The story makes it seem that the math is bad, but it's not. True, the rep apparently mistated 0.015 cents as 1.5 cents, but the $11K results from the LOWER 0.015 cents number:
9x10^6 KB * 8 bits/byte * 0.015 cents/kbit * $1/100 cents = $10,800.
I'm not sure you understand what you're looking at then:)
I guess I don't. What I see is a web page that contains a bunch of plots based on data from NOAA, updated daily, and therefore not going through any kind of peer-review process. I don't see any journal articles on that page.
Or, maybe you don't know what "peer reviewed research" is in reality.
"Peer-reviewed research" refers to journal articles and dissertations which have undergone a scholarly review process prior to publication.
That is not a link to a peer-reviewed article, it is a link to a PNG image. Anyway, it is only for sea ice, which I agree may be growing. What causes ocean levels to rise, however, is glaciers melting and running into the ocean, which has been well-documented. You can look at the paper of Eric Rignot, for example, in Science 2006. The effect from Greenland alone is estimated to contribute 1/4 inch rise in ocean level per decade.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5763/986
No, in fact the scientific consensus is that this kind of result is consistent with a growing global warming problem.
Here is the reason, in simple terms. Global warming leads to increased rates of evaporation from the ocean. Despite global warming, it is still freezing at the poles, and when the higher vapor levels reach the poles, it tends to snow more, leading to increased ice in those areas.
Overall, however, the amount of ice in the world is dramatically decreasing, and oceans are predicted to rise by up to three feet by the end of the century.
Aside from my quibbles that multiple implementations or "uses XML" should not really be part of the definition of an open format, there is not a clear way to interpret the bill as excluding OOXML, the format MS rammed through as an ISO standard to compete with ODF. So if the intent is to support ODF and disallow OOXML, I don't see that this will do it. (The bill as written requires documents to be an open document format, which the bill defines as one that is XML, open, interoperable across platforms and applications, published without restrictions or royalties, independently implemented by multiple SW providers, controlled by an open industry organization -- could arguably apply to both ODF and OOXML.)
And boy oh boy, is Aman Batheja, the author of the Star Telegram article, confused. First of all, he confuses "open document formats" and "open source." He writes, "State Rep. Marc Veasey is pushing lawmakers to require all state agencies to create and share their electronic documents in open-source formats." The bill has nothing to do with open source, or programming of any kind! The bill simply states that the file format for DOCUMENTS should be open, like ODF (and unlike,.doc/.ppt).
He goes on, in his confusion, "It could also mean that many state workers may see familiar Microsoft products such as Word and Excel replaced with lesser-known competitors on their work computers." Again, wrong. MS Office 2007 already has an ODF plugin, so you can read and save to ODF formats from within MS Office if you want to keep using MS Office.
And you wonder why people tune out the Linux crowd.
No, I don't wonder. I realize that MS has been effective as hoodwinking many people into believing they are a "good" monopoly.
Or were you talking about the other part, you know, where I stated some facts about the ad campains? Well, facts are pesky things. I'm sorry the "He's linux" commercial that debuted during the Superbowl in 2004 predates the "I'm a Mac" (2006-) and "I'm a PC" (2007-) series. Fine, tune that out. Good luck with that.
Well as usual with Linux, they show up late to the game
Not quite -- the "he's linux" commercial preceeded either the Mac or PC ad series. Perhaps the only usual thing is that Apple and MS take undeserved credit.
and produce a half ass working team that people find unbearable to watch while the hardcore crowd yells at them for being peons.
But hey we can criticize MS/Apple all day, but when it comes to Linux we have to treat them with special care because they 'do it for free'.
No, we can criticize MS because we've proven in court they illegally use their monopoly to extinguish competition in other areas, and Apple because they lock down both their hardware and software. Linux is the best open source OS there is, and anyone who cares about software freedom ought to care about it.
