People have said this in other forms, but no one's summed it up so far.
When it comes down to it, why do most people use Windows? Not because it's simple or Linux is complex - most computer users couldn't install or manage Windows configurations, so the added complexity of Linux wouldn't make much of a difference if the defaults (a la Mandrake) were any good. Not because it's more familiar (Start Panel, anyone?), or because it runs their productivity apps (most people can be set up with OpenOffice and not notice a difference).
People use Windows because it's got the games. As commentators have said time and time again, the computer industry is driven by gamers. No one buys a Pentium 4 2GHz computer with a GeForce 4 Ti because they want to run Office, eh? Geeks resort to dual-booting, Linux for most tasks and Windows for games, while most users simply use what works best - Windows for everything.
Now, with Xbox, there's an opportunity. Games, by their very nature, defy multitasking. When you're playing a game, you're not doing anything else, period, and you expect real-time performance from your computer. No file/print serving in the background, no preemptive multitasking meaning that your game is only running half as fast as it could. The computer should be doing nothing else but running a game. When you put a game into a console, it loads up that game, isn't running anything else in the background, and thus can (theoretically) give you better performance than any desktop with a full-blown OS can.
So, suppose you had an Xbox with Linux installed. A user decides they want to type a document, or surf the web; they boot up Linux, and can open Moz or OO. Then, they decide they want to use a game. They shut down Linux, put the game CD/DVD in the Xbox, and load it up.
Essentially, users have the benefits of a dual-boot situation without the downsides. Games are fully integrated, having every piece of software you need to run them built-in to the disc; the fact that it uses DirectX behind the scenes is irrelevant. And when you're not gaming, you load up Linux, which requires almost no configuration because it's for a standard PC configuration; the Xbox, in fact, may soon be the most ubiquitous PC configuration (plurality) anywhere.
Users are happy because they get a $200 computer that they can use equally well with a TV, HDTV, or computer monitor; and due to its compact nature, could easily be transported from room to room if need be. Microsoft is happy because people are buying Xboxes, which means they buy games; so MS still ends up making a profit, because most people who buy the Xbox are going to get at least one game (which puts MS almost at break-even).
Like you said, copyright is the exclusive right to copy and redistribute a work. So, though someone who has a licensed copy of a copyrighted work can feel free to edit it, redistributing that edited copy, in the form of "edited-for-TV" movies, isn't legal.
Copyright law is designed to give people the exclusive rights to their work. They can license it at will, but without license, other people can't use it.
Obviously, no one would want exclusive rights to their work - that would make it pointless. Instead, they generally want money. But there's something else very important involved in copyright - the sanctity of the original. These directors created works, and have the right to prohibit people from modifying them.
Bringing in freedom of speech is absurd. If someone wants to show a clean movie, go put on "Pay it Forward". Or write your own damn movie. There is no speech, no "message", being blocked here; this is just saying that you can't alter a movie without someone's permission.
There's a long distance phone company. It's called Working Assets. The rates aren't great, but they donate 10%, I think it is, of every bill to some charity. And they're unionized, and they pay their workers well, etc. etc.
Working Assets is a good company. They care more about providing a good service than making money. Most notable about these good companies is that they're all private; not a single one is on NYSE, Nasdaq, or Amex, and the majority of them don't even trade over-the-counter. Other companies in this category include Malden Mills, LL Bean... and I can't think of any more right now. The list, of course, is very short.
Aside from those companies, every company will do whatever it can to better its bottom line. This means that Microsoft will continue making Mac software as long as it doesn't halt sales of Windows, nVidia will continue making Linux drivers, and AMD will make sure Palladium can be disabled on chips for Linux users. Say all you want about alliances, but no company is going to purposely block a large constituency from buying its product.
Both Verizon and AT&T Broadband, in this sense, fall into the same boat. They both run ISPs, and they both want to make as much money from those ISPs as possible. If people weren't able to download multimedia off the Internet, then many of them would have no incentive to get broadband; meaning both companies have every incentive to make sure those users don't lose service. Verizon happens to be a bigger company than AT&T Broadband. Their size means that, in this case, their opinion has weight; but Verizon could start offering MusicNet tomorrow, and then they would have an incentive to at least make it harder to download music from third parties off the Internet.
It's like with Philips. Remember when they announced that the CD-DA logo was restricted for true, Red Book audio CDs? Everyone cheered, but the next day, Philips was pushing their own copy-control technology.
