> iceweasel was kind of a dick move from developers that didn't want to live up to the same expectations as everybody else.
You are missing the point as to who the 'dick' here is. It's Moz Corp. Take the.src.rpm for firefox from Fedora and issue an rpm --rebuild on it. You can't redistribute the result of that command without entering into a trademark license agreement with Moz Corp. That isn't true for any other package in the Fedora repos, because for any other package such a requirement would be considered a bug. Any other package would get renamed or removed to comply with their requirement that all packages be redistributable, modifiable and not legally encumbered such that Fedora has a special right to distribute. It is way past time for Firefox to go from any free distribution. Debian finally did the Iceweasel rename, now it is Fedora's turn to do the right thing. RedHat can certainly keep the branded version in RHEL but if Fedora is going to stick to it's Free Software only stance it must rename.
> What happened in netbooks to cause this is that Asus did a "bait and switch" on consumers.
That was more a case of ASUS found itself in a Nintendo situation, where they could sell every unit they could produce except in this case they had two lines, the 700 series and the 900 series. If you can sell everything you can build do you build the cheap ones or the more expensive (and likely higher margin) boxes? Now consider the dollar was way down last year, LCD availibility was spotty and batteries were even hard to come by. All that pretty much killed off the $200 original target price. But note that all those factors have shifted again and they are going to try again next year.
And if they don't the generic Chinese shops are starting to push product. One company says they will sell ya ARM based netbooks for $89 wholesale, f.o.b. Hong Kong in quantity 1000. The dam will eventually break and the sub $200 netbook market will get flooded with products. And features will improve annually and prices will creep ever lower towards the $100 retail pricepoint. The world changes during that process in ways that terrify most of the current IT players, which is why it is being held off as long as possible but their day is passing. Computers are about to become consumer electronics, low margin mass merchandised disposable. Nobody can say exactly what sort of unexpected changes that upheaval brings with it. The ruin of Microsoft is the first likely result. But we might not like some of the other results.
> I'm sorry, but if I stole 200$ from the poor so they can't afford food or rent this month or if I > stole it from Bill Gates there's an ethical difference. Both are wrong...
Of course the more popular political philosophy right now says seizing Mr. Gate's money and 'spreading that wealth around' isn't even wrong. Do these Hollywood (and RIAA, game publishers, etc) assholes realize that their support for the one leads to the current attitudes regarding 'piracy' as day leads to night? Just take a look at Robin Hood[1] as understood in popular modern culture, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Robin Hood is a hero. And they think they can convince people to stop pirating stuff from multi-billion dollar corporations that the liberal establishment, including every one of the large media outfits, spends most it's time preaching are 'evil rapacious corporations who control the government through lobbists.'
[1] Note I qualify that with 'as understood in modern popular culture.' Robin Hood is actually somewhat more complex, even in the Disney version. But everybody has been conditioned to believe something entirely different and more in line with proper Marxist teachings. A proper reading of the source materials (or even Disney, Walt was still influencing production so they didn't hose the story totally) show Robin as a loyal royalist fighting against an usurper who was oppressing the people and a few merchants enriching themselves through their loyalty to the usurper. It is doubtful Robin objected to paying his taxes to King John when he returned from the Crusades and no legend has him 'redistributing' the King's wealth.
> So to be value for money this has to outlast 500 newspapers... at one a day that means it'll be about a year and a half.
Assuming it is so locked it only replaces the newspaper. If it also displays eBooks and PDF technical documents the value proposition gets a little better, But I know I won't be buying into a ebook reader until I can buy something that at can at least display an entire 8 1/2 x 11 page at at least fax 196dpi resolution, be able to work with stock PDF files stuck into an SD slot (it can do DRM crap too) and not set me back more than $100 without a monthly contract.
> IMHO, this is a niche that a competent software/hardware company (Apple) could really exploit much > like they did in previous 'established' niches when the time comes.
And they will. They will let everyone else perfect the technology first, then swoop in with their superior marketing skills and their cult of followers to form a firm base set of customers. In an emerging market that is a big advantage. Look how it worked out with the iPod. At the time the portable player market was small enough that their million or so "we buy anything with an Apple logo" followers allowed Apple to dry up the venture capital market for everyone else by creating an 'overnight sensation'. Note that now only self financed ventures like Sandisk, Chineese production powerhouses and established consumer electronics brands who now even try to compete.
Expect the same thing to happen to eBooks. Amazon and a few early adopter tech companies will expend the resources to perfect the tech and establish a market. Then Apple will swoop in with something even more DRM infested and tied to a subscription model (if that is possible) than the Kindle, Steve will hold it forth and the tech press will instantly declare it 'insanely great', the faithful will buy a million in the first week and everyone else's cash supply will dry up. Hopefully in this case Sony at least will have the resources and willpower to survive that year and after the hype dies down a bit fight back for marketshare.
> So they are guarding their differentiators carefully by tying it to their platform and hoping the community > will buy into the cool stuff and flesh out the rest of what they need.
