True, but it can have upsides. I know someone who ordered a midrange Dell laptop, got sent the wrong one, got messed about and ended up doing a credit-card chargeback and then buying a new laptop elsewhere. 6 months later, after many calls mails and e-mails to Dell's incompetent customer service people he sold the unwanted Dell on ebay because they didn't show the slightest sign of wanting to take it back. He had to jump through some legal hoops (formally stating his intent to treat the item as an unsolicited gift if it wasn't taken in 28 days - YMMV, IANAL, but he worked in a law firm at the time so he got good advice free), but he made a tidy profit out of the deal.
The problem is, Apple now have a judge saying they don't have a monopoly, so they could simply jack the price of OS X up to $1,000,129 with a $1m discount if it's installed on an Apple computer, or limit sales to 10 per customer, or use any other way of making it uneconomical to make clones, and it wouldn't count as monopoly abuse.
Judge actually ruled that this is pretty much the exact opposite of 'This would be akin to Microsoft...'
This particular ruling isn't about the EULA aspect of the case, it's about the (alleged) monopoly abuse. Psystar's argument was that Apple had a monopoly in the market for computers running OS X, and therefore had to abide by the much stricter laws on what a company can and cannot do if it gets into a monopoly position. The judge said that 'computers running OS X' isn't the applicable 'market' in this case, he defined the applicable market as 'computers running any OS', therefore Apple only have a minority of the market, and Psystar is wrong. In that market, Microsoft do have a big enough OS market share to be defined as a monopoly.
They took a gamble on how a very vague law would be interpreted by a judge. If they won, then they would have been sitting on a goldmine, having lost they will still have the paycheques they they took home each month. There was a lot of upside for hardly any downside.
It's really difficult to get a feel for this question without knowing why anyone would want a 'remote moving datacentre' that isn't well connected to anything else. Why can't the computers be sited somewhere less troublesome? Would virtualising the machines to get round the booting/power on/off issues help, or is there some reason that this can;t be done?
Rather than putting reflective particles in the Oceans, why not put reflective sheets on land? Giving the world's least hospitable deserts a tin foil hat would do a lot less damage to the ecosystem (since there isn't much of one there), and would be a lot eaiser to reverse if things go wrong.
If that red line is accurate, then the graph looks less like an out of phase correlation with earth sun/distance, and more like an in phase correlation with earth/sun relative velocity.
London's biggest wind farm is built ON the auto plant where Ford smelting the aluminium for all their European diesel engines.
Who cares about transmission losses when the power is generated exactly where it's needed? The exact opposite of what TFA suggests is true in this case, the load on the UK national grid is reduced because Ford don't need to bring in the power that these turbines provide.
For the Slashdot crowd, I can think of nothing better than Fantastic Contraption. It's a free* flash based physics game, where you can construct all sorts of machines, vehicles, catapults, bridges, or whatever else solves the task of 'get this object from a to b'. There's a whole slew of user generated content like the 'find the simplest solution' challenge, or the 'find a green (no motors) solution' challenge.
www.fantasticcontraption.com
*For a $10 donation you get the ability to design your own levels, but that's more of an optional extra than an essential.
The problem in this case isn't about vengeance, social rehabilitation, it's about a different thing that the prison system ought to be doing, keeping the public safe from the inmates. Questions need to be asked about a system that put someone so mentally ill that he wanted to muder his own 3 year old daughter in a prision that he could get out of.
Another factor that doesn't appear to have been taken into account is that the prison system is also ment to be a deterrent to committing crime. Should the system really be sending out a message that if you make millions by spamming you'll get to keep most of it after a 2 year stint in a prison you can easily get out of?
These figures just count units shipped in the US, they exclude mini-notebooks and handhelds and don't take into account profitability or unit costs.
If you go by market capitalisation, Apple isn't behind Dell and HP, it's ahead of both, but behind IBM who don't even get a look-in in the units shipped list.
I can think of 2 good reasons for Microsoft to sue, if they are convinced that SCO's usefulness as an anti-Linux FUD machine is over.
Firstly if SCO has any asset value left, and Microsoft can secure a percentage of the pickings from the corpse then it's not just cash for them, it's also cash that won't be going to Novell & IBM.
Secondly 'Darl tricked us into orchestrating this whole fiaSCO, and we have a judge's verdict proving it' is much better PR than 'hey shareholders, we just wasted $oodles on a doomed court case'
You think your lot are shockingly incompetent, try our lot. Their authentication software is just a basic form filling thing, barely more than a web page, but it requires IE. Applestore staff are really enjoying having to cobble together an emulation solution today as nobody realised that IE for Mac was killed off years ago, especially when they found out that the back end software is as stable as a dizzy stiltwalker in a ball bearing factory.
