I also find it somewhat odd that Shakira is held up as a model for good vibrato. She has a bleating vibrato which varies not only in pitch but in dynamic as well, which in another singer would be considered a serious technical deficiency.
It's not odd when you consider that most people can't tell when Auto-Tune has been used on a track.
KDE was probably one of the higher-profile instances of an "x.0" being not-quite-ready. On the surface it seems screwy but if you looked at the discussions leading up to the release, then you knew what to expect. I think their hands were kind of tied, since it's different enough to warrant the new version number, but not quite complete. There were also the accusations of them leveraging the point release as a way to drum up interest and motivation so that 4.1 would come that much quicker. I dunno. I do know that everyone who asked for a refund got one, for the full amount:)
I agree with you on all points, and I'd like to add the perspective of the small business: it's all the same. You can get a server with Windows Server on it, or with RHEL...you still have to pay to keep the thing running, and over the lifetime of the box, the initial software cost does indeed become small. Hell, it's the electricity that probably costs the most. The license cost of something like Windows Server matters because it gets looked at closely by the bosses, but in the long-term it's a small piece. In short, once the e-word (enterprise) gets uttered, you're done. Billing people is the thing all software houses do equally well.
But there's so much choice with FOSS! Just look at how much software is out there for email servers. Exchange is a safe choice, but if you don't need the more esoteric features, maybe you could go for something like Scalix or Zimbra. They have a different feature set as well as different price packages. It makes it possible, at least in the business world, to get exactly what you need and avoid paying for what you won't use. Or if you have the mojo, you can set up sendmail, etc, which takes more time if you're new to it. So you pay no matter what, but you can choose exactly what you need and pay accordingly. I hope this sort of healthy marketplace depends on the desktop space as well.
Forget the word communism. What he said was that what some people call "healthy competition", others have called "duplication of effort". And that given this, it's a bad idea to argue for FOSS by saying that effort isn't duplicated. IMO it does indeed promote lots of competition, and leads to more groups working on the same solutions, not less. That's not a bad thing, but it'd be wrong to assume that a country who supports a particular piece of open source software only has to spend the effort once.
The context of "justice delayed is justice denied" is cases exactly like the one we're discussing. The RIAA has managed to drag this thing out for three years, because they're set up for that. It probably does make more sense in criminal cases, but it certainly doesn't stop at cases concerning the death penalty. The idea is that you can keep delaying a case, and (as was mentioned earlier by another poster), violate the idea of a speedy trial. The speedy trial right is important -- otherwise the government, or entities like the RIAA, could "lock people up" in litigation indefinitely.
Of course, the length of this case seems to be a side-effect of their overall strategy. They want people to settle. They seek to bring as many people as possible into court, and are hoping that the majority of them settle outside of court. The people who actually defend themselves in some cases are subjected to a series of stalling tactics while the RIAA pretends to look for the evidence that they don't have, or didn't legally acquire.
Justice is being purposefully delayed here, since the RIAA doesn't have justice on their side. And to the extent that you can keep someone in court for three years with no evidence, it's being denied.
MSFT isn't dumb. My conspiracy theory is that they saw right away the potential for the web to be an application platform, and after initially just hoping it'd go away, they embraced & extended it with ActiveX, Active Desktop, Channels, and all of the other OS hooks IE still has. So, it wasn't a problem for them. Just like how J++ tanked, and that wasn't a problem. Just strategy.
ActiveX has no pretense of security because it was an effort to subvert the browser and keep ISVs developing for something that was Windows-only. And God bless 'em, it worked. I think that at least part of the reason it's taken this long for browsers to be this functional (besides the fact that it's not what they were designed for) was that Microsoft made it hard for advanced web standards to take hold. Not that Netscape was any better.
Also, I'd argue that, although you're right about the definition of things like beta & release candidate changing, people have always chosen cheaper software over better software. OS/2 had features we take for granted today, in the late 80s. And it ran DOS & Windows programs. We all know how that turned out. On the extreme end, the Amiga was more advanced than PCs that would show up a decade later, was pretty cheap, and was still relegated to life as a game console.
Organic matter still decomposes. In any case, I was just trying to shed some light on why someone might think the "carbon credits" thing was a scam. I personally don't think that it is. But I do think that people need to watch out for these awareness drives that originate at a company's marketing department. Like all of the pink products that show up during October, where they give half a percent of sales to breast cancer research. Doesn't accomplish much besides allowing people to feel good about not actually doing anything. I think carbon credits is like an awareness scheme...OK I'm aware now, that feels better.
