> All this hysteria is just being generated by the democrats..
As is this BS about it taking six months to change people's pay rate. Here in Biizzaro World something that silly doesn't even get laughed at. In a sane world you would just issue an edict that said, "Shut up and get to work. It's simple, $6.55 * 40.0 = $262. I just ordered the banks to bounce any payroll check greater than that amount drawn on the State's payroll account. I'm betting THEIR Information Tech Dept can manage to carry out that order so you idiots had better make sure you don't cut one for more or somebody is going to get a worthless check instead of a small one."
Yup, I know that because PackageKit removed those when I told it to get Mono the hell off my Fedora install. Those are just little desktop toys that the system runs just fine without. And the day that isn't so is when I move to Xfce.... assuming I don't make the jump sooner. I have ran it for days at at time now and really like it. But it doesn't offer any big reason to migrate everyone at work so for now I'm sticking to the same brand of dogfood I'm feeding everyone else.
No, KDE isn't on my radar. There aren't any problems I have with GNOME that KDE solves. Both are copycats. GNOME seems to favor cloning Microsoft's internals and putting a Mac like UI for Dummies on it, KDE takes whatever TrollTech throws over the wall[1], heaps love on it and then clones Microsoft's braindamaged UI with those (admittedly nice) tools.
The Xfce effort seems to at least be trying to explore what a modern desktop for UNIX looks like. And of course GNUStep will someday be insanely great! Probably just in time to ship as the default on GNU Hurd.
[1] Yes Qt is now GPL, but just how many non Trolltech employees have commit access? In a race for an outsider to get a changeset committed between a Java devel and a Qt devel, which one wins? If any.
My question is what problem is solved by Mono or Silverlight?
Mono v Java is no longer a contest, Java is Free and Mono is a patent minefield laid by a convicted monopolist.
Flash v Silverlight isn't as black and white but there are Free plugins for Flash in active development and the spec is open. Meanwhile Silverlight is a patent minefield laid by a convicted monopolist. In every way that Adobe is difficult to work with Microosft is worse.
Yet Miguel is not only in love with C# and everything Microsoft to the point of wanting every smelly bit ported over to ensire they can promose developers 100% marketshare, he is hellbent in tying GNOME development to the whims of Microsoft.
If anybody actually believed this were true you can bet yer ass the headline wouldn't be some gaywad solar power crap. This reads like 'gimme more funding' not 'major breakthrough, woo hoo I'm going to be rich!'
Near 100% efficiency converting electricity and H2O into H and O2 would be major. Fuel cells are already pretty efficent. So combined you would have the damned holy grail of energy storage. Billions and billions in wealth waiting to be reaped from people happy to hand over the money because real problems would be solved.
> Free, GPL AND open source? All in one package? However do they do it?!
Easy. They lie^Wmarketspeak. It is free, not Free, isn't GPL and not even Open Source. They have a GPL'd cut down version you can get though that isn't much more than the free QEMU they built their product around with some of the shiny wrapper included. Of course since QEMU is Free they didn't exactly have much of a choice did they? So why give them high praise for simply complying with the GPL?
According to their own webpage the cut version lacks USB support, remote display and some other features that I'd agree only enterprise customers are likely to be interested in. But QEMU itself has VNC support and some USB support.
> Look at, for instance, the death of many of the P2P clients > being sued for enabling copyright infringement successfully.
A few differences. Most of those cases involved arguing that the operators were actively encouraging infringement. Screenshots on Napster's old site filled with copyrighted works didn't do em much good. Note that there are still a lot of P2P networks still operating. It required a fair amount of greed and stupidity to get into legal trouble.
> They *can* if they get the right judge it would seem.
That is a more general problem with judges making law and the unpredictability of the US legal system that resulted from judicial activism.
> How are game developers supposed to make money if all their games > can be dumped onto a cartridge for free, easily.
How does Hollywood make billions when DVDs can be trivially copied? How does the music industry make money in a world of mp3 trading? They do it, perhaps not quite as humongous piles of cash but Batman just cleared 300M$ at the box office and Britney Spears is heading back to the studio so she expects her mindless drones^W^Wremaining fans to cough up some more cash.
PC games often have 'no cd' cracks up before the game is in the stores and they still rake in Sagens.
Copyright grants authors an exclusive right to control reproduction and public performance of their works. I missed the clause in the Constituition that gives em the right to control any and all physical products sold in interstate commerce on the grounds that among their uses is that it might make infringement a little easier. Thus the DMCA is flatly unconstituitional and I for one ignore it.
> Which leaves concerns over piracy at the motivation for Nintendo, > et al, in filing suit.
Who cares? By your logic the Supremes would have ruled against Sony in the Betamax decision, because most VCR use was piracy. Especially if you buy the argument that recording TV was infringing use. And thus the whole home video revolution would have been stillborn. You can't ban technology because it MIGHT be used for ill, you can't even ban it because MOST use of it is illegal. You CAN bust people trading ROM images.