Of course there is one little problem with that idea. Yes if Solaris can be made excellent enough the 'Open Source' crowd might be seduced to USE Solaris. But most lines of code come from either paid developers or Free Software types. The use whatever is best today types aren't likely to be paying many developers. And the Free Software types have apparently been avoiding OpenSolaris in droves, so it is a pretty safe bet they won't be lining up to contribute to Solaris anytime soon. So Sun better not sack their in house developers anytime soon, they are going to be needing them for the forseeable future.
> I _think_ they meant assisting companies that was to brand the office product, so if say > Dell wanted to pre-load an office suite, they could install a Dell branded Star-Office or OOo.
They would certainly do that, but as I just noted in a post above, there will be no OEM preloading of OO.o because Microsoft would destroy anyone who attacked it in such a direct way. Simply forcing them to buy Windows at the retail OEM rates would be more than enough to do it and 100% legal. So that's off the table.
I'm just hoping Sun will be sane enough to understand where the line will be that simply kills OO.o at Sun and moves the project to Novell/Microsoft. There are a lot of ways to do co-branding that would only be annoying to users and not instantly lethal to Sun.
Annoying:
Inserting a virtual printer target that submits your document to an online printer/finisher for printout, binding and either ships the finished work or lets you pick it up at the neighborhood shop.
Add UI widgets to use an officially blessed net to fax gateway.
Add click to buy buttons for additional clipart, fonts, themes, templates, etc. from third parties. Perhaps with free previews, sample, etc.
Probably lethal:
Sticking an ad banner in the running product.
Instantly lethal:
Inserting ANY advertising into the output of printed documents or presentations.
>..but if a few PC manufacturers are bold enough to do it, this could be the pivotal moment for that.
Sorry, that isn't being bold. Taking a cattle prod to Microsoft isn't bravery, more like suicide. And preloading OO.o is exactly that, you would be directly threatening their biggest cash cow. Do it and you will find yourself buying your OWM copies of Windows from Ingram Micro at rack rate, which is intended to be a price to kill any OEM doing more than a couple hundred units a month. If you can't negotiate a special deal involving co-marketing kickbacks you can't compete against everyone else who does.
Yup, the Bond franchise has always been about advertising. The product placements in the films themselves have always been blatent and unrepentent. They do it and brag about it. And the hype machine in the months before one drops has always been this way. It's blatent and obvious and the people behind it don't care if everyone knows it is hype.
And the idiots who put this list together cared so little about making a good list instead of just taking the marketing dollars that they left off so many obvious ones. Come on people, they left of the ST:TOS episode "THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE". How frickin obvious is that, it's the first hit on Google.
> Ubuntu alone is not going to "set the stage for Intel to lose the "software advantage"", > or anyone else for that matter, by switching to ARM.
You are missing the big picture. Go look at lilliputing.com's similar story. This is about netbooks. If Canonical is investing in a full port this tells us somebody bigger than the generic Chinese outfit we already know about is planning to introduce an ARM based netbook, which also is isn't news to we who have been paying attention because ARM themselves said as much weeks ago. We still don't know WHO this mystery major vendor is though.
> Sure, a few thousand people will be able to switch to an ARM device without blinking, but > the rest of the 99.9% of the worlds computer users won't give a flying piece of monkey poo.
Have you used an EEEPC running their customized Xandros? It 'just works' and in the last month they have added a full repository where you can just click to add from a quickly growing list of additional apps. I haven't seen Ubuntu Netbook Remix yet but I'm confident that if they put their minds to it thay can produce a similarly seamless experience on a preloaded machine. And the end user won't even realize the machine isn't x86 compatible and won't care as long as it 'just works.'
The big change will be these new ARM netbooks won't have an option for XP. Some might get roughed up enough by Redmond to offer a WinCE option but who in their right mind would pick Pocket IE and Office viewers over a full Firefox and full version of OO.o?
> The discrete components are now manufactured solely for prototyping and hobby use.
Not true. Look in most consumer electronics and you will still find a few old style discretes. And you can buy the same parts RS sells from Mouser or Digikey for a fraction of the cost even when bought in quantity one. Mouser will sell anything in it's catalog for the item cost plus actual postage. This is nothing new, Radio Shack always marked their parts up more than a thousand percent. That is how they pay mall rent. They mark EVERYTHING up more than you could buy it elsewhere. Ya buy from em when you need it NOW or if it is deeply discounted on a sale.
Ok, they want to kill of rental and used games. Fine. Doesn't matter to me.... but the value of games as a bought item like a DVD or book is a lot higher to me than a non-tranferrable license. Price accordingly and I'll bite. Oh! You idiots thought we are going to keep paying $60 and not be able to loan it out to a friend or turn it at Game Stop? That's very different, that is just a big old price increase heading into a recession. Brilliant move guys!
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't charging enterprise prices for simplified hardware > that relies on commodity software solutions, kind of defeat the point?
Yea, that is amazing. Ya could put in a pair of 1U servers with RAID1 on each for a fraction of that pricetag. Use any of a number of ways to make the two units cluster, including using OpenSolaris and you get everything they are selling except the pretty front end for about half the sticker, Go SCSI/SAS on all of the drives in 2U machines if you want to spend about what they are charging and still come out with a redundant cluster.