That is a funny reply to the Mac ad series, but have people already forgotten the great linux ad which *preceded* either the Mac or PC ad series? Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwL0G9wK8j4
It includes Mohommad Ali, Sylvia Nasar, Penny Marshall, and former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.
Wouldn't it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution?
Before trying to get a nice, clean installation of MS Office on linux, how about we wait until a nice, clean installation of MS Office is available for Windows? I haven't seen anything nice or clean yet. MS Office can't even open its own, older files securely (and so MS doesn't allow it to try), and file format isn't documented so any application that wants to interoperate resorts to reverse engineering. Did you see the piece of crap MS put together for their OOXML "standard"? It's an order of magnitude longer than ODF -- see, e.g., http://government.zdnet.com/images/ooxml.JPG
This is not surprising at all. Talk with anyone who grew up listening to records and you'll hear a tale of music with character and soul. That "character" and "soul" is the pop and crack of dust, scratches, and whatnot that the record needle picked up - all the imperfections in the record player and record that we could hear. It's a comforting and familiar noise in the sound.
While there may be people like this, it is a very small minority. The vast majority of people who grew up with records moved to CD's and preferred the obvious quality improvement.
That people prefer MP3 indicates to me that they either have problems physically hearing (loss of high frequency hearing) or mentally they filter out imperfections of MP3. Hardly anyone explicitly likes distortion.
Anyway, I never understood why people, even young people, like a proprietary format like MP3 when OGG is free and at least as good. The success of the iPod, with it's non-support for OGG and its DRMed music, is a testimony that great marketing can convince people that lipstick on a pig turns it into a supermodel.
I think the iPhone just became a positive ROI for many people in these areas.
Not really. From the article, in order to even start the process you have to pay parkingticket.com a deposit equal to 50% of the ticket fine. Here is what can happen:
If the ticket is dismissed, parkingticket.com keeps the 50% you paid them
If the ticket is reduced, parkingticket.com retains 50% of what you saved
If the ticket is dismissed, parkingticket.com will refund the deposit and pay 10% of the ticket
I guess if you're into paying a 50% fee for having someone fill out the paperwork, it's a good deal.
Can someone summarize exactly what we have achieved in this case?
Briefly, in the 1990's MS was found to have a monopoly in its OS, which is not illegal in and of itself, but that it also illegally used its monopoly OS to create barriers to entry in other competitive areas. Particularly, it illegaly tied its browser to the OS, making other browsers not function as well (e.g., for help file viewing) and more difficult to install. At trial, they were shown to be either liars or, if you are very generous, incompetent.
Detailed findings of fact found illegal anti-competitive behavior in multiple areas, and their punishment was to be broken up into several companies. On appeal, MS successfully got that ruling overturned, on the basis that the judge in the case had made some negative comments about MS prior to issuing his ruling. In the meantime, 15 separate cases against MS brought by state attorneys general were merged, and MS settled with them for something so trivial no one remembers what it was. California, New York, and maybe one or two other states held out and separately obtained billion dollar settlements.
Shortly after the break-up order was rescinded, George W. Bush came into office and all efforts to obtain a reasonable remedy were dropped. MS essentially got off scott-free, in the sense that they illegally transformed their OS monopoly into a browser monopoly, with all the due profit that entailed, and weren't punished at all except for what they had to pay their lawyers and a billion to California.
As someone who used RedHat on the desktop from 6 through 9 and actually had just bought "support" when they "left" just to show my support for them I assure you when they abandoned RH 7-9 it most definitely felt like they "left". Way back they were a company with a loyal customer base who bought their boxed distributions even when we didn't have to just to support them. Then they went "public" and suddenly the people that got them to where they were and helped them get rich when they IPO'ed were dirt, and the only people they cared about sat on Wall Street and in the Fortune 500.
They treated the people who got them where they were like kings. You must not have been one of the hundreds of people they invited into their mega-IPO who had nothing to do with RH other than that they happened to contribute to open source code that RH distributed. I've never seen any company with the ethics of RH, willing to give up money on the table to help the people who helped them.