> they don't require a dedicated piece of gaming hardware along with > a specialized cartridge for it
They do if you want to play away from a PC. Zillions of people play simple flash games. It stands to reason that some non-trivial number would play them on a handheld if it were easy. The reason vendors don't sell games like that is Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft demands a large fixed price per title on all of the locked consoles and simple games like that would have to sell for $5-$10 to have a chance of selling.
A Nintendo DS is a small computer: Trying to stop people from running programs on it is like trying to make water not wet. (To mangle an infamous quote.)
Personally my dream is to someday have the Supremes issue a ruling to that effect. Say something like, "You can try to lock down your products if you like, just don't expect US to put people in jail for running programs on a computer they own. Oh, and that goes for you Apple, we won't put people in jail for running your software on whatever computer they want to."
Well yes and no. Did you read the part where they measured total power expended to accomplish various tasks? Burning more power is OK if you can finish the job faster and get back into a low power state. When that is factored in the contest is a bit closer. Of course if the Nano does run for long it is going to bake your lap more than the Atom and drain the battery a lot faster.
Looking at the photos makes it plain where the problem now lies, the northbridge. If Intel can get theirs under control they will totally dominate the low power business. But since the Nano draws so much more power a low power northbridge won't help them as much, which bodes ill for the future. Intel has a lot more room for improvement while Via would have to pull a major rabbit out of their hat to cut much off their current power consumption numbers.
And for small computers that aren't running on batteries but do need to be fairly cool (i.e. quiet) the Nano will be the hands down winner just because Intel is playing marketing games.
> It also means that Windows can compete - very successfully - in the same space:
No. It means that in the $400-$700 space Windows can compete, something we already knew. That it's advantages derived from it's installed base outweigh the incremental price increase when the total sticker price of the system is high enough.
But seeing the ASUS EEEPC 900's modified Xandros convinced me that Linux can indeed be made fully suitable for the ordinary masses. And while ASUS is no longer looking at the $300 space there are others who are. That Linux can play in that space is what makes it possible to build hardware in that catagory. In a few years the hardware specs I gave the Mrs. from ASUS will be in $200 Chinese hardware. And Linux will be running it, not XP, not Vista, not Windows 7. That is when Microsoft is going to be in trouble.
Do the math. The new lower price for XP on hardware destined for the 1st world is $37? (Can't remember the exact number...) That's wholesale in quantity. Mark that up and it would raise a $200 retail to a $260-$275 sticker price. That's pain at the cash register. We will finally see just how much value customers put on the Windows sticker on the box when it won't be a matter of the Linux and XP version being the same price with a few plums thrown at the Penguin folk.
And how long can they keep XP shipping? Remember, as long as XP is shipping in quantity 3rd party vendors will resist Vista Only releases. Obviously hardcore games authors won't care if small underpowered laptops that can't play the games anyway still ship with XP, but what of productivity, contact management/PIM, finance, etc. software? The forced upgrade treadmill is key to Microsoft's profits.
In the end, if I'm right that we entering an age where a sub $300 PC will be 'good enough' for most folks then even if they bite the bullet and keep offering a cutthroat priced OS for the emerging low cost computing devices they still lose. The pricing is so far below what they typically charge it will kill profits and Wall Street will demand heads on sharp sticks. Even worse if to make sales against the Linux+OO.o boxes they have to throw in a truly useful version of Works or heaven forbid, a basic version of Office.
Any replacement for LaTeX that intends to do most of the same things is pretty much doomed to be markup language, even if you dump XML pixie dust on it. XML after all is just a horrible human unreadable markup language itself.
So once one accepts that the question simplifies to can LaTeX be replaced with something more usable by humans. First off the font system is purely a legacy thing, since Tex predates pretty much all other currently popular font tech. So could LaTeX be retrofitted to use TrueType for everything? Probably. In a 100% backwards compatible way? Only if a genius pulls a freaking miracle out of his butt.
If someone were to do a total rethink/rewrite, and if said person were a genius on the level with Knuth, then by making use of what we know today a new and better typesetting system could probably be created. Getting everyone to agree on anything else would be the biggest problem.
College isn't the only place to learn, probably not even be the best place. But expecting to survive in the Information Age with a junior high education (as the idiot I was aiming the flamethrower at was claiming) is just daft.
> The world needs ditch diggers too... and stockboys, coffee makers, and retail clerks.
It does today... but for how much longer? A person coming of age in the next few years will probably live to see many of those positions obsoleted. Not even many actual ditchdiggers today, lots of backhoe operators but not a lot of guys with shovels. Tomorrow it will be one guy supervising a bunch of semi intelligent automated equipment. That one guy will be the one holding the blueprints and making the big picture decisions the machines won't be quite smart enough to be trusted with. Bob the Builder in live action.. and with that nightmare thought I'll stop.
> Just like the iPod the money will be in replacements and the iTunes store.
No. iPods made good profit for Apple from day one and still do. iTunes is as much a driver of iPod sales as iPods drive traffic to the iTunes store.
> If Apple can get a 20% cut of every program sold then they will make lots of money.