> Microsoft could charge $10 to OEMs (maybe $50 retail) upfront, then require a subscription to get updates other than security updates.
Yea, it could. But they currently get $32 for XP on a netbook and as much as $80 for a basic Vista. Big OEMs like Dell pay less (exact amount secret) and some machines that ship with more expensive versions of Vista pay more. The point being that even if your idea could work it would be a fatal hit to their bottom line. If they can't tap people for at least $5 a month a subscription model is going to be seen by Wall Street (rightly) as a lot less profitable than the current model.
The problem is that the only way people might pony up that kind of coin is they actually get something major, not just fixes to product defects. Even giving access to every Microsoft non-game product wouldn't induce many people to put up with a monthly subscription.
> I'd rather pay $50 upfront and then $10 per month for four years than pay $400 upfront at retail.
If they could still clip people for $50 up front they would have a future. Good luck convincing an OEM to put a $50 component into a product destined to retail for $200 or less. That is the world that is coming and it terrifies Microsoft. As the hardware cost for a basic network node approaches zero the software cost must do likewise, the days of selling the basic operating system, browser and office suite are coming to a close. And as computers become consumer electronics the reality of that transition is just being realized by the soon to be former PC makers. So both the current hardware makers and Microsoft are desperately trying to find some way to survive and would just love to transition to a subscription model in some sort of joint venture with the telcos/ISPs. Laptops/netbooks might end up tethered to a cell modem and a monthy bill but neither Dell nor Microsoft are needed by the telcos. They would rather buy the machines direct from China themselves and pocket the profits.
> On a netbook, I think it wouldn't be unreasonable for Microsoft to offer something like Box.net on-line storage/backup > as part of the subscription..
Pay for a net based service? Surely you jest. ASUS is already giving it away for free now.
> There's nothing special about the NES era, as the article insinuates.
You are right there was nothing special about the NES, but there was something special about that time period, across both console, early 8bit PCs and the arcade scene. That was the period when everything was new, the genres were being defined and every month or two some development house was putting out something that was actually new and different.
For example, a lot of good fantasy has been written after J.R.R. Tolkien blew open the genre, but each generation keeps going back to his work. Same thing is games. Donkey Kong might not have been the very first 'platform' game but Mario's enduring legacy traces back to it and because it and the Mario sequels forever left such a stamp on the genre designers still, even unconsiously, follow in Nintendo's footsteps when doing anything that resembles a 'platformer.'
> In the future, gamers will be nostalgic for the games they grew up on.
And will pine away for them in vain. Emulation saved the old 8bit world from oblivion because DRM, even when used, wasn't a serious obstacle. There still hasn't been a proper crack for any of the current generation consoles. Hopefully the proven nostalgia market in this generation will induce teh publishers to do a port to the platforms of 20 years from now, but since the effort will be non-trivial and the die hard fans won't be able to do it themselves.....
> Actually that hasn't impressed anyone in a while, come to think of it. > At least not since Apple figured out what a find index is.
Yo, fanboi. Try the locate command, most Linux distros had it years before Apple even thought about putting Mach under their eye candy.
Of course on modern distros the locate command will complain that it's database doesn't exist until you manually enable the service because the command line is supposed to be dead.:(
Guess you didn't actually read the material. This shouldn't work but somehow a privledge escalation is allowing a non-root user to invoke telnetd and then to connect from outside and actually get a root shell. So the owner of the hardware is able to break int T-Mobile's software. Oh the horror!
So far it is more likely to simply get patched instead of developing into a full jailbreak but stay tuned. The camel's nose has entered the tent, it just might be able to get all the way in.
> I challenge you to find one in each category that is indeed close.
Close as in long history of working closely together in the case of professional assocations, or a long history of associating together in personal affairs.
When Ayers needed somebody he could trust to make sure as much of that $150M in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge went to himself and his fellow communist radicals he picked Barack Obama. He knew he could trust him because they had worked together before. Ayers had signed off on the grant that gave Mr. Obama his first paying job in Chicago. That professional relationship continued long past Ayers's infamous confessions surrounding the publication of Fugitive Days.
Obama himself has called Rev. Wright a close personal friend, a mentor and even a father figure. Rev. Wright wasn't one to be coy about his beliefs. Wright was preaching the same warmed over Marxism from his pulpit the day they met as he was when Obama threw him under the bus. If your minister of twenty years doesn't provide a clue about you what does it say about yer religious convictions? So which is it? Was Obama a cold blooded agnostic using Rev Wright to gain access to his politically connected congregation (which included a Who's Who of Chicago... including at one time Ms. Winfrey.) to further his political ambitions or did/does Mr. Obama actually believe the insane filth that flows so freely from Rev. Wright's chowhole. Or perhaps you would care to propose a third option because damned if I can see one.
> If you're friends with a man who was once a criminal when you were 8 years old but had changed in the decades since..
Now matter how many different ways I say it it is apparent you are 100% immune to reality. But for those following along I'll say it one more time just as clearly as possible.
