Microsoft make a lousy OS, but nice applications. Why are they not selling proprietary software on Linux? They could have killed OpenOffice and ODF years ago if there had been a nice, decently-priced MSOffice for Linux.
If they did that, they'd be slitting their own throats. If you can get MS Office for Linux, why buy Windows? They have to keep that applications barrier to entry high.
MS has pretty well saturated the desktop, so they can't get the steady exceeding analysts' predictions that they want just from the OS monopoly. They're just using what worked in the applications arena: let someone else create the market, and then come in and take it over by leveraging the OS monopoly.
Steve Ballmer, from TFA: "When did China get great? China didn't get great under Mao Zedong. China got great under -- in the recent years -- probably got great under Deng Xiaoping."
I'm skating on the edge of Godwin, but... it's kind of scary when the head of an organization such as Microsoft cites a totalitarian government as an example of greatness.
There have been a number of effects I tried to use on an image under GIMP. After a minute or so with nothing apparently happening, I would cancel.
I eventually asked somewhere whether there was a known bug, or whether the effect was just plain computationally intensive, and thus inherently slow. The answer: the latter.
I would think that image manipulation would often lend itself to divide and conquer, and hence could use as many CPUs as you'd care to throw at the task... and that also, it's a common enough task ("Let's make a really special Mother's Day card/clean up our vacation photos/etc.") that people would want to be able to do it quickly.
(Or how about a compute engine for a bunch of thin clients around the house? Let your screen and tasks follow you if you have to go from one room to another...)
"Microsoft will make available, on commercially reasonable terms, all of the communications protocols that it has built into Windows and that are used to facilitate communication with server versions of Windows."
"Commercially reasonable terms" will, no doubt, exclude GPL software.
"Microsoft will generally license patents on its operating system inventions (other than those that differentiate the appearance of Microsoft's products) on fair and reasonable terms so long as licensees respect Microsoft's intellectual property rights."
I'm sure the terms and the definition of respecting MS's IP rights will be such as to preclude their use in GPL software.
The Core 2 Duos aren't "alpha expensive" -- they're significantly cheaper than AMD's prices as of right now.
Agreed, but... July 24th, the date when AMD is going to cut some CPU prices almost in half, is barely over a weekend away, and there is the question of supply and demand. Will demand be sufficient to drive the price up?
Yes. Goodness knows we can trust the folks who were so blinded by their biases and what they thought was the chance to create a scandal just before an election that they believe that in 1973, a military officer wanting to create "CYA" documents would go to the trouble of typesetting them on a clunky, hard-to-use high-end IBM machine, and who still believe a photocopy that matches the output of Microsoft Word with the same input text is a copy of such a document.
Others have already pointed out bloggers who are in the military, in Iraq, etc.
In Latin and the Romance languages, yes. Alas, grammarians for a long time tried to cram English into the Procrustean bed of Latin grammar...and it still doesn't work.
English is full of verb + preposition combinations:
The house burned down. (Or did it burn up?) After _Let It Be_, the Beatles broke up. He's no fun; he fell right over!
You have to say "In those sentences, 'down', 'up', and 'over' aren't really prepositions" if you want to hold fast to "Prepositions always have objects."
You mean the way BBC newsreaders at least used to be trained to speak?
No way. No way in heck. I had to restrain myself from bazooka barfing every time I heard a BBC World Service newsreader talking about the capital of that Central American country,/muh-NAG-yoo-uh nik-uh-RAG-yoo-uh/, and from laughing every time I heard about Lord Byron's poem/don JOO-uhn/.
Of course, the English have similar thoughts about Americans' pronunciation (e.g. the old joke about the ad for an American film... with English subtitles).
You'll never get people to agree on one group's pronunciation being accepted as standard. Take a gander at a list of English dialects. Might as well accept that written English has at best a loose connection to pronunciation, but at least has the advantage that speakers of all those dialects can read and understand it.
"Take a can of your gasoline. Say this can of gasoline is the sun. Now, you spread a thin line of it to a ball, representing the earth. Now, the gasoline represents the sunlight, the sun particles. Here we saturate the ball with the gasoline, the sunlight. Then we put a flame to the ball. The flame will speedily travel around the earth, back along the line of gasoline to the can, or the sun itself. It will explode this source and spread to every place that gasoline, our sunlight, touches. Explode the sunlight here, gentlemen, you explode the universe."
At this point, you have to ask; is it that the people at Microsoft are incapable of producing a specs-compliant rendering engine (when every one else in the world can?), that they are roped by backwards compatibility, or that they think people will see IE 6 + tabs as "good enough"?
None of the above.