There are very few good companies. Verizon seems to be "fighting the good fight" today; Microsoft did at one point too, and AT&T Broadband also seems to have come out on our side. But not a single one of these companies is going to do this if it means a penny of loss. And therefore, there's no motive whatsoever for me to act any differently.
I've never had a line problem since I switched to AT&T. I've had many with Verizon. Tells you something, eh?
I've heard many a good thing about Verizon DSL. As it is, I'm outside their service area.
Verizon, however, is a competitive provider in all of those industries (even if they're competing with other technologies). But they're a monopoly provider of local service, and outside of business-to-business, that's where most of their revenue comes from. And their service for that sucks.
This just goes to prove that the census long-form is fatally flawed.
There are definitely good reasons why government would want to know how many people live in the country. Assuming that every single person, just by being a US citizen, qualified for a $5,000 yearly check paid for by the US government (this program would take the place of welfare and other means-tested government programs), then it would be very easy to find out how many citizens there are - no one wants to hide, because they won't get their $5,000.
But what's the government doing finding out all these other factors? Who cares how many 42-year-olds there are in the country, or how many Irish? I can go to the Census online, and find out how many Romanians there are in my town of 8,000 people. There's six. Data of that precision is not the kind of stuff that government should have access to! And that's not even getting into religion.
Why can't government just use the census like it's supposed to be, a population count? And better yet, why can't the government find out population counts from other means, so that a census of any form is obsolete?
I used to have Verizon for my phone line, them being the incumbent in Massachusetts. I've never seen a worse company! I call up their customer service, wait half an hour, get somebody who doesn't know anything they're talking about; rarely could I accomplish anything constructive. Phone lines having a problem? Just have to wait it out, until the problems pass.
At the time, Continental Cablevision was my incumbent cable company. As cable doesn't require many support calls, I can't comment about them.
Suddenly, Continental Cablevision, which engaged in a merger a couple of years before, merged with US West's cable operations to form MediaOne. And they started offering MediaOne Express, one of the first broadband connections around, with unprecedented T1 downstream speeds. I went over to the nearest MediaOne center in Beverly, tried the service out, loved it, and ordered it the next day. Often, I end up having to call MediaOne tech support; they're much more responsive than Verizon.
So now, MediaOne starts offering digital phone service. And better yet, they offer a combo package; digital cable (400 channels), broadband, and digital phone service with all optional features included on the first line (and a second bare line), for $100 a month, no more. This is an incredible deal. I call up, order this package, and three days later, I don't have any services from Verizon. Every time I call up MediaOne for tech support, it's *amazing* how fast they respond.
So now I hear that Verizon's standing up "for the consumer", and that AT&T Broadband (which bought MediaOne) is pushing in the other direction. Whoop-de-doo. AT&T Broadband provides me a damn good quality service. Verizon doesn't. Until Verizon improves their quality, I'm going with the company that gives me a good service. After all, in the end, all either one cares about is their bottom line.
There's a fundamental difference between RedHat and Microsoft. It has nothing to with the relative size, or position in the market. It has nothing to do with the current employees at RedHat. It has nothing to do with the business model. It doesn't even have anything to do with the GPL.
No, the fundamental difference between RedHat and Microsoft is that RedHat is standards-compliant. Compile one piece of software on RedHat, and you can run it on most any Linux distro. If you can't, you can get compatibility libraries so you can. All for free.
This means that vendor dependence is no more. Anyone can use RedHat for a while, then if Mandrake offers a better deal, they can switch on the spot. No buying new applications, or hardware, or support contracts; everything stays the same, except the distributor.
This means that RedHat can't do "embrace and extend." If they do, people can switch distros instantly, and RedHat's dominance will be gone. RedHat only remains dominant because they offer a good product; and as Mandrake's offering gets better, its marketshare rises on the charts. If RedHat's tops, it's because it's good software. Period.
The US has the unique privilege of being one of 4 countries in the world where CDMA is the de facto standard for wireless. In some countries analog or TDMA is the standard, but for the most part, everywhere outside of North America uses GSM.
Does Sharp plan on selling this wireless package outside of North America? If so, then why can't any American just pick up the European GSM version of it, and use it here? Sure, the GSM version would need to support 1900 MHz... but Sharp does expect European users to roam, no?
What are diamonds, but hyper-compressed carbon? Scientists are now able to synthesize diamonds in labs. Mind you, I have no idea how that works, if it's practical to get one of those, if the cost's insane; but if not, why not?