Ayers hasn't changed. Not one bit. Listen to him. "Guilty as Hell. Free as a Bird." "I regret nothing." "I'm a small c communist"
And that is the problem. Ayers, by his own words is still the exact same communist radical. He has just decided he can do more for the cause from his perch as a department head at at major university than as bomber. But he explicitly doesn't renounce terrorism as a valid tactic, no he says he just might take up the bombs at some point in the future should he decide his current tactic isn't working.
Wright wasn't a nutjob in the distant past who reformed either. He was still spouting the crazy after Obams threw him under the bus, it is just that somebody has managed to get a muzzle on the guy for now. Expect him to resurface in a couple of days. If I wanted to put $100 on Wright being present at Obama's swearing in what odds would you give me?
And he as been an associate of Obams for how long? Only a few months ago Biden was saying nice things about McCain and that Obama was far too inexperienced for POTUS.
> He's not one of those Muslim Micks, is he?
No, but Biden is an idiot. He has warmed a seat in the Senate since forever but has managed to learn nothing, He has been wrong on every major issue during his tenure. He voted against Gulf War I and for the second. Doesn't that put him 180 degrees opposed to Obama's positions? The idiot even voted against the Alaskan Pipeline!
Had Palin made half the factual errors Biden made she would have been forced to remove herself from politics. But did ya listen to the Washington press corps defend Biden? Ya, we all know he is a fool, but he's a good solid Party Member.
> And it's well known-that one of your good high school buddies was a pedophile. > I'm going to show up at your job tomorrow and let everyone there know about > how you like to pal around with pedophiles. You cool with that?
No retard, if you really can't see the difference there is no hope for ya.
If Axelrod went off the rails this afternoon (just too much stress) and shot up a shopping center nobody would accuse Obama of hanging with a mass murderer. It would correctly be seen as a tragedy. Had Ayers been all talk and no bomb until suddenly going off this week and blowing up some crap, again, it would be wrong to give any serious grief to Obama because a longtime associate got sudden jihad/revolution syndrome. But as Team Obama is always pointing out, Ayers started blowing stuff up when Obama was a wee lad of eight. That doesn't excuse the relationship, it is what makes it so bad. Ayers was the University of Chicago's Star Celebrity Terrorist, the notion that Obama was the only guy in town who didn't know about Ayers is simply not plausible.
And that's assuming you don't believe Ayers and Obama first met in Chicago and not at Columbia. Both were there and had Edward Said as a common connection. Obama as a student, Ayers as co-consirator.
> I'm not sure if he chose Palin because he liked her, or because his Masters told him too. > Either way, she is not a good candidate for VP by any stretch of the imagination.
Perhaps he picked Palin because he knew his base didn't like him and without them he wasn't going to win. I know I said the day before that if he picked some lame ass RINO I was sitting the election out. Palin was my choice but I realized that she was a dark horse Internet blog pick and McCain probably wouldn't have the stones to go there. He suprised me and a lot of other folks when he did it. I ordered my yard sign that morning and apparently I wasn't alone because they had a two week backlog.
In retrospect it was a classic McCain play. He knew he needed Republicans to get behind him. He realized that he needed to go big and he did it. That's the part of McCain we respect, he will take big gambles when he thinks they are the right thing to do. The surge was another big gamble that paid off. McAmnesty was one that didn't. And that is our problem with him, we can't identify a coherent philosophy that allows us to predict where he will come down on an issue.
> Is it that hard for you to believe that Obama has associates who don't match these categories contrived by the media?
It isn't as if I haven't actually dug into this question a bit. I have. It isn't all his fault, other than he picked Chicago and Hyde Park to be his home base. The University of Chicago is the sort of place that would pick Bill Ayers as a department head. Calypso Louie's Temple of Crazy is just a short walk away. And if there is ONE uncorrupted politician in the whole town it would be a miracle so by definition every politician Obama is associated with is a crook. And Obama is right up to his neck in it too unless you think he is that one uncorrupted Chicago pol.
Now remember, Obama had no previous ties to Chicago when he graduated and decided to take up the job of Communist Agitator for Bill Ayers. Yes, go look it up for yourself since I doubt you will believe me. His first job in Chicago was paid for by a grant from the Woods Foundation and guess who was on the board. Bill Ayers.
> Obama has been absolutely spineless about the major philosophical and practical wounds inflicted by his own party.
Has Obama EVER taken a position against the majority of his party?
Has Obama EVER challenged the corruption of the Chicago machine?
Has Obama ever accomplished ANY major achievement?
Obama promises to remake the world. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Name one concrete accomplishment of Senator Obama in his career. Most people seeking POTUS can point to at least one major signature accomplishment. Obama? He gave a great speech at the '04 Democratic Convention.
> I think its best that religious folks stay home.
Can't we all just feel the tolerance this asshole is radiating?
It is fairly typical for a modern leftist. They believe in tolerance for all of their positions and utter hatred of all others. They believe in diversity in as much as they want all races, breeds, sexual variations to all come together and vote for Obama as one.
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> iceweasel was kind of a dick move from developers that didn't want to live up to the same expectations as everybody else.
