No need to be rude. We're pretty much agreeing. Windows is popular because it's popular. It has critical mass. Acer/HP/Dell/etc. already have built up support structures internally, and the internet is already full of users to support each other. Compare with Linux and it's lack of big corporate backers, and smaller user base.
If Acer/HP/Dell/etc. wanted to go with Linux, they'd need to really *commit* to it to get over those hurdles. Doing it half-heartedly won't work. They'd need to spend lots and lots of money on building up a credible, supportable, stable system, and then ride out the stormy early days while the user base (hopefully) grows.
That's never happened, and never been likely to happen before. But assuming that, in this fantasy situation, Microsoft abandons the OEM model to "do an Apple", and the very survival of Acer/HP/Dell/etc. depends on a drastic change of strategy, then who knows?
Most of them faltered at the first hurdle (providing the same level of stability and support as they do with Windows), and were stomped on by Microsoft and their contractual obligations.
Assuming they were willing to stick fingers up at Microsoft (this fantasy situation assumes they're using Linux as a lifeboat to escape competing with their biggest supplier), the support and stability thing is just a matter of persistence. They've never had the motive to stick with it before; who knows how it would go if their corporate lives depended on it?
There have been articles recently about Apple possibly buying Nokia, both for the phone hardware and patents, and for the navteq mapping company that nokia owns.
Even if apple didn't buy Nokia outright, it would still make more sense for the next iphone to be made by someone other than their current ally/enemy Samsung, and apple could license the Navteq maps like the stand-alone GPS makers already do.
I don't buy that rumour. I just can't fathom a reason why Apple (hugely profitable phone maker with cast iron brand) would buy Nokia (hugely loss-making, wedded almost inexorably to one of Apple's biggest rivals). For a handful of patents and some factories? Patents aren't worth THAT much hassle, and it's far cheaper for them to just use contract manufacturers as they always have. If they really wanted in-house factories, there are plenty of no-brand contract manufacturers (such as Foxconn and their ilk) they could buy instead.
Someone like HTC buying Nokia seems more plausible. HTC make Windows phones, and lack a strong global brand like Nokia's. They also have a lot of money to play with, but aren't making much profit and will be grasping for a change of strategy to turn things around. That or someone like Dell or Lenovo- Windows shops which have never managed to break into mobile phones under their own steam.
Hardware will always have a cost, whereas software doesn't necessarily.
If hardware costs $100, and you're willing to pay $100, then it is also probable that you'll be willing to part with $101 (and the company will make a profit).
If software costs $0, and you're only willing to pay $0, it's very difficult to convince you to even pay $1.
Lucky you. I'm UK, finished secondary school 2002. We had a couple of rooms full of Windows NT boxes, and lessons were pretty much exclusively "how to use MS Office". We never learned a single line of programming, never touched a database, never heard a single word of information on networking. And the irony is, our schools had "technology specialist" status!
I don't know if an influx of Pis will help, but it can't exactly make the situation worse...
I was one of the god forsaken "power users" in a previous admin (of the office kind, not the IT kind) job. We had some painful calculations as part of a process that I was doing by hand, and which my (less mathematically confident) colleagues couldn't manage. Seriously long-winded, fiddly stuff resulting from 4 different accounting systems being stitched together after a long series of buyouts and mergers. I lobbied for months to get something automatic built, but the IT department wouldn't do it as they didn't want to support it. So I built something hackish in Excel with BASIC which "got the job done".
I've long since left that job, and I'm sure we can imagine which department now has the job of maintaining that piece of crap!
One fundamental problem with Dyson Spheres (or "space energy" of any variety) is global warming. No, not the greenhouse gas kind, but the thermodynamic kind. If you capture energy that was destined to radiate out into deep space, beam it to earth, and use it to do any work, you'll raise the planet's temperature. If you're capturing a significant proportion of the Sun's energy and utilising it in futuristic devices on Earth, you'll be doing something not terribly unlike increasing Earth's temperature by the entire output of the Sun.