If that doesn't work, you could always just find a reasonably-sized/priced diamond, then buy an equivalent price amount of other stones; say, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, one of each, exactly which doesn't matter. Probably, the amount you would have spent on a diamond ring will allow you to get a ruby ring, bracelet, necklace, and earrings; of course, I'm talking out of my ass seeing that I've never bought gems and won't anytime soon, but last I checked diamonds were far more expensive than anything else.
Course, if you're really lucky, your girlfriend will like silver and stone-other-than-diamond better in the first place, based on looks alone.:D
Agreed completely. And I think that, for that reason, the Moz team should split into three different projects (though they should all stay under the moz.org banner): [a] XUL/toolkit, which depends on no other Moz part; [b] Gecko, which depends on XUL; and [c] browser, which depends on Gecko. Then, they should distribute them separately; you have the XUL modules installed (DLLs on Windows, for example), the Gecko modules installed, and the Moz browser can be a single binary (maybe libs too) that simply depends on those libraries. Then, HTML-based applications can use Gecko without needing to compile all of Moz, and other XUL applications can use XUL without needing to compile Moz or Gecko.
Also, the XUL team should work on a native-wdget port; instead of displaying chrome-based widgets, they should display (on the largest toolkits, GTK and Win32, at least) OS-native widgets. Instead of downloading chromes, you just download a GTK theme, and it applies to all your apps, including XUL-based ones.
Don't you agree that a lot more people would use the Moz tools if they were separate and this easily integratable?
So somebody releases another Linux desktop. Not important. What is important is that it's based on XUL, theoretically a fully cross-platform toolkit; many simple XUL-based applets can run, unedited, on Mozilla on all platforms, at native speed.
Imagine if this OEone desktop can somehow be designed to work equally well on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. So that a user can have a completely identical desktop no matter where they are. It makes transition to Linux much easier than before. Eh?
I have good reason for predicting that, within a year, Apple will buy AOL from AOLTW.
Right now, "convergence" is out. Convergence-based companies, like Vivendi, Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, and more are looking extremely bad. Many of them are on the verge of breaking up.
So let's say Time Warner breaks up. They put publishing and print-based materials in one company (Time), and multimedia/interactive materials in another company (Warner). That leaves America Online; the service that Apple went to special lengths to enable on Mac; the service that powers Apple's new iChat; and the service that now offers the Gecko browser by default on Mac.
Why wouldn't Apple jump to buy America Online, integrating it with OS X, and morphing the Mac AOL client into both a new, fully standards-compliant Galeon-style browser, and a new, fully standards-compliant MSN Explorer-style browser? They've got the money, after all, being one of two profitable computer companies. I think it'll happen.
If these companies are so debt-heavy, maybe it's because they all provide shitty service, and most of all, *charge for incoming calls*? I'd get Nextel in a second, iDEN be damned, just for the free incoming calls, except that I need a cheaper plan. But still, something's wrong when you need to pay on both ends. Cingular could give free incoming calls on all plans, standard, retroactive, and they'd be the biggest cellular company so quick it wouldn't be funny. And they seem to have found a way to afford to switch to GSM.
They've also figured out a solution to the 4-towers problem; Cingular and T-Mobile share networks in California, Nevada, and NYC/Northern NJ. Only one tower, and you can get GSM from either company. That's what they do in Europe, and that's what every cellular company should be doing in N. America; otherwise, it's absurd. Cell towers are a natural monopoly, but the service provided wirelessly isn't.
It's irrelevant, as soon everybody will (should) be using wCDMA anyway. Even Verizon's going to switch to that. Finally, we get the best of all standards, used around the world, and Qualcomm no longer has any power.
This is cool and all, and I'll be downloading it and testing it out soon. But this just goes back to the ultimate boot-from-CD OS: Be.
Be's installer is very simple; it's reminiscent of the installers for DOS games. When you put a Be boot CD in your drive, it loads up the OS, completely runnable off the CD. (Yes, I know that Be-provided images don't run anything but the Installer, but that's not the point - if you make a custom image, it can run whatever you want.) You go to the Be menu, then Applications, then Installer, select a partition, and go; beyond that, there is absolutely nothing you have to do. Reboot, and you're in BeOS.
Not only is there no configuration at all (beyond partitions, and even that can be automatic) that you have to do during Install, almost everything is auto-configured after install, too.
Mandrake may require no more expertise to install than Windows, but Mac OS is quite a bit easier, and Be is even easier than that. Linux should learn from that example.
Perhaps Verizon Wireless does have better customer service than Verizon proper. If so, it's probably in large part due to the fact that Verizon doesn't fully own VW.
