No the patent still lasts for the rest of its 18 (or whatever that number is) years and the proceeds go to the estate. IP patents should be no longer than 2 years.
Unfortunately I do not think that PC's could go in a convection cooled case mainly because we have no control over the shape of the motherboard.
Apple spent a great deal of time and money engineering the perfect shape and orientation for every component in thier convection cooled computers allowing perfect airflow through the system. Because PC systems vary so much and were not designed to be cooled in this fashion it would not be effective.
The other reason convection cooling would not be as effective for PC's is that the PC's just generate more heat. A modern high end PC CPU dissapates around 70W of power. I don't know any mac numbers but I am going to assume they dissapate half that amount if not even less. This helps thier cooling immensely.
If I were this guy and wanted a quite case I would start off by getting an Enermax Whisper Quiet power supply. They are very high quality with great power output and you can hardly hear them. Next I would remove the 80mm case fans that are in the case. Replace those with 92mm or better yet 120mm case fans. Larger fans don't have to turn as fast (which has been said before but can't be stressed enough if you want to deal with noise.) The heatsink/fan is the next place to look. It seems that the way people get more cooling now is bigger fins and faster spinning fans. It works but its noisy. Instead look for something that is efficiently designed and has fans that are being effectively used. The molex radial fin fans mentioned in other posts seem good as does the Silverado HSF. I like the silverado better because it uses a "squirrel cage" style fan that seems to naturally create less turblence (and thus less noise) and also because of its clever use of metals to get maximum cooling. If thats still not quiet enough you can buy a rheostat device that you can connect between the fans and the psu and slow the fan rotation speed (be careful to monitor the head buildup in the case and not let it get too high). Its too bad someone can't temperature varied rheostat for computers to speed up and slow down the fans to keep a moderate temperature in the case.
One last thing to try is getting rid of the axial case fans (these are the normal ones you are used to) and replace it with a single large "squirrel cage" type fan. I haven't tried it but I've seen good use of it. The fan was positioned to blow right on the heatsink (thus acting in place of the fan that is normally on the heat sink which was removed). The single fan was able to push as much or more air than 3 or 4 heavy duty (and LOUD) case fans and was quieter than any single one of the fans removed. The disadvantages are that the fan sticks about 1 foot out the side of your case and looks easy to break off. With clever and sturdy mounting you might be able to reduce this to 6" of extra width or possibly mount the large fan above the case somehow.
If that is still too loud you can move on to water cooling. I have no numbers on this and no resonably proof that it will work but I think a properly designed radiator for your water cooler would allow it to operate well within temperature range while only being convection cooled (no fans at all). You would still have the pump running but the hum from the pump (if its decent) should be less than the noise from your hard drive.
Speaking of hard drives that moves me to my next point. Much of the noise you hear from a computer is actually not the fans but instead case vibration caused by the fans and hard drive. Make sure to mount your hard drive securely. Use all 4 screws and make sure they are tight. You would have to check about grounding and such but I think it would be safe to put little rubber washers between the drive and the case. These shock absorbers would eliminate case vibration caused by the drives. Next put the same shock absorbers on any of the fans you mount. Finally look for any places where the case mounts to it self loosely and tighten it up. Add foam padding to places that rub or rattle. Just make sure not to block up air passages or short out the electronics.
I think that is a summary of all the general cooling and noise reduction knowledge on the web so I hope it helps.
Thing is, I don't mind paying a musician a resonable amount to listen to a song that they put time and effort and quite probably a lot of money in to creating. The problem I have is when I pay $20 for a CD and only $1 (and from what I've heard thats very generous) goes to the artist. I think that with dynamic CD creation being so cheap these days artists would do well to form a coalition to advertise and sell thier music. Just keep with the spirit of music and sell cd's at a reasonable price to cover costs (including salary for the artist of course).
I bet you could sell 10x as many cd's as RIAA companies if you priced them at $4 and you could pocket like $2 of that pretty easily. Heck bump up the price to $6 (which seems to be the upper limit of resonable to me for a cd) and pocket $4 an album.