I think (hope) what the OP is referring to is the fact that plants remove CO2 from the air by converting it into plant mass. Once the tree dies, its carbon goes right back into the air.
If net neutrality doesn't make it into law soon, they won't have to accept anything -- just start blocking protocols they don't like.
How many ISPs are out there that don't already screw with P2P? The more deep packet boxes they install, the easier it gets, and local duopolies ensure that nobody can do a damn thing about it except the government.
For two devices of such different design, I wouldn't expect the efficiency to be the same. One might put out less heat while drawing more power from the battery, for instance. So I'm not sure what measuring the heat would tell you about the rest of the power consumption.
It'd mean that they consider it a shipped product, and if they lost all my email, I'd at least have someone to yell at. They call it beta because they don't want to support it.
Why does it need a version number anyway? It's a service. They should just call it GMail. Beta shouldn't be a weasel word.
I hate hearing "junior senator" thrown around on C-Span. The guy was elected, give him floor time. It *is* aristocracy right now, because despite the reforms, it's still a system where the senile ones (whose state can't be bothered to vote) get to determine whether or not the less-addled get to speak.
Clearly, there needs to be some way to maintain order, but right now that's done by giving the gavel to the guys who are more of a fixture than the desk they sit at. The same people who have no reason to listen to their constituency, because they've forgotten what a real election is like, and are a term away from forgetting their name.
It's not that it's more accurate, since US customary is based on metric. It's that unit conversion in metric does not cause you to go insane.
There are sixteen ounces in a pound. There are sixteen fluid ounces in a pint. So everyone remembers "sixteen ounces" but not everyone understands the difference between ounces and fluid ounces. Smaller companies get this wrong often on food labels -- you'll see "32 oz." for a quart container, but the thing is sold by weight, and you know it's nowhere near two pounds.
An Imperial pint is ~20 oz. In America, we call our units "English", which leads people to believe that they match the Imperial units, but they don't.
All in all, the old systems are better for doing math in your head (12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6 easily) but are absolute crap for unit conversion, and conceptually are harder to deal with...in the US we often think "mass" but say "weight", and our frame of reference in these things is tied to a measure of acceleration. Unfortunately many people here don't like metric for aesthetic reasons, or what they perceive to be political ones. We are only holding ourselves back here.
MS said they sold 20 million Vista licenses. I know everyone here says OEMs don't count, but really, how many people run to the office supply store every time a new OS comes out? You get your copy from an OEM, and if you build your PC, you get an OEM copy for yourself. And the fact that business have not upgraded doesn't mean anything...I still support a couple of Windows 2000 machines where I work. Many places have hundreds of them. Business are not places you expect to find cutting edge systems. They are the absolute last places where you see desktop upgrades, and for good reason.
My point is, no one seems to be questioning the "Vista bombed" meme.
If, in the course of designing the LEO, they purposely ignored (or somehow had not heard of) what was going on the US in that field, then we could rightly call them a bunch of idiots. The ENIAC, unlike the Colossus, was Turing-complete.
That said, the Manchester Baby gets my vote for first "computer".
Two years ago, Apple was not using hardware that you could get at a PC shop. Legislation would not have helped you there. Look at the enterprise market: you can't just throw any OS on any hardware. The HCL for something like UnixWare is much shorter than the one for Windows. Solaris supports 7 WiFi cards, not 70.
In the consumer market, most people are not capable of doing an OS install, however simple they have become, and they see a computer system as a single product, not a bundle. You and I may not, but we cannot ignore that reality. And unfortunately the laws in the US are not as strict when it comes to bundling as they are in other places.
What about the Amiga, or the Spectrum, etc? I know those systems had less off-the-shelf hardware, but not everyone considers x86 off-the-shelf, since they don't know what x86 is. Again, it's only recently that Apple joined the commodity hardware club.
Also, you seem to ignore the possibility that the bundling creates value for the customer. What if the resulting system was more stable? What if it retained its value for an extra couple of years? People pay the Apple tax for that...it's not just fashion.
Finally, notice that MSFT has a driver-signing program, and 64-bit Vista is set up to not allow unsigned drivers in. To the degree that Linux & FreeBSD force more unbundling, I will cheer along with you, but calling Apple a monopoly or a trust is unwarranted here I think.
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If something is subpoenaed, you bring it to the judge, or you are in contempt of court. It's simple, really.
I also find it somewhat odd that Shakira is held up as a model for good vibrato. She has a bleating vibrato which varies not only in pitch but in dynamic as well, which in another singer would be considered a serious technical deficiency.