You are missing the point as to who the 'dick' here is. It's Moz Corp. Take the .src.rpm for firefox from Fedora and issue an rpm --rebuild on it. You can't redistribute the result of that command without entering into a trademark license agreement with Moz Corp. That isn't true for any other package in the Fedora repos, because for any other package such a requirement would be considered a bug. Any other package would get renamed or removed to comply with their requirement that all packages be redistributable, modifiable and not legally encumbered such that Fedora has a special right to distribute. It is way past time for Firefox to go from any free distribution. Debian finally did the Iceweasel rename, now it is Fedora's turn to do the right thing. RedHat can certainly keep the branded version in RHEL but if Fedora is going to stick to it's Free Software only stance it must rename.
> What happened in netbooks to cause this is that Asus did a "bait and switch" on consumers.
That was more a case of ASUS found itself in a Nintendo situation, where they could sell every unit they could produce except in this case they had two lines, the 700 series and the 900 series. If you can sell everything you can build do you build the cheap ones or the more expensive (and likely higher margin) boxes? Now consider the dollar was way down last year, LCD availibility was spotty and batteries were even hard to come by. All that pretty much killed off the $200 original target price. But note that all those factors have shifted again and they are going to try again next year.
And if they don't the generic Chinese shops are starting to push product. One company says they will sell ya ARM based netbooks for $89 wholesale, f.o.b. Hong Kong in quantity 1000. The dam will eventually break and the sub $200 netbook market will get flooded with products. And features will improve annually and prices will creep ever lower towards the $100 retail pricepoint. The world changes during that process in ways that terrify most of the current IT players, which is why it is being held off as long as possible but their day is passing. Computers are about to become consumer electronics, low margin mass merchandised disposable. Nobody can say exactly what sort of unexpected changes that upheaval brings with it. The ruin of Microsoft is the first likely result. But we might not like some of the other results.
> I'm sorry, but if I stole 200$ from the poor so they can't afford food or rent this month or if I
> stole it from Bill Gates there's an ethical difference. Both are wrong...
Of course the more popular political philosophy right now says seizing Mr. Gate's money and 'spreading that wealth around' isn't even wrong. Do these Hollywood (and RIAA, game publishers, etc) assholes realize that their support for the one leads to the current attitudes regarding 'piracy' as day leads to night? Just take a look at Robin Hood[1] as understood in popular modern culture, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Robin Hood is a hero. And they think they can convince people to stop pirating stuff from multi-billion dollar corporations that the liberal establishment, including every one of the large media outfits, spends most it's time preaching are 'evil rapacious corporations who control the government through lobbists.'
[1] Note I qualify that with 'as understood in modern popular culture.' Robin Hood is actually somewhat more complex, even in the Disney version. But everybody has been conditioned to believe something entirely different and more in line with proper Marxist teachings. A proper reading of the source materials (or even Disney, Walt was still influencing production so they didn't hose the story totally) show Robin as a loyal royalist fighting against an usurper who was oppressing the people and a few merchants enriching themselves through their loyalty to the usurper. It is doubtful Robin objected to paying his taxes to King John when he returned from the Crusades and no legend has him 'redistributing' the King's wealth.
> So to be value for money this has to outlast 500 newspapers... at one a day that means it'll be about a year and a half.
Assuming it is so locked it only replaces the newspaper. If it also displays eBooks and PDF technical documents the value proposition gets a little better, But I know I won't be buying into a ebook reader until I can buy something that at can at least display an entire 8 1/2 x 11 page at at least fax 196dpi resolution, be able to work with stock PDF files stuck into an SD slot (it can do DRM crap too) and not set me back more than $100 without a monthly contract.
> IMHO, this is a niche that a competent software/hardware company (Apple) could really exploit much
> like they did in previous 'established' niches when the time comes.
And they will. They will let everyone else perfect the technology first, then swoop in with their superior marketing skills and their cult of followers to form a firm base set of customers. In an emerging market that is a big advantage. Look how it worked out with the iPod. At the time the portable player market was small enough that their million or so "we buy anything with an Apple logo" followers allowed Apple to dry up the venture capital market for everyone else by creating an 'overnight sensation'. Note that now only self financed ventures like Sandisk, Chineese production powerhouses and established consumer electronics brands who now even try to compete.
Expect the same thing to happen to eBooks. Amazon and a few early adopter tech companies will expend the resources to perfect the tech and establish a market. Then Apple will swoop in with something even more DRM infested and tied to a subscription model (if that is possible) than the Kindle, Steve will hold it forth and the tech press will instantly declare it 'insanely great', the faithful will buy a million in the first week and everyone else's cash supply will dry up. Hopefully in this case Sony at least will have the resources and willpower to survive that year and after the hype dies down a bit fight back for marketshare.
> So they are guarding their differentiators carefully by tying it to their platform and hoping the community
> will buy into the cool stuff and flesh out the rest of what they need.