Alternatively start up a napster like service. Have it be an artist opt-in type service where the only songs traded are put on the network by the creators of the songs. Charge a subscription rate to everyone using the service (like $10 a month unlimited downloads). Then divide the profit (that is amount of money left after paying off the network costs and the people that write the software and keep the network going) between the artists based on the percentage of the total transactions there songs made. If there were 1000 total transfers of music (a very small number for an example) and your songs made up 100 trades, you get 10% of the profit.
I used to hate the idea of subscriptions but now I see it as the best way to avoid the hassel of enforcing intellectual property rights while still rewarding the people generating the service.
Government funded research should be public domain. That means no licence on the knowledge. They should publish it and make it freely available for everyone in the country no matter who they are and those people should be free to use it how they wish within the framework of laws we uphold. There should not be a law that says you cannot make money from knowledge obtained from public research, that should be dealt with by competition. If there is no value in the service or product, people will not pay for it.
That has yet to be determined. In the strictest sense of the licence the algorithms are protected because using the same method as the code you read is deriving your source from the licenced source. The FSF is arrogant enough to follow through on thoughts like this.
Where I work we are strictly forbidden to look at any open source lest we inadvertantly pollute the code we write with bits and pieces that could land us in legal trouble. The GPL is a cancer in that once a piece of software goes GPL it and any of its decendants are forever open source. It grows and grows and if you get hit by it your life may be changed.
I often have my argument "refuted" by people saying "if you don't derive from the source code you aren't bound by the licence" but it is unclear what the definition of derivation is. The GPL relies on copyright so it would seem that it only applies to the exact text of the parent program, yet noone would argue that if you took a GPL work and changed all the variable names you would still be bound by the GPL. Also I doubt anyone would argue that if you took GPL'd code and changed all the structure in the code but kept the same results that you would be bound by the GPL. In this same vein I doubt it could be argued that if you copy the same IDEA that a GPL'd product used after having studied that GPL'd code that you would not be bound to the GPL as a derivative work.
That is what the FSF and other supporters of the GPL want. They want the world to run by thier rules and they wrote a license that has a very real chance of succeeding in forcing that. Hoorray for them! Just remember when you are a programmer flipping burgers at McDonalds or answering phones to tell people where the power switch is just why you can't earn money at the career you are trained for. Software should be free and I guess you should work for free too.
One of the common reasons a person desires to live forever is to keep learning. Do you think if a person had a limitless amount of time that they would be able to learn a limitless amount of information? or do you think that there is a capacity on the amount of knowledge a single person can possess?
You are correct, the GPL has the wrong view about freedom. Freedom is about choice and anything that restricts choice restricts freedom.
That given I do realize that its terribly idealistic and won't work because for the most part people suck. I just want people who spout the glories of freedom being portrayed by the GPL to realize they are restricting choice just as much as any other lisence or code distribution method (other than public domain).
If you want truely free (as in speech and not beer) code then you can't have a license but to be practical I feel its fair to require that your source (and no other) be available upon request and that your name be in the credits of derivative software. The GPL is about free (as in beer) software and it definitely seeks to become the license for all code created. Its not about freedom so people get over it.
The GPL is not a licence that cares about the freedom of the source code. In fact its is more demanding than any closed source licence. It not only tries to control your use of the product that is licenced but any future product based on it.
Because of this control of the whole line of decendants the GPL limits innovation nearly as much as closed source. It prohibits any author that does not agree with the GPL from using the code in any way. This is all fine for your "club of likeminded developers" but if you are truely shooting for freedom and want to spur innovation you would use a truely free licence. Something that required that your name be included in the documentation of any derivative document and would require that your source be made available upon request. I'm all for the creators of software controling what happens with it but the GPL rubs me the wrong way when it seeks to control other works that the original author did not create.
I think the people that should be legally responsible are the railroads. They are the ones that licenced out digging rights on the land when they had no rights to do so.
That said I think the homeowners saw a chance to get something for nearly nothing (the railroad already rendered that land useless to the farmer) and I get really pissed when that happens. If anything some of the compensation to the railroads for laying the fiber should be passed back to the homeowners. It seems that the phone companies tried their level best to get the appropriate rights and they were given fools gold by the railroad companies.
I must admit I only know what I read and see. I am from Montana and a majority of the farm/ranch land there is owned by families or the govt and used by families. I have also read a number of articles while I was in my economics class not only stating that coorporations were unable to compete in farming (wheat farming specificially if I remember right) but also attempted to explain why they were unable to compete. So I admit that I may be wrong but then so are half a dozen reputed economists.