Meanwhile I'm not even in an Apple store as O2 randomly decreed that existing customers can only upgrade at O2 stores. I should have been able to upgrade online and have the phone delivered, but despite sending me 3 mails saying I'd successfully ordered online, and debiting my credit card, O2 randomly decided I wasn't getting one, and the estimated delivery date was 'hopefully by the end of Summer'. The idea of reserving the a phone for me at the shop, or couriering one from the shop to me was for no readily apparent reason unthinkable, so I decided to queue at the shop. I was 11th in line. After making a grand total of 3 sales in the first hour after opening, the staff decided to switch to filling in the paperwork offline, which slowed them down to just 2 completed sales in the 2nd hour.
At about this point, they finally realised that some people in the 100 strong queue would not get one of the 30 phones they had in stock. They counted the 16Gb phones, and gave the first 12 people in the queue a yellow post it note that designated us as the lucky ones to get the big memory version. Then they took the 12th post it away, having discovered that their counting abilities matched their organisational abilities. Purple post its for the 8Gbs followed, and the back two thirds of the queue were told they were out of luck, and had waited over 2 hours for no reason.
Five minutes later, they noticed the *other* box of iPhones, and handed out more post-its to people who had only just arrived and joined the back of the queue (of course it didn't occur to staff to stop people joining the queue after the first batch of phones were all accounted for). After much arguing they finally stopped trying to allocate the newly found 16s to the newcomers and swapped purple post its for yellows. Several staff genuinely couldn't understand why people who had queued for hours and been told they could only have an 8 were angry that people who arrived 5 mins ago were getting first dibs on the second lot of 16s. One just kept repeating 'but you've been allocated an 8' over and over.
After nearly 3 hours, I was the 11th person to leave the store with a phone. I expect the store won't sell out today, because they had about 40 left, and only 9 hours before closing time.
Well, I'm sorry that I didn't read the ars technica link posted at 1:54 before making my post at 1:52, but the question remains, why isn't this cross-platform to start with? I can't see anything there that isn't already available in Java games, so why does this need a plug-in, and why is it platform specific?
"Requires Windows Vista/XP"...so much for not being evil! Seriously though, why is this platform specific? It seems really shortsighted to exclude everyone else.
Palm need to stop doing whatever it is that they are regularly losing $40m doing. This may seem obvious, but their management don't seem to have realised it.
Accept that your OS (or microsoft's) will not be better than OS X on iPhone, and even if it was, you would not get 1/4m people to dl at your sdk and/or have costs below that of open source options.
Accept that you cannot make an iPhone/blackberry killer, because the goalposts move faster than you can. Accept that you are no longer a profitable player in the massmarket smartphone market, and get out of the massmarket and into niches. Now.
Palm could have easily made an N-Gage killer, let's face it, it practically killed itself, and it's basic idea is sound, just the execution sucked. What about NOT chasing after ever smaller phones, and targetting people willing to have a phone the same size as they had 5 years back but with unique features? Palm could be the only company (afaik) shipping a specialist 10-12 megapixel cameraphone today if they had spotted the niche. They could have 160Gb hard-drive MP3 player phone, they could have a phone that records decent quality video to a tiny hard drive, they could have got into bed with the open moko people, or gone to Sony and rescued the PSP with phone capabilities, or made a book-sized PDA with a big enough qwerty keyboard for older folks (or just big fingered) people to use, that last one would have cost nearly nothing to make, just house the exisiting internals in a bigger box with the same cheap screens the OLPC people use.
The other option is to stop, sack everyone, and split the remaining cash between the shareholders. If I had Palm shares, I'd be asking why they didn't do that 4 quarters ago.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but it can have upsides. I know someone who ordered a midrange Dell laptop, got sent the wrong one, got messed about and ended up doing a credit-card chargeback and then buying a new laptop elsewhere. 6 months later, after many calls mails and e-mails to Dell's incompetent customer service people he sold the unwanted Dell on ebay because they didn't show the slightest sign of wanting to take it back. He had to jump through some legal hoops (formally stating his intent to treat the item as an unsolicited gift if it wasn't taken in 28 days - YMMV, IANAL, but he worked in a law firm at the time so he got good advice free), but he made a tidy profit out of the deal.
