Big companies rarely compensate their salaried employees adequately for their inventions. That's why so many leave to do a start-up when they come up with something good. Then the big company buys the startup for their IP and the former employee gets his compensation.
So you put up the trade barrier and instead of China moving along the development path to the point where their people are able to fight for better conditions you bury them so they cannot compete.
I don't see the cause and affect here. Why would Chinese be able to change their government because their country becomes more prosperous? I think that wealth empowers those who already have power.
Second, Debian is extremely out of date. Even if you use unstable, packages such as Perl 5.8 are not available. And Perl 5.8 has been out for a long time. If you want software that was new two years ago, then Debian is the way to go. Otherwise, you're wise to choose a different distribution.
This is a fundamental reason why Debian doesn't have enough traction these days to be a serious contender. 100 to one, the released, so-called 'stable' Debian is too old to install on a brand new computer. Think Northbridge support and an obsolete list of PCI IDs. How's that going to be remotely useful in the real world of the desktop? Where's support for Opteron? Sure, it runs great on an old Motorola 68000 Atari ST... Totally ridiculous. Totally out of touch.
I even have my doubts about using it as a base for UserLinux. With distros like Gentoo beginning to offer precompiled binary installs of modern (and stable as a result) up-to-date software, why bend over backward to accomodate the Debian Way?
Being friendly, charismatic, and relatively good-looking had done far more for me than my IT skills ever have or ever will.
That's fine if you're looking at management or sales or getting-laid, but creative people often need peace and quiet so they can fill their heads with variables.
Therefore you cannot say the primary thing on their mind is quality -- it is the free aspects of their program.
Sure quality is upmost. After all, the reason people develop open source software is because they want to USE IT themselves, in contrast to many commercial projects which are out of the scope of interest of the developers, and who may not even use it. Sure, everybody is proud of their work, but developing software for self-use is a much higher bar of quality than developing software for a friggin' check.
Also, the reason open source software is released as beta or RC is for bug hunting. It isn't released because sombody wants top throw out some crap and have other people make it good.
My point was exactly what you said -- the quality comes AFTER the open source product is shipped, if it is maintained at all. Closed source software strives for the opposite, they do QA first before the massive public release.
I'll try again. Open Source projects are available LONG before they're shipped as final. It seems like the only ones which do not release beta versions are mature projects like Apache. And I'm not sure that Apache's projects don't have release candidate (RC) releases.
I would say the open source community is more interested in the fact that their products are OPEN SOURCE and FREE, and that "quality" takes a back seat to those things. Most open source projects don't have QA teams, they rely on the fact that it is open source to get feedback on released projects.
The users ARE QA teams for both open source projects AND commercial products. Commercial software is released with unpreviously recognized bugs because in-house QA is a synthetic process that will never be able to completely validate a product.
In-house QA at commercial houses is akin to an author editing his own manuscript.
Righto. XGI will be irrelevant in the Windows because of price/performance compared to the lower-end ATI and Nvidia parts. It could become relevant in the Linux world if they had open source drivers or if they simply would release specs for programming the chips. They haven't so far, so even with a promised binary X11 driver, they're destined for the scrap heap of Chapter 11 video card companies.
The first one was a well-crafted look at solipsism. Every shot was beautifully composed, the sound was superb, script was fresh.
The two that followed were standard good guys versus bad guys Hollywood gruel. You've seen them before starring John Wayne or Victor Mature. Add expensive modern cinematic artifice (called special effects), add plot hooks into the first movie and that just about says it all.
They're giving up a lot of name recognition by dropping their basic distro. I always think of them as a distro for beginners -- they have a billion-dollar mind share for people who are thinking of trying out Linux. But now they're giving that up for a $1,000 distro that's really no different under the hood than any other Linux distro? What are they thinking?
Maybe beginner (for Linux support) commercial houses like Oracle demand RedHat now, but someday they'll fix their install scripts to be seriously lib and kernel aware rather than simply distro aware. That will leave RedHat perpetually chumming for more beginners in a shrinking market as the world recognizes that the true defacto standard is Linux with GNU tools, not RedHat.
I was thinking in terms of SGI's marketing because they won't even publish their prices. The Altrix line of Itanic servers is better than HP's, and by next summer, Intel might have a turned it into a good CPU. But SGI still relies on their stable of VARs "solution providers" to move boxes, and the Altrix is really, just a box that doesn't really need a solution provider.
Not just because they're all fitted up with Linux. They've gotten all their bases covered. They make Apple's CPUs. They are connected up with AMD, and they're selling Opteron Servers like hotcakes. They sell Itaniums, Pentiums, Power Series. Very pragmatic.