Of course there is one little problem with that idea. Yes if Solaris can be made excellent enough the 'Open Source' crowd might be seduced to USE Solaris. But most lines of code come from either paid developers or Free Software types. The use whatever is best today types aren't likely to be paying many developers. And the Free Software types have apparently been avoiding OpenSolaris in droves, so it is a pretty safe bet they won't be lining up to contribute to Solaris anytime soon. So Sun better not sack their in house developers anytime soon, they are going to be needing them for the forseeable future.
> I _think_ they meant assisting companies that was to brand the office product, so if say
> Dell wanted to pre-load an office suite, they could install a Dell branded Star-Office or OOo.
They would certainly do that, but as I just noted in a post above, there will be no OEM preloading of OO.o because Microsoft would destroy anyone who attacked it in such a direct way. Simply forcing them to buy Windows at the retail OEM rates would be more than enough to do it and 100% legal. So that's off the table.
I'm just hoping Sun will be sane enough to understand where the line will be that simply kills OO.o at Sun and moves the project to Novell/Microsoft. There are a lot of ways to do co-branding that would only be annoying to users and not instantly lethal to Sun.
Annoying:
Inserting a virtual printer target that submits your document to an online printer/finisher for printout, binding and either ships the finished work or lets you pick it up at the neighborhood shop.
Add UI widgets to use an officially blessed net to fax gateway.
Add click to buy buttons for additional clipart, fonts, themes, templates, etc. from third parties. Perhaps with free previews, sample, etc.
Probably lethal:
Sticking an ad banner in the running product.
Instantly lethal:
Inserting ANY advertising into the output of printed documents or presentations.
> ..but if a few PC manufacturers are bold enough to do it, this could be the pivotal moment for that.
Sorry, that isn't being bold. Taking a cattle prod to Microsoft isn't bravery, more like suicide. And preloading OO.o is exactly that, you would be directly threatening their biggest cash cow. Do it and you will find yourself buying your OWM copies of Windows from Ingram Micro at rack rate, which is intended to be a price to kill any OEM doing more than a couple hundred units a month. If you can't negotiate a special deal involving co-marketing kickbacks you can't compete against everyone else who does.
> It is a thinly veiled Quantum of Solace promo.
Yup, the Bond franchise has always been about advertising. The product placements in the films themselves have always been blatent and unrepentent. They do it and brag about it. And the hype machine in the months before one drops has always been this way. It's blatent and obvious and the people behind it don't care if everyone knows it is hype.
And the idiots who put this list together cared so little about making a good list instead of just taking the marketing dollars that they left off so many obvious ones. Come on people, they left of the ST:TOS episode "THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE". How frickin obvious is that, it's the first hit on Google.
> Ubuntu alone is not going to "set the stage for Intel to lose the "software advantage"",
> or anyone else for that matter, by switching to ARM.
You are missing the big picture. Go look at lilliputing.com's similar story. This is about netbooks. If Canonical is investing in a full port this tells us somebody bigger than the generic Chinese outfit we already know about is planning to introduce an ARM based netbook, which also is isn't news to we who have been paying attention because ARM themselves said as much weeks ago. We still don't know WHO this mystery major vendor is though.
> Sure, a few thousand people will be able to switch to an ARM device without blinking, but
> the rest of the 99.9% of the worlds computer users won't give a flying piece of monkey poo.
Have you used an EEEPC running their customized Xandros? It 'just works' and in the last month they have added a full repository where you can just click to add from a quickly growing list of additional apps. I haven't seen Ubuntu Netbook Remix yet but I'm confident that if they put their minds to it thay can produce a similarly seamless experience on a preloaded machine. And the end user won't even realize the machine isn't x86 compatible and won't care as long as it 'just works.'
The big change will be these new ARM netbooks won't have an option for XP. Some might get roughed up enough by Redmond to offer a WinCE option but who in their right mind would pick Pocket IE and Office viewers over a full Firefox and full version of OO.o?
> The discrete components are now manufactured solely for prototyping and hobby use.
Not true. Look in most consumer electronics and you will still find a few old style discretes. And you can buy the same parts RS sells from Mouser or Digikey for a fraction of the cost even when bought in quantity one. Mouser will sell anything in it's catalog for the item cost plus actual postage. This is nothing new, Radio Shack always marked their parts up more than a thousand percent. That is how they pay mall rent. They mark EVERYTHING up more than you could buy it elsewhere. Ya buy from em when you need it NOW or if it is deeply discounted on a sale.
Ok, they want to kill of rental and used games. Fine. Doesn't matter to me.... but the value of games as a bought item like a DVD or book is a lot higher to me than a non-tranferrable license. Price accordingly and I'll bite. Oh! You idiots thought we are going to keep paying $60 and not be able to loan it out to a friend or turn it at Game Stop? That's very different, that is just a big old price increase heading into a recession. Brilliant move guys!
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't charging enterprise prices for simplified hardware
> that relies on commodity software solutions, kind of defeat the point?
Yea, that is amazing. Ya could put in a pair of 1U servers with RAID1 on each for a fraction of that pricetag. Use any of a number of ways to make the two units cluster, including using OpenSolaris and you get everything they are selling except the pretty front end for about half the sticker, Go SCSI/SAS on all of the drives in 2U machines if you want to spend about what they are charging and still come out with a redundant cluster.