The problem is, Apple now have a judge saying they don't have a monopoly, so they could simply jack the price of OS X up to $1,000,129 with a $1m discount if it's installed on an Apple computer, or limit sales to 10 per customer, or use any other way of making it uneconomical to make clones, and it wouldn't count as monopoly abuse.
This would be akin to Microsoft having...
Judge actually ruled that this is pretty much the exact opposite of 'This would be akin to Microsoft...'
This particular ruling isn't about the EULA aspect of the case, it's about the (alleged) monopoly abuse. Psystar's argument was that Apple had a monopoly in the market for computers running OS X, and therefore had to abide by the much stricter laws on what a company can and cannot do if it gets into a monopoly position. The judge said that 'computers running OS X' isn't the applicable 'market' in this case, he defined the applicable market as 'computers running any OS', therefore Apple only have a minority of the market, and Psystar is wrong. In that market, Microsoft do have a big enough OS market share to be defined as a monopoly.
They took a gamble on how a very vague law would be interpreted by a judge. If they won, then they would have been sitting on a goldmine, having lost they will still have the paycheques they they took home each month. There was a lot of upside for hardly any downside.
By day, he's mild mannered lawyer Ray Beckerman, but by night he becomes.... THE UNDERSIGNED!
It's really difficult to get a feel for this question without knowing why anyone would want a 'remote moving datacentre' that isn't well connected to anything else. Why can't the computers be sited somewhere less troublesome? Would virtualising the machines to get round the booting/power on/off issues help, or is there some reason that this can;t be done?
Rather than putting reflective particles in the Oceans, why not put reflective sheets on land? Giving the world's least hospitable deserts a tin foil hat would do a lot less damage to the ecosystem (since there isn't much of one there), and would be a lot eaiser to reverse if things go wrong.
A close relative of the common '404 page not found' error, 418 I'm a Teapot is the response specified in the RFC 2324 - Hypertext Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP).
Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code "418 I'm a teapot". The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout.
The real issue is that they didn't have the brain to use .gov.uk
If that red line is accurate, then the graph looks less like an out of phase correlation with earth sun/distance, and more like an in phase correlation with earth/sun relative velocity.
The solution is just a few miles from here:
http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/projects/Ford/plan_ford.html
London's biggest wind farm is built ON the auto plant where Ford smelting the aluminium for all their European diesel engines.
Who cares about transmission losses when the power is generated exactly where it's needed? The exact opposite of what TFA suggests is true in this case, the load on the UK national grid is reduced because Ford don't need to bring in the power that these turbines provide.
ture... or they could do it the Cyrix way, by reverse engineering.
For the Slashdot crowd, I can think of nothing better than Fantastic Contraption. It's a free* flash based physics game, where you can construct all sorts of machines, vehicles, catapults, bridges, or whatever else solves the task of 'get this object from a to b'. There's a whole slew of user generated content like the 'find the simplest solution' challenge, or the 'find a green (no motors) solution' challenge.
www.fantasticcontraption.com
*For a $10 donation you get the ability to design your own levels, but that's more of an optional extra than an essential.
...or possibly their own foot.
"The real question is whether the judge will find out about it."
Ok, stupidly obvious question here, but I suspect the reply might give some interesting insight into the US legal system...
Why doesn't someone simply tell the judge about it?
The problem in this case isn't about vengeance, social rehabilitation, it's about a different thing that the prison system ought to be doing, keeping the public safe from the inmates. Questions need to be asked about a system that put someone so mentally ill that he wanted to muder his own 3 year old daughter in a prision that he could get out of.
Another factor that doesn't appear to have been taken into account is that the prison system is also ment to be a deterrent to committing crime. Should the system really be sending out a message that if you make millions by spamming you'll get to keep most of it after a 2 year stint in a prison you can easily get out of?
There are 2 production models planned, the 'Typ-1e' is electric and the 'Typ-1h' is a plug in hybrid.
Can anyone spot the logical flaw in your argument that "I didn't know about any banned books therefore there were no banned books"?
I'm sure if you'd tried working your way through the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum) then I'm sure you'd have been in a lot of trouble.
So, Apple charge twice as much, but Dell makes way more money? How does that work?
These figures just count units shipped in the US, they exclude mini-notebooks and handhelds and don't take into account profitability or unit costs.
If you go by market capitalisation, Apple isn't behind Dell and HP, it's ahead of both, but behind IBM who don't even get a look-in in the units shipped list.
