Depends on how you define Unix. OSX/iOS are based on FreeBSD & NetBSD. If you're talking about official, formal Unix OS's, neither Linux, the *BSDs or OSX would count as none of them are entitled to use the Unix trademark; only Solaris, HP-UX and AIX are, that I can think of.
If you're talking about POSIX compliance, OSX does count, but Linux and (oddly) the *BSDs don't. Even more bizarrely, you might count Windows as POSIX compliant due to Cygwin and the like.
If you're talking about "descended from Unix", you'd be able to count *BSD and OSX, but not Linux. If you mean "functionality based on Unix", you'd have to include Windows, which has whole vast swathes of BSD code in it, not to mention stuff it came by through it's VMS heritage. And if you mean "works a lot like Unix", you could probably reach a definition which includes Linux, *BSD & OSX, but excludes Windows.
Or to put it simply- it's a really complicated question unless you're really clear about your terms...
Regardless of how you cut it, they've still managed to attract $10,000,000 of pre-orders in 25 days, on a second-tier crowd-funding site which lacks a lot of mainstream footfall, for a product running unproven software and ill-defined hardware. That tells you* a lot about how appealing their product pitch is to it's potential market. I personally haven't pledged, because I can't quite stomach putting down $650 blind for a hypothetical product. But I would bite their arm off for it if it were on general sale.
* And more importantly, it doesn't just tell YOU about how appealing the concept is; it tells their potential OEM partners. That was probably the whole point of this. The good folks in management at Lenovo, Dell, Acer, etc. will be looking at those pre-orders a little enviously- do they think they could get the same interest and blind faith for their next "premium" Android handset?
I don't think so. Integrating is fine, as long as it's optional and non-default.
The IE bundling thing was a big deal because every Windows user had it installed prominently by default, and there was no way of removing it without breaking core functionality. If Microsoft had released a digital marketplace (like Steam), but made it not installed by default, not a dependency for any core Windows functionality, and not a requirement for playing games on an XBox, I don't think they would have had any trouble.
Whether it would have had any takers is a whole different matter, of course. Microsoft products only seem to get marketshare by using the bundle-and-dependency route; I don't think many of their efforts (XBox itself not withstanding) have managed to make a go of it on their own.
Biggest surprise of that linked blog post was that MATE is less memory intensive than XFCE. Pretty embarrassing for XFCE's "light-weight" cred. Although of course both are miles and miles better than any of the big boys (KDE, Unity, Gnome).
That might make me rethink my next "revive old hardware" install. MATE is certainly the more visually appealing of the two. I wonder how they compare in other performance areas?
Not many economies are integrated in the way you're thinking. Try looking at the economic data for London versus Yorkshire and see how often the two have moved in unison for any sustained period of time.
In most economies it is accepted fact that some areas will boom while others don't, and that the two will cross-subsidise and even each other out. The EU's problem isn't that the nations aren't in synch, it's that there isn't that level of acceptance of cross subsidisation yet. We still have a situation where a German man in the street might resent his taxes being spent in Spain; a hang over to old nationalism. Try asking Londoners if they resent their money being spent in Leeds; most wouldn't even have considered the question before.
Came here to say just that. It's a company putting on a courtesy bus- what's the big deal? Are we claiming that those employees sitting in traffic (on their own, one man per car) would somehow bring them "closer" to the rest of the population? Are we claiming that sharing a traffic jam is and was the only contact these people make with anyone outside of their own companies?
Load of nonsense. Probably just sour grapes from someone who wishes their employer provided a courtesy bus service...
It is bizarre and perplexing to me that a company should offer "100MB/s down, unlimited data!", and then be cross when anyone tries to run that connection at its advertised limits for 10 minutes in a row. Apparently I can only have that if I promise to continue to use it as if it were a 52kbps dial up connection...
It's dishonest. If you can't afford to sell me 100MB/s unlimited, don't pretend you can and take my money anyway. Tell me what you can afford to sell me, and your rivals can too and I can decide which provider to use based on who can offer me what I need. The only way to choose between them at the moment is by spurious word-of-mouth rumours...
There's a juicy irony in calling Windows a new, untested OS. Microsoft have been plugging Windows for touch screens for decades now; they just suck at it.
I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment, by the way, just enjoying the phrasing.