Why are you talking about Cellular One, though? I agree, Cellular One sucks, as they use TDMA. But Cingular, which has nothing to do with Cellular One (except that a lot of CellOne customers got transferred over to Cingular last year), offers GSM in North Carolina, Virginia, and other states where T-Mobile doesn't. In those states, why would you want to get Verizon when you can get GSM?
Maybe in Montana, Verizon's your best choice. But Montana sucks.
Live anywhere in the US but Montana, North/South Dakota, Nebraska, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Vermont, Alaska, or Maine? Get T-Mobile, formerly VoiceStream - you can't do better for 2G than GSM, as any European will tell you.
Live in those states? Some of them Cingular might have GSM in; it's a good idea to try. Otherwise, it's really a tossup. Don't go with Verizon, though; as any one who has them for local service in New England knows, Verizon might not even have a customer service department for as long as it takes to get connected.
Plus, MSI supports one feature found nowhere else (except on Sorcerer Linux): it can set stuff to auto-install on first use. Let's say you copy Office to a network server, for example, and install everything on clients at "first use". The install will end up taking you a couple minutes per workstation. The first time that someone on a client computer opens Word, it will automatically download, install, and set up Word, with no additional work required from you, the administrator.
Clearly, you don't know the first thing about the Hague treaty. If passed, it would allow people to sue content producers in any signatory country. So someone living in South Carolina could sue a Swedish porn producer, bring them to a court in Saudi Arabia, and easily win.
Second, the US does not own the Internet. It invented it, but now much of the networks are owned by foreign companies. KPNQwest, for example, now owned by KPN; the largest backbone network in Europe is European-owned. So what sense does it make that the US goverment, or a corporation sanctioned by it, gets to control European internet policy?
By your logic, because Europeans invented roads, or capitalism, they should be able to tell Americans exactly how to manage their roads or economy.
Take a read. The government can do what it wants, but chances are, it won't work.
What I'm mainly complaining about is that, right now, the.com domain is in a legal limbo state. What that should mean is that only the laws that apply everywhere are enforced; instead, that means that all laws are enforced.
If there was a clearer geopolitical boundary on the Internet, that would mean sites would actually have to deal with less regulation; they would only have to obey the laws of the one country they register with, and not have to worry about foreign users accessing their site. France's Nazi-auction trial would have been moot, because yahoo.co.us would only have to follow American laws.
There's a technology that's been waiting in the wings to replace floppies for quite some time now. It's widely used in Europe, and not so much in the US, but it's use is growing.
It's the smart card, and readers are widely available; so much that Gateway could offer motherboards sans floppy controller, and computers sans floppy drive, and throw in a smart card reader, and they wouldn't have a penny extra in costs.
These are what I want to see ubiquitous. If there's a fast, portable way for people to carry around data, then web terminals become so much easier. Imagine having a SIM card, AmEx card, ATM card, and PC smart card in one, with all your account data. You bring it to a store, have money automatically deducted from your account (no interest); you throw it in your cellphone, make a call, take it out, or if you don't want to bring your cellphone, you throw it in a payphone and do the same; you go to that same payphone booth, throw in the card, have your web homepage automatically come up, be able to run all your applications. All from one little card.
It's easily possible, but only if smart cards become as common as 3.5 floppy drives are now. Sun has the foresight to include them in all its workstations, but that doesn't help us out, now does it? (Even if my next desktop will be a SPARC.:D) We need Dell to include it. We need HPaq to include it. We need the whitebox manufacturers to include it. We need Intel to drop the FDC on all their motherboards!
Why does the US feel that it should own the Internet?
Countries have different laws. That's a fact, and a good thing; I don't think anybody wants that Hague treaty that lets people sue Swedish porn producers in Saudi Arabia, for example. So having global domains only invites problems.
A French's company may have.com domains, but their corporate site will be at.fr. Similar for Japan, Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia, and pretty much every company in the world. Only the US, with a virtually nonexistent.us domain, has all its companies have.com domains.
What we really need to do is eliminate the three-letter TLD, and have every single domain name end in a country code. Then. as part of getting a domain, the owner agrees to abide by the laws of the country controlling the domain, and no other laws.
Whether ICANN exists or not, the US government tries to enforce its laws on the whole of the Internet. By more clearly enforcing existing political boundaries on the Web, all sorts of disputes can be resolved and avoided.
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People have said this in other forms, but no one's summed it up so far.