It's not odd when you consider that most people can't tell when Auto-Tune has been used on a track.
I think it plays to Google's natural desire to not have to stand behind their product...
Dammit, ignore that.
:)
KDE was probably one of the higher-profile instances of an "x.0" being not-quite-ready. On the surface it seems screwy but if you looked at the discussions leading up to the release, then you knew what to expect. I think their hands were kind of tied, since it's different enough to warrant the new version number, but not quite complete. There were also the accusations of them leveraging the point release as a way to drum up interest and motivation so that 4.1 would come that much quicker. I dunno. I do know that everyone who asked for a refund got one, for the full amount
kdebeta
I agree with you on all points, and I'd like to add the perspective of the small business: it's all the same. You can get a server with Windows Server on it, or with RHEL...you still have to pay to keep the thing running, and over the lifetime of the box, the initial software cost does indeed become small. Hell, it's the electricity that probably costs the most. The license cost of something like Windows Server matters because it gets looked at closely by the bosses, but in the long-term it's a small piece. In short, once the e-word (enterprise) gets uttered, you're done. Billing people is the thing all software houses do equally well.
But there's so much choice with FOSS! Just look at how much software is out there for email servers. Exchange is a safe choice, but if you don't need the more esoteric features, maybe you could go for something like Scalix or Zimbra. They have a different feature set as well as different price packages. It makes it possible, at least in the business world, to get exactly what you need and avoid paying for what you won't use. Or if you have the mojo, you can set up sendmail, etc, which takes more time if you're new to it. So you pay no matter what, but you can choose exactly what you need and pay accordingly. I hope this sort of healthy marketplace depends on the desktop space as well.
Forget the word communism. What he said was that what some people call "healthy competition", others have called "duplication of effort". And that given this, it's a bad idea to argue for FOSS by saying that effort isn't duplicated. IMO it does indeed promote lots of competition, and leads to more groups working on the same solutions, not less. That's not a bad thing, but it'd be wrong to assume that a country who supports a particular piece of open source software only has to spend the effort once.
The context of "justice delayed is justice denied" is cases exactly like the one we're discussing. The RIAA has managed to drag this thing out for three years, because they're set up for that. It probably does make more sense in criminal cases, but it certainly doesn't stop at cases concerning the death penalty. The idea is that you can keep delaying a case, and (as was mentioned earlier by another poster), violate the idea of a speedy trial. The speedy trial right is important -- otherwise the government, or entities like the RIAA, could "lock people up" in litigation indefinitely.
Of course, the length of this case seems to be a side-effect of their overall strategy. They want people to settle. They seek to bring as many people as possible into court, and are hoping that the majority of them settle outside of court. The people who actually defend themselves in some cases are subjected to a series of stalling tactics while the RIAA pretends to look for the evidence that they don't have, or didn't legally acquire.
Justice is being purposefully delayed here, since the RIAA doesn't have justice on their side. And to the extent that you can keep someone in court for three years with no evidence, it's being denied.
That's why it's so great!
MSFT isn't dumb. My conspiracy theory is that they saw right away the potential for the web to be an application platform, and after initially just hoping it'd go away, they embraced & extended it with ActiveX, Active Desktop, Channels, and all of the other OS hooks IE still has. So, it wasn't a problem for them. Just like how J++ tanked, and that wasn't a problem. Just strategy.
ActiveX has no pretense of security because it was an effort to subvert the browser and keep ISVs developing for something that was Windows-only. And God bless 'em, it worked. I think that at least part of the reason it's taken this long for browsers to be this functional (besides the fact that it's not what they were designed for) was that Microsoft made it hard for advanced web standards to take hold. Not that Netscape was any better.
Also, I'd argue that, although you're right about the definition of things like beta & release candidate changing, people have always chosen cheaper software over better software. OS/2 had features we take for granted today, in the late 80s. And it ran DOS & Windows programs. We all know how that turned out. On the extreme end, the Amiga was more advanced than PCs that would show up a decade later, was pretty cheap, and was still relegated to life as a game console.
Organic matter still decomposes. In any case, I was just trying to shed some light on why someone might think the "carbon credits" thing was a scam. I personally don't think that it is. But I do think that people need to watch out for these awareness drives that originate at a company's marketing department. Like all of the pink products that show up during October, where they give half a percent of sales to breast cancer research. Doesn't accomplish much besides allowing people to feel good about not actually doing anything. I think carbon credits is like an awareness scheme...OK I'm aware now, that feels better.
I think (hope) what the OP is referring to is the fact that plants remove CO2 from the air by converting it into plant mass. Once the tree dies, its carbon goes right back into the air.
