Ok, it looks hella cool, and as someone who owned a Tandy CoCo and a Commodore 64 the retro factor is good fun. But what is it for?
Is it intended as a glorious remote control? If so what the heck are we paying a Windows license fee for? Is it a computer? Then what are we paying for wireless hdmi for again? With that dinky screen or a TV across the room general purpose computing will be hard. A media center? Doing video decode on an Atom will be pain, literally as the damned thing will burn yer nuts. And not much room for storing media and a tuner is right out.
This thing looks like the sort of impractical but camera hogging stuff Detroit trots out every year as 'concept' cars. So if they are mugging for the camera/blogs why didn't they just make the whole front surface a display with touchscreen and totally pwn the Optimus Keyboard. Bet they could have arranged some sort of permanently attached clear overlay to give about as much tactile feedback as the lame me too apple retro looking keyboard they went with.
> What OLPC really needs is a name change, preferably to some sort of nonsensical word.
And don't the nonsense logo. Changing to a logo most resembling a coffee stain saved Lucent. Oh wait, the bones were sold off to Alcatel.... never mind.
The parent should not have been modded funny as he is close to the truth.
Go look at a BluRay player. They all have a fan. Hint: It ain't because of the burden of the video codec. A DVD codec can run on dedicated hardware powered from AA batteries. HD is pushing more pixels and BluRay uses more power hungrey codecs than MPEG2. But the power consumption doesn't add up to mandatory fans. Nope, it is the crypto and the Java that are sucking the juice. HDCP isn't nearly as hard as the BD+ crypto but you have to count it twice, once in the player and again in the display. And you get to pay that power drain when you watch BD, casually view HD on digital cable and eventually anytime the set is powered and not using the built in tuner... which will be doing other copy protection crypto unless viewing OTA signals. And they want to put DRM on those.
> It can live on just fine as a site which covers legal developments of interest to its geeky audience...
But apparently has no intention of doing that. Starting to look like SCO was right for once, Groklaw was funded to fight IBM's side outside the courthouse. Their own Nazgul were more than capable of handling things inside court but the fight wasn't ever going to really be there, this was a FUD war in the press and Groklaw could do that with far more freedom of action than IBM's official PR machinery.
Nobody should believe the larger war ends with SCO. They were merely a sock puppet for Microsoft (cheered on officially or not) by pretty much every proprietary vendor with a financial stake in the old ways. The question is which tactic will be used next. Will Novell be launched against us as the next SCO/sockpuppet or will Balmer come out from behind the curtain and launch a patent apocalypse himself. But the war isn't over until Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco and the every billion plus software house lies ruined or transformed and the patent trolls stopped somehow.
But Groklaw won't be covering the rest of story, their part is now concluded. They did good work though and will be missed.
> There is no good way to sell a $12 program on Linux or even a $49.95 program on Linux.
Forget the $12 program. Anything that simple is going to be looking over it's shoulder for a free verison to show up at sourceforge. The $49-$99 range could be an interesting niche.
> I think RedHat has given up on the Desktop.
They have never tried for it so that can't have given up. They do go for the workstation market, and appear to make good coin at it. But if you are hankering to push some $49 apps that probably isn't your market. So yea, just go for Ubuntu and perhaps offer a statically linked tarball for everyone else and a Wiki so users can post howtos. At least until you prove a market.
> I still think they need a software store like iTunes and the Google Android store to complete the ecosystem.
If Mr. Shuttleworth thought there was money in it for him one would exist. If you believe in the idea there isn't anything stopping you from building it though. If you build it, perhaps the developers will come.
One problem I see is you will either be putting out a ton of one or two package repos, one for each offering or will need to to get really clever on the server side. So here ya go, for free. A simple Yum plugin would do it for the rpm side, but you can still pull it off with.deb and apt. You generate a custom repo URL for each customer. When apt wants to see if anything new is available you generate the repo metadata on the fly for that customer so they only see what they have the rights to download.
If you could get some buyin from PackageKit you could show everything but stick a big $ (eventually localized to the local currency symbol) by products that would require an extra charge. Then you either do your checks at download time or let everybody download but require a license key to do more than see a demo/timed trial.
So how to pull it off? I'd suggest the Google/Moz Corp angle. Offer the packagekit and/or the distros a small taste if they include a version of PackageKit supporting your store's extensions and your repo enabled by default. Again, your odds of inclusion improve if you make your extension an open documented standard. The odds improve again if you have compelling content to offer. Arguments about clutter would tend to fall on deaf ears, when there are already 10,000+ packages in a modern distro adding a few hundred commercial apps shouldn't be a problem, especially since any user who isn't interested can simply remove the checkmark besides your commercial repo. Talk about an opportunity, if something like Quickbooks were ported and available in the package manager listed right where similar apps are listed, if it didn't sell it would prove once and for all low dollar commercial apps just aren't viable on Linux. Maybe if GNUCash and MoneyDance are listed for $0 along woth Quicken/Quickbooks people would pick the free one every time. But even though I personally try to be as RMS Pure as possible I suspect something like Quicken, if it were known to be a good solid port, would indeed move units.
> A license key is a version of DRM. That is one reason I don't really like that solution. I feel > that DRM doesn't really work to prevent piracy.
Most commercial vendors disagree. Those who are 100% RMS Pure won't buy a commercial app anyway so it isn't much of a loss from the POV of commercial vendors.
> You have mentioned LSB but LSB hasn't solved the problem of distribution.
Mostly because it hasn't been tried. If you code 100% to the LSB you are assured your app will install and run on any LSB compliant system. The LSB of course doesn't cover everything a game, for example, needs so to avoid.dll hell you would have to statically link any non-LSB libraries. Netscape used to be distributed as a completely static linked executable and it would work anywhere. It can work. I'm sure Windows software vendors deal with similar issues to make an single executable work across Win98/W2K/XP/Vista/Mohave-beta.
> I think deb is a little better. But that is the problem.
No it isn't. The only reason.deb files tend to be more portable is the simpler family tree. In.deb land you have Debian and everything else is pretty much a direct descendant that still tracks upstream enough that serious divergence doesn't happen. In RPM land you have Redhat/Fedora, SUSE and Mandriva as top levels that aren't package compatible between each other and all other rpm based distros tend to be descendents of one of them. Even though Mandriva (as Mandrake) forked from RedHat it was so long ago it is now a totally different animal. Packages tend to be portable inside the three families. But a 100% LSB package is portable, in theory even to Debian but good luck finding a repo tech that will deal with.rpm files in a Debian style package repository.