When it comes down to it, why do most people use Windows? Not because it's simple or Linux is complex - most computer users couldn't install or manage Windows configurations, so the added complexity of Linux wouldn't make much of a difference if the defaults (a la Mandrake) were any good. Not because it's more familiar (Start Panel, anyone?), or because it runs their productivity apps (most people can be set up with OpenOffice and not notice a difference).
People use Windows because it's got the games. As commentators have said time and time again, the computer industry is driven by gamers. No one buys a Pentium 4 2GHz computer with a GeForce 4 Ti because they want to run Office, eh? Geeks resort to dual-booting, Linux for most tasks and Windows for games, while most users simply use what works best - Windows for everything.
Now, with Xbox, there's an opportunity. Games, by their very nature, defy multitasking. When you're playing a game, you're not doing anything else, period, and you expect real-time performance from your computer. No file/print serving in the background, no preemptive multitasking meaning that your game is only running half as fast as it could. The computer should be doing nothing else but running a game. When you put a game into a console, it loads up that game, isn't running anything else in the background, and thus can (theoretically) give you better performance than any desktop with a full-blown OS can.
So, suppose you had an Xbox with Linux installed. A user decides they want to type a document, or surf the web; they boot up Linux, and can open Moz or OO. Then, they decide they want to use a game. They shut down Linux, put the game CD/DVD in the Xbox, and load it up.
Essentially, users have the benefits of a dual-boot situation without the downsides. Games are fully integrated, having every piece of software you need to run them built-in to the disc; the fact that it uses DirectX behind the scenes is irrelevant. And when you're not gaming, you load up Linux, which requires almost no configuration because it's for a standard PC configuration; the Xbox, in fact, may soon be the most ubiquitous PC configuration (plurality) anywhere.
Users are happy because they get a $200 computer that they can use equally well with a TV, HDTV, or computer monitor; and due to its compact nature, could easily be transported from room to room if need be. Microsoft is happy because people are buying Xboxes, which means they buy games; so MS still ends up making a profit, because most people who buy the Xbox are going to get at least one game (which puts MS almost at break-even).
Like you said, copyright is the exclusive right to copy and redistribute a work. So, though someone who has a licensed copy of a copyrighted work can feel free to edit it, redistributing that edited copy, in the form of "edited-for-TV" movies, isn't legal.
This is the entire point of copyright!
Copyright law is designed to give people the exclusive rights to their work. They can license it at will, but without license, other people can't use it.
Obviously, no one would want exclusive rights to their work - that would make it pointless. Instead, they generally want money. But there's something else very important involved in copyright - the sanctity of the original. These directors created works, and have the right to prohibit people from modifying them.
Bringing in freedom of speech is absurd. If someone wants to show a clean movie, go put on "Pay it Forward". Or write your own damn movie. There is no speech, no "message", being blocked here; this is just saying that you can't alter a movie without someone's permission.
There's a long distance phone company. It's called Working Assets. The rates aren't great, but they donate 10%, I think it is, of every bill to some charity. And they're unionized, and they pay their workers well, etc. etc.
Working Assets is a good company. They care more about providing a good service than making money. Most notable about these good companies is that they're all private; not a single one is on NYSE, Nasdaq, or Amex, and the majority of them don't even trade over-the-counter. Other companies in this category include Malden Mills, LL Bean... and I can't think of any more right now. The list, of course, is very short.
Aside from those companies, every company will do whatever it can to better its bottom line. This means that Microsoft will continue making Mac software as long as it doesn't halt sales of Windows, nVidia will continue making Linux drivers, and AMD will make sure Palladium can be disabled on chips for Linux users. Say all you want about alliances, but no company is going to purposely block a large constituency from buying its product.
Both Verizon and AT&T Broadband, in this sense, fall into the same boat. They both run ISPs, and they both want to make as much money from those ISPs as possible. If people weren't able to download multimedia off the Internet, then many of them would have no incentive to get broadband; meaning both companies have every incentive to make sure those users don't lose service. Verizon happens to be a bigger company than AT&T Broadband. Their size means that, in this case, their opinion has weight; but Verizon could start offering MusicNet tomorrow, and then they would have an incentive to at least make it harder to download music from third parties off the Internet.
It's like with Philips. Remember when they announced that the CD-DA logo was restricted for true, Red Book audio CDs? Everyone cheered, but the next day, Philips was pushing their own copy-control technology.
There are very few good companies. Verizon seems to be "fighting the good fight" today; Microsoft did at one point too, and AT&T Broadband also seems to have come out on our side. But not a single one of these companies is going to do this if it means a penny of loss. And therefore, there's no motive whatsoever for me to act any differently.