There aren't many people stupid enough to buy into such a closed ecosystem for them to have any hope of double digit penetration, especially with decades of experience with more open PCs. Even current Macs don't require app vendors to give Apple a percentage. They have about saturated the mildly retarded but somehow wealthy market already, I guess they can hope to milk a little from the mentally deficient poor but then what?
Although what do I know, I'd have never bought into a closed phone or PDA but millions of lemmings can't be wrong? Hell, most phones ship with handcuffs not just Apple's pretty little turds.
> The fact is, the U.S. had what you recommend earlier in its history, > and it didn't work as you describe.
I dunno, I'd say the system prior to mandatory education in government schools worked pretty damned good all other things considered. At that point a lot of people really didn't need the level of education we need these days to succeed so it didn't make always make sense to spend twelve years in a classroom.... especially in an age when life expectency was much shorter.
But anybody who wanted and was willing to put some effort into it managed to learn to read, write and do masic math. If you really had the desire (and didn't have the misfortune to, for example, have to stop your education to become the primary breadwinner for your family) getting a high school education wasn't exactly hard.
And remember, what passed for an 8th grade education back then would be a college freshman today. Don't believe me? Go watch Ken Burns' miniseries on the 'Civil War' and observe the literacy of those 'barely educated farmers' writing home from the front. Note not only the literacy and writing skills but the knowledge of literature, history and philosophy the writers possessed.
> Opps we find out that we can really get by with less than > a junior high education.
For sure. If you think making shift manager at Burger King is a career goal instead of just a waystation on a longer path..... that you achieved at 20 putting yourself through college. And I really wish we could stop the people who think a junior high education makes them ready to vote from getting near a voting booth.
In the post industrial world we are now transitioning into it is all about having a clue and being able to reason. That means you need to know things, and unless you are one of the few who can self teach themselves it means an education. Unskilled labor is just people we are keeping around because a) we haven't quite got the robots perfected yet to take over your job and b) even after the robots we will be too squemish to put 'yall down so we will give you a welfare check until you die of natural causes, which will probably be pretty early with your tendencies to unhealthy habits.
[Yes this post is borderline flamebait. But it also has some painful truth in it that will hopefully get some arguiments going.]
> This has been the death knell for OEM Linux at Walmart.
Only because it was done poorly. I gave the Mrs. an EEEPC 900, thus I have played around with one enough to say one thing about them: It works.
And that changes everything. It means that Linux for the masses can be done. ASUS and Xandros obviously busted their asses to pull it off, but it proves it can be done. And Moore's Law is bringing the price of the required hardware lower and lower so it is only a matter of time now.
Apple and Microsoft can't compete in the The geek will blow a C-note on a fantasy that comes with a > thirty-second warranty...
The ASUS offering comes with a 1 year warranty, same as most other midrange consumer electronics. But you are correct, warranty coverage is important which is why the winner in the next stage, the $300 market, will probabaly be one which offers at least a 90-180 day warranty. By the time the sweet spot gets to $99-$149 a basic ninety day warranty will probably be just fine.
> bureaucrats who like education the way it is â" flawed and > therefore always needing more money?
It's even worse. To the bureaucrats, liberals and other enemies of civilization the government schools aren't broken, they are working exactly as they designed them.
Like socialism, our government schools are relics of the Industrial Revolution and the assumptions and thinking of that era. All 'right thinking people' of the period believed Socialism was the future. And the other major thing they believed was that the purpose of mandatory public education was social engineering, to remake the unruly free peoples of the civilizations engendered by the Enlightenment into docile worker bees fit to work long mind numbing hours in factories. Leader types (the ones making these policies) would, of course, continue sending their own children to elite academies to be taught how to be doers, thinkers, leaders.
Nope, won't happen. The Macbook Air will probably eventually get a smaller version but Apple won't enter the lowcost netpad market for the same reason Microsoft won't play in the $300 space either. They both would lose by winning. Of course failing to play, while the right move short term, is longterm death.
We are facing a major extinction level disaster for almost all of the major players in the computing industry as customers are coming to the realization that $200-$300 will buy 'enough' computer for most people's day to day needs. But all of the major players have built their whole business around computers that have subsystems in that price range.
Imagine what the coming new world looks like. Imagine ten years out when most people, corporate desktops included, aren't paying more then $200-300 per seat including all of the basic productivity software. Assume Apple somehow launched an iNetbook and got 100% marketshare. Compare and contrast to their approx 10%[1] market share of PC sales. It is a certainty that even in that most rosy of scenarios their profits would be DOWN since they would be very lucky to be making $50 ($25 would be more realistic) free and clear per seat while they make hundreds off of each sale of a current machine. That that assumes Apple has driven Microsoft, Dell, etc. completely out of business which isn't bloody likely. The math of the lowered price gutting sales and profits apply equally well if Microsoft or Dell tries to win.
On the other hand a new player, or a currently small (ASUS) player can play this new game and win. Sure they won't be as big as Dell/Apple/Microsoft when the dust settles but they can still be a lot bigger than they currently are. Or as the RedHat guy said years ago, the goal isn't to become as large as Microsoft, the goal is to make Microsoft as small as RedHat... i.e. you go up, they come down and ya pass em on your way up.
