I know that's not where we want to be, but it's still better than what we have now. Linux experts and corporate IT customers would be happy with a bare computer (especially laptops) without the Microsoft tax or at least with a discount because Microsoft software support isn't built into the price.
Dell sells much more to businesses than home users, so the idea of Dell selling preinstalled/fully supported Linux desktops to Joe Average users is a red herring.
Not true. Dell PCs have a hardware diagnostic built in to the BIOS. They also ship a bootable CD with diagnostics. If the diagnostics show the hardware is good, you probably don't have a hardware problem. If the hardware problem is more subtle, like bad RAM, I can usually convince Dell to ship replacement hardware by doing basic hardware troubleshooting like swapping in known good hardware.
It's simpler than that. Just sell hardware that's compatible with Linux and sell it bare with no OS or with FreeDOS. Provide hardware support only, no software support. Linux users are self-supported anyway. Even if Dell pays the Microsoft tax through their OEM contract, they can still save money on the software support. Dell did sell PCs with FreeDOS but didn't promote them at all.
I can't RTFA because it's slashdotted, but I can tell you running 3D games is one of the toughest stress tests for a system. The CPU and GPU usage are both maxxed out, and they're both generating a huge amount of heat, maybe double the heat of a CPU intensive task. I've run CPU intensive tasks on laptops before like compiling, and most laptops don't have a problem with that even if the case gets too hot to touch.
You're not looking hard enough. Just about every laptop maker has a model in the ultra-portable category: 12" screen, no optical drive, about 4 lbs (some close to 3 lbs), and pretty decent battery life.
Thanks for the info about pricing. I find it hard to call it "wholesale", as if the labels were actually moving merchandise. It's more like sitting on their asses collecting royalty checks from songs they permit Apple to sell.
I know those numbers were just examples, but the record label's cut of a $0.99 download is already about $0.65. With that pricing the iTunes music store just about breaks even (Apple's profit is in selling iPods). The record executives think $0.99 is too low for a popular hit song, so they pressured Apple to raise prices and wanted more than $0.65 a song. Never mind that the labels are already making out like bandits at $.65 a song and $6.50 an album (for a $9.99 album off the ITMS). They don't make nearly that much royalties off a CD sale.
Except in both of those cases, you're actually paying for the content.
Umm no. Lots of people don't have cable or satellite. If I watch a TV show off the air, I don't pay for content. The advertisers pay for time with the hope that viewers will watch the commercials.
Indeed, if something that never happens were to happen, things might be different.
Well yes, that was a hypothetical scenario. Today, it's useless to include commercials in TV rips. I was just extending the scenario, that if TV networks made it legal to redistribute off-the-air recordings with the commercials intact, downloaders would probably prefer to download legal TV shows with commercials instead of illegal TV shows without commercials.
It may be illegal to download TV episodes with BT, but the harm done is no worse than skipping the commercials on a DVR or walking out of the room during commercials. TV shows are paid for by advertisers. If you leave the commercials in the BT files, there's no harm done to advertisers at all, except for local ads being watched in places that don't matter to the advertiser. Because TV is already supported by advertisers, there's a big opportunity here for networks to innovate by legalizing P2P downloads that keep the commercials and then including download viewers when charging advertising rates. It won't happen though.
You can avoid that problem entirely by selling to medium-size and larger businesses. Those places would have IT staff to handle the "average" user questions. You may get those support calls from small businesses, but in this case, Dell avoids that buy installing Linux on Precision workstations which are intended for professional and power users.
Actually the purpose is to prevent casual copying. The professional pirates will always have a way, like say... open an HDCP TV set and tap into the component video signals driving the CRT.
HD-DVDs won't be locked to a single player. They'll only play at full resolution on a player and monitor that complies with HDCP copy protection. What they can do is disable non-compliant players by distributing key revocation lists in new movie releases. If your player has a compromised key or a hackable firmware, that nice, new Terminator 5 HD-DVD will turn it into a paperweight.
"It's the first console FPS that actually managed a default controller scheme that was not only as easy as using a mouse and keyboard; it was easy to pick up, and in some cases provided even -more- manouverability to a casual player than even a seasoned Quake 3 lunatic could manage."
They way they made it playable on a gamepad was with generous aim assist. It certainly makes it less frustrating playing with a gamepad, but it takes a lot of the skill out of the game.