If net neutrality doesn't make it into law soon, they won't have to accept anything -- just start blocking protocols they don't like.
How many ISPs are out there that don't already screw with P2P? The more deep packet boxes they install, the easier it gets, and local duopolies ensure that nobody can do a damn thing about it except the government.
If you have pockets, it makes things easier.
For two devices of such different design, I wouldn't expect the efficiency to be the same. One might put out less heat while drawing more power from the battery, for instance. So I'm not sure what measuring the heat would tell you about the rest of the power consumption.
"Their products ooze of something designed for a company with 100-1000 employees."
In other words: most companies?
It'd mean that they consider it a shipped product, and if they lost all my email, I'd at least have someone to yell at. They call it beta because they don't want to support it.
Why does it need a version number anyway? It's a service. They should just call it GMail. Beta shouldn't be a weasel word.
Just one vote...dammit.
I hate hearing "junior senator" thrown around on C-Span. The guy was elected, give him floor time. It *is* aristocracy right now, because despite the reforms, it's still a system where the senile ones (whose state can't be bothered to vote) get to determine whether or not the less-addled get to speak.
Clearly, there needs to be some way to maintain order, but right now that's done by giving the gavel to the guys who are more of a fixture than the desk they sit at. The same people who have no reason to listen to their constituency, because they've forgotten what a real election is like, and are a term away from forgetting their name.
It's not that it's more accurate, since US customary is based on metric. It's that unit conversion in metric does not cause you to go insane.
There are sixteen ounces in a pound. There are sixteen fluid ounces in a pint. So everyone remembers "sixteen ounces" but not everyone understands the difference between ounces and fluid ounces. Smaller companies get this wrong often on food labels -- you'll see "32 oz." for a quart container, but the thing is sold by weight, and you know it's nowhere near two pounds.
An Imperial pint is ~20 oz. In America, we call our units "English", which leads people to believe that they match the Imperial units, but they don't.
All in all, the old systems are better for doing math in your head (12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6 easily) but are absolute crap for unit conversion, and conceptually are harder to deal with...in the US we often think "mass" but say "weight", and our frame of reference in these things is tied to a measure of acceleration. Unfortunately many people here don't like metric for aesthetic reasons, or what they perceive to be political ones. We are only holding ourselves back here.
Well, there's one...DRM...but I'll admit it's not a very good one.
MS said they sold 20 million Vista licenses. I know everyone here says OEMs don't count, but really, how many people run to the office supply store every time a new OS comes out? You get your copy from an OEM, and if you build your PC, you get an OEM copy for yourself. And the fact that business have not upgraded doesn't mean anything...I still support a couple of Windows 2000 machines where I work. Many places have hundreds of them. Business are not places you expect to find cutting edge systems. They are the absolute last places where you see desktop upgrades, and for good reason.
.NET lock-in, what about Mono?
My point is, no one seems to be questioning the "Vista bombed" meme.
As to
Because the GPL is not strictly a EULA?
If, in the course of designing the LEO, they purposely ignored (or somehow had not heard of) what was going on the US in that field, then we could rightly call them a bunch of idiots. The ENIAC, unlike the Colossus, was Turing-complete.
That said, the Manchester Baby gets my vote for first "computer".
Two years ago, Apple was not using hardware that you could get at a PC shop. Legislation would not have helped you there. Look at the enterprise market: you can't just throw any OS on any hardware. The HCL for something like UnixWare is much shorter than the one for Windows. Solaris supports 7 WiFi cards, not 70.
In the consumer market, most people are not capable of doing an OS install, however simple they have become, and they see a computer system as a single product, not a bundle. You and I may not, but we cannot ignore that reality. And unfortunately the laws in the US are not as strict when it comes to bundling as they are in other places.
What about the Amiga, or the Spectrum, etc? I know those systems had less off-the-shelf hardware, but not everyone considers x86 off-the-shelf, since they don't know what x86 is. Again, it's only recently that Apple joined the commodity hardware club.
Also, you seem to ignore the possibility that the bundling creates value for the customer. What if the resulting system was more stable? What if it retained its value for an extra couple of years? People pay the Apple tax for that...it's not just fashion.
Finally, notice that MSFT has a driver-signing program, and 64-bit Vista is set up to not allow unsigned drivers in. To the degree that Linux & FreeBSD force more unbundling, I will cheer along with you, but calling Apple a monopoly or a trust is unwarranted here I think.
Apple would give its first born to be Microsoft, but I don't think they have much choice.
Are you sure about that?