Or even more bluntly, PCs are about to finally become consumer electronics. There is both good and bad in that, but it is going to happen so anyone who wants to survive better realize that and find a way to live with it.
[1] Yes I know that 10% is Mac fanboi fiction, work with me here and lets use round numbers, K?
> In fact, I have often wondered if we couldn't duplicate the > cheap-laptops-for-kids efforts with free, donated laptops...
Do the fscking math. Those exotic ultralights sold in the thousands for each model, there might be a million in existance on the whole planet. Assuming every one still operating could be collected up you would be left with the dubious task of making a reference install for hundreds of hardware variations and after buying new batteries, upgrading and replacing a few hard drives, etc. you still only have a few hundred thousand units. And none were designed to meet the special needs of kids. Except for the few Toughbooks (are there even eny ultralight Toughbooks?) you would get they don't tend to be very durable.
Expand to trying to recycle any laptops and you get fifty pound children trying to slog their way to school with a fifteen pound laptop bag full 'o crap.
Seriously. Just click around on that website. Looks like China is about to unleash a crapload of cheap laptops. I said it back when the EEEPC refocused on the $400-$600 market, that at those prices Linux was going to get replaced with XP and I was mostly right. But I also said somebody would remember the hugh interest when Asus mentioned a $200 pricepoint and that somebody would fill it. Consider it filled.
Most of these are very poorly thought out designs, especially today's link. Most will fail in the marketplace, only a few will even get into mass retail channels as even the morons at Best Buy can smell the fail. But all it takes is for ONE to succeed and that will probably happen. When that happens everything changes.
Re:He's just this guy, you know.
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Apple After Jobs
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> However, providing he's not the only, single source of talent within the company..
He isn't. But it is probably safe to say he is the sole source of LEADERSHIP in the company because his ego would never permit anyone else to show any inititive. Anyone who disagreed with his Steveness would by now either have left the company or learned to supress their disagreements, drink deeply of the Kool-Aid and do His will. And thus have spent a decade NOT developing the skillset needed to do Steve's job someday.
That means they will be forced to go outside the company for a replacement and that spells trouble. They might survive the period while the cultures clash, but it will be a rough patch where little gets done.
As did other simple integrated productivity apps. Hell, Tandy's Deskmate predates Office. None of those mattered and neither did AppleWorks, and for the same reason.
Office was from Microsoft. Only they could force enough of a critical mass to get the full network effect going and ramp up to a monopoly. Only Microsoft could blow WordPerfect and Lotus out of their way.
> Apple is taking more than its fair share out of the economy.
No they aren't. But it does mean their stock valuation is unreasonable, thus I long since got out of it, after taking some nice gains. Yes I missed some hella big upside, but that is the rear view mirror. I also missed out on Enron, Countrywide and most of the dot bomb. Because I understand the concept of bubbles and that unrealistic valuations have a nasty tendency to suddenly and violently correct and it is very hard to pick the top and very easy to stay in a day too long.
Just keep holding that AAPL and watch what happens. Stocks that are priced to perfection tend to fall hard on the first sign of bad news. For example, watch what the current rumors are doing, now imagine what would happen if the wires run a real story in a few weeks that His Steveness is in the hospital or something.
> but when one person/group/company controls the entire ecosystem
I can't help it if people can't understand that there isn't a "Vista PC". Microsoft just makes one component that PC makers use, along with CPUs, GPUs, storage devices, power supplies, etc. to make a system. Buy from a crappy company and you get a crappy machine. Blame the company who sold you the system if they didn't properly integrate the subsystems.
Apple has the advantage of making the OS and the integrated systems, but the drawbacks have proven to far outweigh the benefits. Yes, proven.
The invisible hand of the marketplace has rendered it's verdict. If Apple's way were better they would have found broad market acceptance by now and not just be a small[1] niche seller of luxury goods to customers who buy status symbols. Especially nowadays since Apple is a fabless builder who could double their production in China with a phone call... if they had more customers willing to pay super premium prices for under performing products with insane legal restrictions.
How many times per year does/. excoriate Apple for the huge fscking hole in their product line they refuse to fill, just to gouge their limited customer base? That tells me that Apple is convinced that introducing a midrange choice would just result in most of the current customers buying that instead of the insane Xeon monsters they have to buy currently and few new customers being added. And they are probably correct.
The knowledge that Apple is totally sue happy is probably a minor reason major accounts avoid them. Individuals generally don't care, knowing they would have to do something infamous to be worth suing, but a corporation with deep pockets and a legal department worries about getting entangled with rogues.
[1] iPod excepted. They managed to dominate that segment for a while, but competition has finally delivered enough quality products at better prices that their dominance is fading. But I was never tempted to buy one, knowing what sort of assholes Apple are. Although the older units that can run Rockbox tempt a bit on the grounds that eBay should be able to supply replacement hardware for a few years.
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> All this hysteria is just being generated by the democrats..