Atari joysticks were a little different. You moved the stick with your whole hand and pressed the button with your left thumb. You could switch to a finger for the button if your thumb got tired. The NES gamepad was one of the first to use all thumbs, and it was very unergonomic, all square edges.
Technically, the Apple II was basically equivalent to many of the ordinary microcomputer systems sold in the 70s, most of which were designed by unsung anonymous engineers who only ended up with a few $thousand in salary. Most of the Apple II's perceived value over its competitors was derived from Jobs' reality distortion field and the bragging rights to say "we thought of it a few weeks before anyone else did".
The Apple II had a few things going for it. Visicalc was the killer app, and being the first with a new kind of killer app is a big advantage. It was cheap compared to other business computers, which typically had Z80 and 8080 CPUs, CP/M OS, and an S100 bus. Much of the cost advantage came from Woz simplifying the hardware. The floppy drive was controlled by the CPU. It may sound like a kludge, but it still managed to run faster than Atari and Commodore floppies with their dedicated controller chips. More info here.
All forms of government fail because they all forget to factor in 1 key element. Human Nature.
Actually lots of people understood the untrustworthiness of human nature, like this guy:
"What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." -James Madison (from Federalist No. 51)
If you want some numbers for a rough estimate, my Athlon 64 system runs at about 85W power consumption idle and 120W at full CPU load. Running the simulation when you were planning to keep the computer switched on anyway consumes an additional 35W, and obviously running the simulation when you were planning to keep the computer switched off consumes an additional 120W, unless you subtract the idle power draw of an ATX PC which can be 2-5W. Multiply that by 10,000 computers and you're talking about 350 kW or 1.2 MW.
This is an old assertion by the RIAA. Repeating it now doesn't make it any more true. Even Sen. Orrin Hatch, architect of the DMCA, disagreed in a 2000 Senate hearing:
A skeptical Hatch then turned to the Recording Industry Association of America president, Hilary Rosen, a surprise addition to the roster of witnesses. Wedging herself into a space next to MP3.com head Michael Robertson, whom the RIAA recently helped to sue, Rosen found herself subjected to the kind of puzzled questions about fair use -- a notorious legal morass -- that millions of music owners have been asking themselves for the last few months.
"Can I make a copy of a CD that I buy and put it into a car?" asked Hatch. When Rosen hemmed and hawed, Hatch muttered, "The answer is yes."
"Is it fair use to give the copy to my wife for her car?" Hatch continued. "Is it fair use for me to rip a CD? Is it fair use if (a computer network) decides for efficiency reasons that one copy is sufficient to serve for storage, instead of keeping 200 separate copies, is that fair use?"
"None of these is fair use," Rosen eventually replied. She argued that musicians' willingness to "tolerate" people making copies was an instance of "no good deed goes unpunished."
As I understand it, the Saudis have actually been pretty accomodating to us. In the past they've had reserve capacity to produce more oil to stabilize prices. Sure, high prices are good for profits but only up to a point. A worldwide recession due to high energy prices would cut into profits too.
However, now the signs point to the Saudis being tapped out in production rate. They can't pump more to stabilize prices so we've been seeing more price volatility. Also remember that you can damage a well by pumping too fast, sort of like sucking a Slurpee too fast through a straw.
"As for other resources, petrol is probably the biggest concern, bar none. It's the only material that we can't recycle, replace with nuclear power, sythesize, or mine from elsewhere in our solar system. If it doesn't exist as petroleum that can be refined with far less energy than it provides, then it's useless to us."
One obvious result would be the death of suburbs and sprawl. It just won't be viable. One other option is to shift long-haul freight to railroads with electric or even steam locomotives (although you might run into a copper shortage there). We'd also have to consider how much of that long-haul freight is really necessary. Bananas cost $.33 a pound or less. How can it be so cheap to ship them all the way from the tropics?
"The more efficient you are, the less they'll produce. Prices will not change."
We're talking about the survival of human civilization, not bargain hunting at the mall. If we're more efficient, the oil companies produce less, the oil lasts longer, and it buys us some time to build out the energy infrastructure to supplant oil.
You wouldn't even have to destroy the data, the encryption software could just lose the key. Let's say the disk is encrypted with a 256 bit static key which is stored in a file encrypted with a GPG-style private key + passphrase. If you wipe the private key, it doesn't help to know the passphrase. If you're even more paranoid, you could store the private key on removable media that can be destroyed rather than wiping the private key file on the disk. None of this helps *after* the disk has been seized, though, because the first thing they'll do is dd the drive.