I've never had a line problem since I switched to AT&T. I've had many with Verizon. Tells you something, eh?
I've heard many a good thing about Verizon DSL. As it is, I'm outside their service area.
Verizon, however, is a competitive provider in all of those industries (even if they're competing with other technologies). But they're a monopoly provider of local service, and outside of business-to-business, that's where most of their revenue comes from. And their service for that sucks.
This just goes to prove that the census long-form is fatally flawed.
There are definitely good reasons why government would want to know how many people live in the country. Assuming that every single person, just by being a US citizen, qualified for a $5,000 yearly check paid for by the US government (this program would take the place of welfare and other means-tested government programs), then it would be very easy to find out how many citizens there are - no one wants to hide, because they won't get their $5,000.
But what's the government doing finding out all these other factors? Who cares how many 42-year-olds there are in the country, or how many Irish? I can go to the Census online, and find out how many Romanians there are in my town of 8,000 people. There's six. Data of that precision is not the kind of stuff that government should have access to! And that's not even getting into religion.
Why can't government just use the census like it's supposed to be, a population count? And better yet, why can't the government find out population counts from other means, so that a census of any form is obsolete?
I used to have Verizon for my phone line, them being the incumbent in Massachusetts. I've never seen a worse company! I call up their customer service, wait half an hour, get somebody who doesn't know anything they're talking about; rarely could I accomplish anything constructive. Phone lines having a problem? Just have to wait it out, until the problems pass.
At the time, Continental Cablevision was my incumbent cable company. As cable doesn't require many support calls, I can't comment about them.
Suddenly, Continental Cablevision, which engaged in a merger a couple of years before, merged with US West's cable operations to form MediaOne. And they started offering MediaOne Express, one of the first broadband connections around, with unprecedented T1 downstream speeds. I went over to the nearest MediaOne center in Beverly, tried the service out, loved it, and ordered it the next day. Often, I end up having to call MediaOne tech support; they're much more responsive than Verizon.
So now, MediaOne starts offering digital phone service. And better yet, they offer a combo package; digital cable (400 channels), broadband, and digital phone service with all optional features included on the first line (and a second bare line), for $100 a month, no more. This is an incredible deal. I call up, order this package, and three days later, I don't have any services from Verizon. Every time I call up MediaOne for tech support, it's *amazing* how fast they respond.
So now I hear that Verizon's standing up "for the consumer", and that AT&T Broadband (which bought MediaOne) is pushing in the other direction. Whoop-de-doo. AT&T Broadband provides me a damn good quality service. Verizon doesn't. Until Verizon improves their quality, I'm going with the company that gives me a good service. After all, in the end, all either one cares about is their bottom line.
Arr.
There's a fundamental difference between RedHat and Microsoft. It has nothing to with the relative size, or position in the market. It has nothing to do with the current employees at RedHat. It has nothing to do with the business model. It doesn't even have anything to do with the GPL.
No, the fundamental difference between RedHat and Microsoft is that RedHat is standards-compliant. Compile one piece of software on RedHat, and you can run it on most any Linux distro. If you can't, you can get compatibility libraries so you can. All for free.
This means that vendor dependence is no more. Anyone can use RedHat for a while, then if Mandrake offers a better deal, they can switch on the spot. No buying new applications, or hardware, or support contracts; everything stays the same, except the distributor.
This means that RedHat can't do "embrace and extend." If they do, people can switch distros instantly, and RedHat's dominance will be gone. RedHat only remains dominant because they offer a good product; and as Mandrake's offering gets better, its marketshare rises on the charts. If RedHat's tops, it's because it's good software. Period.
The US has the unique privilege of being one of 4 countries in the world where CDMA is the de facto standard for wireless. In some countries analog or TDMA is the standard, but for the most part, everywhere outside of North America uses GSM.
Does Sharp plan on selling this wireless package outside of North America? If so, then why can't any American just pick up the European GSM version of it, and use it here? Sure, the GSM version would need to support 1900 MHz... but Sharp does expect European users to roam, no?
Everybody knows real geeks use Blackbox, joe, Objective-C, Amaya, and Eiffel on a Debian GNU/Hurd box.
What are diamonds, but hyper-compressed carbon? Scientists are now able to synthesize diamonds in labs. Mind you, I have no idea how that works, if it's practical to get one of those, if the cost's insane; but if not, why not?