And having two package systems isn't a major problem. Two is managable, twelve wouldn't be. And if it weren't for the fairly recent rise of Ubuntu you could just skip.deb entirely and tell the couple of paying customers on.deb based tech to just use alien. For commercial apps your audience will be almost entirely RHEL, SUSE and Ubuntu. The eeepc has it's own software distribution system so you will have to deal with them anyway if you want into their walled garden.
> The problem starts with the lack of a good installer and goes from there.
Th problem is the refusal for people like you to get yer head out of Microsoft's ass long enough to realize that just because Microsoft does it a broken way doesn't mean we have to follow.
The software installation problem has been solved for years. If InstallShield is the answer you have asked a dumb question. RPM and DEB will cover almost 100% of the users who would likely buy commercial software. So package it up as an RPM first as an LSB compliant package and put it into a repo. Once that works do it again as a.deb in a repo. When you sell the software online you just point them to the repo file. With modern YUM/RPM based distros you just put the.rpm file there and when they click it the browser does the right thing. I'm not as up on the Debian/Ubuntu world, it might need another couple of clicks.
Now your software is just another package in the package manager. It gets updated right along with the rest of the system right up to an update causing the little icon to blink in the system tray. If you stick to the LSB you won't get stuck trying to play library bingo with dozens of distro/version combinations. With the most recent work in PackageKit you can even have the install CD in a box if you want to sell retail and everything still just works. The CD does the initial install in theory, but of course by the time you get a CD to somebody the online repo is probably carrying newer packages.
But... But how can I SELL software that way! Duh. You use a license key just like you already do with the CD media you sell to Windows users. But people will pirate it. Yup, just like they do your Windows version except you are offering them one big incentive to buy, access to the repo. Always up to date is a selling feature and if they pirate they would be an idiot to enable your repo.
If the commercial vendors really wanted to control access you just create a yum plugin to send a license key with the request for the packages, only make them available via http and have the web server be smart enough to run the license keys to ensure packages only get distributed to paying users. Make that plugin a standard available under the GPL so distros could include it.
But... they would never include something that smelled like DRM. They just might, if you make it a standard by getting a dozen or so vendors onboard. Besides, once something like that existed you might see Free Software made available through it. Imagine a prime mirror with smoking fast access only available with a small subscription. Heck, make it extensible enough and RedHat could adopt it to distribute RHEL updates. The point is that if you make it generally useful and correctly licensed it could indeed get picked up by 100% DSFG distributions.
> It's presence in their TVs and Movie players and toasters and refrigerators will > eventually come to their attention.
Maybe it will come to their attention, maybe it won't. But it won't matter. As Linux becomes the substrate most consumer electronics get built on top of compatibility with Linux becomes far more important than compatibility with Windows.
When your linux based camcorder writes files to a card that plays perfectly in your Linux based picture frame, TV and settop DVD Recorder and netbook that also all run Linux it had better work on the Windows PC or it becomes the odd man out. In other words Microsoft is already in the position where it is losing the ability to set standards by fiat. Witness their recent surrender to ODF, they figured out that it was a standard and they were goingto have to support it or lose marketshare. Sure they wouldn't have lost but a point or two in the next five years but if they ever let the camel get it's nose into the tent they are in trouble. With Linux has more than it's nose in the tent these days even if most people never see the logo.
And this is where you go wrong. Apparently you believe in Democracy. I on the other hand agree with the Founding Fathers that democracy is wicked and a sure fire way to destroy a nation. Direct Democracy is a horrible idea, little better than mob rule. Or as Jonah Goldberg is always saying, Democracy is 51% voting to piss in the corn flakes of the losing 49%; and if everybody involved believes in 'Democracy' the 49% are required to suck it up and say "Oh well, it was a fair vote and we lost."
Which is why our Founders gave us a Constituitional Republic instead of a Democracy. We have inalienable rights that no majority may rightfully infinge. If we get stuck in the 49% we can rightfully tell the 51% to get the hell away from our bowl of corn flakes because they have no right to even be voting on something so wicked. And if they refuse the 49% are morally permitted to start shooting because the whole social contract will have been voided by the majority. Yes we can change our Constituition but it was made difficult by design so that only changes that had broad support over a fair length of time would make it through the process. That is the danger of the Democratic (Socialists) and their 'living Constituition', it removes the stability of having a well defined and hard to change written agreement controlling the relationship between the government and the governed.
> fear in urban communities by gun toting thugs is a form of slavery
1. Your solution is to remove the gun. This has been tried and shown not to work for the quite logical reason that the thugs simply get a fresh weapon. And no gun ban can change that cold reality. When the criminal world can bring in narcotics by the metric ton they will be able to stick a couple of small arms in the bales. So close every gun shop in America and criminals will have exactly the same weapons. On the other hand if we remove the whole gun toting thug we at least prevent all of the future crimes that particular thug would commit.
2. You guys really need to STFU with comparing everything to slavery. Yes living in fear from a total breakdown in law enforcement is horrible but it ain't got shit on chains, whips and all the horrors of actual slavery. It is as bad as the feminazis overloading the word 'rape' until it loses most of it's meaning.
Yes Sun laywers are a bunch of dicks but remember that this is prerelease software. Normal releases od java don't have some of those nasty bits in the license and we can hope that the license will get improve as they continue the Open Source process with java.
A few posts above I slag Java pretty hard, just trying to be fair.:)
> much, if not most, server side *enterprise* work is done in java,
Yea and a decade ago that 'enterprise' stuff was steaming piles of VB. Now it's racks of big ass servers or blades groaning under badly designed layers and layers of Java 'middleware'. Not sure things have actually improved much.
> which is a mature, robust, reliable, performant and scalable platform...
If you have insane amounts of CPU and memory to throw at it to cover up the slowness you can keep a team of medium skill code monkeys permantly employed maintaining all that interfacing between the various middleware products from different vendors.
