Ellison did NOT claim that Linux would win on the desktop. He merely claimed that Linux would win in the datacenter, and that StarOffice would force Microsoft to compete on the desktop. I think he may be right. I don't claim to be an expert on datacenters though.
I do believe that Microsoft's power will fade, due in large part to Office competitors. I can't see how Microsoft can maintain their Office monopoly when they keep rachetting up the price. Even the OEM version, bundled with a new PC, is several hundred dollars. So many people will turn to alternatives, like MS Works. Once many people are running scaled back versions like Works, then some people will start realizing that StarOffice (and others) are better, and even cheaper. Not everyone will switch, but all you need is a critical mass, which will give competitors enough money to reinvest in improving their office suites, allowing them to compete head to head with the full version of Office. Microsoft will have to cut prices for an indefinite period, which will lower profits. Lower profits in the Office division will reduce or eliminate their ability to absorb losses in other divisions, forcing a retreat from other markets. Sure, they have large cash reserves, but you'd be amazed how fast you can blow through billions of dollars when you're forced to compete for the first time in years.
The only thing that's needed, as I see it, is a competitor to Windows. I would love for someone to make Linux into something the average computer user would be comfortable using, but I just don't think it'll ever happen. I'd love for OS X to run on commodity hardware, but I don't think that'll happen either. So I'm not sure that Microsoft will ever lose the desktop OS monopoly. I can always hope though.
Even better was "Forbes America," where he buys Russia, and uses orbital lasers to carve it into the shape of America, to fulfill his dream of a flat tax USA. Also, everyone gets a pony.
Antisemitism? This struck me as odd, so I did a Google search. All I found was this quote which is clearly not antisemetic:
". . . You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely 'anti-Zionist.' And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--this is God's own truth.
"Antisemitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently antisemitic, and ever will be so.
"Why is this? You know that Zionism is nothing less than the dream and ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land. The Jewish people, the Scriptures tell us, once enjoyed a flourishing Commonwealth in the Holy Land. From this they were expelled by the Roman tyrant, the same Romans who cruelly murdered Our Lord. Driven from their homeland, their nation in ashes, forced to wander the globe, the Jewish people time and again suffered the lash of whichever tyrant happened to rule over them.
"The Negro people, my friend, know what it is to suffer the torment of tyranny under rulers not of our choosing. Our brothers in Africa have begged, pleaded, requested--DEMANDED the recognition and realization of our inborn right to live in peace under our own sovereignty in our own country.
"How easy it should be, for anyone who holds dear this inalienable right of all mankind, to understand and support the right of the Jewish People to live in their ancient Land of Israel. All men of good will exult in the fulfilment of God's promise, that his People should return in joy to rebuild their plundered land.
This is Zionism, nothing more, nothing less.
"And what is anti-Zionist? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the Globe. It is discrimination against Jews, my friend, because they are Jews. In short, it is antisemitism.
"The antisemite rejoices at any opportunity to vent his malice. The times have made it unpopular, in the West, to proclaim openly a hatred of the Jews. This being the case, the antisemite must constantly seek new forms and forums for his poison. How he must revel in the new masquerade! He does not hate the Jews, he is just 'anti-Zionist'!
"My friend, I do not accuse you of deliberate antisemitism. I know you feel, as I do, a deep love of truth and justice and a revulsion for racism, prejudice, and discrimination. But I know you have been misled--as others have been--into thinking you can be 'anti-Zionist' and yet remain true to these heartfelt principles that you and I share.
Let my words echo in the depths of your soul: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--make no mistake about it."
The point is that Google clearly marks ads as such. Other search engines will boost ranking for money, and not denote the boosted ranking as an ad. That's the important difference.
Quite frankly, I think paid ads are a useful search engine tool. Sometimes, people willing to pay to be seen are the people I want to find, for example if I want to buy something, the people willing to sell that something are probably going to advertise under that keyword.
The new company that purchases the Replay line will pick up the lifetime service obligation for the sheer reason that it wouldn't want to alienate it's new user base.
No, they don't care about pissing off their USER base. They care about pissing off their CUSTOMER base. If you paid SonicBlue for a lifetime subscription, then SonicBlue goes belly up, and sells thier customers off to someone else, the new company is only going to care about those people that will bring them in new revenue. A new company will have no interest whatsoever in providing a service for free just because you paid another company a couple hundred bucks once upon a time.
