goodies, even though she might not even notice I did it.
Compiz is eye candy, but on Feisty I had to:
* Install printer drivers - it was a pain.
* Futz around with the wireless network drivers, also a pain.
* Get multiple monitors working. Any time you have to edit xorg.conf it's a bad day, especially for newbies.
* Spend a lot of time trying to get Beryl working.
* Get NTFS working - it was really easy, but still had to be done.
Gutsy is supposed to address all of the above. It looks like they fixed all the right stuff.
People are happier at work if they can act like themselves. I'm sure it's not just me - over the last 10 years it's become more and more difficult to work in an office for fear of breaking HR rules. Humor, sex and profanity have been all but eliminated from some offices - what fun is that??
Greg.
There's a simple two-word answer for his danger addiction: RACE TRACK. I've spent a considerable amount of time on racing motorcycles, in local clubs, trying to get kids off the streets and onto the track.
Skills can be sharpened there in a safe environment without danger to anyone else. Surely this spoiled child can afford some track time if he can afford to waste money and time street racing. While he's there he can hire expect instructors. The street-racer types are quickly humbled when they're put on a track and discover how much they don't know.
The public streets are not a raceway. Lives can be destroyed for the sake of this pointless game.
I think you're correct here, and most importantly it keeps companies from building on Linux technologies.
There's a saying in the I.T. world, and I'm sure most of you have heard it - nobody ever got fired for going with Microsoft. In *business* nobody's really interested in Linux vs. Microsoft. They want what works and is cheapest with minimal risk. The prospect of building a business on top of a platform with patent suits around it is enough to scare most people away. Even if that risk is minuscule and ridiculous. Witness the sudden surge of business Novell got the minute they paid off Microsoft.
A simplification.... Back in "old days" of the web, before on-page scripting, programs run on the server had to be done by CGI - common gateway interface. I.e. fill in a form, hit submit - the server runs a program and eventually spits out the result.
Many of these CGI programs were written in something like PERL, which had to compile itself before it ran every time. So it could take a while before the program finished doing what it was supposed to do, and it was doing so many many times, over and over, putting a big load on the server.
FastCGI simply pre-loaded the program(s) into memory and kept them persistent. This way the program was loaded up once, when the web server started, and was then available at any time.
My company was using OpenMarket transaction server, which was all CGI-based and quite huge. They (OpenMarket) developed FastCGI in part to speed up that application and made it available to all for free.
I am rather surprised that this became an "Apache is better" discussion... OK I'm not that surprised. Instead I was wondering why it took so long for something like this to come out for IIS. It's really been around a long time, in Web-years anyway.
The possible number was about 2 million.
"...a screen shot repeatedly displayed to jurors during the three-day case showed that more than 2 million people were on Kazaa sharing hundreds of millions of songs on Feb. 21, 2005."
It looks like the lawyers did their job. What about the facts are you not understanding?
It's sort of the perfect target for the RIAA. Somebody was caught and then stubbornly played dumb, ignoring the possible repercussions. The result is exactly what they wanted - big headlines to scare the general file-sharing public. The money reward is pocket change.
Meanwhile, will it really deter piracy? No. Does the punishment fit the crime? No. They can see all that money slipping away and there's not a thing they can do about it.
I have been using Photoshop professionally for 10+ years. It has always wanted 4x the RAM as any standard desktop, minimum. I never minded the expense, it's a professional tool for professionals. A few hundred dollars extra for the RAM to run Photoshop is nothing. Back in "the day" it was a few thousand dollars extra and nobody minded still.
"Need" is too strong a word, but I can relate. Sometimes the T.V. is a lifesaver. Like you, we pick shows that are educational, age-appropriate and do not contain advertising. Some programming is even beneficial. To us, it is very important to not let corporate media shape our kids' minds.
We just went camping for a week with our young kids and specifically left the toys behind. They fully entertained themselves the entire time with sticks, pine-cones, bikes, books and fishing poles. Kids don't need T.V.
Of course for myself the hypocrite... I have Lost, Battlestar and the Office all cued up on the TiVo.