> java on the desktop has a place too
What? Must have missed it. Is there really a demand for slow bloated crap applications running on the local desktop instead of on slow overloaded webservers? Silly me, I thought the primary reason everybody rejected Java and Vista was the bloat and suck. Cross platform was the only possible reason why somebody might have been attracted to Java for a desktop app but until this year cross platform has basically meant Windows and Solaris. Mac on and off again and with an alien feel such that no Mac zealot would accept a Java app as anything but a temporary solution and the Linux situation so fudged up no sane vendor would depend on Java being available and stable. Ask the guys (Was it Borland???) who bet the company around the turn of the century on a Java based office suite and finally abandoned the unfinished projet too late to save themselves.
> done well, nobody would know/care what language its written in..
No, you notice when a small app starts sucking up all available memory. Java sucks memory so hard GNOME starts looking lean in comparison. Lools like they solve the sluggishness of garbage collection by not actually doing it until malloc returns ENOMEM. Ok, small exageration.
> then theres j2me, and i'd wager if you have any tivo type device, or even set-top box > for your cable service, or blu-ray player, or most mobile phones these days, then you > have java working for you there too.
That sort of thing was what Java was origionally created to do. Mixed results though. It's killing BluRay almost singlehandedly, even faster than Sony's own DRM stupidity is killing it off. All I had to do was see how goddamned SLOW a BluRay player was to lose all interest, and I'm not alone. They actually put players on shelves that take upwards of two minutes to go from tray close to anything useful appearing on the display. It is going to take Moore's Law longer to fix that much suck than BluRay is likely to be viable.
Number one complaint you hear about the typical STB? Too slow. I've got a cheap crappy basic cell phone. You can almost see individual pixels draw on the darned thing... smell the Java! BASIC on my old Tandy CoCo outperformed this danged phone's Java. It literally could push more pixels per second.
> Seriously, Java plug-ins are still around for some reason?
Can't recall seeing a big gaping hole on a page where a Java Applet would be in at least a year. And this story is only important if somebody out there has a burning need to run a 64bit Java app... in a web browser.
Good riddence to java 32 and 64bit, Sun freed it about a decade too late for most people to give a crap. Can anybody name a good reason to develop new code in the environment? Yes a lot of legacy stuff was created in the 1990s while Java was the new shiny for people too blind to see (or with a PHB too blind...) the myriad problems but new projects? And when Java goes away can it take Microsoft's lame me too C++/Mono disease with it?
> A scientist saying creationism is real will get him shunned, as it should.
Yes it should. As should saying creationism is false should. Neither can be proved by the ways of science and anyone trying to push a political or religious agenda under the cover of science should be written out of the profession. Current science is only even believed to be valid back to the big bang and can say zero about anything before that... even if the phrase 'before the big bang' has a meaning or not. It might be able to say more in the future as our understanding improves but as things currently stand science cannot answer the big questions of Life, the Universe and Everything.
> A scientist saying "we need nukes, there is no possible way anything else can work" is not a scientific statement.
Corrent. However one can say all of the following and be 100% correct from a scientific Pov.
1. We currently possess the knowledge to build safe reliable nuke plants on a scale to provide all of our energy needs. The only obstacles are political. Since we know of at least one route to generating all of the energy we could want any talk of an 'energy crisis' is this pure political theater.
2. Sufficient proven reserves of Uranium exist to supply our needs for over a hundred years without recycling spent fuel rods. With recycling we have enough to either last much longer or increase our energy usage during the next hundred year.
3. No other currently proposed 'alternative energy' source, alone or in total can demonstrate a plan to provide our current energy supply at anywhere close to the current costs. Solar and wind are currently so innefficient that without government subsidies they would only be practical in locations so far off the grid that wiring them would be impractical. Continued research and development may or may not improve the deployment cost and output so as to make one or more alternatives practical in the future. Thus adopting as official policy that we MUST adopt these technologies means betting our future lifestyle and prosperiety on an ASSUMPTION that the price/kwh can be brought down.
4. While it is true that a practical fusion reactor has been thirty years away for the last forty years, unity gain is getting closer and closer now. It is thus rational to argue that it is at least as likely that we can build a fusion reactor in the next hundred years as it is that we can perfect wind or solar in the next twenty.
> Yes, it sounds like the author had an axe to grind.
Of course the author had an ax to grind. Green gets grant money, nukes get you shunned from elite society.
The horrible truth is that for hard core greens the only solution is eliminating a couple billion excess humans and forcing the remnant to live a 'reduced' lifestyle to satisfy their self loathing. Thus no proposed solution to the 'energy crisis' is going to be acceptable if it has the potential to actually produce energy at affordable prices in quantities anywhere close to current levels. As you correctly note the greens are already mobilizing against wind and solar on the fear that they MIGHT become practical someday. There are even efforts to stop geothermal! What could possibly be wrong with geothermal? Google it if you want to be sickened.
The truth is there is no 'energy crisis' there is only a political movement to change our lifesysle. Nukes can be built perfectly safe these days, the fuel can be reprocessed to minimize the waste storage issue and we have more than enough Uranium to power any lifestyle we want until we finally perfect a practical fusion reactor. Saying this in public will end a scientist, politician or TV pundit's career though so we hear endless bleating about an energy crisis, running out of energy and global warming bullcrap intended to frighten us into doing things sane people would never do otherwise.
Yes the teacher brought the storm on herself. Not by being ignorant of open source but by being rude. This is a good object lesson about email more than anything else.
Helios was perfectly in the right to flame back, especially since he was pretty polite about it considering the pretty nasty slander the teacher was throwing at him. And even being ticked off he protected her identity so she won't have to suffer the consequences of her bad manners. Even better, after talking it over with her he appears to have turned the situation into a win. So high praise for him and since she seems to have learned something positive out of the mess lets give her a break now.
> Most European states. Can you smoke a joint legally? The people in Holland can.
If you define freedom entirely by the freedom to smoke dope. They fail on a lot of other criteria. Can you own a firearm? Nope. Freedom of speech? Nope.
> Why is it that they needed a Costitutional amendment to outlaw the drug alcohol, but not to outlaw the drug marijuana?
Because we still lived in a Nation of Laws instead of men. Socialism (FDR, New Deal, etc) eventually changed all of that. Now we have the Messiah and the courts had to rule that a Citizen has no standing to question whether the SOB was actually born here because they won't allow anything to stop his Final Solution to the problem of the Constituition getting in their way.