That's just standard boilerplate. I suppose in the coming years someone will get around to striking that from the list, but removing a non-existant region from list of restricted countries is not exactly a high priority.
When OJ was retried, it was on a civil basis. You can't be imprisoned based on a civil trial, and civil trials are much harder for the defense to win. So it makes sense that OJ could have the civil trial go against him. Note that the constitution specifically says "life or limb," and a civil trial does not jeopardize life or limb, merely one's financial resources.
Was the time they designed that Mars probe using Imperial measurements.
I kid, I kid. I wonder, though, if MIT vs. Caltech could set off the same sort of flamewar here on Slashdot that Emacs vs. Vi, Gnome vs. KDE, or Mac vs. PC can.
No, it's not standard practice on the stage. If someone had written a new version of Othello 70 years after Shakespeare wrote his version, it would have been criticized too. It is usually not acceptable to remake a play within about 100 years of the original. Occasionally it's considered alright if you're both writing plays based on the same ancient source material (Hercules, for example), and you base it on the original source, not on the other person's play.
Here's an example of how people react adversely to someone doing the same thing on stage: when Rossini released his version of The Barber of Seville, the opening perfomance was booed so loudly by fans of the original Pizzello opera that no one could hear the singing. This was despite the fact that he wrote a letter to Pizzello, and wrote an insert for the program in which he explained his reasons for remaking the opera, and his great respect for the earlier composer.
I think there are a few reasons that remakes rub people the wrong way. One of the biggest is probably that you're implicitly saying "I'm better and more talented than the guy who made the original." Another reason is that if it's no good, it will sour others on the original. Someone who had only seen the new Planet of the Apes would probably be uninterested in seeing the original. Finally, it's often unoriginal. While there can be some truly imaginative remakes, often someone can be tempted to simply update the special effects and copy the rest verbatim. It is right, I think, that people are against remakes. It means that unless you've actually a worthwhile take on the original, you shouldn't bother with a remake.
He said "who," not "which national group." The point is, there was no identifiable artist who made the cross in its current form. It started as a tool (a tool for execution), and then more stylized deptictions of it became the religious icons we know today.
Unfortunately, I have not seen any similar adaptors that connect to a laptop style connector (with power) because if there where it would make a cool direct HD replacement for an older laptop.
As mentioned above, that probably wouldn't be a good idea. Virtual memory gets rewritten a lot, and you may hit yout 1 million write limit.
Sorry, 1 ain't a prime. A prime number has two unique divisors: 1 and itself. 1 only has one divisor, and is therefore a special case, neither prime nor composite.
Re:debian political parties vs. a national ones
on
Martin Michlmayr Wins DPL
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· Score: 2, Interesting
10 votes? No, I don't think so. You would simply rank canidates, 1 through 5. In the pairwise comparisons, you simply look at who is ranked higher. And I highly doubt that "no one" would win, given how few write ins are cast in any election.
Australia uses a system not dissimilar, whereby people rank their choices in canidates. Everyone's first place choices are examined, and the canidate with the fewest 1st place choices is eliminated. Those that voted for the least popular canidate have their votes reassigned to their second place choices. The process is repeated until one canidate has over 50% of the vote.
By "did just fine," I think he meant it ended up well regarded and popular, and has made its parent companies billions. Not that it necessarily did well when it was first run. Besides which, Star Trek was cancelled one year before demographics were first examined. It turned out that Star Trek: TOS had a very desirable audience, and hence would not have been cancelled had that information been looked at earlier.
iBooks are terribly made. My girlfriend has one, and the ethernet jack is totally borked. She can't even remember having done anything to it, but we speculate that she must have tripped over the ethernet cord. Certainly if she'd done something more dramatic, she'd remember.
Anyway, Apple's "wonderful" repair centers are refusing to fix it under warranty because it is "accidental damage or mistreatment." Since iBooks do not have PCMCIA ports, and usb ethernet devices only work with Macs, she has two choices. She can either pay the outrageous $775 that Apple is charging to repair an ethernet jack with a few broken pins, or else buy an AirPort card and 802.11b base station.
It should also be mentioned that the power connector is very fragile. Being stepped on can bend it completely out of shape, and it is very difficult to get back in the right shape, because it has to be basically a perfect circle.