I think there's chinks in most of the other big company's armour because they each have a 'religious' ball and chain holding them back:
Sun has their SPARC religion.
HP has their Itanic religion. They have all those other dead-end achitectures to support. Their current IA86 lineup is ho-hum whiteboxes.
Dell has Intel religion, no matter what. Serious whitebox sticker slappers. Also, are they moving too much support to India?
I wonder if anybody has studied the prevalance of Candida albicans in overweight people who respond well to the Atkins diet. The Atkins diet is very similar to Candida diets which were so popular 5 years ago. This also reminds me that some quacks suggest Candida blooms are the result of parasitic protozoa infections.
Google is doing great, but they can't expect to dominate internet searches any more than they do.
It doesn't seem as though the folks at Google are wringing their hands about the future. Maybe they can continue to enjoy themselves in spite of becoming multi-millionaires. Really -- there are worse things that can happen to somebody than getting really big and then getting small.
They are bright people there at Google. Greed is a brutal taskmaster. I wouldn't wish it on them.
I remember playing around with a voice recog system called Simon on a NeXT computer years ago. Fun, but am I the only one who feels stoopit talking out loud to a computer?
I guess what makes this new Microsoft technology so exciting is to find out who it is they stole it from.
I'll be watching the headlines for news of a lawsuit from a small voice recognition software company that 'entered negotiations' a few years ago with MS which were 'suddenly dropped without explanation' after said small company 'showed MS' 'key algorythms' of their voice recognition project.
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I don't see the cause and affect here. Why would Chinese be able to change their government because their country becomes more prosperous? I think that wealth empowers those who already have power.
This is a fundamental reason why Debian doesn't have enough traction these days to be a serious contender. 100 to one, the released, so-called 'stable' Debian is too old to install on a brand new computer. Think Northbridge support and an obsolete list of PCI IDs. How's that going to be remotely useful in the real world of the desktop? Where's support for Opteron? Sure, it runs great on an old Motorola 68000 Atari ST... Totally ridiculous. Totally out of touch.
I even have my doubts about using it as a base for UserLinux. With distros like Gentoo beginning to offer precompiled binary installs of modern (and stable as a result) up-to-date software, why bend over backward to accomodate the Debian Way?
That's fine if you're looking at management or sales or getting-laid, but creative people often need peace and quiet so they can fill their heads with variables.
Sure quality is upmost. After all, the reason people develop open source software is because they want to USE IT themselves, in contrast to many commercial projects which are out of the scope of interest of the developers, and who may not even use it. Sure, everybody is proud of their work, but developing software for self-use is a much higher bar of quality than developing software for a friggin' check.
Also, the reason open source software is released as beta or RC is for bug hunting. It isn't released because sombody wants top throw out some crap and have other people make it good.
I'll try again. Open Source projects are available LONG before they're shipped as final. It seems like the only ones which do not release beta versions are mature projects like Apache. And I'm not sure that Apache's projects don't have release candidate (RC) releases.
The users ARE QA teams for both open source projects AND commercial products. Commercial software is released with unpreviously recognized bugs because in-house QA is a synthetic process that will never be able to completely validate a product.
In-house QA at commercial houses is akin to an author editing his own manuscript.
The two that followed were standard good guys versus bad guys Hollywood gruel. You've seen them before starring John Wayne or Victor Mature. Add expensive modern cinematic artifice (called special effects), add plot hooks into the first movie and that just about says it all.
Maybe beginner (for Linux support) commercial houses like Oracle demand RedHat now, but someday they'll fix their install scripts to be seriously lib and kernel aware rather than simply distro aware. That will leave RedHat perpetually chumming for more beginners in a shrinking market as the world recognizes that the true defacto standard is Linux with GNU tools, not RedHat.
Too bad about the MIPS line dying out, though.
I think there's chinks in most of the other big company's armour because they each have a 'religious' ball and chain holding them back:
But is there one good thing you can say about the Bush administration?
It doesn't seem as though the folks at Google are wringing their hands about the future. Maybe they can continue to enjoy themselves in spite of becoming multi-millionaires. Really -- there are worse things that can happen to somebody than getting really big and then getting small.
They are bright people there at Google. Greed is a brutal taskmaster. I wouldn't wish it on them.
I guess what makes this new Microsoft technology so exciting is to find out who it is they stole it from.
I'll be watching the headlines for news of a lawsuit from a small voice recognition software company that 'entered negotiations' a few years ago with MS which were 'suddenly dropped without explanation' after said small company 'showed MS' 'key algorythms' of their voice recognition project.
Now, how do we assess the competency of the person that asked the question in the first place?