Socialism; Like they practice in Holland is the problem and increasingly here. Freedom is the answer. Vote anything but Democrat. Republicans certainly have their problems but are currently our best bet, especially right now. With em down, out and desperate for a comeback we might get their attention.
> That reminds me of Bastiat's "The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else."
Except the dude was just a little pessimestic. It appears MOST seek to live at the expense of everybody else through the power of socialism. Some of us though, still vote for limited government as envisioned by the US Founders. The US Constituition. That would be Change I can Believe in. Doubt I'll ever see it practiced again, but I can keep trying for a little while longer at the voting booth and then go for watering the Tree of Liberty.
Don't try to solve multiple problems. If electric distribution can be solved, great. But idiots saying "If we can't solve every problem and have a green wonderland NOW then screw it." are just holding back progress. Solving power generation is a totally seperate problem and should be tackled by a different effort.
Specifically, wind and tidal energy are NEVER going to be close to cost effective. If you want to solve generation build nukes. We know how to build them safe, we know how to recycle the fuel and we have enough domestic supply to last a century or so. If we can't move on to fusion or some other super tech by then we deserve a Darwin Award.
Eliminate the entire concept of saving. Map the file directly to memory and edit. No more concept of a file 'loaded' in memory needing to be saved. Click the close box, the file gets closed, no save needed. So long as the system is syncing (a manual sync call to make sure changes get to the platters would be a good idea) you can even have a crash and be ok. Revert with undo, and if you editing any sort of structured document you put the undo data in the file so it works equally well when you reload later. Obviously a purge feature would have to be available and encouraged to prevent leaking information whan such documents are shared.
The whole concept of loading and saving files between memory and mass storage is such a throwback to the days when such measures were required by the limitations of the tech. They always confuse the heck out of new users because without understanding the limits of long dead systems they really don't make much sense.
Yes, versioned filesystems would probably be more desirable in such an environment and in sense that a new version would probably only get created when the file was closed there would still be a little of the load/save mindset remaining.
>...and I finally discovered that the pagefile had been split into tens of thousands of fragments!
And that is why most Linux systems are setup to swap to a seperate partition. Yes we could just use a swapfile like Windows does, but the folks putting together OUR distributions have a little more clue than Balmer's Monkeys. It's still handy though to be able to throw an extra gig or two of swap at a problem with a quick dd and swapon.
But really, these days swap is a relic of a day when RAM was expensive. Don't think any of the SSD based netbooks use swap at all and they get along just fine.
On the other hand the Windows folk are currently stuck with a 3-3.5GB max ram limit on most machines so they have some serious limits of just how much they can overkill the memory load.
> But they're not. They're putting bigger screens, keyboards, and drives in them.
Because for most of the year an EEE PC on a shelf was about as rare as a Wii. So if you can sell every box you can ship the decision of which to make more of is a simple one. The one with the best profit. That was the 900 series. But ASUS is promising to finally hit their original $200 MSRP next year. And if they don't there are countless generic Chinese houses with products entering the channels and some of those don't even have an x86 compatible CPU so Windows isn't really an option.
When the latest ARM chips finally make it into actual products the whole game is likely to be changed yet again. Imagine a two pound netbook with 10+ hours of battery life with enough DSP grunt to be able to do Flash, YouTube and mpeg4 playback. And it just might be able to run compiz. That will change everything. The great weakness that to date nobody has been able to exploit with Windows is the fact they killed off all their ports and have tied their fortunes to the fate of x86. No x86 on a development map gets near the 1W under load power consumption mark and the notion of idle power in the single digit milliwatt range is fantasy. ARM is already there.
So be patient, those netbooks in blister packs hanging as impulse purchases are the future. And Windows isn't likely to be a part of that future.
> Linux seems to have completely failed to capitalize on Vistas unpopularity, > still having less than 1% market share.
Patience. The netbook appears to be the crack that the penguin has been waiting for. If I had told you three years ago that I forsaw Linux being sold in Target and ToysRUs you would have laughed. Honestly, I would laughed too because I didn't see it coming either. But seeing is believing.
To date we have faced a chicken and the egg problem. Nobody wanted to try selling Linux because nobody had ever succeeded selling Linux. Everybody believed that (Mac excepted, those people are just wierd) all PCs were Windows sales, largely because Microsoft would brutally punish any OEM who didn't agree. All that is now changed. We now know that Linux can be successfully sold in retail environments when correctly executed. ASUS reports return rates sililar to Windows while Acer's less polished implementation was a disaster, thus the correct lesson will be learned; do it right and it sells.
And just wait for the pricepoints on netbooks to shift even lower. Microsoft will either be forced to abandon the segment (fatal) or slash prices to levels that will have Wall Street analysts howling for blood.
Once everyone has completed the mental adjustment to retail Linux as a done deal the whole industry will have to take a long hard look at one of the (if not THE) most expensive components in a lower end PC. If ordinary people will buy an EEE or a Dell Mini 9 with Linux, would they buy a low end desktop (of the sort that won't play current FPS games anyway) if the level of integration were similar? Expect to find out the answer to that question over the next year or two. Will Crossover/Transgaming have a part to play in the final solution? Looking at how Parallels, VMWare and/or Crossover Mac are on display anywhere Mac software is sold I'd put my money on yes.
> And a million Apple fans will cry out, as if suddenly stripped of their > exclusive status symbol as the hip outsiders.
Don't worry, never happen. Let Apple hit 15% and watch em jack up prices and reap insanely great profits. Apple does not want to be mainstream. They understand their customers and share their belief that half the value of Apple is the premium brand experience they are selling.
Could you imagine BMW deciding to go mainstream and try for double digit penetration in the US auto market? It would destroy them. The new customers buying low end products could never replace the fat margins they are getting from their existing customers who would leave when the status symbol value of the BMW logo was destroyed.
Same for Apple. The iPod has so far been a notable exception, they have managed to totally dominate the portable player market while avoiding mainstreaming the core Apple brand. But it is the exception that proves the rule. Were Macs to become the new Dell all of the trendsetters who currently use an Apple logo glowing on the back of their laptop to demonstrate their superiour taste would have to begin buying something else.
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Ok, it looks hella cool, and as someone who owned a Tandy CoCo and a Commodore 64 the retro factor is good fun. But what is it for?