Feel free to accuse me of having my facts wrong but know that I had substance to back what I wrote.
I would argue that every McDonalds that opens up puts more money in your pocket. Its a pretty well known economic fact that there are only a few ways to increase the true wealth of a society.
#1 increase the human capitol of the society. This just means making people smarter and healthier a task that was accomplished by better healthcare, health insurance, public education, and popularization of post-secondary education.
#2 increase material capital. This means building more machines and making sure those machines are working at maximum capacity. This is one area that coorporations shine. If you had a Buger King Style burger cooker in your house it would be a huge waste because you only need 4 or maybe 6 burgers (if you are a family). In burger king however it allows them to make hundreds of burgers an hour with next to no effort. This allows the world to have more hamburgers for the same price thus giving more wealth.
The final way that wealth grows is through creation of better technology. Coorporations also contribute in this area. There is always a push by coorporations to find a new way of doing things so they can cut costs.
In the end its evident that without coorporations we would not be the most wealthy society in history. Right now you and I have more real wealth than any of our ancestors. This isn't just in number of dollars but instead in real buying power. We are able to have more than twice as much real stuff than people 100 years ago. You may hate coorporations but without them its likely that you would be too busy working in the fields to write articles about how bad it would be if there was a coorporation.
#1 you forgot to figure in about $2 for energy to run the grill and whatever else. You also forgot the 20minutes of cleanup after you are done cooking. I am on your side and think that cooking food for yourself is a better alternative in a host of different ways though.
McDonalds (and to a lesser extent Microsoft) preys on peoples dislike of certain tasks. This is a dislike that was already there before the existance of McDonalds as an alternative. Just ask most people in a fast food place why they are eating there and a fairly regular answer is that they could not be bothered to cook. (I think thats a more common answer at a pizza place but still) I don't blame the coorporation for using this weakness in people to make money, but the solution has to come from the people not the coorporation, if we want our country to be free anyways.
That said both McDonalds and Microsoft make a product that works as advertised and actually is capable of fulfilling most of peoples expectations. The product just does the job and so people will buy it because they don't want to deal with it on thier own. I don't think McDonalds breeds stupid and uncaring people, I think that stupid and uncaring people bread McDonalds and they are free to do that.
I worked in fast food for years and there are two main reasons that people wouldn't eat at the places they work.
The first and probably the key factor is that when you look at the same food 6hours a day 7days a week you do not want to eat it. It makes you shudder in horror because you really hate the work, not the food. You associate all the stress and bad stuff at the job with the food and bam you don't want to eat it. (No fast food is not particularily stressful, no more so than any other job I'd say, but people that work there tend to be the ones that couldn't, and didn't want, to work anywhere else and so have a low opinion of work in the first place).
The number two reason is the people that work in fast food places couldn't care less about the people that eat the food and so they take very little care in preparation. "Oops I dropped that burger on the floor, oh well if I wipe it off noone will notice." As far as things go, in the US you can be nearly certain that food from a coorporate source is as safe as you can get because they are the groups that are most likely going to get hammered if they don't live up to regulations.
Farming went coorporate in the states like 60 years ago or something and got totally out competed by small family farmers. I really don't see coorporations trying in that industry again.
This post (not the NASA article) seems to just be spreading FUD in order to raise ratings on the site or something. Do they want us to wear metal helmets to protect ourselves from the fallout from the collision too?
The chances of the earth being hit by a dangerously significant item from space are far lower than the chances I get hit by a car before I make it home tonight. People there is no news here, go home and relax and worry about something real like rising taxes and falling stocks.
As I understand it, under GNOME and KDE you can still have different window managers (this might have changed since the last time I fired up linux because I have only really seen the 1.0 versions of GNOME and KDE) and the window managers have vastly different functionality. Just walk up to a random linux machine running X and try to bring a window to the forground. You might have to try 5 different methods to accomplish a task that trivial. In windows you just click on it (or the icon in the taskbar) and it all works right away and the same every time.
Ok on to your other arguments, especially emacs. Way to use a *nix program to say that windows programs are not consitent. Its a port and half the time hardly runs.