I agree completely. 98% of the problems I've had you listed above. Most of those can be narrowed down to driver issues, i.e. hardware support. Wifi, audio, laptop sleep/awaken, xorg - most of my problems with X were due to crappy ATI drivers. Have you ever plugged an external monitor into a Mac? It's automatically detected and turned on, like magic. That's the way it should work.
A/V issues are a function of too many competing codecs and players. It will sort itself out.
We are in the infancy of Linux desktop. Stuff we take for granted on Windows or Mac is still being worked out on Linux, but it will come around. On the server it's worked for a long time, because I compile and tailor everything how I want it. The desktop changes at an exponentially higher rate, it's a lot more complicated.
Acts like Sarbanes Oxley ("SOX") are not new laws. They're acts making punishment of breaking the existing laws more severe. It also makes the officers of the companies personally responsible. The intended effect is to give CEOs incentive to make things right.
Not really no. I wanted to change, I didn't need to. In fact I kept XP - I dual-boot to it. The same exact copy I've had for n number of years. Why not, I own it right?
My point is the economics. I do not want to pony up the money for a new OS when I don't need to. I have a lot of non-tech friends, almost all of them are running pirated copies of XP. When it comes time for them to upgrade and if Vista can't be pirated, to where will they turn? More often than not people will pick what's cheapest.
Why I finally switched to Linux on my Desktop - Money.
I think the author nailed it. I used my legit copy of XP for a long time - as long as possible. Why? I've been using Unix & Linux for 15 years, I was as admin for a long time. There was no technical learning curve. But XP was paid for and it was too much trouble to switch everything. It works fine. I can do everything I need to on either Windows or Linux, so why go through the trouble to switch?
But Vista gave me a reason. My machine was just not powerful enough to run Vista. I wanted new hardware but didn't want to pay for Vista, based on the price and negative rumors. I considered Mac and Linux. I decided to try Linux on the desktop for real, on my main machine. I chose the cheaper one even though I know Apple's product is better, just like in the car example. It's free and I can still do all the stuff I want to do.
If Vista is made truly "uncrackable" (yeah right) I think we'll see much the same thought process happen more and more often.
Believe it or not I won it at a charity auction. I was pretty excited to get it, my 2gb mobile player wasn't cutting it for long trips.
Here's the truth - they did a good job with it. It's well made. The interface is solid, easy to use and intuitive. I didn't have to read the instructions to use it. The software works pretty well, but is a little confusing.
When the Zune came out it'd have been pretty hard to F*** up. With all the money in the world and dozens of business cases to study it'd be pretty difficult to come out with an MP3 player that didn't do a passable job. The Zune did just that, and now true to Microsoft form 2.0 will come out, and then 3.0 and 4.0, and it'll continue to improve.
If I were voting with my own money I'd have probably bought Creative's 30gb model, but in truth the Zune is pretty good at what it does. If you can live with people poking fun at you for owning it, go ahead and buy one.
It only syncs with Windows, by the way.
Slashdot Mirror
"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years."
Google can replace 60 with 6,000.
Ah, thank you YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzhb3U2cONs.
That's what's already happening. Even if a standard is published it's usually ignored. The problem is that Microsoft now has the huge majority and can do pretty much whatever they want. If my web app breaks when the next IE comes out you better believe the site will be made compatible, whether I like it or not.
So your plan for winner-take-all is nice in theory, so long as you don't complain when Microsoft wins because they can muscle their way into a de-facto standard.
Using the nicknames very effective in "demystifying" the whole experience.
I've been using Linux and Unix for a long time. One thing it's never been is friendly to outsiders. Ubuntu excels at making the Linux experience seem simple and clean. The documentation, installation, desktop, even the web site is simplified and unified. Attaching an easy to remember nickname to the release is part of that plan. It humanizes the product. Techies may be chapped over it, but realize the cute nickname isn't for you. It's for people who are scared of the word "kernel."
Shouldn't the first question be: does it make business sense? Do both companies benefit from a merger?
I can think of a lot of companies that can merge just because they make products that seem to go together. Does it mean they should do so, just because I think it'd be a neat idea?
They weren't going to sue, but their CEO was up late watching Nick at Night and saw an ad to call for a free no-risk consultation.