Is it intended as a glorious remote control? If so what the heck are we paying a Windows license fee for? Is it a computer? Then what are we paying for wireless hdmi for again? With that dinky screen or a TV across the room general purpose computing will be hard. A media center? Doing video decode on an Atom will be pain, literally as the damned thing will burn yer nuts. And not much room for storing media and a tuner is right out.
This thing looks like the sort of impractical but camera hogging stuff Detroit trots out every year as 'concept' cars. So if they are mugging for the camera/blogs why didn't they just make the whole front surface a display with touchscreen and totally pwn the Optimus Keyboard. Bet they could have arranged some sort of permanently attached clear overlay to give about as much tactile feedback as the lame me too apple retro looking keyboard they went with.
> What OLPC really needs is a name change, preferably to some sort of nonsensical word.
And don't the nonsense logo. Changing to a logo most resembling a coffee stain saved Lucent. Oh wait, the bones were sold off to Alcatel.... never mind.
> why not just ban the use of HDCP?
The parent should not have been modded funny as he is close to the truth.
Go look at a BluRay player. They all have a fan. Hint: It ain't because of the burden of the video codec. A DVD codec can run on dedicated hardware powered from AA batteries. HD is pushing more pixels and BluRay uses more power hungrey codecs than MPEG2. But the power consumption doesn't add up to mandatory fans. Nope, it is the crypto and the Java that are sucking the juice. HDCP isn't nearly as hard as the BD+ crypto but you have to count it twice, once in the player and again in the display. And you get to pay that power drain when you watch BD, casually view HD on digital cable and eventually anytime the set is powered and not using the built in tuner... which will be doing other copy protection crypto unless viewing OTA signals. And they want to put DRM on those.
> It can live on just fine as a site which covers legal developments of interest to its geeky audience...
But apparently has no intention of doing that. Starting to look like SCO was right for once, Groklaw was funded to fight IBM's side outside the courthouse. Their own Nazgul were more than capable of handling things inside court but the fight wasn't ever going to really be there, this was a FUD war in the press and Groklaw could do that with far more freedom of action than IBM's official PR machinery.
Nobody should believe the larger war ends with SCO. They were merely a sock puppet for Microsoft (cheered on officially or not) by pretty much every proprietary vendor with a financial stake in the old ways. The question is which tactic will be used next. Will Novell be launched against us as the next SCO/sockpuppet or will Balmer come out from behind the curtain and launch a patent apocalypse himself. But the war isn't over until Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco and the every billion plus software house lies ruined or transformed and the patent trolls stopped somehow.
But Groklaw won't be covering the rest of story, their part is now concluded. They did good work though and will be missed.
> There is no good way to sell a $12 program on Linux or even a $49.95 program on Linux.
Forget the $12 program. Anything that simple is going to be looking over it's shoulder for a free verison to show up at sourceforge. The $49-$99 range could be an interesting niche.
> I think RedHat has given up on the Desktop.
They have never tried for it so that can't have given up. They do go for the workstation market, and appear to make good coin at it. But if you are hankering to push some $49 apps that probably isn't your market. So yea, just go for Ubuntu and perhaps offer a statically linked tarball for everyone else and a Wiki so users can post howtos. At least until you prove a market.
> I still think they need a software store like iTunes and the Google Android store to complete the ecosystem.
If Mr. Shuttleworth thought there was money in it for him one would exist. If you believe in the idea there isn't anything stopping you from building it though. If you build it, perhaps the developers will come.
One problem I see is you will either be putting out a ton of one or two package repos, one for each offering or will need to to get really clever on the server side. So here ya go, for free. A simple Yum plugin would do it for the rpm side, but you can still pull it off with .deb and apt. You generate a custom repo URL for each customer. When apt wants to see if anything new is available you generate the repo metadata on the fly for that customer so they only see what they have the rights to download.
If you could get some buyin from PackageKit you could show everything but stick a big $ (eventually localized to the local currency symbol) by products that would require an extra charge. Then you either do your checks at download time or let everybody download but require a license key to do more than see a demo/timed trial.
So how to pull it off? I'd suggest the Google/Moz Corp angle. Offer the packagekit and/or the distros a small taste if they include a version of PackageKit supporting your store's extensions and your repo enabled by default. Again, your odds of inclusion improve if you make your extension an open documented standard. The odds improve again if you have compelling content to offer. Arguments about clutter would tend to fall on deaf ears, when there are already 10,000+ packages in a modern distro adding a few hundred commercial apps shouldn't be a problem, especially since any user who isn't interested can simply remove the checkmark besides your commercial repo. Talk about an opportunity, if something like Quickbooks were ported and available in the package manager listed right where similar apps are listed, if it didn't sell it would prove once and for all low dollar commercial apps just aren't viable on Linux. Maybe if GNUCash and MoneyDance are listed for $0 along woth Quicken/Quickbooks people would pick the free one every time. But even though I personally try to be as RMS Pure as possible I suspect something like Quicken, if it were known to be a good solid port, would indeed move units.
> A license key is a version of DRM. That is one reason I don't really like that solution. I feel
> that DRM doesn't really work to prevent piracy.
Most commercial vendors disagree. Those who are 100% RMS Pure won't buy a commercial app anyway so it isn't much of a loss from the POV of commercial vendors.
> You have mentioned LSB but LSB hasn't solved the problem of distribution.
Mostly because it hasn't been tried. If you code 100% to the LSB you are assured your app will install and run on any LSB compliant system. The LSB of course doesn't cover everything a game, for example, needs so to avoid .dll hell you would have to statically link any non-LSB libraries. Netscape used to be distributed as a completely static linked executable and it would work anywhere. It can work. I'm sure Windows software vendors deal with similar issues to make an single executable work across Win98/W2K/XP/Vista/Mohave-beta.
> I think deb is a little better. But that is the problem.
No it isn't. The only reason .deb files tend to be more portable is the simpler family tree. In .deb land you have Debian and everything else is pretty much a direct descendant that still tracks upstream enough that serious divergence doesn't happen. In RPM land you have Redhat/Fedora, SUSE and Mandriva as top levels that aren't package compatible between each other and all other rpm based distros tend to be descendents of one of them. Even though Mandriva (as Mandrake) forked from RedHat it was so long ago it is now a totally different animal. Packages tend to be portable inside the three families. But a 100% LSB package is portable, in theory even to Debian but good luck finding a repo tech that will deal with .rpm files in a Debian style package repository.