The test of laptop sturdiness, IMHO, is not whether it can survive the dramatic falls, but whether it can survive the minor, day to day damage over a prolonged period. Can it survive being tripped over, carried around in a backpack, etc? I have a 4 year old Dell laptop that I have treated far more roughly than my girlfriend has treated her 6 month old iBook. The Dell looks a little worse for the wear, but works perfectly. The iBook still looks shiny and new, but has been completely crippled.
What, you mean like Linux? I thought the open source philosophy tended to favor "release early, release often." I'm not arguing the technical merits of Fresco vs. X, but I don't think they should be criticized for releasing an early, buggy version, or people should be criticized for running it (on non-critical machines, of course).
Why thank you, yes, it was part of the firmware upgrade, so now I have hold too. I'll report back (if slashdot will still let me post to this article) if it seems to help with the hard resets too.
Happily, my hard resets have not wiped out any songs, it just resets my place in the playlist, volume settings, stuff like that.
Yeah, the non-uploading and proprietary software is too bad, but since I mainly just use one computer, it hasn't really been an issue for me. Besides, with and upgrade to 256 megs, I can go for days without needing new tracks.
One thing that would be REALLY nice though, would be a better fast forward. The ability to seek forward, say, a minute at a time would be tremendously useful. Another feature they really should have added was a "hold" switch, to prevent accidental button pushing when the thing's in your pocket.
First of all, LCDs are more expensive, so it takes a smaller volume to achieve the same level of revenue. Second, all laptops use LCDs, and you need to buy a new LCD for every new laptop, whereas desktops can reuse old CRTs. Finally, this is only looking at new sales, and doesn't really say anything about how fast people are replacing existing CRTs with LCDs.
Despite this statistic, I think it'll be a long time before CRTs become an uncommon sight on a desktop machine.
It should also be pointed out that the vast majority of Chapter 11 filing fail, and the company has to end up liquidating. See Loki Games as fairly recent example of a company that filed Chapter 11 and ended up in Chapter 7. For that matter, United Airlines looks like another that's headed for the trashbin.
I recently bought at Rio Sport 35S. I loved the idea of 128 megs (upgradable to 256) with no moving parts, but the sad fact is it's rather poorly engineered. I'm not sure if it's the cold, or static electricity, or what, but I can't walk around outside wearing it without it suffering a hard reset every 5 minutes or so. I've also gotten some bizarre bursts of static electricity (the first time it happened, I was walking out of an airport, past the metal detectors, so I thought that might have something to do with it, but it's happened twice since with no obvious reason).
Oh well, others are making good competitive products, so I guess there's no reason really to be sad to see them go.
Certainly throughout history the tendancy seems for new languages to develop, but is that true anymore? Doesn't this massive language extinction amid great population growth suggest that we are moving towards a few common languages? I think that if everyone woke up tomorrow speaking the same language, the world is interconnected enough that few, if any, dialects would spring up, and even then it would only be among the most underdeveloped or intentionally isolationist regions.
it makes some sense that recruiters would be working hard right now. If there's one thing the military hates, it's recruits who decide after 6 months that they really made a bad choice. Anyone who joins up right at the outset of a war is probably pretty damn sure he wants to be in the military, so he'll make a good recruit.
This is basically the opposite of the time immediately after Sept. 11th, when the military was turning people away because most people who wanted to sign up then were not really that serious about it.
Indeed. I have a CmdrTaco number of 3! That's one short of being able to post in his journal, but oh well. Anyway, I believe the script took too many pageviews, and so the guy would get banned whenever he tired to run it more than 3 degrees deep.
Slashdot Mirror
I do believe that Microsoft's power will fade, due in large part to Office competitors. I can't see how Microsoft can maintain their Office monopoly when they keep rachetting up the price. Even the OEM version, bundled with a new PC, is several hundred dollars. So many people will turn to alternatives, like MS Works. Once many people are running scaled back versions like Works, then some people will start realizing that StarOffice (and others) are better, and even cheaper. Not everyone will switch, but all you need is a critical mass, which will give competitors enough money to reinvest in improving their office suites, allowing them to compete head to head with the full version of Office. Microsoft will have to cut prices for an indefinite period, which will lower profits. Lower profits in the Office division will reduce or eliminate their ability to absorb losses in other divisions, forcing a retreat from other markets. Sure, they have large cash reserves, but you'd be amazed how fast you can blow through billions of dollars when you're forced to compete for the first time in years.