As far as menu's being consitent just look at the file or edit menus. What program doesn't have the file menu as the left most choice and what program doesn't have the save function in this menu. As far as setting user preferences goes the convention of using tools->options is actually relatively new to MS. Previously I thought they also used Edit->Preferences.
Again I say this, given any random linux installation the chances that its interface works differently than another is much higher than the chances that the windows interface is different on two different systems.
If linux wants to live on the desktop its going to have to achieve the same level of consistency and I think that linux SHOULD NOT try to live on the desktop. That said I wish for linux to always stay competitive as an OS and to stay strong in the server and also the computer geek OS markets. It will assure that Windows continues to make real moves forward to stay competative in those same markets.
Put someone in front of KDE or Ximian and force them to use only it for a month. They'll be as proficient with it as they are currently with Windows. And when they see the power and the non-crash feature, they'll never want to use Windows again.
This is true except for one MAJOR thing. The windows interface is very consistant. Every app has the same menu's and the same commands and they all look exactly the same. In windows there are almost no user configurable options for look or operation of the OS. Its much easier to learn an OS and the applications in it if they are always the same. You can learn one thing and be able to use it in every application you ever see on the system. You will also be able to go to your neighbors house and know exactly what things will look like and how they will operate.
With linux the great power and draw is that you can set up the system exactly the way you want to. You can also pick apps that work in the way you think. This is all good but for the general person this makes the learning curve much much higher.
I won't even get in to hardware or system configuration issues under linux but I think you get my point. Linux needs to be shaped and polished if it ever wants to be a true consumer desktop OS and personally I think trying to bring linux in to that arena will ruin what good attributes it posesses.
If someone came along to your court and started cheating, sure you could always drive to another park.
If someone came to my park and started cheating my group would kick his ass and he would leave the park. That is why game servers (and most other social type servers including chat and such) have kick and ban functionality.
Its still a social issue. The world can't be protected from every bad thing that can happen so learn to deal with it.
Causeing what could be useful features to be removed froms software just because some stupid people do stupid and unfun things with them is wrong. I find it somewhat hypocritical when the sentiment here is that a corporation that removes functionality from a product in a cry from corporations to get protection from it is bad, yet when there is something that you feel damages you, you cheer for the feature to be removed.
Cheating is best dealt with socially in games. If a person cheats you don't play with that person and then they either cheat all by themselves or they start to not cheat. The only time cheating should be an issue is if there is money to be gained.
Games should be for fun and excitement and it seems too many gamers take them FAR to seriously. I think its abominable for the community to make a company restrict drivers for this reason. Blah.
The thing you are missing is the choice for what licence model software is under needs to come from the creator, not from the consumer. We consumers can want MS or any other company to release thier software under a certain licence but in the end it is their choice as creators which to use. In this speech Mundie states that MS supports the rights of the creator of intellectual property to choose its method of disemination.
Basically he is saying that MS supports the right to intellectual property in general. He believes that source code and (though he doesn't expcitly say it) other types of itellectual property is valuable and that the creator of said property is entitled to rents when other people benifit from it.
I think that the reason the GPL is bad is that it is written in the name of freedom of intellectual property and information in general but has nearly as severe restrictions on its use as closed source software. The problem I see is that the entire derivative of a GPL work has to be under the GPL or compatible licence. This means if you want to use GPL source in your product you have to show all of it, including any "trade secrets" in the open source. I think a better licence would require that any code taken from an open source work to be disclosed and open in a derivative but new modules created by the author that are not a derivative of an open work the author should have the choice to release closed. This would allow the wish of each creator to be fulfilled and would preserve the idea of intellectual property. It would allow current business models to continue to work and be expanded while also allowing open source a wider scope to work in. The GPL is a virus but open source does not have to be under the GPL.
Its rather bad PR for a company to create a product and then go "but it really sux so we don't use it internally". This goes for all companies, you can bet that IBM uses the Lotus series of services for corporate communication and HP would have used its series of communications software (until they discontinued it which I think they did).
The number two benifit of having your employees use software that you develop internally is licencing. You basically get to ignore the whole concept of keeping track of licences if you wrote the software in the first place.
The third thing and a very important one is you can get your employees to find bugs for you. Make it a quazi mandate that everyone has to use the beta (or newly released) version of your product internally and you will generate a ton of bug reports.