As is this BS about it taking six months to change people's pay rate. Here in Biizzaro World something that silly doesn't even get laughed at. In a sane world you would just issue an edict that said, "Shut up and get to work. It's simple, $6.55 * 40.0 = $262. I just ordered the banks to bounce any payroll check greater than that amount drawn on the State's payroll account. I'm betting THEIR Information Tech Dept can manage to carry out that order so you idiots had better make sure you don't cut one for more or somebody is going to get a worthless check instead of a small one."
> it's required for running Tomboy and F-Spot.
Yup, I know that because PackageKit removed those when I told it to get Mono the hell off my Fedora install. Those are just little desktop toys that the system runs just fine without. And the day that isn't so is when I move to Xfce.... assuming I don't make the jump sooner. I have ran it for days at at time now and really like it. But it doesn't offer any big reason to migrate everyone at work so for now I'm sticking to the same brand of dogfood I'm feeding everyone else.
No, KDE isn't on my radar. There aren't any problems I have with GNOME that KDE solves. Both are copycats. GNOME seems to favor cloning Microsoft's internals and putting a Mac like UI for Dummies on it, KDE takes whatever TrollTech throws over the wall[1], heaps love on it and then clones Microsoft's braindamaged UI with those (admittedly nice) tools.
The Xfce effort seems to at least be trying to explore what a modern desktop for UNIX looks like. And of course GNUStep will someday be insanely great! Probably just in time to ship as the default on GNU Hurd.
[1] Yes Qt is now GPL, but just how many non Trolltech employees have commit access? In a race for an outsider to get a changeset committed between a Java devel and a Qt devel, which one wins? If any.
My question is what problem is solved by Mono or Silverlight?
Mono v Java is no longer a contest, Java is Free and Mono is a patent minefield laid by a convicted monopolist.
Flash v Silverlight isn't as black and white but there are Free plugins for Flash in active development and the spec is open. Meanwhile Silverlight is a patent minefield laid by a convicted monopolist. In every way that Adobe is difficult to work with Microosft is worse.
Yet Miguel is not only in love with C# and everything Microsoft to the point of wanting every smelly bit ported over to ensire they can promose developers 100% marketshare, he is hellbent in tying GNOME development to the whims of Microsoft.
A pox on him, and his corporate owners at Novell.
If anybody actually believed this were true you can bet yer ass the headline wouldn't be some gaywad solar power crap. This reads like 'gimme more funding' not 'major breakthrough, woo hoo I'm going to be rich!'
Near 100% efficiency converting electricity and H2O into H and O2 would be major. Fuel cells are already pretty efficent. So combined you would have the damned holy grail of energy storage. Billions and billions in wealth waiting to be reaped from people happy to hand over the money because real problems would be solved.
> Free, GPL AND open source? All in one package? However do they do it?!
Easy. They lie^Wmarketspeak. It is free, not Free, isn't GPL and not even Open Source. They have a GPL'd cut down version you can get though that isn't much more than the free QEMU they built their product around with some of the shiny wrapper included. Of course since QEMU is Free they didn't exactly have much of a choice did they? So why give them high praise for simply complying with the GPL?
According to their own webpage the cut version lacks USB support, remote display and some other features that I'd agree only enterprise customers are likely to be interested in. But QEMU itself has VNC support and some USB support.
> Look at, for instance, the death of many of the P2P clients
> being sued for enabling copyright infringement successfully.
A few differences. Most of those cases involved arguing that the operators were actively encouraging infringement. Screenshots on Napster's old site filled with copyrighted works didn't do em much good. Note that there are still a lot of P2P networks still operating. It required a fair amount of greed and stupidity to get into legal trouble.
> They *can* if they get the right judge it would seem.
That is a more general problem with judges making law and the unpredictability of the US legal system that resulted from judicial activism.
> How are game developers supposed to make money if all their games
> can be dumped onto a cartridge for free, easily.
How does Hollywood make billions when DVDs can be trivially copied? How does the music industry make money in a world of mp3 trading? They do it, perhaps not quite as humongous piles of cash but Batman just cleared 300M$ at the box office and Britney Spears is heading back to the studio so she expects her mindless drones^W^Wremaining fans to cough up some more cash.
PC games often have 'no cd' cracks up before the game is in the stores and they still rake in Sagens.
Copyright grants authors an exclusive right to control reproduction and public performance of their works. I missed the clause in the Constituition that gives em the right to control any and all physical products sold in interstate commerce on the grounds that among their uses is that it might make infringement a little easier. Thus the DMCA is flatly unconstituitional and I for one ignore it.
> Would you have paid $35 per title...
Who cares?
> Which leaves concerns over piracy at the motivation for Nintendo,
> et al, in filing suit.
Who cares? By your logic the Supremes would have ruled against Sony in the Betamax decision, because most VCR use was piracy. Especially if you buy the argument that recording TV was infringing use. And thus the whole home video revolution would have been stillborn. You can't ban technology because it MIGHT be used for ill, you can't even ban it because MOST use of it is illegal. You CAN bust people trading ROM images.
