Re:Low cost, not always better
on
WinDSL Coming?
·
· Score: 1
Reminds of one of my favorite sayings:
Things can be two of the following: cheap, high quality, or available quickly. You want a cheap modem NOW. Its not going to be high quality. You want a high quality modem NOW its not going to be cheap. You want a cheap, high quality modem, its not going to be available now.
You also have to keep in mind that part of Motorolla's goal here is to break a price bariaer. I am sure that there are people out there who are saying as soon as I can get a DSL modem for less the $X I will get one. Motorolla is trying to be the first one to tap into a large number of these people.
SGI is no longer promoting IRIX for anything other then its very high end systems. The school I go has an arangement with SGI, so most of the major servers, including the multiuser login machines are SGIs running IRIX. On the very high end machines, i.e. the R12000s with multiple processors they are still advocating IRIX but for the generic workstations and lower end servers they are promoting Linux. They have basically decided to that all these fractured Unixes are a bad thing and to try and phase one of them out. Now if only the rest of the major manufactuarers would decide to adopt this policy, Linux would really go mainstream.
Very few wireless service providers give you an unlimited number of messages for free. Most of them cap it at 250 or 500 per billing cycle. After that they charge you a few cents per message. And what happens when the cellphone companies start offering a lower cost text messaging service that charges per message?
This is along the same reason that europeans hate spam so much. In Europe even local calls are billed by the minute, so every email spam they get takes time to download which they are then billed for.
The Final Fantasy series is not inflating the numbers. In Japan there have been 8 different Final Fantasy games released. Role playing games in Japan are insanely popular, to the point that the government asks ompanies to release them on Saturday's to reduce the number of kids skipping school to get the new game.
They are planning on releasing an anthology containing several of the final fantasy games that we here in the states missed. Don't know any detials, but I'm sure if you look you can find them.
--Travis
Re:Whoops... (why not public domain?)
on
GPL for Books?
·
· Score: 1
The problem I see with public domain is that you give up almost all control. If you distribute under the licesnes you link to then there are requirements made on people who want to copy, modify, and distribute the document. Additionally by attaching this license you are reducing your liability by expressly denying any waranty etc.
Credit and control of your name are also inheriently good things. If it wasn't for getting credit for Linux, Linus would probably still be freezing in scandinavia, instead of nice and warm in Silicon Valley working for what looks to be a startup with very good prospects. Control of your name keeps someone from draging it through the dirt. Lets say Andy publishes a book detailing how to safely swim with sharks, and the founding principle is that you are in a cage all the time. Now Bill comes along and dosen't agree with this principle, so he deletes all reference to the cage, and also includes a waranty with his book, explictly stating that this book tells you all you need to know to swim with sharks. The waranty allows him to charge a lot more for it. By distributing under this license Bill has to denote that he made changes, so that when Charlie gets eaten his family knows that it is Bill's and not Andy's fault that Charlie got eaten. ------------------------------------------------
Opinions expressed herin are just that. I claim no legal knowledge about these matters. YMMV.
The way that the announcement on SeriousDomains reads to me they still own the domains. However in order to sell them, the person they are selling them to must be aproved and licensed by Torvalds.
The way it looks to me all that Torvalds can do is restrict the use of those domain names. SeriousDomains still owns them, but because they don't have a license to use the trademark they can't put a site up etc. using them. It makes little to no sense for a company to buy a domain name that they may or many not be able to use, and if SeriousDomains had implied that the purchaser would not have had to jump through some more hoops before actually using the domain names they would have been misrepresenting their product.
Heres an analogy for you: This guy I know owns a good sized farm. He decides he wants to auction it off to housing developers and make some money. He imples that there aren't any "special" restrictions on the land and that the developers won't have to apply for an permits above and beyond the usual. In reality this land has been placed into an "agricultural trust" that prohibts development. If the farmer dosen't share this fact he is misrepresenting what he is selling. If the developers find this out, not a one of them is going to want to buy the land, because they can't use it, so the farmer decides to pull the plug on the auction.
Now say one of the developers has an idea for some sort of "hybrid" development, say it chops the farm up into small plots for gentlemen farmers. He goes down to the courthouse, gets aproval, and then can approach the farmer about buying the land.
The way the thing on SeriousDomains reads to me they can still sell the domains, but you have to get a license first, probably in large part due to the fact that without a license the domains aren't worth the $35 a year a costs to maintain them. If some company is going to be doing genuine linux work, they can go and get a licnese from Torvalds, at nominal cost, and then aproach SeriousDomains and negoiate a price. The name is now much more valuable, because the buyer will actually be able to use it.
While the free (in terms of $) nature of Linux is often used as an argument for purchase it is not the only or even primary benifit of Linux. First off Linux and BSD are in many ways very similar to UNIX, while be able to run on hardware that costs substantially less. Sun (which use Solaris) and SGI (which use IRIX the SGI variant of UNIX) workstations cost a whole lot more, and are harder to get then an x86 machine. Secondly, looking at you other example, NT. Linux is cleaner and more stable then NT by a long shot. How many companies reboot their NT servers on a weekly basis as a part of preventative maintenace, more then you would expect. On the other hand there are Linux machines that have been up for years without a reboot. Thats what happens when you have a community that is truly interested in making a better product, rather then milking their customers for every dime they can. Above all this is the real reason to chose Linux, the freedom it gives you. Don't like the way something works in Linux, or find something broken in Linux, you can fix it yourself, given sufficent knowledge. Lets see you do the same with NT or even most of the UNIX variants out there. You'll end up waiting weeks or months for the provider to provide you with a patch or hotfix. Linux in and of itself may turn out to be hype in the end, but the open software revolution it has started marks a substantial shift in the way software companies will do business for all time.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds of one of my favorite sayings:
Things can be two of the following: cheap, high quality, or available quickly. You want a cheap modem NOW. Its not going to be high quality. You want a high quality modem NOW its not going to be cheap. You want a cheap, high quality modem, its not going to be available now.