And having two package systems isn't a major problem. Two is managable, twelve wouldn't be. And if it weren't for the fairly recent rise of Ubuntu you could just skip .deb entirely and tell the couple of paying customers on .deb based tech to just use alien. For commercial apps your audience will be almost entirely RHEL, SUSE and Ubuntu. The eeepc has it's own software distribution system so you will have to deal with them anyway if you want into their walled garden.
> The problem starts with the lack of a good installer and goes from there.
Th problem is the refusal for people like you to get yer head out of Microsoft's ass long enough to realize that just because Microsoft does it a broken way doesn't mean we have to follow.
The software installation problem has been solved for years. If InstallShield is the answer you have asked a dumb question. RPM and DEB will cover almost 100% of the users who would likely buy commercial software. So package it up as an RPM first as an LSB compliant package and put it into a repo. Once that works do it again as a .deb in a repo. When you sell the software online you just point them to the repo file. With modern YUM/RPM based distros you just put the .rpm file there and when they click it the browser does the right thing. I'm not as up on the Debian/Ubuntu world, it might need another couple of clicks.
Now your software is just another package in the package manager. It gets updated right along with the rest of the system right up to an update causing the little icon to blink in the system tray. If you stick to the LSB you won't get stuck trying to play library bingo with dozens of distro/version combinations. With the most recent work in PackageKit you can even have the install CD in a box if you want to sell retail and everything still just works. The CD does the initial install in theory, but of course by the time you get a CD to somebody the online repo is probably carrying newer packages.
But... But how can I SELL software that way! Duh. You use a license key just like you already do with the CD media you sell to Windows users. But people will pirate it. Yup, just like they do your Windows version except you are offering them one big incentive to buy, access to the repo. Always up to date is a selling feature and if they pirate they would be an idiot to enable your repo.
If the commercial vendors really wanted to control access you just create a yum plugin to send a license key with the request for the packages, only make them available via http and have the web server be smart enough to run the license keys to ensure packages only get distributed to paying users. Make that plugin a standard available under the GPL so distros could include it.
But... they would never include something that smelled like DRM. They just might, if you make it a standard by getting a dozen or so vendors onboard. Besides, once something like that existed you might see Free Software made available through it. Imagine a prime mirror with smoking fast access only available with a small subscription. Heck, make it extensible enough and RedHat could adopt it to distribute RHEL updates. The point is that if you make it generally useful and correctly licensed it could indeed get picked up by 100% DSFG distributions.
> It's presence in their TVs and Movie players and toasters and refrigerators will
> eventually come to their attention.
Maybe it will come to their attention, maybe it won't. But it won't matter. As Linux becomes the substrate most consumer electronics get built on top of compatibility with Linux becomes far more important than compatibility with Windows.
When your linux based camcorder writes files to a card that plays perfectly in your Linux based picture frame, TV and settop DVD Recorder and netbook that also all run Linux it had better work on the Windows PC or it becomes the odd man out. In other words Microsoft is already in the position where it is losing the ability to set standards by fiat. Witness their recent surrender to ODF, they figured out that it was a standard and they were goingto have to support it or lose marketshare. Sure they wouldn't have lost but a point or two in the next five years but if they ever let the camel get it's nose into the tent they are in trouble. With Linux has more than it's nose in the tent these days even if most people never see the logo.
> the popular vote is all that should matter
And this is where you go wrong. Apparently you believe in Democracy. I on the other hand agree with the Founding Fathers that democracy is wicked and a sure fire way to destroy a nation. Direct Democracy is a horrible idea, little better than mob rule. Or as Jonah Goldberg is always saying, Democracy is 51% voting to piss in the corn flakes of the losing 49%; and if everybody involved believes in 'Democracy' the 49% are required to suck it up and say "Oh well, it was a fair vote and we lost."
Which is why our Founders gave us a Constituitional Republic instead of a Democracy. We have inalienable rights that no majority may rightfully infinge. If we get stuck in the 49% we can rightfully tell the 51% to get the hell away from our bowl of corn flakes because they have no right to even be voting on something so wicked. And if they refuse the 49% are morally permitted to start shooting because the whole social contract will have been voided by the majority. Yes we can change our Constituition but it was made difficult by design so that only changes that had broad support over a fair length of time would make it through the process. That is the danger of the Democratic (Socialists) and their 'living Constituition', it removes the stability of having a well defined and hard to change written agreement controlling the relationship between the government and the governed.
> fear in urban communities by gun toting thugs is a form of slavery
1. Your solution is to remove the gun. This has been tried and shown not to work for the quite logical reason that the thugs simply get a fresh weapon. And no gun ban can change that cold reality. When the criminal world can bring in narcotics by the metric ton they will be able to stick a couple of small arms in the bales. So close every gun shop in America and criminals will have exactly the same weapons. On the other hand if we remove the whole gun toting thug we at least prevent all of the future crimes that particular thug would commit.
2. You guys really need to STFU with comparing everything to slavery. Yes living in fear from a total breakdown in law enforcement is horrible but it ain't got shit on chains, whips and all the horrors of actual slavery. It is as bad as the feminazis overloading the word 'rape' until it loses most of it's meaning.
> Some of the contents of the license:
Yes Sun laywers are a bunch of dicks but remember that this is prerelease software. Normal releases od java don't have some of those nasty bits in the license and we can hope that the license will get improve as they continue the Open Source process with java.
A few posts above I slag Java pretty hard, just trying to be fair. :)
> much, if not most, server side *enterprise* work is done in java,
Yea and a decade ago that 'enterprise' stuff was steaming piles of VB. Now it's racks of big ass servers or blades groaning under badly designed layers and layers of Java 'middleware'. Not sure things have actually improved much.
> which is a mature, robust, reliable, performant and scalable platform...
If you have insane amounts of CPU and memory to throw at it to cover up the slowness you can keep a team of medium skill code monkeys permantly employed maintaining all that interfacing between the various middleware products from different vendors.