All in all I agree with the originator of this thread, its not terribly incredible that a company would ask its employees to use company products. I think that extends to other areas of industry as well. If you work at John Deere and drive a toro tractor, or work at Ford and drive a Chevy you will probably get your ass kicked by coworkers. In fact you are probably in more danger using a competitors product in those cases than in the software world.
I want you to come work for me. If you don't mind me not paying you for 4 months and then just jump on board when I demand you sign a contract after the fact absolving me of having to pay you any further money then you are the perfect employee.
Bottom line is that the company signed into a binding contract and they SHOULD NOT be let out of that contract. If you can't do business the way you promised you shouldn't do business at all. Stealing services from someone else is wrong and should be procecuted.
The unfortunate bit in all of this is even if you win the lawsuit the chances of you getting any money are slim because it sounds like the company doesn't have any. I'd say sue them (nearly any lawyer should be able to win this case for you if the facts are as clear cut as you say though IANAL) and find a different means for revenue on your site.
I don't see how they can bring out this terminal at a price that can compete with current hardware available.
Considering its rather low performance the box will have to come out at a lower price than the PS2 or the yet to be released xbox. I think the big problem with this box are that its benifits are not that great compared to a celery based computer of the same speed and they are entering an arena where you have to sell your hardware for no profit in order to get anyone to buy it.
One key to marketing this would be to stress the "everything included out of the box" aspect and also to sell the reliability. Convince everyone that because all the machines are built to the same specifications that the drivers and OS are much more stable on that machine than a general OS on a general machine because they were able to debug against thier hardware longer.
Honestly though I have to give this box a thumbs down. Old computers in new boxes don't sell without a great gimmick and I don't see the great gimmick in this.
Slashdot Mirror
No the patent still lasts for the rest of its 18 (or whatever that number is) years and the proceeds go to the estate. IP patents should be no longer than 2 years.
Apple spent a great deal of time and money engineering the perfect shape and orientation for every component in thier convection cooled computers allowing perfect airflow through the system. Because PC systems vary so much and were not designed to be cooled in this fashion it would not be effective.
The other reason convection cooling would not be as effective for PC's is that the PC's just generate more heat. A modern high end PC CPU dissapates around 70W of power. I don't know any mac numbers but I am going to assume they dissapate half that amount if not even less. This helps thier cooling immensely.
If I were this guy and wanted a quite case I would start off by getting an Enermax Whisper Quiet power supply. They are very high quality with great power output and you can hardly hear them. Next I would remove the 80mm case fans that are in the case. Replace those with 92mm or better yet 120mm case fans. Larger fans don't have to turn as fast (which has been said before but can't be stressed enough if you want to deal with noise.) The heatsink/fan is the next place to look. It seems that the way people get more cooling now is bigger fins and faster spinning fans. It works but its noisy. Instead look for something that is efficiently designed and has fans that are being effectively used. The molex radial fin fans mentioned in other posts seem good as does the Silverado HSF. I like the silverado better because it uses a "squirrel cage" style fan that seems to naturally create less turblence (and thus less noise) and also because of its clever use of metals to get maximum cooling. If thats still not quiet enough you can buy a rheostat device that you can connect between the fans and the psu and slow the fan rotation speed (be careful to monitor the head buildup in the case and not let it get too high). Its too bad someone can't temperature varied rheostat for computers to speed up and slow down the fans to keep a moderate temperature in the case.
One last thing to try is getting rid of the axial case fans (these are the normal ones you are used to) and replace it with a single large "squirrel cage" type fan. I haven't tried it but I've seen good use of it. The fan was positioned to blow right on the heatsink (thus acting in place of the fan that is normally on the heat sink which was removed). The single fan was able to push as much or more air than 3 or 4 heavy duty (and LOUD) case fans and was quieter than any single one of the fans removed. The disadvantages are that the fan sticks about 1 foot out the side of your case and looks easy to break off. With clever and sturdy mounting you might be able to reduce this to 6" of extra width or possibly mount the large fan above the case somehow.
If that is still too loud you can move on to water cooling. I have no numbers on this and no resonably proof that it will work but I think a properly designed radiator for your water cooler would allow it to operate well within temperature range while only being convection cooled (no fans at all). You would still have the pump running but the hum from the pump (if its decent) should be less than the noise from your hard drive.
