At least it's not like Microsoft and Apple, where both companies benefit from appearing to be in competition with each other when in reality they are not.
As for Ubuntu, that required millions of dollars to start.
Name a business that didn't require initial investment.
Business software, as mentioned in my first post, is more compatible with OSS as far as I can tell. What I'm having a harder time grasping, is how it will work for media players, games, operating systems, messengers, etc. Those very rarely are developed "in house" as your average US household has no programmers in it.
Media players and messengers are mostly freeware, and a few are free software (ever heard of VLC or Pidgin?). Operating systems can come preinstalled with a support package, or can charge a similar "Microsoft tax" and make money on each machine with the preinstalled OS if demand is high enough. If free OSs are as common as Windows is today, there won't be any reason (other than upgrading, but few people upgrade their machines anyway) for most to distribute the software.
touche. However, the amount of money Geek Squad brings in pales in comparison to the amount of money proprietary software brings in.
So free companies make less. Does this mean that we should prop up proprietary companies because they stand to be phased out in the next few decades?
My company writes software predominately for business end users. Our only "in house" stuff is a build system and Trac. We function almost as a remote IT department for our customers so I suspect we could go open source and survive. I don't see this as being the case for the majority of software developers who have a less personal relationship with a greater number of customers (especially when OSS projects don't have any proprietary software funding sources)
Ever heard of IBM? What about Google? They seem to be doing a good job at free software funding.
The simple fact is the software industry must take in the amount it does, to continue paying people what it does. If it takes in less, it must pay fewer people and/or pay each person less. That is, unless there is some other source of funding that I am unaware of (hence my first question. How will it work?)
Support? Hardware? Custom software for businesses which would have little value outside of that business?
MS lost both marketshare and mindshare with Vista. Everyone, from the kid down the street to the sysadmin to the 50 year old knows that Vista sucks. There is no denying it.
Really? In my experience the number of laptops I've seen where the user is running Vista seems to be growing. Where I am the probability of seeing a Vista machine is approaching about half (the other half running XP, and a minority of MacBooks). Not as many people seem to care about Vista as we do.
Unless of course you're a Redmond-based company that pretty much owns all of the office suite market and most of the operating system market, and can get by on brand image and vendor lock-in alone, no matter how many blunders your company makes.
Still, legalization probably creates as many problems as it solves from a law enforcement or even financial standpoint - sure it no longer is illegal to possess and the government profits by taxing, but suddenly you have a much bigger "under the influence" category to enforce, whether that be driving under the influence, stealing to support a habit, rehab, crimes committed under the influence, or some other category.
All of that stuff was illegal before (except rehab of course). I see no reason that it won't continue to be illegal afterwards under the current laws.
Personally, I am for legalization, but any money earned from legal sales and cultivation needs to go to education and users should be monitored for addiction. Why education? Because I watched a heroin addict go through kicking the habit (bandmate a long time ago) and later lived in a house with 3 reformed heroin addicts (6 renters there - big old house - the owner and two tenants met in rehab) and after hearing their stories, I can tell you heroin scares the shit out of me. After watching a tenant at my wife's rental property self destruct on meth losing her job, kids, and getting evicted from our property, then choosing to live on the street vs rehab (her mom was going to help if she sought treatment), I can tell you meth scares the shit out of me. Education on the effects and how to resist the peer pressure is more useful than enforcement, in my opinion.
Absolutely. The problem is that the current laws cause "education" in practice to be nothing more than "drugs are bad, mmmkay" and scare tactics. Tobacco and alcohol, despite being legal, also fall under this category. Legalization is the first step. Education abut responsibility (as opposed to abstinence) is the next one.
This was no business of the schools and was purely a private matter between the principal and the student. A suspension may be seen as a lighter sentence compared to a civil suit, but it is still an abuse of power.
To use a different example: would it be right for the government to fine you if you made libelous statements about the president, or would it be more appropriate for him to sue you in a civil court?
However, we already have more than 1 IP address for each person (look around you: desktop computer; PDA; laptop; router; IP phone; IPTV; and so on). I believe that the number of items capable of network communication will increase in time - and one day it might greatly exceed the number of living persons.
I can see this happening, but I can't envision that we will ever exhaust all 2^128 IPv6 addresses in this century, if at all. We're far more likely to run out of MAC addresses first.
You assume people care. Most people never reach this limit, and Comcast doesn't really care if those that do reach it decide to quit or never sign up. People who don't reach this limit don't have an incentive to care.