> java on the desktop has a place too
What? Must have missed it. Is there really a demand for slow bloated crap applications running on the local desktop instead of on slow overloaded webservers? Silly me, I thought the primary reason everybody rejected Java and Vista was the bloat and suck. Cross platform was the only possible reason why somebody might have been attracted to Java for a desktop app but until this year cross platform has basically meant Windows and Solaris. Mac on and off again and with an alien feel such that no Mac zealot would accept a Java app as anything but a temporary solution and the Linux situation so fudged up no sane vendor would depend on Java being available and stable. Ask the guys (Was it Borland???) who bet the company around the turn of the century on a Java based office suite and finally abandoned the unfinished projet too late to save themselves.
> done well, nobody would know/care what language its written in..
No, you notice when a small app starts sucking up all available memory. Java sucks memory so hard GNOME starts looking lean in comparison. Lools like they solve the sluggishness of garbage collection by not actually doing it until malloc returns ENOMEM. Ok, small exageration.
> then theres j2me, and i'd wager if you have any tivo type device, or even set-top box
> for your cable service, or blu-ray player, or most mobile phones these days, then you
> have java working for you there too.
That sort of thing was what Java was origionally created to do. Mixed results though. It's killing BluRay almost singlehandedly, even faster than Sony's own DRM stupidity is killing it off. All I had to do was see how goddamned SLOW a BluRay player was to lose all interest, and I'm not alone. They actually put players on shelves that take upwards of two minutes to go from tray close to anything useful appearing on the display. It is going to take Moore's Law longer to fix that much suck than BluRay is likely to be viable.
Number one complaint you hear about the typical STB? Too slow. I've got a cheap crappy basic cell phone. You can almost see individual pixels draw on the darned thing... smell the Java! BASIC on my old Tandy CoCo outperformed this danged phone's Java. It literally could push more pixels per second.
> I hope you mean "C#/Mono disease".
[voice Homer Simpson]
Doh!
[/voice]
> Seriously, Java plug-ins are still around for some reason?
Can't recall seeing a big gaping hole on a page where a Java Applet would be in at least a year. And this story is only important if somebody out there has a burning need to run a 64bit Java app... in a web browser.
Good riddence to java 32 and 64bit, Sun freed it about a decade too late for most people to give a crap. Can anybody name a good reason to develop new code in the environment? Yes a lot of legacy stuff was created in the 1990s while Java was the new shiny for people too blind to see (or with a PHB too blind...) the myriad problems but new projects? And when Java goes away can it take Microsoft's lame me too C++/Mono disease with it?
> A scientist saying creationism is real will get him shunned, as it should.
Yes it should. As should saying creationism is false should. Neither can be proved by the ways of science and anyone trying to push a political or religious agenda under the cover of science should be written out of the profession. Current science is only even believed to be valid back to the big bang and can say zero about anything before that... even if the phrase 'before the big bang' has a meaning or not. It might be able to say more in the future as our understanding improves but as things currently stand science cannot answer the big questions of Life, the Universe and Everything.
> A scientist saying "we need nukes, there is no possible way anything else can work" is not a scientific statement.
Corrent. However one can say all of the following and be 100% correct from a scientific Pov.
1. We currently possess the knowledge to build safe reliable nuke plants on a scale to provide all of our energy needs. The only obstacles are political. Since we know of at least one route to generating all of the energy we could want any talk of an 'energy crisis' is this pure political theater.
2. Sufficient proven reserves of Uranium exist to supply our needs for over a hundred years without recycling spent fuel rods. With recycling we have enough to either last much longer or increase our energy usage during the next hundred year.
3. No other currently proposed 'alternative energy' source, alone or in total can demonstrate a plan to provide our current energy supply at anywhere close to the current costs. Solar and wind are currently so innefficient that without government subsidies they would only be practical in locations so far off the grid that wiring them would be impractical. Continued research and development may or may not improve the deployment cost and output so as to make one or more alternatives practical in the future. Thus adopting as official policy that we MUST adopt these technologies means betting our future lifestyle and prosperiety on an ASSUMPTION that the price/kwh can be brought down.
4. While it is true that a practical fusion reactor has been thirty years away for the last forty years, unity gain is getting closer and closer now. It is thus rational to argue that it is at least as likely that we can build a fusion reactor in the next hundred years as it is that we can perfect wind or solar in the next twenty.
> Yes, it sounds like the author had an axe to grind.
Of course the author had an ax to grind. Green gets grant money, nukes get you shunned from elite society.
The horrible truth is that for hard core greens the only solution is eliminating a couple billion excess humans and forcing the remnant to live a 'reduced' lifestyle to satisfy their self loathing. Thus no proposed solution to the 'energy crisis' is going to be acceptable if it has the potential to actually produce energy at affordable prices in quantities anywhere close to current levels. As you correctly note the greens are already mobilizing against wind and solar on the fear that they MIGHT become practical someday. There are even efforts to stop geothermal! What could possibly be wrong with geothermal? Google it if you want to be sickened.
The truth is there is no 'energy crisis' there is only a political movement to change our lifesysle. Nukes can be built perfectly safe these days, the fuel can be reprocessed to minimize the waste storage issue and we have more than enough Uranium to power any lifestyle we want until we finally perfect a practical fusion reactor. Saying this in public will end a scientist, politician or TV pundit's career though so we hear endless bleating about an energy crisis, running out of energy and global warming bullcrap intended to frighten us into doing things sane people would never do otherwise.
Yes the teacher brought the storm on herself. Not by being ignorant of open source but by being rude. This is a good object lesson about email more than anything else.
Helios was perfectly in the right to flame back, especially since he was pretty polite about it considering the pretty nasty slander the teacher was throwing at him. And even being ticked off he protected her identity so she won't have to suffer the consequences of her bad manners. Even better, after talking it over with her he appears to have turned the situation into a win. So high praise for him and since she seems to have learned something positive out of the mess lets give her a break now.
> Most European states. Can you smoke a joint legally? The people in Holland can.
If you define freedom entirely by the freedom to smoke dope. They fail on a lot of other criteria. Can you own a firearm? Nope. Freedom of speech? Nope.
> Why is it that they needed a Costitutional amendment to outlaw the drug alcohol, but not to outlaw the drug marijuana?
Because we still lived in a Nation of Laws instead of men. Socialism (FDR, New Deal, etc) eventually changed all of that. Now we have the Messiah and the courts had to rule that a Citizen has no standing to question whether the SOB was actually born here because they won't allow anything to stop his Final Solution to the problem of the Constituition getting in their way.