Economics has traditionally been the science of allocating scarce resources. In a world of plenty where arbitrary material objects can be produced for zero cost, you don't need *currency* to *buy* things. If physical parts for a sports car could be tweaked and replicated as easily as patching and compiling a Linux kernel, I guarantee you car geeks around the world will be all over this improving their cars. Need help with aerodynamics? Replicate a wind tunnel or supercomputer to run CFG simulations. Want to try new suspension geometry? New parts coming right up.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that's not where we want to be, but it's still better than what we have now. Linux experts and corporate IT customers would be happy with a bare computer (especially laptops) without the Microsoft tax or at least with a discount because Microsoft software support isn't built into the price.
Dell sells much more to businesses than home users, so the idea of Dell selling preinstalled/fully supported Linux desktops to Joe Average users is a red herring.
Not true. Dell PCs have a hardware diagnostic built in to the BIOS. They also ship a bootable CD with diagnostics. If the diagnostics show the hardware is good, you probably don't have a hardware problem. If the hardware problem is more subtle, like bad RAM, I can usually convince Dell to ship replacement hardware by doing basic hardware troubleshooting like swapping in known good hardware.
It's simpler than that. Just sell hardware that's compatible with Linux and sell it bare with no OS or with FreeDOS. Provide hardware support only, no software support. Linux users are self-supported anyway. Even if Dell pays the Microsoft tax through their OEM contract, they can still save money on the software support. Dell did sell PCs with FreeDOS but didn't promote them at all.
I can't RTFA because it's slashdotted, but I can tell you running 3D games is one of the toughest stress tests for a system. The CPU and GPU usage are both maxxed out, and they're both generating a huge amount of heat, maybe double the heat of a CPU intensive task. I've run CPU intensive tasks on laptops before like compiling, and most laptops don't have a problem with that even if the case gets too hot to touch.
You're not looking hard enough. Just about every laptop maker has a model in the ultra-portable category: 12" screen, no optical drive, about 4 lbs (some close to 3 lbs), and pretty decent battery life.
Thanks for the info about pricing. I find it hard to call it "wholesale", as if the labels were actually moving merchandise. It's more like sitting on their asses collecting royalty checks from songs they permit Apple to sell.
I know those numbers were just examples, but the record label's cut of a $0.99 download is already about $0.65. With that pricing the iTunes music store just about breaks even (Apple's profit is in selling iPods). The record executives think $0.99 is too low for a popular hit song, so they pressured Apple to raise prices and wanted more than $0.65 a song. Never mind that the labels are already making out like bandits at $.65 a song and $6.50 an album (for a $9.99 album off the ITMS). They don't make nearly that much royalties off a CD sale.
Except in both of those cases, you're actually paying for the content.
Umm no. Lots of people don't have cable or satellite. If I watch a TV show off the air, I don't pay for content. The advertisers pay for time with the hope that viewers will watch the commercials.
Indeed, if something that never happens were to happen, things might be different.
Well yes, that was a hypothetical scenario. Today, it's useless to include commercials in TV rips. I was just extending the scenario, that if TV networks made it legal to redistribute off-the-air recordings with the commercials intact, downloaders would probably prefer to download legal TV shows with commercials instead of illegal TV shows without commercials.
It may be illegal to download TV episodes with BT, but the harm done is no worse than skipping the commercials on a DVR or walking out of the room during commercials. TV shows are paid for by advertisers. If you leave the commercials in the BT files, there's no harm done to advertisers at all, except for local ads being watched in places that don't matter to the advertiser. Because TV is already supported by advertisers, there's a big opportunity here for networks to innovate by legalizing P2P downloads that keep the commercials and then including download viewers when charging advertising rates. It won't happen though.
You can avoid that problem entirely by selling to medium-size and larger businesses. Those places would have IT staff to handle the "average" user questions. You may get those support calls from small businesses, but in this case, Dell avoids that buy installing Linux on Precision workstations which are intended for professional and power users.
Actually the purpose is to prevent casual copying. The professional pirates will always have a way, like say... open an HDCP TV set and tap into the component video signals driving the CRT.
HD-DVDs won't be locked to a single player. They'll only play at full resolution on a player and monitor that complies with HDCP copy protection. What they can do is disable non-compliant players by distributing key revocation lists in new movie releases. If your player has a compromised key or a hackable firmware, that nice, new Terminator 5 HD-DVD will turn it into a paperweight.