My grandmother has the same problem (she even called me saying that Firefox was broken and I later found out that she had resized the browser window) but she manages while I'm away by having books lying around about this stuff. To date I'm not aware of her exposing any unwanted details to an e-mail that looks like it came from a bank. Then again, she might not be either, but I'm assuming that it hasn't happened.
It's a dumb idea because it gives people fish instead of teaching them how to fish. It's like the misperception that the existence of anti-virus software inherently protects a machine, and that you have no worries about whether to open those suspicious files. You and me both know that it is still more than possible to get hosed even if all sorts of security stuff is installed if the problem lies between the keyboard and chair. PEBKAC doesn't go away with more software. Only education can reduce it.
I wasn't discrediting IPv6. I was pointing out that IPv7 will never need to happen, ever. There are far more estimated stars in the universe than there are possible IPv6 addresses (I underestimated earlier).
PS: Wouldn't your statement be impossible? "All the people who ever lived" will have changed substantially in the future, and until we reach a live population that dwarfs the known dead population I don't see how we could possibly need more addresses than "all the people who ever lived" ever. "All the people who ever lived as of the time of this post," perhaps.
While a clever way to comply with the law, this is wishful thinking. Most students will avoid the service because it doesn't have $RIAARTIST1 or $RIAAARTIST2.
To give some perspective: my college has a well-publicized campus radio station, but only a small percentage of students listen to it over ClearChannel stations.
Putting anti-phishing filters into browsers just shifts the responsibility of good security practices from the user to some blacklisting company. What incentive is there to be weary about suspicious sites if you can count on the almighty Google to hold your hand while you browse the Web? This makes about as much sense as someone installing parental controls in their machine and declaring that their Internet connection is now "kid-friendly."
I've never had these filters turned on, and I've never exposed my financial data to others by accident. Usually this has something to do with me hovering the mouse over links and checking the URL in the status bar.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know it still existed.
You can be sure that Microsoft and other proprietary companies will be fighting tooth and nail to remove this provision.
At least it's not like Microsoft and Apple, where both companies benefit from appearing to be in competition with each other when in reality they are not.
People still use AOL?
You have violated one of the most sacred of rules on Slashdot: never reading the articles.
Turn in your UID. Now.
Catholicism / Christianity
Not sure why you picked Catholicism in particular. Protestantism also caused a number of atrocities. Remember the Salem Which Trials?
Put them in record players and see what happens.
How do I Create Commons?
As for Ubuntu, that required millions of dollars to start.
Name a business that didn't require initial investment.
Business software, as mentioned in my first post, is more compatible with OSS as far as I can tell. What I'm having a harder time grasping, is how it will work for media players, games, operating systems, messengers, etc. Those very rarely are developed "in house" as your average US household has no programmers in it.
Media players and messengers are mostly freeware, and a few are free software (ever heard of VLC or Pidgin?). Operating systems can come preinstalled with a support package, or can charge a similar "Microsoft tax" and make money on each machine with the preinstalled OS if demand is high enough. If free OSs are as common as Windows is today, there won't be any reason (other than upgrading, but few people upgrade their machines anyway) for most to distribute the software.
touche. However, the amount of money Geek Squad brings in pales in comparison to the amount of money proprietary software brings in.
So free companies make less. Does this mean that we should prop up proprietary companies because they stand to be phased out in the next few decades?
My company writes software predominately for business end users. Our only "in house" stuff is a build system and Trac. We function almost as a remote IT department for our customers so I suspect we could go open source and survive. I don't see this as being the case for the majority of software developers who have a less personal relationship with a greater number of customers (especially when OSS projects don't have any proprietary software funding sources)
Ever heard of IBM? What about Google? They seem to be doing a good job at free software funding.
The simple fact is the software industry must take in the amount it does, to continue paying people what it does. If it takes in less, it must pay fewer people and/or pay each person less. That is, unless there is some other source of funding that I am unaware of (hence my first question. How will it work?)
Support? Hardware? Custom software for businesses which would have little value outside of that business?
Make that a third (1/3 Windows XP, 1/3 Windows Vista, 1/3 Mac OS X). Everyone else (including myself) forms a tiny minority.
MS lost both marketshare and mindshare with Vista. Everyone, from the kid down the street to the sysadmin to the 50 year old knows that Vista sucks. There is no denying it.
Really? In my experience the number of laptops I've seen where the user is running Vista seems to be growing. Where I am the probability of seeing a Vista machine is approaching about half (the other half running XP, and a minority of MacBooks). Not as many people seem to care about Vista as we do.