Really though, I think the patent law suits are just another piece of ammo that companies can use to squash competition. The risk of an ongoing legal battle, no matter how ridiculous, is enough to kill some companies.
Apple won big on this. They receive a kickback from AT&T for the locked phones, and they also make profit on sale of the UNlocked phones - some of which they sold at full retail, not wholesale to AT&T.
I have to suspect Apple knew this would happen, but probably not at this scale. Obviously there's a demand, so industrious people are buying up iPhones, unlocking them, then selling them on Ebay (or wherever) at a markup.
My 3-minute research on Ebay shows:
6693 iPhones on Ebay,
$500 average price for an unlocked 8gb model ($399 direct from Apple)
So people are willing to pay a $100+ premium for an unlocked iPhone even though it voids the warranty.
But it wasn't Vista who won, it was Ubuntu. While I was waiting for Leopard to come out to make my first Mac purchase in 10 years, I tried Ubuntu and stuck with it. Ubuntu somehow became a buzzword at exactly the right time.
However, I did get my wife a Macbook this summer and honestly Tiger is still a big upgrade from XP. It works great! I'm going to upgrade to Leopard just to see the new goodies, even though she might not even notice I did it.
Compiz is eye candy, but on Feisty I had to: * Install printer drivers - it was a pain. * Futz around with the wireless network drivers, also a pain. * Get multiple monitors working. Any time you have to edit xorg.conf it's a bad day, especially for newbies. * Spend a lot of time trying to get Beryl working. * Get NTFS working - it was really easy, but still had to be done. Gutsy is supposed to address all of the above. It looks like they fixed all the right stuff.
People are happier at work if they can act like themselves. I'm sure it's not just me - over the last 10 years it's become more and more difficult to work in an office for fear of breaking HR rules. Humor, sex and profanity have been all but eliminated from some offices - what fun is that?? Greg.
There's a simple two-word answer for his danger addiction: RACE TRACK. I've spent a considerable amount of time on racing motorcycles, in local clubs, trying to get kids off the streets and onto the track.
Skills can be sharpened there in a safe environment without danger to anyone else. Surely this spoiled child can afford some track time if he can afford to waste money and time street racing. While he's there he can hire expect instructors. The street-racer types are quickly humbled when they're put on a track and discover how much they don't know.
The public streets are not a raceway. Lives can be destroyed for the sake of this pointless game.
I think you're correct here, and most importantly it keeps companies from building on Linux technologies.
There's a saying in the I.T. world, and I'm sure most of you have heard it - nobody ever got fired for going with Microsoft. In *business* nobody's really interested in Linux vs. Microsoft. They want what works and is cheapest with minimal risk. The prospect of building a business on top of a platform with patent suits around it is enough to scare most people away. Even if that risk is minuscule and ridiculous. Witness the sudden surge of business Novell got the minute they paid off Microsoft.
I tried this already. I thought it would eliminate all my home-support calls if I got her a Macbook.
I was wrong.
A simplification.... Back in "old days" of the web, before on-page scripting, programs run on the server had to be done by CGI - common gateway interface. I.e. fill in a form, hit submit - the server runs a program and eventually spits out the result.
Many of these CGI programs were written in something like PERL, which had to compile itself before it ran every time. So it could take a while before the program finished doing what it was supposed to do, and it was doing so many many times, over and over, putting a big load on the server.
FastCGI simply pre-loaded the program(s) into memory and kept them persistent. This way the program was loaded up once, when the web server started, and was then available at any time.
My company was using OpenMarket transaction server, which was all CGI-based and quite huge. They (OpenMarket) developed FastCGI in part to speed up that application and made it available to all for free.
I am rather surprised that this became an "Apache is better" discussion... OK I'm not that surprised. Instead I was wondering why it took so long for something like this to come out for IIS. It's really been around a long time, in Web-years anyway.
The possible number was about 2 million. "...a screen shot repeatedly displayed to jurors during the three-day case showed that more than 2 million people were on Kazaa sharing hundreds of millions of songs on Feb. 21, 2005." It looks like the lawyers did their job. What about the facts are you not understanding?
It's sort of the perfect target for the RIAA. Somebody was caught and then stubbornly played dumb, ignoring the possible repercussions. The result is exactly what they wanted - big headlines to scare the general file-sharing public. The money reward is pocket change.