Socialism; Like they practice in Holland is the problem and increasingly here. Freedom is the answer. Vote anything but Democrat. Republicans certainly have their problems but are currently our best bet, especially right now. With em down, out and desperate for a comeback we might get their attention.
> That reminds me of Bastiat's "The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else."
Except the dude was just a little pessimestic. It appears MOST seek to live at the expense of everybody else through the power of socialism. Some of us though, still vote for limited government as envisioned by the US Founders. The US Constituition. That would be Change I can Believe in. Doubt I'll ever see it practiced again, but I can keep trying for a little while longer at the voting booth and then go for watering the Tree of Liberty.
Don't try to solve multiple problems. If electric distribution can be solved, great. But idiots saying "If we can't solve every problem and have a green wonderland NOW then screw it." are just holding back progress. Solving power generation is a totally seperate problem and should be tackled by a different effort.
Specifically, wind and tidal energy are NEVER going to be close to cost effective. If you want to solve generation build nukes. We know how to build them safe, we know how to recycle the fuel and we have enough domestic supply to last a century or so. If we can't move on to fusion or some other super tech by then we deserve a Darwin Award.
> What would you do instead of file save?
Eliminate the entire concept of saving. Map the file directly to memory and edit. No more concept of a file 'loaded' in memory needing to be saved. Click the close box, the file gets closed, no save needed. So long as the system is syncing (a manual sync call to make sure changes get to the platters would be a good idea) you can even have a crash and be ok. Revert with undo, and if you editing any sort of structured document you put the undo data in the file so it works equally well when you reload later. Obviously a purge feature would have to be available and encouraged to prevent leaking information whan such documents are shared.
The whole concept of loading and saving files between memory and mass storage is such a throwback to the days when such measures were required by the limitations of the tech. They always confuse the heck out of new users because without understanding the limits of long dead systems they really don't make much sense.
Yes, versioned filesystems would probably be more desirable in such an environment and in sense that a new version would probably only get created when the file was closed there would still be a little of the load/save mindset remaining.
> ...and I finally discovered that the pagefile had been split into tens of thousands of fragments!
And that is why most Linux systems are setup to swap to a seperate partition. Yes we could just use a swapfile like Windows does, but the folks putting together OUR distributions have a little more clue than Balmer's Monkeys. It's still handy though to be able to throw an extra gig or two of swap at a problem with a quick dd and swapon.
But really, these days swap is a relic of a day when RAM was expensive. Don't think any of the SSD based netbooks use swap at all and they get along just fine.
On the other hand the Windows folk are currently stuck with a 3-3.5GB max ram limit on most machines so they have some serious limits of just how much they can overkill the memory load.
> But they're not. They're putting bigger screens, keyboards, and drives in them.
Because for most of the year an EEE PC on a shelf was about as rare as a Wii. So if you can sell every box you can ship the decision of which to make more of is a simple one. The one with the best profit. That was the 900 series. But ASUS is promising to finally hit their original $200 MSRP next year. And if they don't there are countless generic Chinese houses with products entering the channels and some of those don't even have an x86 compatible CPU so Windows isn't really an option.
When the latest ARM chips finally make it into actual products the whole game is likely to be changed yet again. Imagine a two pound netbook with 10+ hours of battery life with enough DSP grunt to be able to do Flash, YouTube and mpeg4 playback. And it just might be able to run compiz. That will change everything. The great weakness that to date nobody has been able to exploit with Windows is the fact they killed off all their ports and have tied their fortunes to the fate of x86. No x86 on a development map gets near the 1W under load power consumption mark and the notion of idle power in the single digit milliwatt range is fantasy. ARM is already there.
So be patient, those netbooks in blister packs hanging as impulse purchases are the future. And Windows isn't likely to be a part of that future.
> Linux seems to have completely failed to capitalize on Vistas unpopularity,
> still having less than 1% market share.
Patience. The netbook appears to be the crack that the penguin has been waiting for. If I had told you three years ago that I forsaw Linux being sold in Target and ToysRUs you would have laughed. Honestly, I would laughed too because I didn't see it coming either. But seeing is believing.
To date we have faced a chicken and the egg problem. Nobody wanted to try selling Linux because nobody had ever succeeded selling Linux. Everybody believed that (Mac excepted, those people are just wierd) all PCs were Windows sales, largely because Microsoft would brutally punish any OEM who didn't agree. All that is now changed. We now know that Linux can be successfully sold in retail environments when correctly executed. ASUS reports return rates sililar to Windows while Acer's less polished implementation was a disaster, thus the correct lesson will be learned; do it right and it sells.
And just wait for the pricepoints on netbooks to shift even lower. Microsoft will either be forced to abandon the segment (fatal) or slash prices to levels that will have Wall Street analysts howling for blood.
Once everyone has completed the mental adjustment to retail Linux as a done deal the whole industry will have to take a long hard look at one of the (if not THE) most expensive components in a lower end PC. If ordinary people will buy an EEE or a Dell Mini 9 with Linux, would they buy a low end desktop (of the sort that won't play current FPS games anyway) if the level of integration were similar? Expect to find out the answer to that question over the next year or two. Will Crossover/Transgaming have a part to play in the final solution? Looking at how Parallels, VMWare and/or Crossover Mac are on display anywhere Mac software is sold I'd put my money on yes.
> And a million Apple fans will cry out, as if suddenly stripped of their
> exclusive status symbol as the hip outsiders.
Don't worry, never happen. Let Apple hit 15% and watch em jack up prices and reap insanely great profits. Apple does not want to be mainstream. They understand their customers and share their belief that half the value of Apple is the premium brand experience they are selling.
Could you imagine BMW deciding to go mainstream and try for double digit penetration in the US auto market? It would destroy them. The new customers buying low end products could never replace the fat margins they are getting from their existing customers who would leave when the status symbol value of the BMW logo was destroyed.
Same for Apple. The iPod has so far been a notable exception, they have managed to totally dominate the portable player market while avoiding mainstreaming the core Apple brand. But it is the exception that proves the rule. Were Macs to become the new Dell all of the trendsetters who currently use an Apple logo glowing on the back of their laptop to demonstrate their superiour taste would have to begin buying something else.