Unless of course you're a Redmond-based company that pretty much owns all of the office suite market and most of the operating system market, and can get by on brand image and vendor lock-in alone, no matter how many blunders your company makes.
Still, legalization probably creates as many problems as it solves from a law enforcement or even financial standpoint - sure it no longer is illegal to possess and the government profits by taxing, but suddenly you have a much bigger "under the influence" category to enforce, whether that be driving under the influence, stealing to support a habit, rehab, crimes committed under the influence, or some other category.
All of that stuff was illegal before (except rehab of course). I see no reason that it won't continue to be illegal afterwards under the current laws.
Personally, I am for legalization, but any money earned from legal sales and cultivation needs to go to education and users should be monitored for addiction. Why education? Because I watched a heroin addict go through kicking the habit (bandmate a long time ago) and later lived in a house with 3 reformed heroin addicts (6 renters there - big old house - the owner and two tenants met in rehab) and after hearing their stories, I can tell you heroin scares the shit out of me. After watching a tenant at my wife's rental property self destruct on meth losing her job, kids, and getting evicted from our property, then choosing to live on the street vs rehab (her mom was going to help if she sought treatment), I can tell you meth scares the shit out of me. Education on the effects and how to resist the peer pressure is more useful than enforcement, in my opinion.
Absolutely. The problem is that the current laws cause "education" in practice to be nothing more than "drugs are bad, mmmkay" and scare tactics. Tobacco and alcohol, despite being legal, also fall under this category. Legalization is the first step. Education abut responsibility (as opposed to abstinence) is the next one.
This was no business of the schools and was purely a private matter between the principal and the student. A suspension may be seen as a lighter sentence compared to a civil suit, but it is still an abuse of power.
To use a different example: would it be right for the government to fine you if you made libelous statements about the president, or would it be more appropriate for him to sue you in a civil court?
However, we already have more than 1 IP address for each person (look around you: desktop computer; PDA; laptop; router; IP phone; IPTV; and so on). I believe that the number of items capable of network communication will increase in time - and one day it might greatly exceed the number of living persons.
I can see this happening, but I can't envision that we will ever exhaust all 2^128 IPv6 addresses in this century, if at all. We're far more likely to run out of MAC addresses first.
You assume people care. Most people never reach this limit, and Comcast doesn't really care if those that do reach it decide to quit or never sign up. People who don't reach this limit don't have an incentive to care.
My grandmother has the same problem (she even called me saying that Firefox was broken and I later found out that she had resized the browser window) but she manages while I'm away by having books lying around about this stuff. To date I'm not aware of her exposing any unwanted details to an e-mail that looks like it came from a bank. Then again, she might not be either, but I'm assuming that it hasn't happened.
It's a dumb idea because it gives people fish instead of teaching them how to fish. It's like the misperception that the existence of anti-virus software inherently protects a machine, and that you have no worries about whether to open those suspicious files. You and me both know that it is still more than possible to get hosed even if all sorts of security stuff is installed if the problem lies between the keyboard and chair. PEBKAC doesn't go away with more software. Only education can reduce it.
I wasn't discrediting IPv6. I was pointing out that IPv7 will never need to happen, ever. There are far more estimated stars in the universe than there are possible IPv6 addresses (I underestimated earlier).
PS: Wouldn't your statement be impossible? "All the people who ever lived" will have changed substantially in the future, and until we reach a live population that dwarfs the known dead population I don't see how we could possibly need more addresses than "all the people who ever lived" ever. "All the people who ever lived as of the time of this post," perhaps.
IPv6 provides an address for everyone that has ever lived. Remind me again why we would run out of addresses?
While a clever way to comply with the law, this is wishful thinking. Most students will avoid the service because it doesn't have $RIAARTIST1 or $RIAAARTIST2.
To give some perspective: my college has a well-publicized campus radio station, but only a small percentage of students listen to it over ClearChannel stations.
Until the RIAA puts you out of business with either lawsuits or insane Internet radio fees.
Putting anti-phishing filters into browsers just shifts the responsibility of good security practices from the user to some blacklisting company. What incentive is there to be weary about suspicious sites if you can count on the almighty Google to hold your hand while you browse the Web? This makes about as much sense as someone installing parental controls in their machine and declaring that their Internet connection is now "kid-friendly."
I've never had these filters turned on, and I've never exposed my financial data to others by accident. Usually this has something to do with me hovering the mouse over links and checking the URL in the status bar.
I don't consider it worthless, but I also don't consider it the primary reason for attending college.
I couldn't care less if my professors get smashed regularly on the weekends, so long as they did a really good job at teaching.