The only thing that's needed, as I see it, is a competitor to Windows. I would love for someone to make Linux into something the average computer user would be comfortable using, but I just don't think it'll ever happen. I'd love for OS X to run on commodity hardware, but I don't think that'll happen either. So I'm not sure that Microsoft will ever lose the desktop OS monopoly. I can always hope though.
Even better was "Forbes America," where he buys Russia, and uses orbital lasers to carve it into the shape of America, to fulfill his dream of a flat tax USA. Also, everyone gets a pony.
Antisemitism? This struck me as odd, so I did a Google search. All I found was this quote which is clearly not antisemetic:
". . . You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely 'anti-Zionist.' And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--this is God's own truth.
"Antisemitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently antisemitic, and ever will be so.
"Why is this? You know that Zionism is nothing less than the dream and ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land. The Jewish people, the Scriptures tell us, once enjoyed a flourishing Commonwealth in the Holy Land. From this they were expelled by the Roman tyrant, the same Romans who cruelly murdered Our Lord. Driven from their homeland, their nation in ashes, forced to wander the globe, the Jewish people time and again suffered the lash of whichever tyrant happened to rule over them.
"The Negro people, my friend, know what it is to suffer the torment of tyranny under rulers not of our choosing. Our brothers in Africa have begged, pleaded, requested--DEMANDED the recognition and realization of our inborn right to live in peace under our own sovereignty in our own country.
"How easy it should be, for anyone who holds dear this inalienable right of all mankind, to understand and support the right of the Jewish People to live in their ancient Land of Israel. All men of good will exult in the fulfilment of God's promise, that his People should return in joy to rebuild their plundered land.
This is Zionism, nothing more, nothing less.
"And what is anti-Zionist? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the Globe. It is discrimination against Jews, my friend, because they are Jews. In short, it is antisemitism.
"The antisemite rejoices at any opportunity to vent his malice. The times have made it unpopular, in the West, to proclaim openly a hatred of the Jews. This being the case, the antisemite must constantly seek new forms and forums for his poison. How he must revel in the new masquerade! He does not hate the Jews, he is just 'anti-Zionist'!
"My friend, I do not accuse you of deliberate antisemitism. I know you feel, as I do, a deep love of truth and justice and a revulsion for racism, prejudice, and discrimination. But I know you have been misled--as others have been--into thinking you can be 'anti-Zionist' and yet remain true to these heartfelt principles that you and I share.
Let my words echo in the depths of your soul: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--make no mistake about it."
Do you have a reference?
Quite frankly, I think paid ads are a useful search engine tool. Sometimes, people willing to pay to be seen are the people I want to find, for example if I want to buy something, the people willing to sell that something are probably going to advertise under that keyword.
No, they don't care about pissing off their USER base. They care about pissing off their CUSTOMER base. If you paid SonicBlue for a lifetime subscription, then SonicBlue goes belly up, and sells thier customers off to someone else, the new company is only going to care about those people that will bring them in new revenue. A new company will have no interest whatsoever in providing a service for free just because you paid another company a couple hundred bucks once upon a time.
That's just standard boilerplate. I suppose in the coming years someone will get around to striking that from the list, but removing a non-existant region from list of restricted countries is not exactly a high priority.
When OJ was retried, it was on a civil basis. You can't be imprisoned based on a civil trial, and civil trials are much harder for the defense to win. So it makes sense that OJ could have the civil trial go against him. Note that the constitution specifically says "life or limb," and a civil trial does not jeopardize life or limb, merely one's financial resources.
I kid, I kid. I wonder, though, if MIT vs. Caltech could set off the same sort of flamewar here on Slashdot that Emacs vs. Vi, Gnome vs. KDE, or Mac vs. PC can.
Here's an example of how people react adversely to someone doing the same thing on stage: when Rossini released his version of The Barber of Seville, the opening perfomance was booed so loudly by fans of the original Pizzello opera that no one could hear the singing. This was despite the fact that he wrote a letter to Pizzello, and wrote an insert for the program in which he explained his reasons for remaking the opera, and his great respect for the earlier composer.
I think there are a few reasons that remakes rub people the wrong way. One of the biggest is probably that you're implicitly saying "I'm better and more talented than the guy who made the original." Another reason is that if it's no good, it will sour others on the original. Someone who had only seen the new Planet of the Apes would probably be uninterested in seeing the original. Finally, it's often unoriginal. While there can be some truly imaginative remakes, often someone can be tempted to simply update the special effects and copy the rest verbatim. It is right, I think, that people are against remakes. It means that unless you've actually a worthwhile take on the original, you shouldn't bother with a remake.