> they don't require a dedicated piece of gaming hardware along with
> a specialized cartridge for it
They do if you want to play away from a PC. Zillions of people play simple flash games. It stands to reason that some non-trivial number would play them on a handheld if it were easy. The reason vendors don't sell games like that is Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft demands a large fixed price per title on all of the locked consoles and simple games like that would have to sell for $5-$10 to have a chance of selling.
A Nintendo DS is a small computer: Trying to stop people from running programs on it is like trying to make water not wet. (To mangle an infamous quote.)
Personally my dream is to someday have the Supremes issue a ruling to that effect. Say something like, "You can try to lock down your products if you like, just don't expect US to put people in jail for running programs on a computer they own. Oh, and that goes for you Apple, we won't put people in jail for running your software on whatever computer they want to."
Well yes and no. Did you read the part where they measured total power expended to accomplish various tasks? Burning more power is OK if you can finish the job faster and get back into a low power state. When that is factored in the contest is a bit closer. Of course if the Nano does run for long it is going to bake your lap more than the Atom and drain the battery a lot faster.
Looking at the photos makes it plain where the problem now lies, the northbridge. If Intel can get theirs under control they will totally dominate the low power business. But since the Nano draws so much more power a low power northbridge won't help them as much, which bodes ill for the future. Intel has a lot more room for improvement while Via would have to pull a major rabbit out of their hat to cut much off their current power consumption numbers.
And for small computers that aren't running on batteries but do need to be fairly cool (i.e. quiet) the Nano will be the hands down winner just because Intel is playing marketing games.
> It also means that Windows can compete - very successfully - in the same space:
No. It means that in the $400-$700 space Windows can compete, something we already knew. That it's advantages derived from it's installed base outweigh the incremental price increase when the total sticker price of the system is high enough.
But seeing the ASUS EEEPC 900's modified Xandros convinced me that Linux can indeed be made fully suitable for the ordinary masses. And while ASUS is no longer looking at the $300 space there are others who are. That Linux can play in that space is what makes it possible to build hardware in that catagory. In a few years the hardware specs I gave the Mrs. from ASUS will be in $200 Chinese hardware. And Linux will be running it, not XP, not Vista, not Windows 7. That is when Microsoft is going to be in trouble.
Do the math. The new lower price for XP on hardware destined for the 1st world is $37? (Can't remember the exact number...) That's wholesale in quantity. Mark that up and it would raise a $200 retail to a $260-$275 sticker price. That's pain at the cash register. We will finally see just how much value customers put on the Windows sticker on the box when it won't be a matter of the Linux and XP version being the same price with a few plums thrown at the Penguin folk.
And how long can they keep XP shipping? Remember, as long as XP is shipping in quantity 3rd party vendors will resist Vista Only releases. Obviously hardcore games authors won't care if small underpowered laptops that can't play the games anyway still ship with XP, but what of productivity, contact management/PIM, finance, etc. software? The forced upgrade treadmill is key to Microsoft's profits.
In the end, if I'm right that we entering an age where a sub $300 PC will be 'good enough' for most folks then even if they bite the bullet and keep offering a cutthroat priced OS for the emerging low cost computing devices they still lose. The pricing is so far below what they typically charge it will kill profits and Wall Street will demand heads on sharp sticks. Even worse if to make sales against the Linux+OO.o boxes they have to throw in a truly useful version of Works or heaven forbid, a basic version of Office.
Any replacement for LaTeX that intends to do most of the same things is pretty much doomed to be markup language, even if you dump XML pixie dust on it. XML after all is just a horrible human unreadable markup language itself.
So once one accepts that the question simplifies to can LaTeX be replaced with something more usable by humans. First off the font system is purely a legacy thing, since Tex predates pretty much all other currently popular font tech. So could LaTeX be retrofitted to use TrueType for everything? Probably. In a 100% backwards compatible way? Only if a genius pulls a freaking miracle out of his butt.
If someone were to do a total rethink/rewrite, and if said person were a genius on the level with Knuth, then by making use of what we know today a new and better typesetting system could probably be created. Getting everyone to agree on anything else would be the biggest problem.
> ..you're a failure if you don't go to college.
College isn't the only place to learn, probably not even be the best place. But expecting to survive in the Information Age with a junior high education (as the idiot I was aiming the flamethrower at was claiming) is just daft.
> The world needs ditch diggers too... and stockboys, coffee makers, and retail clerks.
It does today... but for how much longer? A person coming of age in the next few years will probably live to see many of those positions obsoleted. Not even many actual ditchdiggers today, lots of backhoe operators but not a lot of guys with shovels. Tomorrow it will be one guy supervising a bunch of semi intelligent automated equipment. That one guy will be the one holding the blueprints and making the big picture decisions the machines won't be quite smart enough to be trusted with. Bob the Builder in live action.. and with that nightmare thought I'll stop.
> Just like the iPod the money will be in replacements and the iTunes store.
No. iPods made good profit for Apple from day one and still do. iTunes is as much a driver of iPod sales as iPods drive traffic to the iTunes store.
> If Apple can get a 20% cut of every program sold then they will make lots of money.