Doesn't KDE still follow the traditional click-the-menu paradigm? As does XFCE, Cinammon, MATE, LXDE, and most of the "lightweight" ones.
Gnome might not (I haven't tried Gnome 3 in ages). Unity presents a big text search by default, but the clickable list of all applications (filterable by category, as in Gnome 2) is only 2 clicks away. And this new fella (from TFA) is just an OS X clone- same paradigm Apple have been plugging for decades.
Well, "everybody" excluding (as you say) Apple, Microsoft, (and as you didn't say) Android, Blackberry, Jolla, Samsung/Tizen, Firefox...
It isn't a huge surprise that the big beasts of the Linux DE world might be on the same page. And since you mention it; the thought of a KDE phone is unbelievably appealing.
IE6 seemed more like an attempt to knee-cap other browsers, rather than an attempt to do anything genuinely revolutionary with the browser itself (and I really don't count ActiveX as revolutionary, either in intent or execution...).
It was the Mozilla continuity (through Netscape and Firefox) which really seemed to attempt to extend the browser beyond simple document viewing. While Chrome came much later, Google helped at the other end of the system by providing all the various cloud- and web-based applications to run it with.
You aren't wrong, but you are being disingenuous if you're claiming that Acer's strategic management made that mistake when deciding to focus on Chromebook/Android sales over Windows.
Presumably they're smart enough to do the maths and make an informed decision as to which way to steer their billion-dollar corporate giant. And presumably they think that the way their Chromebooks are selling, there is more untapped demand for Chromebooks than yet more Windows devices.
You just described the Ubuntu strategy. And you're right; that does seem like the best design, and it seems so obvious, and it's surprising how long it has taken for any major producers to jump on the idea.
I always thought the main point of HDCP was to prevent precious Hollywood movies leaking out of DVD land and on to Torrent. It only takes one determined hacker to render that purpose useless, even if you have (bonus!) managed to make millions of innocent users' lives more difficult in the process.
They're talking about the NEXT next Doctor. Peter Capaldi will be incarnation number 12. Number 13th is theoretically the last one (although obviously not necessarily), so in theory only one more opportunity to do so.
"Backed" does not mean the same as "required to produce". A modern dollar requires paper, metal and energy to produce- but it is not backed by these things.
The point of gold or silver backed currency is that your coin/note is an "IOU" for some gold or silver. If you wanted to, you could take your (old, gold-standard era) dollar to the Fed and request it's value in gold, and receive a few grains of metal for your trouble. Although a Bitcoin took electricity and computing cycles to create, you can't cash in a Bitcoin in exchange for electricity or time on a computer cluster; if you have a Bitcoin, all you can trade it for is a) another Bitcoin, or b) the property of someone who wants some Bitcoins.
(Caveat- I am not in any way endorsing a return to the Gold Standard; a view which is inexplicably popular on Slashdot. Gold Standard was an economic disaster, and there's a reason why every single world currency switched to fiat.)
If I run a Ponzi scheme whereby you invest $100 and I promise you $150 back, before promptly going bust and losing your money, you'd expect the SEC to get involved. If I run a Ponzi scheme where you give me 10oz of precious metal, and I promise you 15oz back- surely the SEC has just as much reason to regulate that.
And just to point out that the SEC's main remit isn't currency (in the conventional sense), but stocks and shares. If I scam you out of $1000 worth of shares, I have robbed you without a single $ changing hands. Indeed, I have just "bartered" $1000 worth of non-currency property out of you. Yet we still consider that an exchange of currency, even though the exchange did not involve any actual money.
What's stopping you putting a video recorder on the SCART/VGA/HDMI/whatever line between your cable box and your TV, in a daisy chain fashion? So instead of: CableBox >---SCART--->TV It's CableBox>---SCART--->Video>---SCART--->TV
That's how all of my childhood VCRs and later DVD-Rs were set up. Then you just set timers and reminders for your shows.
My company (which is a big UK national) enquired after this sort of arrangement (not for XP, but for another programme going out of support in 2014- an old Microsoft CMS). Basically, they wanted multi-millions for it. Our pockets are deep, but nowhere near deep enough for those shenanigans.
There won't be many companies who can justify that sort of cost on a long term basis.