The same objection has been levelled at nuclear power (particularly in relation to futuristic cold fusion).
Obviously, you can discount this if all your energy is going to be used powering spaceships and whatnot.
They donate at least $100,000 to the Linux Foundation a year, if nothing else. Pocket money to Google, maybe. But No small chunk of change to the Linux Foundation. Creating and releasing an extremely popular and novel Linux-based OS has got to count for something, too.
Samsung donates at least $500,000 a year, so they do still win in "we love Linux" top trumps.
Who's forcing what on who? You're the one wishing that they'd "die". Nobody's forcing you to buy one just because they exist.
Netbooks are still stocked in all good PC retailers, so I presume they're selling well enough. There must be enough people interested in small cheap laptops that the likes of Acer, Asus and HP still consider it worth their while to design and manufacture them, and Curry's to stock them. If Acer weren't selling any, presumably they'd stop making them and save the hassle.
Maybe netbooks are "niche" (although I can't imagine something "niche" being so widely available); but since when do we all need to buy only the products that you like? A choice between a 15" laptop and a tablet with an ARM processor might suit you fine, but surely the world has enough room for an extra competing product?
Power Mac G5s can't be upgraded beyond OS X 10.5, which is no longer supported by Apple. That is, no security updates, driver updates, or what have you.
Compare with Windows XP, which was itself "deprecated" in favour of Vista in 2006. While it's true that you might have bought an XP machine just before the Vista launch, the difference is that Windows XP will be supported by Microsoft until April 2014. There's also not really any such thing as an XP box that "can't" be upgraded to Vista or Win 7. It might not be practical taking into account processor or RAM, but there are no genuine barriers. It is very unlikely that an XP box bought in 2006 couldn't have been upgraded to Vista in 2007. This is again unlike the situation with G5s.
I've just sold 4 XP desktop computers refurbished. 2 of them were from around 2006, and the other 2 were from around 2002 (the latter two Acers, the former were custom builds). Not for a lot of money, obviously, but some. That's a very long working life those machines have had- should I have expected less?
I've owned several netbooks, and I love them. What I want is something small enough that it'll fit in my bag, and cheap enough that I wouldn't be devastated if it got broken or stolen. My netbook has a 10" screen and cost £100 less than the very very cheapest notebook I can find (and I'm going to take a punt that that notebook is not of the highest of quality). The only things I can find of even remotely similar price and size are cheap Android tablets- which have considerably lower-powered processors and no built in keyboard. I run them with Linux on, so I don't miss any software features.
In other words- just because a product isn't for you, it doesn't mean it isn't for someone.
That sounds crazy. I'm one of the guys from "the other department" who is always requesting things of coders. But I never go to the coders directly- company policy. I go to their managers. Their managers then dish out the work to their teams as required.
You know, management doing some managing. Odd concept, I know.
Did you ask your manager for a breakdown of what he does all day?
That would presumably be "possession of an illegal weapon" or "possession of hazardous materials without a licence which proves that you're competent to do so". Both of which seem basically sensible rules.
Possession of a computer programme that's capable of copying data seems like a rather less pressing problem to us mere plebs.
I'm not a huge fan of wheat beers, but they taste nothing like lager. They have very distinctive (some would say pungent) flavour (which is why I don't like them, as an English ale drinker).
Reserve your scorn for deserving targets like lager, and leave the real drinks like ale and wheat beer well alone!
I'm going to assume that if they've put your name and face on the video, they can't genuinely argue that the video has nothing to do with you.
If you haven't already, plaster your website with messages about their group, how you don't endorse them, and how they're lieing thieving gits. Tell them that you'll be happy to remove the messages if they stop infringing your copyright. It probably won't work, but at least you can give their reputationa good kicking. Speaking of which- you failed to mention the infringer by name in your submission. The YouTube submission is in the name of Harun Yahya, real name Adnan Oktar, a Turkish Islamic fundamentalist, creationist, conspiracy theorist and holocaust denier (so says Wikipedia).