Users who bought all those RH CD's from the early days and wanted to stick with a RH distribution simply moved on to Fedora Core 1. And if you were paying for support as you say, then RHEL would be no different than what you were doing under RHL 9. I don't see what anyone is complaining about.
I left Redhat when they went Fedora and have never looked back. I hope I never have to.
Oh, so you've stopped using the kernel, ext3, Xorg, usb, glib, glibc, gcc, gnome, KDE, nautilus, gconf, dbus, hal, NetworkManager, coreutils, parted, grub, rpm, yum, anaconda, kudzu, ntsysv, and firefox? If not, you haven't left Red Hat. They write, maintain, or make major contributions to all of these areas, and you're using RH whether you're using their branded distribution or not.
I am grateful for all that RH has done and is continuing to do for linux.
The article seems to conflate "desktop" and "desktop virtualization."
RH has been on the desktop since the beginning. They offered Red Hat Linux 1.0 in 1995, all the way up through RHL 9 in 2003. They followed that with 10 bleeding-edge releases of Fedora and five main releases of RH Enterprise Linux. All 100% open, including their own work on utilities, Gnome/KDE, and kernel development. They have done more for linux on the desktop than just about any other company. And now we all reap the benefit, even if we use another distribution like Ubuntu.
So it is nonsense to say RH "returns" to the desktop. They never left.
Now, the article goes on to talk a lot about desktop *virtualization.* That's a totally different topic. Maybe the article should have been titled RH returns to desktop virtualization.
What happened to the freedom of a company to sell their own product without interference?
The freedom to sell their own product without interference ended for Netscape when Microsoft choked off their air supply by illegally tying IE to their monopoly OS. Continuing to allow the illegal tying doesn't increase freedom or competition.
Open Source zealots still use IE to post to Slashdot. Why?
Because MS is an OS monopoly that illegally ties its browser to its OS. It's difficult to get away from Windows and IE, because of their anticompetitive behavior. That's the whole point of the EU decision!
Here comes the worst...OpenOffice file formats are 100% open for years now, i.e., free to implement but there is not a single open source office suite that implements them with 100% fidelity!
What are you talking about? OpenOffice.org implements ODF perfectly well.
Same story on browsers and so on.
These are folks that talk "vendor lock-in"..."open formats" and all the similar rant. Please give us a break!
Sorry, but it is vendor lock-in when the file format is not published and has to be reverse engineered. That wouldn't be a problem if the software were well written, but it isn't. MS Office isn't even compatible with itself, as it refuses to open old Word files because MS has determined Office can't do it in a secure fashion. OOo is so far ahead of MS Office that OOo can open the old Word files MS Office won't!
MS Word was leaps ahead of WordStar and WordPerfect, and Excel was leaps ahead of MultiCalc and Lotus. With the OS, a half-intelligent user can find their way around unfamiliar areas in minutes, versus hours of trawling through manpages, weird config files (and all too often, also source files) to do equivalent things in open source OSs.
This is a bit of a strawman. OOo is the same basic experience as MS Word.
OpenBSD might be about the world's best OS out there from an overall technical and security point of view, but to your average Joe Sixpack user, who wouldn't even be able to get through the installer, OpenBSD is a ridiculous load of shit.
Yes, but the same Joe Sixpack couldn't get past the Windows installer either, so that's not exactly distinguishing between OS's. I venture that some linux distributions are comparable or easier to install than Windows, in fact.
Of non technical people making technical decisions.
What, did you miss the entire 1990's? Microsoft is a monopoly that is illegally tying its browser to its OS. The response is perfectly reasonable -- open up browsers to compete on a level playing field.