There aren't many people stupid enough to buy into such a closed ecosystem for them to have any hope of double digit penetration, especially with decades of experience with more open PCs. Even current Macs don't require app vendors to give Apple a percentage. They have about saturated the mildly retarded but somehow wealthy market already, I guess they can hope to milk a little from the mentally deficient poor but then what?
Although what do I know, I'd have never bought into a closed phone or PDA but millions of lemmings can't be wrong? Hell, most phones ship with handcuffs not just Apple's pretty little turds.
> The fact is, the U.S. had what you recommend earlier in its history,
> and it didn't work as you describe.
I dunno, I'd say the system prior to mandatory education in government schools worked pretty damned good all other things considered. At that point a lot of people really didn't need the level of education we need these days to succeed so it didn't make always make sense to spend twelve years in a classroom.... especially in an age when life expectency was much shorter.
But anybody who wanted and was willing to put some effort into it managed to learn to read, write and do masic math. If you really had the desire (and didn't have the misfortune to, for example, have to stop your education to become the primary breadwinner for your family) getting a high school education wasn't exactly hard.
And remember, what passed for an 8th grade education back then would be a college freshman today. Don't believe me? Go watch Ken Burns' miniseries on the 'Civil War' and observe the literacy of those 'barely educated farmers' writing home from the front. Note not only the literacy and writing skills but the knowledge of literature, history and philosophy the writers possessed.
> Opps we find out that we can really get by with less than
> a junior high education.
For sure. If you think making shift manager at Burger King is a career goal instead of just a waystation on a longer path..... that you achieved at 20 putting yourself through college. And I really wish we could stop the people who think a junior high education makes them ready to vote from getting near a voting booth.
In the post industrial world we are now transitioning into it is all about having a clue and being able to reason. That means you need to know things, and unless you are one of the few who can self teach themselves it means an education. Unskilled labor is just people we are keeping around because a) we haven't quite got the robots perfected yet to take over your job and b) even after the robots we will be too squemish to put 'yall down so we will give you a welfare check until you die of natural causes, which will probably be pretty early with your tendencies to unhealthy habits.
[Yes this post is borderline flamebait. But it also has some painful truth in it that will hopefully get some arguiments going.]
> This has been the death knell for OEM Linux at Walmart.
Only because it was done poorly. I gave the Mrs. an EEEPC 900, thus I have played around with one enough to say one thing about them: It works.
And that changes everything. It means that Linux for the masses can be done. ASUS and Xandros obviously busted their asses to pull it off, but it proves it can be done. And Moore's Law is bringing the price of the required hardware lower and lower so it is only a matter of time now.
Apple and Microsoft can't compete in the The geek will blow a C-note on a fantasy that comes with a
> thirty-second warranty...
The ASUS offering comes with a 1 year warranty, same as most other midrange consumer electronics. But you are correct, warranty coverage is important which is why the winner in the next stage, the $300 market, will probabaly be one which offers at least a 90-180 day warranty. By the time the sweet spot gets to $99-$149 a basic ninety day warranty will probably be just fine.
> bureaucrats who like education the way it is â" flawed and
> therefore always needing more money?
It's even worse. To the bureaucrats, liberals and other enemies of civilization the government schools aren't broken, they are working exactly as they designed them.
Like socialism, our government schools are relics of the Industrial Revolution and the assumptions and thinking of that era. All 'right thinking people' of the period believed Socialism was the future. And the other major thing they believed was that the purpose of mandatory public education was social engineering, to remake the unruly free peoples of the civilizations engendered by the Enlightenment into docile worker bees fit to work long mind numbing hours in factories. Leader types (the ones making these policies) would, of course, continue sending their own children to elite academies to be taught how to be doers, thinkers, leaders.
> Just wait for the iNetbook.
Nope, won't happen. The Macbook Air will probably eventually get a smaller version but Apple won't enter the lowcost netpad market for the same reason Microsoft won't play in the $300 space either. They both would lose by winning. Of course failing to play, while the right move short term, is longterm death.
We are facing a major extinction level disaster for almost all of the major players in the computing industry as customers are coming to the realization that $200-$300 will buy 'enough' computer for most people's day to day needs. But all of the major players have built their whole business around computers that have subsystems in that price range.
Imagine what the coming new world looks like. Imagine ten years out when most people, corporate desktops included, aren't paying more then $200-300 per seat including all of the basic productivity software. Assume Apple somehow launched an iNetbook and got 100% marketshare. Compare and contrast to their approx 10%[1] market share of PC sales. It is a certainty that even in that most rosy of scenarios their profits would be DOWN since they would be very lucky to be making $50 ($25 would be more realistic) free and clear per seat while they make hundreds off of each sale of a current machine. That that assumes Apple has driven Microsoft, Dell, etc. completely out of business which isn't bloody likely. The math of the lowered price gutting sales and profits apply equally well if Microsoft or Dell tries to win.