:D
If that doesn't work, you could always just find a reasonably-sized/priced diamond, then buy an equivalent price amount of other stones; say, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, one of each, exactly which doesn't matter. Probably, the amount you would have spent on a diamond ring will allow you to get a ruby ring, bracelet, necklace, and earrings; of course, I'm talking out of my ass seeing that I've never bought gems and won't anytime soon, but last I checked diamonds were far more expensive than anything else.
Course, if you're really lucky, your girlfriend will like silver and stone-other-than-diamond better in the first place, based on looks alone.
Agreed completely. And I think that, for that reason, the Moz team should split into three different projects (though they should all stay under the moz.org banner): [a] XUL/toolkit, which depends on no other Moz part; [b] Gecko, which depends on XUL; and [c] browser, which depends on Gecko. Then, they should distribute them separately; you have the XUL modules installed (DLLs on Windows, for example), the Gecko modules installed, and the Moz browser can be a single binary (maybe libs too) that simply depends on those libraries. Then, HTML-based applications can use Gecko without needing to compile all of Moz, and other XUL applications can use XUL without needing to compile Moz or Gecko.
Also, the XUL team should work on a native-wdget port; instead of displaying chrome-based widgets, they should display (on the largest toolkits, GTK and Win32, at least) OS-native widgets. Instead of downloading chromes, you just download a GTK theme, and it applies to all your apps, including XUL-based ones.
Don't you agree that a lot more people would use the Moz tools if they were separate and this easily integratable?
So somebody releases another Linux desktop. Not important. What is important is that it's based on XUL, theoretically a fully cross-platform toolkit; many simple XUL-based applets can run, unedited, on Mozilla on all platforms, at native speed.
Imagine if this OEone desktop can somehow be designed to work equally well on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. So that a user can have a completely identical desktop no matter where they are. It makes transition to Linux much easier than before. Eh?
Well, do we hate Apple?
I have good reason for predicting that, within a year, Apple will buy AOL from AOLTW.
Right now, "convergence" is out. Convergence-based companies, like Vivendi, Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, and more are looking extremely bad. Many of them are on the verge of breaking up.
So let's say Time Warner breaks up. They put publishing and print-based materials in one company (Time), and multimedia/interactive materials in another company (Warner). That leaves America Online; the service that Apple went to special lengths to enable on Mac; the service that powers Apple's new iChat; and the service that now offers the Gecko browser by default on Mac.
Why wouldn't Apple jump to buy America Online, integrating it with OS X, and morphing the Mac AOL client into both a new, fully standards-compliant Galeon-style browser, and a new, fully standards-compliant MSN Explorer-style browser? They've got the money, after all, being one of two profitable computer companies. I think it'll happen.
If these companies are so debt-heavy, maybe it's because they all provide shitty service, and most of all, *charge for incoming calls*? I'd get Nextel in a second, iDEN be damned, just for the free incoming calls, except that I need a cheaper plan. But still, something's wrong when you need to pay on both ends. Cingular could give free incoming calls on all plans, standard, retroactive, and they'd be the biggest cellular company so quick it wouldn't be funny. And they seem to have found a way to afford to switch to GSM.
They've also figured out a solution to the 4-towers problem; Cingular and T-Mobile share networks in California, Nevada, and NYC/Northern NJ. Only one tower, and you can get GSM from either company. That's what they do in Europe, and that's what every cellular company should be doing in N. America; otherwise, it's absurd. Cell towers are a natural monopoly, but the service provided wirelessly isn't.
It's irrelevant, as soon everybody will (should) be using wCDMA anyway. Even Verizon's going to switch to that. Finally, we get the best of all standards, used around the world, and Qualcomm no longer has any power.
This is cool and all, and I'll be downloading it and testing it out soon. But this just goes back to the ultimate boot-from-CD OS: Be.
Be's installer is very simple; it's reminiscent of the installers for DOS games. When you put a Be boot CD in your drive, it loads up the OS, completely runnable off the CD. (Yes, I know that Be-provided images don't run anything but the Installer, but that's not the point - if you make a custom image, it can run whatever you want.) You go to the Be menu, then Applications, then Installer, select a partition, and go; beyond that, there is absolutely nothing you have to do. Reboot, and you're in BeOS.
Not only is there no configuration at all (beyond partitions, and even that can be automatic) that you have to do during Install, almost everything is auto-configured after install, too.
Mandrake may require no more expertise to install than Windows, but Mac OS is quite a bit easier, and Be is even easier than that. Linux should learn from that example.
Perhaps Verizon Wireless does have better customer service than Verizon proper. If so, it's probably in large part due to the fact that Verizon doesn't fully own VW.