"It's the first console FPS that actually managed a default controller scheme that was not only as easy as using a mouse and keyboard; it was easy to pick up, and in some cases provided even -more- manouverability to a casual player than even a seasoned Quake 3 lunatic could manage."
They way they made it playable on a gamepad was with generous aim assist. It certainly makes it less frustrating playing with a gamepad, but it takes a lot of the skill out of the game.
Atari joysticks were a little different. You moved the stick with your whole hand and pressed the button with your left thumb. You could switch to a finger for the button if your thumb got tired. The NES gamepad was one of the first to use all thumbs, and it was very unergonomic, all square edges.
Technically, the Apple II was basically equivalent to many of the ordinary microcomputer systems sold in the 70s, most of which were designed by unsung anonymous engineers who only ended up with a few $thousand in salary. Most of the Apple II's perceived value over its competitors was derived from Jobs' reality distortion field and the bragging rights to say "we thought of it a few weeks before anyone else did".
The Apple II had a few things going for it. Visicalc was the killer app, and being the first with a new kind of killer app is a big advantage. It was cheap compared to other business computers, which typically had Z80 and 8080 CPUs, CP/M OS, and an S100 bus. Much of the cost advantage came from Woz simplifying the hardware. The floppy drive was controlled by the CPU. It may sound like a kludge, but it still managed to run faster than Atari and Commodore floppies with their dedicated controller chips. More info here.
For such a high-tech country with all that high-priced real estate, why don't they have some decent electrical codes for construction?
All forms of government fail because they all forget to factor in 1 key element. Human Nature.
Actually lots of people understood the untrustworthiness of human nature, like this guy:
"What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." -James Madison (from Federalist No. 51)
If you want some numbers for a rough estimate, my Athlon 64 system runs at about 85W power consumption idle and 120W at full CPU load. Running the simulation when you were planning to keep the computer switched on anyway consumes an additional 35W, and obviously running the simulation when you were planning to keep the computer switched off consumes an additional 120W, unless you subtract the idle power draw of an ATX PC which can be 2-5W. Multiply that by 10,000 computers and you're talking about 350 kW or 1.2 MW.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010531100247/http://
As I understand it, the Saudis have actually been pretty accomodating to us. In the past they've had reserve capacity to produce more oil to stabilize prices. Sure, high prices are good for profits but only up to a point. A worldwide recession due to high energy prices would cut into profits too.
However, now the signs point to the Saudis being tapped out in production rate. They can't pump more to stabilize prices so we've been seeing more price volatility. Also remember that you can damage a well by pumping too fast, sort of like sucking a Slurpee too fast through a straw.
"As for other resources, petrol is probably the biggest concern, bar none. It's the only material that we can't recycle, replace with nuclear power, sythesize, or mine from elsewhere in our solar system. If it doesn't exist as petroleum that can be refined with far less energy than it provides, then it's useless to us."
One obvious result would be the death of suburbs and sprawl. It just won't be viable. One other option is to shift long-haul freight to railroads with electric or even steam locomotives (although you might run into a copper shortage there). We'd also have to consider how much of that long-haul freight is really necessary. Bananas cost $.33 a pound or less. How can it be so cheap to ship them all the way from the tropics?
"The more efficient you are, the less they'll produce. Prices will not change."
We're talking about the survival of human civilization, not bargain hunting at the mall. If we're more efficient, the oil companies produce less, the oil lasts longer, and it buys us some time to build out the energy infrastructure to supplant oil.
"Stopped for a while" means they stopped selling it in the U.S. although the RX7 was sold in Japan until 2002.
You wouldn't even have to destroy the data, the encryption software could just lose the key. Let's say the disk is encrypted with a 256 bit static key which is stored in a file encrypted with a GPG-style private key + passphrase. If you wipe the private key, it doesn't help to know the passphrase. If you're even more paranoid, you could store the private key on removable media that can be destroyed rather than wiping the private key file on the disk. None of this helps *after* the disk has been seized, though, because the first thing they'll do is dd the drive.
Economics has traditionally been the science of allocating scarce resources. In a world of plenty where arbitrary material objects can be produced for zero cost, you don't need *currency* to *buy* things. If physical parts for a sports car could be tweaked and replicated as easily as patching and compiling a Linux kernel, I guarantee you car geeks around the world will be all over this improving their cars. Need help with aerodynamics? Replicate a wind tunnel or supercomputer to run CFG simulations. Want to try new suspension geometry? New parts coming right up.