Looking at his Wikipedia page, it looks like this man is no stranger to court cases, but it's still worth going the legal route. I think you're British, right? In that case, go to your local Citizen's Advice Bureaux and ask them to hook you up with a good specialist lawyer in your area. Ask for a free consultation and see what they think. If they advise you not to bother, it might be worth just leaving it and moving on with your life.
The problem with helium is that it's cheap- undervalued, compared to what it should be worth, in the extreme.
So the cost of refining impure helium for scanners is greater than buying freshly mined stuff (or stuff being sold off from stockpiles). This is also the reason we're selling one of the rarest and most difficult to harvest elements on Earth on the higstreet for using at children's parties. And the reason, too, that medical scanners boil off helium rather than capturing and recycling it.
If helium were worth its value (lets say several thousand dollars per kilo), a lot of that would be fixed.
That was including SourceForge and FreeCode too. I bet Slashdot isn't worth much compared to SourceForge.
To play imaginary maths- if Slashdot had 10,000 members, and the price was $5,000,000, then that'd be a $500 price tag per person. Still too much, but not crazily out of reach. How many active users do you think Slashdot has these days?
Slashdot Mirror
No need to be rude. We're pretty much agreeing. Windows is popular because it's popular. It has critical mass. Acer/HP/Dell/etc. already have built up support structures internally, and the internet is already full of users to support each other. Compare with Linux and it's lack of big corporate backers, and smaller user base.
If Acer/HP/Dell/etc. wanted to go with Linux, they'd need to really *commit* to it to get over those hurdles. Doing it half-heartedly won't work. They'd need to spend lots and lots of money on building up a credible, supportable, stable system, and then ride out the stormy early days while the user base (hopefully) grows.
That's never happened, and never been likely to happen before. But assuming that, in this fantasy situation, Microsoft abandons the OEM model to "do an Apple", and the very survival of Acer/HP/Dell/etc. depends on a drastic change of strategy, then who knows?
Most of them faltered at the first hurdle (providing the same level of stability and support as they do with Windows), and were stomped on by Microsoft and their contractual obligations.
Assuming they were willing to stick fingers up at Microsoft (this fantasy situation assumes they're using Linux as a lifeboat to escape competing with their biggest supplier), the support and stability thing is just a matter of persistence. They've never had the motive to stick with it before; who knows how it would go if their corporate lives depended on it?
There have been articles recently about Apple possibly buying Nokia, both for the phone hardware and patents, and for the navteq mapping company that nokia owns.
http://www.tnl.net/blog/2012/10/06/why-apple-should-acquire-nokia/
Even if apple didn't buy Nokia outright, it would still make more sense for the next iphone to be made by someone other than their current ally/enemy Samsung, and apple could license the Navteq maps like the stand-alone GPS makers already do.
I don't buy that rumour. I just can't fathom a reason why Apple (hugely profitable phone maker with cast iron brand) would buy Nokia (hugely loss-making, wedded almost inexorably to one of Apple's biggest rivals). For a handful of patents and some factories? Patents aren't worth THAT much hassle, and it's far cheaper for them to just use contract manufacturers as they always have. If they really wanted in-house factories, there are plenty of no-brand contract manufacturers (such as Foxconn and their ilk) they could buy instead.
Someone like HTC buying Nokia seems more plausible. HTC make Windows phones, and lack a strong global brand like Nokia's. They also have a lot of money to play with, but aren't making much profit and will be grasping for a change of strategy to turn things around. That or someone like Dell or Lenovo- Windows shops which have never managed to break into mobile phones under their own steam.
Hardware will always have a cost, whereas software doesn't necessarily.
If hardware costs $100, and you're willing to pay $100, then it is also probable that you'll be willing to part with $101 (and the company will make a profit).
If software costs $0, and you're only willing to pay $0, it's very difficult to convince you to even pay $1.