Given IE's prevalence, it is to MS's benefit to keep it broken, to maintain the vicious cycle of forcing web designers through the rigamarole of compensating for IE's standard violations and thus encouraging the lazy and incompetent to only bother to develop for IE. Joe Sixpack doesn't know from web standards, and only knows that Firefox doesn't render IE-only web pages...and thus blames Firefox.
1. Gratuitous centering. Read Robin Williams's The Non-Designer's Design Book.
2. The main metaphor is the Declaration of Independence... but only two of the presidents on Mount Rushmore are Founding Fathers. Surely there are stock images of paintings of the signing of the Declaration that could be used.
3. I'd be inclined to not interrupt the hook. How about "Declare your independence... they did." followed by the spiel for OpenOffice.
4. OpenOffice is software. OpenOffice.org is a web site. Not the same thing.
5. This is awfully late to be asking for input into the ad design given the theme! It needs to come out as close to July 4th as possible.
If you don't like their policies, DON'T BUY THEIR MUSIC! It's that simple. You don't need to explain why you're not buying it since you're not doing business with them anymore.
I'm not sure about that. Decreases in music sales have been spun as "See? This proves that piracy is on the rise!" rather than "Hmmm... Maybe people don't like DRM, or people are tired of the dreck we're putting out."
I fear you'll have no more luck with your campaign than whoever it was (Jonathan Swift?) did centuries ago campaigning against the horrid then-neologism "mob" as opposed to the proper Latin mobile vulgus.
If you decide to write a browser specifically to display things exactly as IE does, you put yourself in the same boat as WINE and OpenOffice are now, and OS/2 used to be. You're playing a perpetual game of catch-up, where MS can at its whim make changes to break your product by your criterion of mimicking the MS product's behavior. You'll have no way to know there's not something you've not gotten right until it turns up. There's no point in doing it.
The problem with OSS, as has been stated, is that it does not prepare students for what the vast majority of them are going to see in the real world.
Perhaps I have the wrong notion of the purpose of schools other than vo tech schools... but I would like to think not. Wouldn't it be better to teach students the principles rather than the application du jour?
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Microsoft make a lousy OS, but nice applications. Why are they not selling proprietary software on Linux? They could have killed OpenOffice and ODF years ago if there had been a nice, decently-priced MSOffice for Linux.
If they did that, they'd be slitting their own throats. If you can get MS Office for Linux, why buy Windows? They have to keep that applications barrier to entry high.
MS has pretty well saturated the desktop, so they can't get the steady exceeding analysts' predictions that they want just from the OS monopoly. They're just using what worked in the applications arena: let someone else create the market, and then come in and take it over by leveraging the OS monopoly.
Steve Ballmer, from TFA: "When did China get great? China didn't get great under Mao Zedong. China got great under -- in the recent years -- probably got great under Deng Xiaoping."
I'm skating on the edge of Godwin, but... it's kind of scary when the head of an organization such as Microsoft cites a totalitarian government as an example of greatness.
There have been a number of effects I tried to use on an image under GIMP. After a minute or so with nothing apparently happening, I would cancel.
I eventually asked somewhere whether there was a known bug, or whether the effect was just plain computationally intensive, and thus inherently slow. The answer: the latter.
I would think that image manipulation would often lend itself to divide and conquer, and hence could use as many CPUs as you'd care to throw at the task... and that also, it's a common enough task ("Let's make a really special Mother's Day card/clean up our vacation photos/etc.") that people would want to be able to do it quickly.
(Or how about a compute engine for a bunch of thin clients around the house? Let your screen and tasks follow you if you have to go from one room to another...)
Perhaps this incident will inspire a new Kinky Friedman novel. If it gives Linux some publicity, so much the better.
Oops. Jumped the gun. Also from that page:
"Microsoft will make available, on commercially reasonable terms, all of the communications protocols that it has built into Windows and that are used to facilitate communication with server versions of Windows."
"Commercially reasonable terms" will, no doubt, exclude GPL software.
From that page:
"Microsoft will generally license patents on its operating system inventions (other than those that differentiate the appearance of Microsoft's products) on fair and reasonable terms so long as licensees respect Microsoft's intellectual property rights."
I'm sure the terms and the definition of respecting MS's IP rights will be such as to preclude their use in GPL software.
The Core 2 Duos aren't "alpha expensive" -- they're significantly cheaper than AMD's prices as of right now.
Agreed, but... July 24th, the date when AMD is going to cut some CPU prices almost in half, is barely over a weekend away, and there is the question of supply and demand. Will demand be sufficient to drive the price up?
The strategy is to get them hooked at school, and then make them pay for the rest of their lives.
Isn't the other point to contaminate the students with MS IP and thus taint Open Source projects they work on in the future?