I'm intrigued- what important stuff? If I snuff it, my family will have no great reason to get into my emails, social networks, shopping accounts, etc. And they don't need the password to my online banks and whatnot- they just need to inform the bank I'm dead (and present proof that they're my estate's executor), and the bank will give them access to everything they need to know. Indeed, it's illegal to access and withdraw money from the account of a dead person without going through the proper channels, as you might be doing so to deprive the beneficiary of their will, or to avoid inheritance taxes, or whatnot.
I'm not sure what my family would a) need to access and b) not be able to access by flashing my death certificate around. Pretty narrow Venn Diagram, there.
Firstly, the mobile phone market is a global one, not a national one; the phones created by companies today are for sale all over the world. Secondly, the mobile phone industry is remarkably competitive compared to some other industries. You've got 8 fully formed OSs that I can count in the Smart Phone space (Android, iOS, Windows, BB, Firefox, Tizen, Sailfish, Ubuntu), and lots of mass-market manufacturers (Apple, Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony, Nokia, Motorola...). While carrier lock-in seems common in the United States (if nowhere else), there are lots of big carriers competing with each other on a national scale (admittedly that doesn't offer much comfort to an individual customer in an area with a local monopoly, but the carriers do go head-to-head in most of the main metropolitan markets).
Mobile phones are just about as free a market as any market can get, within technological constraints. And it's still broken. That's because the whole concept of "free market" is a load of worthless wank with no historical supporting evidence of any kind. It's just a fantasy that some ideologues like to hang on to. Free market forces will certainly lead the market to "something", but there's absolutely no reason (other than wishful thinking) to believe that it will lead to cheaper, higher quality, and more varied products for the consumer.
Huawei is a company motivated by the desire to do business with people. There's nothing fishy about them trying to sell lots of your products to an emerging market.
China almost certainly does have espionage interests in Africa, and Huawei equipment might be a vector. But I'm sure they're joined in that noble endeavour by the NSA, GCHQ, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on how you define Unix. OSX/iOS are based on FreeBSD & NetBSD. If you're talking about official, formal Unix OS's, neither Linux, the *BSDs or OSX would count as none of them are entitled to use the Unix trademark; only Solaris, HP-UX and AIX are, that I can think of.
If you're talking about POSIX compliance, OSX does count, but Linux and (oddly) the *BSDs don't. Even more bizarrely, you might count Windows as POSIX compliant due to Cygwin and the like.
If you're talking about "descended from Unix", you'd be able to count *BSD and OSX, but not Linux. If you mean "functionality based on Unix", you'd have to include Windows, which has whole vast swathes of BSD code in it, not to mention stuff it came by through it's VMS heritage. And if you mean "works a lot like Unix", you could probably reach a definition which includes Linux, *BSD & OSX, but excludes Windows.
Or to put it simply- it's a really complicated question unless you're really clear about your terms...
Regardless of how you cut it, they've still managed to attract $10,000,000 of pre-orders in 25 days, on a second-tier crowd-funding site which lacks a lot of mainstream footfall, for a product running unproven software and ill-defined hardware. That tells you* a lot about how appealing their product pitch is to it's potential market. I personally haven't pledged, because I can't quite stomach putting down $650 blind for a hypothetical product. But I would bite their arm off for it if it were on general sale.
* And more importantly, it doesn't just tell YOU about how appealing the concept is; it tells their potential OEM partners. That was probably the whole point of this. The good folks in management at Lenovo, Dell, Acer, etc. will be looking at those pre-orders a little enviously- do they think they could get the same interest and blind faith for their next "premium" Android handset?
I don't think so. Integrating is fine, as long as it's optional and non-default.
The IE bundling thing was a big deal because every Windows user had it installed prominently by default, and there was no way of removing it without breaking core functionality. If Microsoft had released a digital marketplace (like Steam), but made it not installed by default, not a dependency for any core Windows functionality, and not a requirement for playing games on an XBox, I don't think they would have had any trouble.
Whether it would have had any takers is a whole different matter, of course. Microsoft products only seem to get marketshare by using the bundle-and-dependency route; I don't think many of their efforts (XBox itself not withstanding) have managed to make a go of it on their own.
Biggest surprise of that linked blog post was that MATE is less memory intensive than XFCE. Pretty embarrassing for XFCE's "light-weight" cred. Although of course both are miles and miles better than any of the big boys (KDE, Unity, Gnome).