Slashdot Mirror
The story makes it seem that the math is bad, but it's not. True, the rep apparently mistated 0.015 cents as 1.5 cents, but the $11K results from the LOWER 0.015 cents number: 9x10^6 KB * 8 bits/byte * 0.015 cents/kbit * $1/100 cents = $10,800.
Perhaps I'm too late to post this, but, uh, guys, tethering has already been hacked, and works: http://www.isyougeekedup.com/palm-pre-how-to-guide-to-enable-tethering/
I'm not sure you understand what you're looking at then :)
I guess I don't. What I see is a web page that contains a bunch of plots based on data from NOAA, updated daily, and therefore not going through any kind of peer-review process. I don't see any journal articles on that page.
Or, maybe you don't know what "peer reviewed research" is in reality.
"Peer-reviewed research" refers to journal articles and dissertations which have undergone a scholarly review process prior to publication.
That is not a link to a peer-reviewed article, it is a link to a PNG image. Anyway, it is only for sea ice, which I agree may be growing. What causes ocean levels to rise, however, is glaciers melting and running into the ocean, which has been well-documented. You can look at the paper of Eric Rignot, for example, in Science 2006. The effect from Greenland alone is estimated to contribute 1/4 inch rise in ocean level per decade. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5763/986
He solved the issue of Global Warming? Already?
No, in fact the scientific consensus is that this kind of result is consistent with a growing global warming problem.
Here is the reason, in simple terms. Global warming leads to increased rates of evaporation from the ocean. Despite global warming, it is still freezing at the poles, and when the higher vapor levels reach the poles, it tends to snow more, leading to increased ice in those areas.
Overall, however, the amount of ice in the world is dramatically decreasing, and oceans are predicted to rise by up to three feet by the end of the century.
Aside from my quibbles that multiple implementations or "uses XML" should not really be part of the definition of an open format, there is not a clear way to interpret the bill as excluding OOXML, the format MS rammed through as an ISO standard to compete with ODF. So if the intent is to support ODF and disallow OOXML, I don't see that this will do it. (The bill as written requires documents to be an open document format, which the bill defines as one that is XML, open, interoperable across platforms and applications, published without restrictions or royalties, independently implemented by multiple SW providers, controlled by an open industry organization -- could arguably apply to both ODF and OOXML.)
And boy oh boy, is Aman Batheja, the author of the Star Telegram article, confused. First of all, he confuses "open document formats" and "open source." He writes, "State Rep. Marc Veasey is pushing lawmakers to require all state agencies to create and share their electronic documents in open-source formats." The bill has nothing to do with open source, or programming of any kind! The bill simply states that the file format for DOCUMENTS should be open, like ODF (and unlike, .doc/.ppt).
He goes on, in his confusion, "It could also mean that many state workers may see familiar Microsoft products such as Word and Excel replaced with lesser-known competitors on their work computers." Again, wrong. MS Office 2007 already has an ODF plugin, so you can read and save to ODF formats from within MS Office if you want to keep using MS Office.
And you wonder why people tune out the Linux crowd.
No, I don't wonder. I realize that MS has been effective as hoodwinking many people into believing they are a "good" monopoly.
Or were you talking about the other part, you know, where I stated some facts about the ad campains? Well, facts are pesky things. I'm sorry the "He's linux" commercial that debuted during the Superbowl in 2004 predates the "I'm a Mac" (2006-) and "I'm a PC" (2007-) series. Fine, tune that out. Good luck with that.
Well as usual with Linux, they show up late to the game
Not quite -- the "he's linux" commercial preceeded either the Mac or PC ad series. Perhaps the only usual thing is that Apple and MS take undeserved credit.
and produce a half ass working team that people find unbearable to watch while the hardcore crowd yells at them for being peons.
I found http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwL0G9wK8j4 to be a fully working team, coached by Wooden no less.
But hey we can criticize MS/Apple all day, but when it comes to Linux we have to treat them with special care because they 'do it for free'.