I can think of 2 good reasons for Microsoft to sue, if they are convinced that SCO's usefulness as an anti-Linux FUD machine is over.
Firstly if SCO has any asset value left, and Microsoft can secure a percentage of the pickings from the corpse then it's not just cash for them, it's also cash that won't be going to Novell & IBM.
Secondly 'Darl tricked us into orchestrating this whole fiaSCO, and we have a judge's verdict proving it' is much better PR than 'hey shareholders, we just wasted $oodles on a doomed court case'
You think your lot are shockingly incompetent, try our lot. Their authentication software is just a basic form filling thing, barely more than a web page, but it requires IE. Applestore staff are really enjoying having to cobble together an emulation solution today as nobody realised that IE for Mac was killed off years ago, especially when they found out that the back end software is as stable as a dizzy stiltwalker in a ball bearing factory.
Meanwhile I'm not even in an Apple store as O2 randomly decreed that existing customers can only upgrade at O2 stores. I should have been able to upgrade online and have the phone delivered, but despite sending me 3 mails saying I'd successfully ordered online, and debiting my credit card, O2 randomly decided I wasn't getting one, and the estimated delivery date was 'hopefully by the end of Summer'. The idea of reserving the a phone for me at the shop, or couriering one from the shop to me was for no readily apparent reason unthinkable, so I decided to queue at the shop. I was 11th in line. After making a grand total of 3 sales in the first hour after opening, the staff decided to switch to filling in the paperwork offline, which slowed them down to just 2 completed sales in the 2nd hour.
At about this point, they finally realised that some people in the 100 strong queue would not get one of the 30 phones they had in stock. They counted the 16Gb phones, and gave the first 12 people in the queue a yellow post it note that designated us as the lucky ones to get the big memory version. Then they took the 12th post it away, having discovered that their counting abilities matched their organisational abilities. Purple post its for the 8Gbs followed, and the back two thirds of the queue were told they were out of luck, and had waited over 2 hours for no reason.
Five minutes later, they noticed the *other* box of iPhones, and handed out more post-its to people who had only just arrived and joined the back of the queue (of course it didn't occur to staff to stop people joining the queue after the first batch of phones were all accounted for). After much arguing they finally stopped trying to allocate the newly found 16s to the newcomers and swapped purple post its for yellows. Several staff genuinely couldn't understand why people who had queued for hours and been told they could only have an 8 were angry that people who arrived 5 mins ago were getting first dibs on the second lot of 16s. One just kept repeating 'but you've been allocated an 8' over and over.
After nearly 3 hours, I was the 11th person to leave the store with a phone. I expect the store won't sell out today, because they had about 40 left, and only 9 hours before closing time.
My activation worked just fine though :-)
Well, I'm sorry that I didn't read the ars technica link posted at 1:54 before making my post at 1:52, but the question remains, why isn't this cross-platform to start with? I can't see anything there that isn't already available in Java games, so why does this need a plug-in, and why is it platform specific?
"Requires Windows Vista/XP" ...so much for not being evil! Seriously though, why is this platform specific? It seems really shortsighted to exclude everyone else.
Palm need to stop doing whatever it is that they are regularly losing $40m doing. This may seem obvious, but their management don't seem to have realised it.
Accept that your OS (or microsoft's) will not be better than OS X on iPhone, and even if it was, you would not get 1/4m people to dl at your sdk and/or have costs below that of open source options.
Accept that you cannot make an iPhone/blackberry killer, because the goalposts move faster than you can. Accept that you are no longer a profitable player in the massmarket smartphone market, and get out of the massmarket and into niches. Now.
Palm could have easily made an N-Gage killer, let's face it, it practically killed itself, and it's basic idea is sound, just the execution sucked. What about NOT chasing after ever smaller phones, and targetting people willing to have a phone the same size as they had 5 years back but with unique features? Palm could be the only company (afaik) shipping a specialist 10-12 megapixel cameraphone today if they had spotted the niche. They could have 160Gb hard-drive MP3 player phone, they could have a phone that records decent quality video to a tiny hard drive, they could have got into bed with the open moko people, or gone to Sony and rescued the PSP with phone capabilities, or made a book-sized PDA with a big enough qwerty keyboard for older folks (or just big fingered) people to use, that last one would have cost nearly nothing to make, just house the exisiting internals in a bigger box with the same cheap screens the OLPC people use.
The other option is to stop, sack everyone, and split the remaining cash between the shareholders. If I had Palm shares, I'd be asking why they didn't do that 4 quarters ago.