That might make me rethink my next "revive old hardware" install. MATE is certainly the more visually appealing of the two. I wonder how they compare in other performance areas?
Not many economies are integrated in the way you're thinking. Try looking at the economic data for London versus Yorkshire and see how often the two have moved in unison for any sustained period of time.
In most economies it is accepted fact that some areas will boom while others don't, and that the two will cross-subsidise and even each other out. The EU's problem isn't that the nations aren't in synch, it's that there isn't that level of acceptance of cross subsidisation yet. We still have a situation where a German man in the street might resent his taxes being spent in Spain; a hang over to old nationalism. Try asking Londoners if they resent their money being spent in Leeds; most wouldn't even have considered the question before.
Came here to say just that. It's a company putting on a courtesy bus- what's the big deal? Are we claiming that those employees sitting in traffic (on their own, one man per car) would somehow bring them "closer" to the rest of the population? Are we claiming that sharing a traffic jam is and was the only contact these people make with anyone outside of their own companies?
Load of nonsense. Probably just sour grapes from someone who wishes their employer provided a courtesy bus service...
It is bizarre and perplexing to me that a company should offer "100MB/s down, unlimited data!", and then be cross when anyone tries to run that connection at its advertised limits for 10 minutes in a row. Apparently I can only have that if I promise to continue to use it as if it were a 52kbps dial up connection...
It's dishonest. If you can't afford to sell me 100MB/s unlimited, don't pretend you can and take my money anyway. Tell me what you can afford to sell me, and your rivals can too and I can decide which provider to use based on who can offer me what I need. The only way to choose between them at the moment is by spurious word-of-mouth rumours...
There's a juicy irony in calling Windows a new, untested OS. Microsoft have been plugging Windows for touch screens for decades now; they just suck at it.
I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment, by the way, just enjoying the phrasing.
Doesn't KDE still follow the traditional click-the-menu paradigm? As does XFCE, Cinammon, MATE, LXDE, and most of the "lightweight" ones.
Gnome might not (I haven't tried Gnome 3 in ages). Unity presents a big text search by default, but the clickable list of all applications (filterable by category, as in Gnome 2) is only 2 clicks away. And this new fella (from TFA) is just an OS X clone- same paradigm Apple have been plugging for decades.
In other words, you worry too much.
"I swear I wasn't involved! My original document was about a massive terrorist plot which was set to take place on 9/12! I'm innocent, damn it!".
Well, "everybody" excluding (as you say) Apple, Microsoft, (and as you didn't say) Android, Blackberry, Jolla, Samsung/Tizen, Firefox...
It isn't a huge surprise that the big beasts of the Linux DE world might be on the same page. And since you mention it; the thought of a KDE phone is unbelievably appealing.
IE6 seemed more like an attempt to knee-cap other browsers, rather than an attempt to do anything genuinely revolutionary with the browser itself (and I really don't count ActiveX as revolutionary, either in intent or execution...).
It was the Mozilla continuity (through Netscape and Firefox) which really seemed to attempt to extend the browser beyond simple document viewing. While Chrome came much later, Google helped at the other end of the system by providing all the various cloud- and web-based applications to run it with.
Why bother installing ChromeOS if you're going to install Emacs? You only need one OS on a laptop!
You aren't wrong, but you are being disingenuous if you're claiming that Acer's strategic management made that mistake when deciding to focus on Chromebook/Android sales over Windows.
Presumably they're smart enough to do the maths and make an informed decision as to which way to steer their billion-dollar corporate giant. And presumably they think that the way their Chromebooks are selling, there is more untapped demand for Chromebooks than yet more Windows devices.
You just described the Ubuntu strategy. And you're right; that does seem like the best design, and it seems so obvious, and it's surprising how long it has taken for any major producers to jump on the idea.
I always thought the main point of HDCP was to prevent precious Hollywood movies leaking out of DVD land and on to Torrent. It only takes one determined hacker to render that purpose useless, even if you have (bonus!) managed to make millions of innocent users' lives more difficult in the process.
But then that's the DRM story all over, isn't it.
They're talking about the NEXT next Doctor. Peter Capaldi will be incarnation number 12. Number 13th is theoretically the last one (although obviously not necessarily), so in theory only one more opportunity to do so.