> Microsoft could charge $10 to OEMs (maybe $50 retail) upfront, then require a subscription to get updates other than security updates.
Yea, it could. But they currently get $32 for XP on a netbook and as much as $80 for a basic Vista. Big OEMs like Dell pay less (exact amount secret) and some machines that ship with more expensive versions of Vista pay more. The point being that even if your idea could work it would be a fatal hit to their bottom line. If they can't tap people for at least $5 a month a subscription model is going to be seen by Wall Street (rightly) as a lot less profitable than the current model.
The problem is that the only way people might pony up that kind of coin is they actually get something major, not just fixes to product defects. Even giving access to every Microsoft non-game product wouldn't induce many people to put up with a monthly subscription.
> I'd rather pay $50 upfront and then $10 per month for four years than pay $400 upfront at retail.
If they could still clip people for $50 up front they would have a future. Good luck convincing an OEM to put a $50 component into a product destined to retail for $200 or less. That is the world that is coming and it terrifies Microsoft. As the hardware cost for a basic network node approaches zero the software cost must do likewise, the days of selling the basic operating system, browser and office suite are coming to a close. And as computers become consumer electronics the reality of that transition is just being realized by the soon to be former PC makers. So both the current hardware makers and Microsoft are desperately trying to find some way to survive and would just love to transition to a subscription model in some sort of joint venture with the telcos/ISPs. Laptops/netbooks might end up tethered to a cell modem and a monthy bill but neither Dell nor Microsoft are needed by the telcos. They would rather buy the machines direct from China themselves and pocket the profits.
> On a netbook, I think it wouldn't be unreasonable for Microsoft to offer something like Box.net on-line storage/backup
> as part of the subscription..
Pay for a net based service? Surely you jest. ASUS is already giving it away for free now.
> There's nothing special about the NES era, as the article insinuates.
You are right there was nothing special about the NES, but there was something special about that time period, across both console, early 8bit PCs and the arcade scene. That was the period when everything was new, the genres were being defined and every month or two some development house was putting out something that was actually new and different.
For example, a lot of good fantasy has been written after J.R.R. Tolkien blew open the genre, but each generation keeps going back to his work. Same thing is games. Donkey Kong might not have been the very first 'platform' game but Mario's enduring legacy traces back to it and because it and the Mario sequels forever left such a stamp on the genre designers still, even unconsiously, follow in Nintendo's footsteps when doing anything that resembles a 'platformer.'
> In the future, gamers will be nostalgic for the games they grew up on.
And will pine away for them in vain. Emulation saved the old 8bit world from oblivion because DRM, even when used, wasn't a serious obstacle. There still hasn't been a proper crack for any of the current generation consoles. Hopefully the proven nostalgia market in this generation will induce teh publishers to do a port to the platforms of 20 years from now, but since the effort will be non-trivial and the die hard fans won't be able to do it themselves.....
> Actually that hasn't impressed anyone in a while, come to think of it.
> At least not since Apple figured out what a find index is.
Yo, fanboi. Try the locate command, most Linux distros had it years before Apple even thought about putting Mach under their eye candy.
Of course on modern distros the locate command will complain that it's database doesn't exist until you manually enable the service because the command line is supposed to be dead. :(
> Agreed. Non-story. This is just stupid.
Guess you didn't actually read the material. This shouldn't work but somehow a privledge escalation is allowing a non-root user to invoke telnetd and then to connect from outside and actually get a root shell. So the owner of the hardware is able to break int T-Mobile's software. Oh the horror!
So far it is more likely to simply get patched instead of developing into a full jailbreak but stay tuned. The camel's nose has entered the tent, it just might be able to get all the way in.
> I challenge you to find one in each category that is indeed close.
Close as in long history of working closely together in the case of professional assocations, or a long history of associating together in personal affairs.
When Ayers needed somebody he could trust to make sure as much of that $150M in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge went to himself and his fellow communist radicals he picked Barack Obama. He knew he could trust him because they had worked together before. Ayers had signed off on the grant that gave Mr. Obama his first paying job in Chicago. That professional relationship continued long past Ayers's infamous confessions surrounding the publication of Fugitive Days.
Obama himself has called Rev. Wright a close personal friend, a mentor and even a father figure. Rev. Wright wasn't one to be coy about his beliefs. Wright was preaching the same warmed over Marxism from his pulpit the day they met as he was when Obama threw him under the bus. If your minister of twenty years doesn't provide a clue about you what does it say about yer religious convictions? So which is it? Was Obama a cold blooded agnostic using Rev Wright to gain access to his politically connected congregation (which included a Who's Who of Chicago... including at one time Ms. Winfrey.) to further his political ambitions or did/does Mr. Obama actually believe the insane filth that flows so freely from Rev. Wright's chowhole. Or perhaps you would care to propose a third option because damned if I can see one.
> If you're friends with a man who was once a criminal when you were 8 years old but had changed in the decades since..
Now matter how many different ways I say it it is apparent you are 100% immune to reality. But for those following along I'll say it one more time just as clearly as possible.