On the other hand a new player, or a currently small (ASUS) player can play this new game and win. Sure they won't be as big as Dell/Apple/Microsoft when the dust settles but they can still be a lot bigger than they currently are. Or as the RedHat guy said years ago, the goal isn't to become as large as Microsoft, the goal is to make Microsoft as small as RedHat... i.e. you go up, they come down and ya pass em on your way up.
Or even more bluntly, PCs are about to finally become consumer electronics. There is both good and bad in that, but it is going to happen so anyone who wants to survive better realize that and find a way to live with it.
[1] Yes I know that 10% is Mac fanboi fiction, work with me here and lets use round numbers, K?
> In fact, I have often wondered if we couldn't duplicate the
> cheap-laptops-for-kids efforts with free, donated laptops...
Do the fscking math. Those exotic ultralights sold in the thousands for each model, there might be a million in existance on the whole planet. Assuming every one still operating could be collected up you would be left with the dubious task of making a reference install for hundreds of hardware variations and after buying new batteries, upgrading and replacing a few hard drives, etc. you still only have a few hundred thousand units. And none were designed to meet the special needs of kids. Except for the few Toughbooks (are there even eny ultralight Toughbooks?) you would get they don't tend to be very durable.
Expand to trying to recycle any laptops and you get fifty pound children trying to slog their way to school with a fifteen pound laptop bag full 'o crap.
Seriously. Just click around on that website. Looks like China is about to unleash a crapload of cheap laptops. I said it back when the EEEPC refocused on the $400-$600 market, that at those prices Linux was going to get replaced with XP and I was mostly right. But I also said somebody would remember the hugh interest when Asus mentioned a $200 pricepoint and that somebody would fill it. Consider it filled.
Most of these are very poorly thought out designs, especially today's link. Most will fail in the marketplace, only a few will even get into mass retail channels as even the morons at Best Buy can smell the fail. But all it takes is for ONE to succeed and that will probably happen. When that happens everything changes.
> However, providing he's not the only, single source of talent within the company..
He isn't. But it is probably safe to say he is the sole source of LEADERSHIP in the company because his ego would never permit anyone else to show any inititive. Anyone who disagreed with his Steveness would by now either have left the company or learned to supress their disagreements, drink deeply of the Kool-Aid and do His will. And thus have spent a decade NOT developing the skillset needed to do Steve's job someday.
That means they will be forced to go outside the company for a replacement and that spells trouble. They might survive the period while the cultures clash, but it will be a rough patch where little gets done.
> AppleWorks predates MS Office by 5 years.
As did other simple integrated productivity apps. Hell, Tandy's Deskmate predates Office. None of those mattered and neither did AppleWorks, and for the same reason.
Office was from Microsoft. Only they could force enough of a critical mass to get the full network effect going and ramp up to a monopoly. Only Microsoft could blow WordPerfect and Lotus out of their way.
> Apple is taking more than its fair share out of the economy.
No they aren't. But it does mean their stock valuation is unreasonable, thus I long since got out of it, after taking some nice gains. Yes I missed some hella big upside, but that is the rear view mirror. I also missed out on Enron, Countrywide and most of the dot bomb. Because I understand the concept of bubbles and that unrealistic valuations have a nasty tendency to suddenly and violently correct and it is very hard to pick the top and very easy to stay in a day too long.
Just keep holding that AAPL and watch what happens. Stocks that are priced to perfection tend to fall hard on the first sign of bad news. For example, watch what the current rumors are doing, now imagine what would happen if the wires run a real story in a few weeks that His Steveness is in the hospital or something.
> but when one person/group/company controls the entire ecosystem
I can't help it if people can't understand that there isn't a "Vista PC". Microsoft just makes one component that PC makers use, along with CPUs, GPUs, storage devices, power supplies, etc. to make a system. Buy from a crappy company and you get a crappy machine. Blame the company who sold you the system if they didn't properly integrate the subsystems.
Apple has the advantage of making the OS and the integrated systems, but the drawbacks have proven to far outweigh the benefits. Yes, proven.
The invisible hand of the marketplace has rendered it's verdict. If Apple's way were better they would have found broad market acceptance by now and not just be a small[1] niche seller of luxury goods to customers who buy status symbols. Especially nowadays since Apple is a fabless builder who could double their production in China with a phone call... if they had more customers willing to pay super premium prices for under performing products with insane legal restrictions.
How many times per year does /. excoriate Apple for the huge fscking hole in their product line they refuse to fill, just to gouge their limited customer base? That tells me that Apple is convinced that introducing a midrange choice would just result in most of the current customers buying that instead of the insane Xeon monsters they have to buy currently and few new customers being added. And they are probably correct.
The knowledge that Apple is totally sue happy is probably a minor reason major accounts avoid them. Individuals generally don't care, knowing they would have to do something infamous to be worth suing, but a corporation with deep pockets and a legal department worries about getting entangled with rogues.
[1] iPod excepted. They managed to dominate that segment for a while, but competition has finally delivered enough quality products at better prices that their dominance is fading. But I was never tempted to buy one, knowing what sort of assholes Apple are. Although the older units that can run Rockbox tempt a bit on the grounds that eBay should be able to supply replacement hardware for a few years.