No, we can criticize MS because we've proven in court they illegally use their monopoly to extinguish competition in other areas, and Apple because they lock down both their hardware and software. Linux is the best open source OS there is, and anyone who cares about software freedom ought to care about it.
Two years ago?
That is a funny reply to the Mac ad series, but have people already forgotten the great linux ad which *preceded* either the Mac or PC ad series? Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwL0G9wK8j4 It includes Mohommad Ali, Sylvia Nasar, Penny Marshall, and former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.
Wouldn't it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution?
Before trying to get a nice, clean installation of MS Office on linux, how about we wait until a nice, clean installation of MS Office is available for Windows? I haven't seen anything nice or clean yet. MS Office can't even open its own, older files securely (and so MS doesn't allow it to try), and file format isn't documented so any application that wants to interoperate resorts to reverse engineering. Did you see the piece of crap MS put together for their OOXML "standard"? It's an order of magnitude longer than ODF -- see, e.g., http://government.zdnet.com/images/ooxml.JPG
They could include a coupon for a free Palm Pre.
This is not surprising at all. Talk with anyone who grew up listening to records and you'll hear a tale of music with character and soul. That "character" and "soul" is the pop and crack of dust, scratches, and whatnot that the record needle picked up - all the imperfections in the record player and record that we could hear. It's a comforting and familiar noise in the sound.
While there may be people like this, it is a very small minority. The vast majority of people who grew up with records moved to CD's and preferred the obvious quality improvement.
That people prefer MP3 indicates to me that they either have problems physically hearing (loss of high frequency hearing) or mentally they filter out imperfections of MP3. Hardly anyone explicitly likes distortion.
Anyway, I never understood why people, even young people, like a proprietary format like MP3 when OGG is free and at least as good. The success of the iPod, with it's non-support for OGG and its DRMed music, is a testimony that great marketing can convince people that lipstick on a pig turns it into a supermodel.
I think the iPhone just became a positive ROI for many people in these areas.
Not really. From the article, in order to even start the process you have to pay parkingticket.com a deposit equal to 50% of the ticket fine. Here is what can happen:
I guess if you're into paying a 50% fee for having someone fill out the paperwork, it's a good deal.
Can someone summarize exactly what we have achieved in this case?
Briefly, in the 1990's MS was found to have a monopoly in its OS, which is not illegal in and of itself, but that it also illegally used its monopoly OS to create barriers to entry in other competitive areas. Particularly, it illegaly tied its browser to the OS, making other browsers not function as well (e.g., for help file viewing) and more difficult to install. At trial, they were shown to be either liars or, if you are very generous, incompetent.
Detailed findings of fact found illegal anti-competitive behavior in multiple areas, and their punishment was to be broken up into several companies. On appeal, MS successfully got that ruling overturned, on the basis that the judge in the case had made some negative comments about MS prior to issuing his ruling. In the meantime, 15 separate cases against MS brought by state attorneys general were merged, and MS settled with them for something so trivial no one remembers what it was. California, New York, and maybe one or two other states held out and separately obtained billion dollar settlements.
Shortly after the break-up order was rescinded, George W. Bush came into office and all efforts to obtain a reasonable remedy were dropped. MS essentially got off scott-free, in the sense that they illegally transformed their OS monopoly into a browser monopoly, with all the due profit that entailed, and weren't punished at all except for what they had to pay their lawyers and a billion to California.
To summarize and answer your question: Not Much.
As someone who used RedHat on the desktop from 6 through 9 and actually had just bought "support" when they "left" just to show my support for them I assure you when they abandoned RH 7-9 it most definitely felt like they "left". Way back they were a company with a loyal customer base who bought their boxed distributions even when we didn't have to just to support them. Then they went "public" and suddenly the people that got them to where they were and helped them get rich when they IPO'ed were dirt, and the only people they cared about sat on Wall Street and in the Fortune 500.