Speaking of hard drives that moves me to my next point. Much of the noise you hear from a computer is actually not the fans but instead case vibration caused by the fans and hard drive. Make sure to mount your hard drive securely. Use all 4 screws and make sure they are tight. You would have to check about grounding and such but I think it would be safe to put little rubber washers between the drive and the case. These shock absorbers would eliminate case vibration caused by the drives. Next put the same shock absorbers on any of the fans you mount. Finally look for any places where the case mounts to it self loosely and tighten it up. Add foam padding to places that rub or rattle. Just make sure not to block up air passages or short out the electronics.
I think that is a summary of all the general cooling and noise reduction knowledge on the web so I hope it helps.
I bet you could sell 10x as many cd's as RIAA companies if you priced them at $4 and you could pocket like $2 of that pretty easily. Heck bump up the price to $6 (which seems to be the upper limit of resonable to me for a cd) and pocket $4 an album.
Alternatively start up a napster like service. Have it be an artist opt-in type service where the only songs traded are put on the network by the creators of the songs. Charge a subscription rate to everyone using the service (like $10 a month unlimited downloads). Then divide the profit (that is amount of money left after paying off the network costs and the people that write the software and keep the network going) between the artists based on the percentage of the total transactions there songs made. If there were 1000 total transfers of music (a very small number for an example) and your songs made up 100 trades, you get 10% of the profit.
I used to hate the idea of subscriptions but now I see it as the best way to avoid the hassel of enforcing intellectual property rights while still rewarding the people generating the service.
The plants are probably cheaper than any probe we build as well. Nature is better at building these sorts of things than humans are for sure.
Government funded research should be public domain. That means no licence on the knowledge. They should publish it and make it freely available for everyone in the country no matter who they are and those people should be free to use it how they wish within the framework of laws we uphold. There should not be a law that says you cannot make money from knowledge obtained from public research, that should be dealt with by competition. If there is no value in the service or product, people will not pay for it.
Where I work we are strictly forbidden to look at any open source lest we inadvertantly pollute the code we write with bits and pieces that could land us in legal trouble. The GPL is a cancer in that once a piece of software goes GPL it and any of its decendants are forever open source. It grows and grows and if you get hit by it your life may be changed.
I often have my argument "refuted" by people saying "if you don't derive from the source code you aren't bound by the licence" but it is unclear what the definition of derivation is. The GPL relies on copyright so it would seem that it only applies to the exact text of the parent program, yet noone would argue that if you took a GPL work and changed all the variable names you would still be bound by the GPL. Also I doubt anyone would argue that if you took GPL'd code and changed all the structure in the code but kept the same results that you would be bound by the GPL. In this same vein I doubt it could be argued that if you copy the same IDEA that a GPL'd product used after having studied that GPL'd code that you would not be bound to the GPL as a derivative work.
That is what the FSF and other supporters of the GPL want. They want the world to run by thier rules and they wrote a license that has a very real chance of succeeding in forcing that. Hoorray for them! Just remember when you are a programmer flipping burgers at McDonalds or answering phones to tell people where the power switch is just why you can't earn money at the career you are trained for. Software should be free and I guess you should work for free too.
Thats exactly what the world needs. A little bit of weapons grade plutonium under every pillow. Sounds like some sort of odd nightmare to me.
One of the common reasons a person desires to live forever is to keep learning. Do you think if a person had a limitless amount of time that they would be able to learn a limitless amount of information? or do you think that there is a capacity on the amount of knowledge a single person can possess?
That given I do realize that its terribly idealistic and won't work because for the most part people suck. I just want people who spout the glories of freedom being portrayed by the GPL to realize they are restricting choice just as much as any other lisence or code distribution method (other than public domain).
If you want truely free (as in speech and not beer) code then you can't have a license but to be practical I feel its fair to require that your source (and no other) be available upon request and that your name be in the credits of derivative software. The GPL is about free (as in beer) software and it definitely seeks to become the license for all code created. Its not about freedom so people get over it.