Luckily enough, that's not exactly an obstacle in this particular universe...
"Backed" does not mean the same as "required to produce". A modern dollar requires paper, metal and energy to produce- but it is not backed by these things.
The point of gold or silver backed currency is that your coin/note is an "IOU" for some gold or silver. If you wanted to, you could take your (old, gold-standard era) dollar to the Fed and request it's value in gold, and receive a few grains of metal for your trouble. Although a Bitcoin took electricity and computing cycles to create, you can't cash in a Bitcoin in exchange for electricity or time on a computer cluster; if you have a Bitcoin, all you can trade it for is a) another Bitcoin, or b) the property of someone who wants some Bitcoins.
(Caveat- I am not in any way endorsing a return to the Gold Standard; a view which is inexplicably popular on Slashdot. Gold Standard was an economic disaster, and there's a reason why every single world currency switched to fiat.)
Pretty much, yeah. And why not?
If I run a Ponzi scheme whereby you invest $100 and I promise you $150 back, before promptly going bust and losing your money, you'd expect the SEC to get involved. If I run a Ponzi scheme where you give me 10oz of precious metal, and I promise you 15oz back- surely the SEC has just as much reason to regulate that.
And just to point out that the SEC's main remit isn't currency (in the conventional sense), but stocks and shares. If I scam you out of $1000 worth of shares, I have robbed you without a single $ changing hands. Indeed, I have just "bartered" $1000 worth of non-currency property out of you. Yet we still consider that an exchange of currency, even though the exchange did not involve any actual money.
What's stopping you putting a video recorder on the SCART/VGA/HDMI/whatever line between your cable box and your TV, in a daisy chain fashion? So instead of:
CableBox >---SCART--->TV
It's
CableBox>---SCART--->Video>---SCART--->TV
That's how all of my childhood VCRs and later DVD-Rs were set up. Then you just set timers and reminders for your shows.
It's that or set up a MythTV box, obviously.
My company (which is a big UK national) enquired after this sort of arrangement (not for XP, but for another programme going out of support in 2014- an old Microsoft CMS). Basically, they wanted multi-millions for it. Our pockets are deep, but nowhere near deep enough for those shenanigans.
There won't be many companies who can justify that sort of cost on a long term basis.
I'm intrigued- what important stuff? If I snuff it, my family will have no great reason to get into my emails, social networks, shopping accounts, etc. And they don't need the password to my online banks and whatnot- they just need to inform the bank I'm dead (and present proof that they're my estate's executor), and the bank will give them access to everything they need to know. Indeed, it's illegal to access and withdraw money from the account of a dead person without going through the proper channels, as you might be doing so to deprive the beneficiary of their will, or to avoid inheritance taxes, or whatnot.
I'm not sure what my family would a) need to access and b) not be able to access by flashing my death certificate around. Pretty narrow Venn Diagram, there.
How so?
Firstly, the mobile phone market is a global one, not a national one; the phones created by companies today are for sale all over the world. Secondly, the mobile phone industry is remarkably competitive compared to some other industries. You've got 8 fully formed OSs that I can count in the Smart Phone space (Android, iOS, Windows, BB, Firefox, Tizen, Sailfish, Ubuntu), and lots of mass-market manufacturers (Apple, Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony, Nokia, Motorola...). While carrier lock-in seems common in the United States (if nowhere else), there are lots of big carriers competing with each other on a national scale (admittedly that doesn't offer much comfort to an individual customer in an area with a local monopoly, but the carriers do go head-to-head in most of the main metropolitan markets).
Mobile phones are just about as free a market as any market can get, within technological constraints. And it's still broken. That's because the whole concept of "free market" is a load of worthless wank with no historical supporting evidence of any kind. It's just a fantasy that some ideologues like to hang on to. Free market forces will certainly lead the market to "something", but there's absolutely no reason (other than wishful thinking) to believe that it will lead to cheaper, higher quality, and more varied products for the consumer.
No.
Huawei is a company motivated by the desire to do business with people. There's nothing fishy about them trying to sell lots of your products to an emerging market.
China almost certainly does have espionage interests in Africa, and Huawei equipment might be a vector. But I'm sure they're joined in that noble endeavour by the NSA, GCHQ, etc...