You also have to keep in mind that part of Motorolla's goal here is to break a price bariaer. I am sure that there are people out there who are saying as soon as I can get a DSL modem for less the $X I will get one. Motorolla is trying to be the first one to tap into a large number of these people.
SGI is no longer promoting IRIX for anything other then its very high end systems. The school I go has an arangement with SGI, so most of the major servers, including the multiuser login machines are SGIs running IRIX. On the very high end machines, i.e. the R12000s with multiple processors they are still advocating IRIX but for the generic workstations and lower end servers they are promoting Linux. They have basically decided to that all these fractured Unixes are a bad thing and to try and phase one of them out. Now if only the rest of the major manufactuarers would decide to adopt this policy, Linux would really go mainstream.
Very few wireless service providers give you an unlimited number of messages for free. Most of them cap it at 250 or 500 per billing cycle. After that they charge you a few cents per message. And what happens when the cellphone companies start offering a lower cost text messaging service that charges per message?
This is along the same reason that europeans hate spam so much. In Europe even local calls are billed by the minute, so every email spam they get takes time to download which they are then billed for.
The Final Fantasy series is not inflating the numbers. In Japan there have been 8 different Final Fantasy games released. Role playing games in Japan are insanely popular, to the point that the government asks ompanies to release them on Saturday's to reduce the number of kids skipping school to get the new game.
They are planning on releasing an anthology containing several of the final fantasy games that we here in the states missed. Don't know any detials, but I'm sure if you look you can find them.
--Travis
The problem I see with public domain is that you give up almost all control. If you distribute under the licesnes you link to then there are requirements made on people who want to copy, modify, and distribute the document. Additionally by attaching this license you are reducing your liability by expressly denying any waranty etc.
Credit and control of your name are also inheriently good things. If it wasn't for getting credit for Linux, Linus would probably still be freezing in scandinavia, instead of nice and warm in Silicon Valley working for what looks to be a startup with very good prospects. Control of your name keeps someone from draging it through the dirt. Lets say Andy publishes a book detailing how to safely swim with sharks, and the founding principle is that you are in a cage all the time. Now Bill comes along and dosen't agree with this principle, so he deletes all reference to the cage, and also includes a waranty with his book, explictly stating that this book tells you all you need to know to swim with sharks. The waranty allows him to charge a lot more for it. By distributing under this license Bill has to denote that he made changes, so that when Charlie gets eaten his family knows that it is Bill's and not Andy's fault that Charlie got eaten.
------------------------------------------------
Opinions expressed herin are just that. I claim no legal knowledge about these matters. YMMV.
The way that the announcement on SeriousDomains reads to me they still own the domains. However in order to sell them, the person they are selling them to must be aproved and licensed by Torvalds.
The way it looks to me all that Torvalds can do is restrict the use of those domain names. SeriousDomains still owns them, but because they don't have a license to use the trademark they can't put a site up etc. using them. It makes little to no sense for a company to buy a domain name that they may or many not be able to use, and if SeriousDomains had implied that the purchaser would not have had to jump through some more hoops before actually using the domain names they would have been misrepresenting their product.
Heres an analogy for you: This guy I know owns a good sized farm. He decides he wants to auction it off to housing developers and make some money. He imples that there aren't any "special" restrictions on the land and that the developers won't have to apply for an permits above and beyond the usual. In reality this land has been placed into an "agricultural trust" that prohibts development. If the farmer dosen't share this fact he is misrepresenting what he is selling. If the developers find this out, not a one of them is going to want to buy the land, because they can't use it, so the farmer decides to pull the plug on the auction.
Now say one of the developers has an idea for some sort of "hybrid" development, say it chops the farm up into small plots for gentlemen farmers. He goes down to the courthouse, gets aproval, and then can approach the farmer about buying the land.
The way the thing on SeriousDomains reads to me they can still sell the domains, but you have to get a license first, probably in large part due to the fact that without a license the domains aren't worth the $35 a year a costs to maintain them. If some company is going to be doing genuine linux work, they can go and get a licnese from Torvalds, at nominal cost, and then aproach SeriousDomains and negoiate a price. The name is now much more valuable, because the buyer will actually be able to use it.
While the free (in terms of $) nature of Linux is often used as an argument for purchase it is not the only or even primary benifit of Linux. First off Linux and BSD are in many ways very similar to UNIX, while be able to run on hardware that costs substantially less. Sun (which use Solaris) and SGI (which use IRIX the SGI variant of UNIX) workstations cost a whole lot more, and are harder to get then an x86 machine. Secondly, looking at you other example, NT. Linux is cleaner and more stable then NT by a long shot. How many companies reboot their NT servers on a weekly basis as a part of preventative maintenace, more then you would expect. On the other hand there are Linux machines that have been up for years without a reboot. Thats what happens when you have a community that is truly interested in making a better product, rather then milking their customers for every dime they can. Above all this is the real reason to chose Linux, the freedom it gives you. Don't like the way something works in Linux, or find something broken in Linux, you can fix it yourself, given sufficent knowledge. Lets see you do the same with NT or even most of the UNIX variants out there. You'll end up waiting weeks or months for the provider to provide you with a patch or hotfix. Linux in and of itself may turn out to be hype in the end, but the open software revolution it has started marks a substantial shift in the way software companies will do business for all time.