Because of this control of the whole line of decendants the GPL limits innovation nearly as much as closed source. It prohibits any author that does not agree with the GPL from using the code in any way. This is all fine for your "club of likeminded developers" but if you are truely shooting for freedom and want to spur innovation you would use a truely free licence. Something that required that your name be included in the documentation of any derivative document and would require that your source be made available upon request. I'm all for the creators of software controling what happens with it but the GPL rubs me the wrong way when it seeks to control other works that the original author did not create.
That said I think the homeowners saw a chance to get something for nearly nothing (the railroad already rendered that land useless to the farmer) and I get really pissed when that happens. If anything some of the compensation to the railroads for laying the fiber should be passed back to the homeowners. It seems that the phone companies tried their level best to get the appropriate rights and they were given fools gold by the railroad companies.
Feel free to accuse me of having my facts wrong but know that I had substance to back what I wrote.
#1 increase the human capitol of the society. This just means making people smarter and healthier a task that was accomplished by better healthcare, health insurance, public education, and popularization of post-secondary education.
#2 increase material capital. This means building more machines and making sure those machines are working at maximum capacity. This is one area that coorporations shine. If you had a Buger King Style burger cooker in your house it would be a huge waste because you only need 4 or maybe 6 burgers (if you are a family). In burger king however it allows them to make hundreds of burgers an hour with next to no effort. This allows the world to have more hamburgers for the same price thus giving more wealth.
The final way that wealth grows is through creation of better technology. Coorporations also contribute in this area. There is always a push by coorporations to find a new way of doing things so they can cut costs.
In the end its evident that without coorporations we would not be the most wealthy society in history. Right now you and I have more real wealth than any of our ancestors. This isn't just in number of dollars but instead in real buying power. We are able to have more than twice as much real stuff than people 100 years ago. You may hate coorporations but without them its likely that you would be too busy working in the fields to write articles about how bad it would be if there was a coorporation.
McDonalds (and to a lesser extent Microsoft) preys on peoples dislike of certain tasks. This is a dislike that was already there before the existance of McDonalds as an alternative. Just ask most people in a fast food place why they are eating there and a fairly regular answer is that they could not be bothered to cook. (I think thats a more common answer at a pizza place but still) I don't blame the coorporation for using this weakness in people to make money, but the solution has to come from the people not the coorporation, if we want our country to be free anyways.
That said both McDonalds and Microsoft make a product that works as advertised and actually is capable of fulfilling most of peoples expectations. The product just does the job and so people will buy it because they don't want to deal with it on thier own. I don't think McDonalds breeds stupid and uncaring people, I think that stupid and uncaring people bread McDonalds and they are free to do that.
The first and probably the key factor is that when you look at the same food 6hours a day 7days a week you do not want to eat it. It makes you shudder in horror because you really hate the work, not the food. You associate all the stress and bad stuff at the job with the food and bam you don't want to eat it. (No fast food is not particularily stressful, no more so than any other job I'd say, but people that work there tend to be the ones that couldn't, and didn't want, to work anywhere else and so have a low opinion of work in the first place).
The number two reason is the people that work in fast food places couldn't care less about the people that eat the food and so they take very little care in preparation. "Oops I dropped that burger on the floor, oh well if I wipe it off noone will notice." As far as things go, in the US you can be nearly certain that food from a coorporate source is as safe as you can get because they are the groups that are most likely going to get hammered if they don't live up to regulations.
Farming went coorporate in the states like 60 years ago or something and got totally out competed by small family farmers. I really don't see coorporations trying in that industry again.
The chances of the earth being hit by a dangerously significant item from space are far lower than the chances I get hit by a car before I make it home tonight. People there is no news here, go home and relax and worry about something real like rising taxes and falling stocks.
Ok on to your other arguments, especially emacs. Way to use a *nix program to say that windows programs are not consitent. Its a port and half the time hardly runs.
As far as menu's being consitent just look at the file or edit menus. What program doesn't have the file menu as the left most choice and what program doesn't have the save function in this menu. As far as setting user preferences goes the convention of using tools->options is actually relatively new to MS. Previously I thought they also used Edit->Preferences.
Again I say this, given any random linux installation the chances that its interface works differently than another is much higher than the chances that the windows interface is different on two different systems.
If linux wants to live on the desktop its going to have to achieve the same level of consistency and I think that linux SHOULD NOT try to live on the desktop. That said I wish for linux to always stay competitive as an OS and to stay strong in the server and also the computer geek OS markets. It will assure that Windows continues to make real moves forward to stay competative in those same markets.