He said "who," not "which national group." The point is, there was no identifiable artist who made the cross in its current form. It started as a tool (a tool for execution), and then more stylized deptictions of it became the religious icons we know today.
As mentioned above, that probably wouldn't be a good idea. Virtual memory gets rewritten a lot, and you may hit yout 1 million write limit.
Sorry, 1 ain't a prime. A prime number has two unique divisors: 1 and itself. 1 only has one divisor, and is therefore a special case, neither prime nor composite.
Australia uses a system not dissimilar, whereby people rank their choices in canidates. Everyone's first place choices are examined, and the canidate with the fewest 1st place choices is eliminated. Those that voted for the least popular canidate have their votes reassigned to their second place choices. The process is repeated until one canidate has over 50% of the vote.
Cell phones have always been required to be off on airplanes. The rapid travel overwhelms the stations on the ground, which can't keep up.
By "did just fine," I think he meant it ended up well regarded and popular, and has made its parent companies billions. Not that it necessarily did well when it was first run. Besides which, Star Trek was cancelled one year before demographics were first examined. It turned out that Star Trek: TOS had a very desirable audience, and hence would not have been cancelled had that information been looked at earlier.
Anyway, Apple's "wonderful" repair centers are refusing to fix it under warranty because it is "accidental damage or mistreatment." Since iBooks do not have PCMCIA ports, and usb ethernet devices only work with Macs, she has two choices. She can either pay the outrageous $775 that Apple is charging to repair an ethernet jack with a few broken pins, or else buy an AirPort card and 802.11b base station.
It should also be mentioned that the power connector is very fragile. Being stepped on can bend it completely out of shape, and it is very difficult to get back in the right shape, because it has to be basically a perfect circle.
The test of laptop sturdiness, IMHO, is not whether it can survive the dramatic falls, but whether it can survive the minor, day to day damage over a prolonged period. Can it survive being tripped over, carried around in a backpack, etc? I have a 4 year old Dell laptop that I have treated far more roughly than my girlfriend has treated her 6 month old iBook. The Dell looks a little worse for the wear, but works perfectly. The iBook still looks shiny and new, but has been completely crippled.
What, you mean like Linux? I thought the open source philosophy tended to favor "release early, release often." I'm not arguing the technical merits of Fresco vs. X, but I don't think they should be criticized for releasing an early, buggy version, or people should be criticized for running it (on non-critical machines, of course).
Why thank you, yes, it was part of the firmware upgrade, so now I have hold too. I'll report back (if slashdot will still let me post to this article) if it seems to help with the hard resets too.
Yeah, the non-uploading and proprietary software is too bad, but since I mainly just use one computer, it hasn't really been an issue for me. Besides, with and upgrade to 256 megs, I can go for days without needing new tracks.
One thing that would be REALLY nice though, would be a better fast forward. The ability to seek forward, say, a minute at a time would be tremendously useful. Another feature they really should have added was a "hold" switch, to prevent accidental button pushing when the thing's in your pocket.
Despite this statistic, I think it'll be a long time before CRTs become an uncommon sight on a desktop machine.
It should also be pointed out that the vast majority of Chapter 11 filing fail, and the company has to end up liquidating. See Loki Games as fairly recent example of a company that filed Chapter 11 and ended up in Chapter 7. For that matter, United Airlines looks like another that's headed for the trashbin.
Oh well, others are making good competitive products, so I guess there's no reason really to be sad to see them go.
Certainly throughout history the tendancy seems for new languages to develop, but is that true anymore? Doesn't this massive language extinction amid great population growth suggest that we are moving towards a few common languages? I think that if everyone woke up tomorrow speaking the same language, the world is interconnected enough that few, if any, dialects would spring up, and even then it would only be among the most underdeveloped or intentionally isolationist regions.
This is basically the opposite of the time immediately after Sept. 11th, when the military was turning people away because most people who wanted to sign up then were not really that serious about it.
Indeed. I have a CmdrTaco number of 3! That's one short of being able to post in his journal, but oh well. Anyway, I believe the script took too many pageviews, and so the guy would get banned whenever he tired to run it more than 3 degrees deep.