Yes. Goodness knows we can trust the folks who were so blinded by their biases and what they thought was the chance to create a scandal just before an election that they believe that in 1973, a military officer wanting to create "CYA" documents would go to the trouble of typesetting them on a clunky, hard-to-use high-end IBM machine, and who still believe a photocopy that matches the output of Microsoft Word with the same input text is a copy of such a document.
Others have already pointed out bloggers who are in the military, in Iraq, etc.
You're right. That's why I started using LyX.
So what? Are you saying that the end justifies the means?
Sure. Double it every day of continued noncompliance. Seems appropriate for a software company...
A preposition must always have an object.
In Latin and the Romance languages, yes. Alas, grammarians for a long time tried to cram English into the Procrustean bed of Latin grammar...and it still doesn't work.
English is full of verb + preposition combinations:
The house burned down. (Or did it burn up?)
After _Let It Be_, the Beatles broke up.
He's no fun; he fell right over!
You have to say "In those sentences, 'down', 'up', and 'over' aren't really prepositions" if you want to hold fast to "Prepositions always have objects."
You mean the way BBC newsreaders at least used to be trained to speak?
/muh-NAG-yoo-uh nik-uh-RAG-yoo-uh/, and from laughing every time I heard about Lord Byron's poem /don JOO-uhn/.
No way. No way in heck. I had to restrain myself from bazooka barfing every time I heard a BBC World Service newsreader talking about the capital of that Central American country,
Of course, the English have similar thoughts about Americans' pronunciation (e.g. the old joke about the ad for an American film... with English subtitles).
You'll never get people to agree on one group's pronunciation being accepted as standard. Take a gander at a list of English dialects. Might as well accept that written English has at best a loose connection to pronunciation, but at least has the advantage that speakers of all those dialects can read and understand it.
You appear to be trying to parallel park. Would you like help?
How do you know they haven't already done so for the Mac, or for Linux... or funded such activity by others?
Next he needs to explain how Solaronite works.
"Take a can of your gasoline. Say this can of gasoline is the sun. Now, you spread a thin line of it to a ball, representing the earth. Now, the gasoline represents the sunlight, the sun particles. Here we saturate the ball with the gasoline, the sunlight. Then we put a flame to the ball. The flame will speedily travel around the earth, back along the line of gasoline to the can, or the sun itself. It will explode this source and spread to every place that gasoline, our sunlight, touches. Explode the sunlight here, gentlemen, you explode the universe."
At this point, you have to ask; is it that the people at Microsoft are incapable of producing a specs-compliant rendering engine (when every one else in the world can?), that they are roped by backwards compatibility, or that they think people will see IE 6 + tabs as "good enough"?
None of the above.
Given IE's prevalence, it is to MS's benefit to keep it broken, to maintain the vicious cycle of forcing web designers through the rigamarole of compensating for IE's standard violations and thus encouraging the lazy and incompetent to only bother to develop for IE. Joe Sixpack doesn't know from web standards, and only knows that Firefox doesn't render IE-only web pages...and thus blames Firefox.
1. Gratuitous centering. Read Robin Williams's The Non-Designer's Design Book.
2. The main metaphor is the Declaration of Independence... but only two of the presidents on Mount Rushmore are Founding Fathers. Surely there are stock images of paintings of the signing of the Declaration that could be used.
3. I'd be inclined to not interrupt the hook. How about "Declare your independence... they did." followed by the spiel for OpenOffice.
4. OpenOffice is software. OpenOffice.org is a web site. Not the same thing.
5. This is awfully late to be asking for input into the ad design given the theme! It needs to come out as close to July 4th as possible.
6. Ditch the yellow... please?
If you don't like their policies, DON'T BUY THEIR MUSIC! It's that simple. You don't need to explain why you're not buying it since you're not doing business with them anymore.
I'm not sure about that. Decreases in music sales have been spun as "See? This proves that piracy is on the rise!" rather than "Hmmm... Maybe people don't like DRM, or people are tired of the dreck we're putting out."
I fear you'll have no more luck with your campaign than whoever it was (Jonathan Swift?) did centuries ago campaigning against the horrid then-neologism "mob" as opposed to the proper Latin mobile vulgus.
If you decide to write a browser specifically to display things exactly as IE does, you put yourself in the same boat as WINE and OpenOffice are now, and OS/2 used to be. You're playing a perpetual game of catch-up, where MS can at its whim make changes to break your product by your criterion of mimicking the MS product's behavior. You'll have no way to know there's not something you've not gotten right until it turns up. There's no point in doing it.
The problem with OSS, as has been stated, is that it does not prepare students for what the vast majority of them are going to see in the real world.
Perhaps I have the wrong notion of the purpose of schools other than vo tech schools... but I would like to think not. Wouldn't it be better to teach students the principles rather than the application du jour?
Should be like roads?
Ah, so you mean that during a hefty part of each year, net traffic should be drastically slowed down or cut off for reconstruction?