This is true except for one MAJOR thing. The windows interface is very consistant. Every app has the same menu's and the same commands and they all look exactly the same. In windows there are almost no user configurable options for look or operation of the OS. Its much easier to learn an OS and the applications in it if they are always the same. You can learn one thing and be able to use it in every application you ever see on the system. You will also be able to go to your neighbors house and know exactly what things will look like and how they will operate.
With linux the great power and draw is that you can set up the system exactly the way you want to. You can also pick apps that work in the way you think. This is all good but for the general person this makes the learning curve much much higher.
I won't even get in to hardware or system configuration issues under linux but I think you get my point. Linux needs to be shaped and polished if it ever wants to be a true consumer desktop OS and personally I think trying to bring linux in to that arena will ruin what good attributes it posesses.
If someone came to my park and started cheating my group would kick his ass and he would leave the park. That is why game servers (and most other social type servers including chat and such) have kick and ban functionality.
Its still a social issue. The world can't be protected from every bad thing that can happen so learn to deal with it.
Causeing what could be useful features to be removed froms software just because some stupid people do stupid and unfun things with them is wrong. I find it somewhat hypocritical when the sentiment here is that a corporation that removes functionality from a product in a cry from corporations to get protection from it is bad, yet when there is something that you feel damages you, you cheer for the feature to be removed.
Games should be for fun and excitement and it seems too many gamers take them FAR to seriously. I think its abominable for the community to make a company restrict drivers for this reason. Blah.
Basically he is saying that MS supports the right to intellectual property in general. He believes that source code and (though he doesn't expcitly say it) other types of itellectual property is valuable and that the creator of said property is entitled to rents when other people benifit from it.
I think that the reason the GPL is bad is that it is written in the name of freedom of intellectual property and information in general but has nearly as severe restrictions on its use as closed source software. The problem I see is that the entire derivative of a GPL work has to be under the GPL or compatible licence. This means if you want to use GPL source in your product you have to show all of it, including any "trade secrets" in the open source. I think a better licence would require that any code taken from an open source work to be disclosed and open in a derivative but new modules created by the author that are not a derivative of an open work the author should have the choice to release closed. This would allow the wish of each creator to be fulfilled and would preserve the idea of intellectual property. It would allow current business models to continue to work and be expanded while also allowing open source a wider scope to work in. The GPL is a virus but open source does not have to be under the GPL.
The number two benifit of having your employees use software that you develop internally is licencing. You basically get to ignore the whole concept of keeping track of licences if you wrote the software in the first place.
The third thing and a very important one is you can get your employees to find bugs for you. Make it a quazi mandate that everyone has to use the beta (or newly released) version of your product internally and you will generate a ton of bug reports.
All in all I agree with the originator of this thread, its not terribly incredible that a company would ask its employees to use company products. I think that extends to other areas of industry as well. If you work at John Deere and drive a toro tractor, or work at Ford and drive a Chevy you will probably get your ass kicked by coworkers. In fact you are probably in more danger using a competitors product in those cases than in the software world.
Bottom line is that the company signed into a binding contract and they SHOULD NOT be let out of that contract. If you can't do business the way you promised you shouldn't do business at all. Stealing services from someone else is wrong and should be procecuted.
The unfortunate bit in all of this is even if you win the lawsuit the chances of you getting any money are slim because it sounds like the company doesn't have any. I'd say sue them (nearly any lawyer should be able to win this case for you if the facts are as clear cut as you say though IANAL) and find a different means for revenue on your site.
Considering its rather low performance the box will have to come out at a lower price than the PS2 or the yet to be released xbox. I think the big problem with this box are that its benifits are not that great compared to a celery based computer of the same speed and they are entering an arena where you have to sell your hardware for no profit in order to get anyone to buy it.
One key to marketing this would be to stress the "everything included out of the box" aspect and also to sell the reliability. Convince everyone that because all the machines are built to the same specifications that the drivers and OS are much more stable on that machine than a general OS on a general machine because they were able to debug against thier hardware longer.
Honestly though I have to give this box a thumbs down. Old computers in new boxes don't sell without a great gimmick and I don't see the great gimmick in this.