They treated the people who got them where they were like kings. You must not have been one of the hundreds of people they invited into their mega-IPO who had nothing to do with RH other than that they happened to contribute to open source code that RH distributed. I've never seen any company with the ethics of RH, willing to give up money on the table to help the people who helped them.
Users who bought all those RH CD's from the early days and wanted to stick with a RH distribution simply moved on to Fedora Core 1. And if you were paying for support as you say, then RHEL would be no different than what you were doing under RHL 9. I don't see what anyone is complaining about.
I left Redhat when they went Fedora and have never looked back. I hope I never have to.
Oh, so you've stopped using the kernel, ext3, Xorg, usb, glib, glibc, gcc, gnome, KDE, nautilus, gconf, dbus, hal, NetworkManager, coreutils, parted, grub, rpm, yum, anaconda, kudzu, ntsysv, and firefox? If not, you haven't left Red Hat. They write, maintain, or make major contributions to all of these areas, and you're using RH whether you're using their branded distribution or not.
I am grateful for all that RH has done and is continuing to do for linux.
The article seems to conflate "desktop" and "desktop virtualization."
RH has been on the desktop since the beginning. They offered Red Hat Linux 1.0 in 1995, all the way up through RHL 9 in 2003. They followed that with 10 bleeding-edge releases of Fedora and five main releases of RH Enterprise Linux. All 100% open, including their own work on utilities, Gnome/KDE, and kernel development. They have done more for linux on the desktop than just about any other company. And now we all reap the benefit, even if we use another distribution like Ubuntu.
So it is nonsense to say RH "returns" to the desktop. They never left.
Now, the article goes on to talk a lot about desktop *virtualization.* That's a totally different topic. Maybe the article should have been titled RH returns to desktop virtualization.
What happened to the freedom of a company to sell their own product without interference?
The freedom to sell their own product without interference ended for Netscape when Microsoft choked off their air supply by illegally tying IE to their monopoly OS. Continuing to allow the illegal tying doesn't increase freedom or competition.
Open Source zealots still use IE to post to Slashdot. Why?
Because MS is an OS monopoly that illegally ties its browser to its OS. It's difficult to get away from Windows and IE, because of their anticompetitive behavior. That's the whole point of the EU decision!
Here comes the worst...OpenOffice file formats are 100% open for years now, i.e., free to implement but there is not a single open source office suite that implements them with 100% fidelity!
What are you talking about? OpenOffice.org implements ODF perfectly well.
Same story on browsers and so on.
These are folks that talk "vendor lock-in"..."open formats" and all the similar rant. Please give us a break!
Sorry, but it is vendor lock-in when the file format is not published and has to be reverse engineered. That wouldn't be a problem if the software were well written, but it isn't. MS Office isn't even compatible with itself, as it refuses to open old Word files because MS has determined Office can't do it in a secure fashion. OOo is so far ahead of MS Office that OOo can open the old Word files MS Office won't!
What part of Windows doesn't allow users to choose a competing web browser?
The part that doesn't allow one to remove IE.
MS Word was leaps ahead of WordStar and WordPerfect, and Excel was leaps ahead of MultiCalc and Lotus. With the OS, a half-intelligent user can find their way around unfamiliar areas in minutes, versus hours of trawling through manpages, weird config files (and all too often, also source files) to do equivalent things in open source OSs.
This is a bit of a strawman. OOo is the same basic experience as MS Word.
OpenBSD might be about the world's best OS out there from an overall technical and security point of view, but to your average Joe Sixpack user, who wouldn't even be able to get through the installer, OpenBSD is a ridiculous load of shit.
Yes, but the same Joe Sixpack couldn't get past the Windows installer either, so that's not exactly distinguishing between OS's. I venture that some linux distributions are comparable or easier to install than Windows, in fact.
Of non technical people making technical decisions.
What, did you miss the entire 1990's? Microsoft is a monopoly that is illegally tying its browser to its OS. The response is perfectly reasonable -- open up browsers to compete on a level playing field.