Ayers hasn't changed. Not one bit. Listen to him. "Guilty as Hell. Free as a Bird." "I regret nothing." "I'm a small c communist"
And that is the problem. Ayers, by his own words is still the exact same communist radical. He has just decided he can do more for the cause from his perch as a department head at at major university than as bomber. But he explicitly doesn't renounce terrorism as a valid tactic, no he says he just might take up the bombs at some point in the future should he decide his current tactic isn't working.
Wright wasn't a nutjob in the distant past who reformed either. He was still spouting the crazy after Obams threw him under the bus, it is just that somebody has managed to get a muzzle on the guy for now. Expect him to resurface in a couple of days. If I wanted to put $100 on Wright being present at Obama's swearing in what odds would you give me?
> Joe Biden?
And he as been an associate of Obams for how long? Only a few months ago Biden was saying nice things about McCain and that Obama was far too inexperienced for POTUS.
> He's not one of those Muslim Micks, is he?
No, but Biden is an idiot. He has warmed a seat in the Senate since forever but has managed to learn nothing, He has been wrong on every major issue during his tenure. He voted against Gulf War I and for the second. Doesn't that put him 180 degrees opposed to Obama's positions? The idiot even voted against the Alaskan Pipeline!
Had Palin made half the factual errors Biden made she would have been forced to remove herself from politics. But did ya listen to the Washington press corps defend Biden? Ya, we all know he is a fool, but he's a good solid Party Member.
> And it's well known-that one of your good high school buddies was a pedophile.
> I'm going to show up at your job tomorrow and let everyone there know about
> how you like to pal around with pedophiles. You cool with that?
No retard, if you really can't see the difference there is no hope for ya.
If Axelrod went off the rails this afternoon (just too much stress) and shot up a shopping center nobody would accuse Obama of hanging with a mass murderer. It would correctly be seen as a tragedy. Had Ayers been all talk and no bomb until suddenly going off this week and blowing up some crap, again, it would be wrong to give any serious grief to Obama because a longtime associate got sudden jihad/revolution syndrome. But as Team Obama is always pointing out, Ayers started blowing stuff up when Obama was a wee lad of eight. That doesn't excuse the relationship, it is what makes it so bad. Ayers was the University of Chicago's Star Celebrity Terrorist, the notion that Obama was the only guy in town who didn't know about Ayers is simply not plausible.
And that's assuming you don't believe Ayers and Obama first met in Chicago and not at Columbia. Both were there and had Edward Said as a common connection. Obama as a student, Ayers as co-consirator.
> I'm not sure if he chose Palin because he liked her, or because his Masters told him too.
> Either way, she is not a good candidate for VP by any stretch of the imagination.
Perhaps he picked Palin because he knew his base didn't like him and without them he wasn't going to win. I know I said the day before that if he picked some lame ass RINO I was sitting the election out. Palin was my choice but I realized that she was a dark horse Internet blog pick and McCain probably wouldn't have the stones to go there. He suprised me and a lot of other folks when he did it. I ordered my yard sign that morning and apparently I wasn't alone because they had a two week backlog.
In retrospect it was a classic McCain play. He knew he needed Republicans to get behind him. He realized that he needed to go big and he did it. That's the part of McCain we respect, he will take big gambles when he thinks they are the right thing to do. The surge was another big gamble that paid off. McAmnesty was one that didn't. And that is our problem with him, we can't identify a coherent philosophy that allows us to predict where he will come down on an issue.
> Is it that hard for you to believe that Obama has associates who don't match these categories contrived by the media?
It isn't as if I haven't actually dug into this question a bit. I have. It isn't all his fault, other than he picked Chicago and Hyde Park to be his home base. The University of Chicago is the sort of place that would pick Bill Ayers as a department head. Calypso Louie's Temple of Crazy is just a short walk away. And if there is ONE uncorrupted politician in the whole town it would be a miracle so by definition every politician Obama is associated with is a crook. And Obama is right up to his neck in it too unless you think he is that one uncorrupted Chicago pol.
Now remember, Obama had no previous ties to Chicago when he graduated and decided to take up the job of Communist Agitator for Bill Ayers. Yes, go look it up for yourself since I doubt you will believe me. His first job in Chicago was paid for by a grant from the Woods Foundation and guess who was on the board. Bill Ayers.
> Obama has been absolutely spineless about the major philosophical and practical wounds inflicted by his own party.
Has Obama EVER taken a position against the majority of his party?
Has Obama EVER challenged the corruption of the Chicago machine?
Has Obama ever accomplished ANY major achievement?
Obama promises to remake the world. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Name one concrete accomplishment of Senator Obama in his career. Most people seeking POTUS can point to at least one major signature accomplishment. Obama? He gave a great speech at the '04 Democratic Convention.
> I think its best that religious folks stay home.
Can't we all just feel the tolerance this asshole is radiating?
It is fairly typical for a modern leftist. They believe in tolerance for all of their positions and utter hatred of all others. They believe in diversity in as much as they want all races, breeds, sexual variations to all come together and vote for Obama as one.