Apple and Nokia are direct competitors. Google and Motorola had a supplier/buyer relationship. That's the difference.
A supplier merging with their long term partner is integration. A company swallowing one of its biggest rivals is an anti-trust issue.
Minor pedantry- the British Union of Fascists were "blackshirts", not "brown shirts".
You think the majority of mobile computers will be in tablet form factor, as opposed to laptop form factor? On what time scale?
In 2011, 233 million laptops were estimated to have been sold, versus 70 million tablets. So 3.25x more. (Numbers according to Gartner, so YMMV).
I'd be very surprised if tablets in circulation overtake laptops anything like soon.
Lucky you. I'm UK, finished secondary school 2002. We had a couple of rooms full of Windows NT boxes, and lessons were pretty much exclusively "how to use MS Office". We never learned a single line of programming, never touched a database, never heard a single word of information on networking. And the irony is, our schools had "technology specialist" status!
I don't know if an influx of Pis will help, but it can't exactly make the situation worse...
Seconded there.
I was one of the god forsaken "power users" in a previous admin (of the office kind, not the IT kind) job. We had some painful calculations as part of a process that I was doing by hand, and which my (less mathematically confident) colleagues couldn't manage. Seriously long-winded, fiddly stuff resulting from 4 different accounting systems being stitched together after a long series of buyouts and mergers. I lobbied for months to get something automatic built, but the IT department wouldn't do it as they didn't want to support it. So I built something hackish in Excel with BASIC which "got the job done".
I've long since left that job, and I'm sure we can imagine which department now has the job of maintaining that piece of crap!
One fundamental problem with Dyson Spheres (or "space energy" of any variety) is global warming. No, not the greenhouse gas kind, but the thermodynamic kind. If you capture energy that was destined to radiate out into deep space, beam it to earth, and use it to do any work, you'll raise the planet's temperature. If you're capturing a significant proportion of the Sun's energy and utilising it in futuristic devices on Earth, you'll be doing something not terribly unlike increasing Earth's temperature by the entire output of the Sun.
The same objection has been levelled at nuclear power (particularly in relation to futuristic cold fusion).
Obviously, you can discount this if all your energy is going to be used powering spaceships and whatnot.
They donate at least $100,000 to the Linux Foundation a year, if nothing else. Pocket money to Google, maybe. But No small chunk of change to the Linux Foundation. Creating and releasing an extremely popular and novel Linux-based OS has got to count for something, too.
Samsung donates at least $500,000 a year, so they do still win in "we love Linux" top trumps.
Why would you need to look up his IP protocol? There are only two of them (4 and 6), and Slashdot doesn't support 6 (I think).
You might want to look up his IP number- but that's not very funny.
Who's forcing what on who? You're the one wishing that they'd "die". Nobody's forcing you to buy one just because they exist.
Netbooks are still stocked in all good PC retailers, so I presume they're selling well enough. There must be enough people interested in small cheap laptops that the likes of Acer, Asus and HP still consider it worth their while to design and manufacture them, and Curry's to stock them. If Acer weren't selling any, presumably they'd stop making them and save the hassle.
Maybe netbooks are "niche" (although I can't imagine something "niche" being so widely available); but since when do we all need to buy only the products that you like? A choice between a 15" laptop and a tablet with an ARM processor might suit you fine, but surely the world has enough room for an extra competing product?
We've been here before already:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin
As a civilization, we have extremely short memory sometimes...
Power Mac G5s can't be upgraded beyond OS X 10.5, which is no longer supported by Apple. That is, no security updates, driver updates, or what have you.
Compare with Windows XP, which was itself "deprecated" in favour of Vista in 2006. While it's true that you might have bought an XP machine just before the Vista launch, the difference is that Windows XP will be supported by Microsoft until April 2014. There's also not really any such thing as an XP box that "can't" be upgraded to Vista or Win 7. It might not be practical taking into account processor or RAM, but there are no genuine barriers. It is very unlikely that an XP box bought in 2006 couldn't have been upgraded to Vista in 2007. This is again unlike the situation with G5s.