Why are you talking about Cellular One, though? I agree, Cellular One sucks, as they use TDMA. But Cingular, which has nothing to do with Cellular One (except that a lot of CellOne customers got transferred over to Cingular last year), offers GSM in North Carolina, Virginia, and other states where T-Mobile doesn't. In those states, why would you want to get Verizon when you can get GSM?
Maybe in Montana, Verizon's your best choice. But Montana sucks.
Live anywhere in the US but Montana, North/South Dakota, Nebraska, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Vermont, Alaska, or Maine? Get T-Mobile, formerly VoiceStream - you can't do better for 2G than GSM, as any European will tell you.
Live in those states? Some of them Cingular might have GSM in; it's a good idea to try. Otherwise, it's really a tossup. Don't go with Verizon, though; as any one who has them for local service in New England knows, Verizon might not even have a customer service department for as long as it takes to get connected.
Plus, MSI supports one feature found nowhere else (except on Sorcerer Linux): it can set stuff to auto-install on first use. Let's say you copy Office to a network server, for example, and install everything on clients at "first use". The install will end up taking you a couple minutes per workstation. The first time that someone on a client computer opens Word, it will automatically download, install, and set up Word, with no additional work required from you, the administrator.
Why do I even bother replying to these trolls...
Clearly, you don't know the first thing about the Hague treaty. If passed, it would allow people to sue content producers in any signatory country. So someone living in South Carolina could sue a Swedish porn producer, bring them to a court in Saudi Arabia, and easily win.
Second, the US does not own the Internet. It invented it, but now much of the networks are owned by foreign companies. KPNQwest, for example, now owned by KPN; the largest backbone network in Europe is European-owned. So what sense does it make that the US goverment, or a corporation sanctioned by it, gets to control European internet policy?
By your logic, because Europeans invented roads, or capitalism, they should be able to tell Americans exactly how to manage their roads or economy.
Now that I think of it, why don't we just completely scrap the idea of pages belonging to a certain server? In other words, everybody use Freenet.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_muller 071202.asp
.com domain is in a legal limbo state. What that should mean is that only the laws that apply everywhere are enforced; instead, that means that all laws are enforced.
Take a read. The government can do what it wants, but chances are, it won't work.
What I'm mainly complaining about is that, right now, the
If there was a clearer geopolitical boundary on the Internet, that would mean sites would actually have to deal with less regulation; they would only have to obey the laws of the one country they register with, and not have to worry about foreign users accessing their site. France's Nazi-auction trial would have been moot, because yahoo.co.us would only have to follow American laws.
I can't believe everyone's missing the obvious.
:D) We need Dell to include it. We need HPaq to include it. We need the whitebox manufacturers to include it. We need Intel to drop the FDC on all their motherboards!
There's a technology that's been waiting in the wings to replace floppies for quite some time now. It's widely used in Europe, and not so much in the US, but it's use is growing.
It's the smart card, and readers are widely available; so much that Gateway could offer motherboards sans floppy controller, and computers sans floppy drive, and throw in a smart card reader, and they wouldn't have a penny extra in costs.
These are what I want to see ubiquitous. If there's a fast, portable way for people to carry around data, then web terminals become so much easier. Imagine having a SIM card, AmEx card, ATM card, and PC smart card in one, with all your account data. You bring it to a store, have money automatically deducted from your account (no interest); you throw it in your cellphone, make a call, take it out, or if you don't want to bring your cellphone, you throw it in a payphone and do the same; you go to that same payphone booth, throw in the card, have your web homepage automatically come up, be able to run all your applications. All from one little card.
It's easily possible, but only if smart cards become as common as 3.5 floppy drives are now. Sun has the foresight to include them in all its workstations, but that doesn't help us out, now does it? (Even if my next desktop will be a SPARC.
Why does the US feel that it should own the Internet?
.com domains, but their corporate site will be at .fr. Similar for Japan, Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia, and pretty much every company in the world. Only the US, with a virtually nonexistent .us domain, has all its companies have .com domains.
Countries have different laws. That's a fact, and a good thing; I don't think anybody wants that Hague treaty that lets people sue Swedish porn producers in Saudi Arabia, for example. So having global domains only invites problems.
A French's company may have
What we really need to do is eliminate the three-letter TLD, and have every single domain name end in a country code. Then. as part of getting a domain, the owner agrees to abide by the laws of the country controlling the domain, and no other laws.
Whether ICANN exists or not, the US government tries to enforce its laws on the whole of the Internet. By more clearly enforcing existing political boundaries on the Web, all sorts of disputes can be resolved and avoided.