Meanwhile, will it really deter piracy? No. Does the punishment fit the crime? No. They can see all that money slipping away and there's not a thing they can do about it.
I blame the testers!
10 FOR I = 1 TO 50 20 WALK 30 IF ROBOT = BUMPINTOSOMETHING THEN GOTO 50 40 NEXT I 50 PRINT "Ouch!"; 60 TURNAROUND 70 GOTO 10
Are Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier somehow involved in this?
I have been using Photoshop professionally for 10+ years. It has always wanted 4x the RAM as any standard desktop, minimum. I never minded the expense, it's a professional tool for professionals. A few hundred dollars extra for the RAM to run Photoshop is nothing. Back in "the day" it was a few thousand dollars extra and nobody minded still.
"Need" is too strong a word, but I can relate. Sometimes the T.V. is a lifesaver. Like you, we pick shows that are educational, age-appropriate and do not contain advertising. Some programming is even beneficial. To us, it is very important to not let corporate media shape our kids' minds.
We just went camping for a week with our young kids and specifically left the toys behind. They fully entertained themselves the entire time with sticks, pine-cones, bikes, books and fishing poles. Kids don't need T.V.
Of course for myself the hypocrite... I have Lost, Battlestar and the Office all cued up on the TiVo.
I agree completely. 98% of the problems I've had you listed above. Most of those can be narrowed down to driver issues, i.e. hardware support. Wifi, audio, laptop sleep/awaken, xorg - most of my problems with X were due to crappy ATI drivers. Have you ever plugged an external monitor into a Mac? It's automatically detected and turned on, like magic. That's the way it should work. A/V issues are a function of too many competing codecs and players. It will sort itself out. We are in the infancy of Linux desktop. Stuff we take for granted on Windows or Mac is still being worked out on Linux, but it will come around. On the server it's worked for a long time, because I compile and tailor everything how I want it. The desktop changes at an exponentially higher rate, it's a lot more complicated.
Acts like Sarbanes Oxley ("SOX") are not new laws. They're acts making punishment of breaking the existing laws more severe. It also makes the officers of the companies personally responsible. The intended effect is to give CEOs incentive to make things right.
My point is the economics. I do not want to pony up the money for a new OS when I don't need to. I have a lot of non-tech friends, almost all of them are running pirated copies of XP. When it comes time for them to upgrade and if Vista can't be pirated, to where will they turn? More often than not people will pick what's cheapest.
Why I finally switched to Linux on my Desktop - Money.
I think the author nailed it. I used my legit copy of XP for a long time - as long as possible. Why? I've been using Unix & Linux for 15 years, I was as admin for a long time. There was no technical learning curve. But XP was paid for and it was too much trouble to switch everything. It works fine. I can do everything I need to on either Windows or Linux, so why go through the trouble to switch?
But Vista gave me a reason. My machine was just not powerful enough to run Vista. I wanted new hardware but didn't want to pay for Vista, based on the price and negative rumors. I considered Mac and Linux. I decided to try Linux on the desktop for real, on my main machine. I chose the cheaper one even though I know Apple's product is better, just like in the car example. It's free and I can still do all the stuff I want to do.
If Vista is made truly "uncrackable" (yeah right) I think we'll see much the same thought process happen more and more often.
Believe it or not I won it at a charity auction. I was pretty excited to get it, my 2gb mobile player wasn't cutting it for long trips. Here's the truth - they did a good job with it. It's well made. The interface is solid, easy to use and intuitive. I didn't have to read the instructions to use it. The software works pretty well, but is a little confusing. When the Zune came out it'd have been pretty hard to F*** up. With all the money in the world and dozens of business cases to study it'd be pretty difficult to come out with an MP3 player that didn't do a passable job. The Zune did just that, and now true to Microsoft form 2.0 will come out, and then 3.0 and 4.0, and it'll continue to improve. If I were voting with my own money I'd have probably bought Creative's 30gb model, but in truth the Zune is pretty good at what it does. If you can live with people poking fun at you for owning it, go ahead and buy one. It only syncs with Windows, by the way.