I've just sold 4 XP desktop computers refurbished. 2 of them were from around 2006, and the other 2 were from around 2002 (the latter two Acers, the former were custom builds). Not for a lot of money, obviously, but some. That's a very long working life those machines have had- should I have expected less?
I've owned several netbooks, and I love them. What I want is something small enough that it'll fit in my bag, and cheap enough that I wouldn't be devastated if it got broken or stolen. My netbook has a 10" screen and cost £100 less than the very very cheapest notebook I can find (and I'm going to take a punt that that notebook is not of the highest of quality). The only things I can find of even remotely similar price and size are cheap Android tablets- which have considerably lower-powered processors and no built in keyboard. I run them with Linux on, so I don't miss any software features.
In other words- just because a product isn't for you, it doesn't mean it isn't for someone.
That sounds crazy. I'm one of the guys from "the other department" who is always requesting things of coders. But I never go to the coders directly- company policy. I go to their managers. Their managers then dish out the work to their teams as required.
You know, management doing some managing. Odd concept, I know.
Did you ask your manager for a breakdown of what he does all day?
That would presumably be "possession of an illegal weapon" or "possession of hazardous materials without a licence which proves that you're competent to do so". Both of which seem basically sensible rules.
Possession of a computer programme that's capable of copying data seems like a rather less pressing problem to us mere plebs.
I'm 99% sure that someone from the Google Maps Team is a Slashdot regular- it looks fixed to me now.
Not the first time someone's bitched about a Google Maps bug on here only to see it immediately fixed (happened to me once).
I haven't looked into it particularly (I own no dimmers), but you can buy "dimmable bulbs":
http://www.energybulbs.co.uk/products/Dimmable+Light+Bulbs
Assuming they work as described, that's you main objection solved. Have a happy life!
I'm not a huge fan of wheat beers, but they taste nothing like lager. They have very distinctive (some would say pungent) flavour (which is why I don't like them, as an English ale drinker).
Reserve your scorn for deserving targets like lager, and leave the real drinks like ale and wheat beer well alone!
I'm going to assume that if they've put your name and face on the video, they can't genuinely argue that the video has nothing to do with you.
If you haven't already, plaster your website with messages about their group, how you don't endorse them, and how they're lieing thieving gits. Tell them that you'll be happy to remove the messages if they stop infringing your copyright. It probably won't work, but at least you can give their reputationa good kicking. Speaking of which- you failed to mention the infringer by name in your submission. The YouTube submission is in the name of Harun Yahya, real name Adnan Oktar, a Turkish Islamic fundamentalist, creationist, conspiracy theorist and holocaust denier (so says Wikipedia).
Looking at his Wikipedia page, it looks like this man is no stranger to court cases, but it's still worth going the legal route. I think you're British, right? In that case, go to your local Citizen's Advice Bureaux and ask them to hook you up with a good specialist lawyer in your area. Ask for a free consultation and see what they think. If they advise you not to bother, it might be worth just leaving it and moving on with your life.
Seeing as YouTube is a US site, I'm thinking it still "means shit" in this guy's case.
The problem with helium is that it's cheap- undervalued, compared to what it should be worth, in the extreme.
So the cost of refining impure helium for scanners is greater than buying freshly mined stuff (or stuff being sold off from stockpiles). This is also the reason we're selling one of the rarest and most difficult to harvest elements on Earth on the higstreet for using at children's parties. And the reason, too, that medical scanners boil off helium rather than capturing and recycling it.
If helium were worth its value (lets say several thousand dollars per kilo), a lot of that would be fixed.
That was including SourceForge and FreeCode too. I bet Slashdot isn't worth much compared to SourceForge.
To play imaginary maths- if Slashdot had 10,000 members, and the price was $5,000,000, then that'd be a $500 price tag per person. Still too much, but not crazily out of reach. How many active users do you think Slashdot has these days?