The overall impression I have of the recent relative popularity of open source licenses is that copyleft has faced a steady barrage of criticism from people favouring a BSD/MIT approach. Copyleft seems to be losing a bit of ground lately. Is my impression wrong? How can the FSF and other people who see the benefits of copyleft do a better job of explaining its benefits, and a better job of refuting some of the criticism coming from BSD/MIT advocates?
And the typical conservative or libertarian is no better. Intolerance is a fact of human nature, not a corollary of any particular political philosophy.
The only thing Stallman has done is "create more extremists in the world"? The ONLY thing???? Don't look now, Mr. AC, but the "extremist" in this thread seems to be you.
,.. so this is just more of the same from him. One of the most overrated people in the tech journalism echo chamber. While these blowhards are all busy singing off the same page, no one is pointing out the obvious fact that we've ended up in another huge tech bubble and we're overdue for a correction as severe as the one that took place in 2000.
I think Erdogan and his so-called "moderate Islamist" party, the AKP, are fast heading for totalitarian rule. I can't imagine the Euros accepting Turkey into their club under these circumstances. Turkey has more journalists in jail than anybody. It is now illegal for medical personnel to give medical attention to people who were injured while demonstrating against the government. And now this - Turkey is joining China, Iran, North Korea and other heavy-handed countries in clamping down on the Internet.
Meanwhile, another group of Islamists loyal to an expatriate named Fetullah Gulen who is resident in the US and is widely believed to be a CIA asset, heretofore loyal to Erdogan and the AKP, has apparently turned on them, possibly at the behest of Gulen's US hosts. These two groups of Islamists, both equally reprehensible, are now fighting it out to see in which wrong direction Turkey will head.
And the lingering rump of secularists on the political left are left to watch the Islamist infighting. They are increasingly irrelevant.
I understand why Canonical wants to do this product. The Linux desktop is, along with all desktops including Windows and Mac OS, declining in importance. Canonical needs to establish their presence on mobile and Edge us their best hope. But I don't understand why any user who is less than wealthy would want to pledge $700-$800 for a first-time device from Ubuntu. It's somewhat analogous to people wanting to pay $1500 for the Google Glass Explorer Edition, but at least Google Glass is in new territory, wearable technology. Ubuntu Edge is going to be compared to all the smartphone systems that have come before it, and I don't think very many people are going to find the case for running it very compelling.
Yes, Edge is supposed to be one device that does it all, but that has been tried before, most notably by Motorola and Asus, and their devices turned out to be expensive and didn't sell especially well. I don't think substituting Ubuntu's phone system for the Moto/Asus devices' Android would have made much difference. Solving all the hardware problems of the do-everything Edge is going to be the hard part, no matter what OS it runs. And there's the biggest hurdle. Ubuntu is not a hardware company. They are a comparatively small software distributor for desktop Linux with no known experience in hardware, mobile or otherwise. They are a big fish in the desktop Linux pond, but that's a very, very small pond.
What seems to appeal most about the Edge is that nifty slide-from-the-left launcher. I think instead of going all in with a new device with very difficult to solve hardware design problems, Ubuntu could have set their sights lower by offering their user interface design as an add-on launcher on Android. If that went well, they could fork Android the way Amazon has, to offer their own user experience, development environment and app market.
By trying to do the difficult-to-design hardware of the Edge along with selling people on their software, I think Canonical is trying to do much too much at once, and unless they get very lucky with the hardware, the odds have to be heavily against them.
Cedega was _not_ done by the same people who contribute to Wine. They forked their code from Wine when Wine was under a more liberal license that didn't require contributing your code back. Therefore their proprietary mouse driver fix died with them. The commercial outfit that DOES contribute - and contribute a great deal - to Wine is Codeweavers, who sell their commercial version of wine as various versions of CrossOver. Generally, bleeding edge code goes into Wine first and appears in a subsequent CrossOver if it stands the test of time.
I don't think you're being at all fair in characterizing Linux people as being unwilling to pay for stuff. I think every Humble Bundle with Linux support has seen Linux users pay appreciably more than Windows and Mac users.
I think our problem with Nvidia is one of educating the company's management to see the benefits of going open source. Thus far we've failed. Linus's "outburst" might get their attention, although the Nvidia response shows that they still don't get it. We have to keep trying. We'll persuade them yet.
that Obama and his Department of (In)Justice are more in the pockets of Dodd and his Hollywood masters than the most venal member of Congress, let those doubts disappear now. We can expect no more from a gutless president and a DOJ staffed from the RIAA and MPAA's "let's sue children for a living" legal teams.
The best way to bring down Hollywood is to shrink their business by consuming less and less of their product. We're seeing this happen already - the hit TV shows of the past decade have included many cable series produced on a shoestring (compared to network TV) budget - Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Weeds, The Wire, etc. etc. Hollywood is already on the way down not because of filesharing but because of their own lack of creativity and aversion to risk. They would rather crank out a Cars 2 or a Transformers 3 than come up with compelling new ideas. We're already moving away from Hollywood - first to the current hit cable series and eventually to web based shows that let us leave cable TV behind altogether.
The days of a mass audience are passing quickly, together with the big-budget (expensive production values and very higly paid actors) Hollywood system providing entertainment to that audience. Will the sitcom of the future be populated with computer-generated characters? We're not there yet (crossing the "Uncanny Valley"), but we will be soon.
We can best hurry the process along by making a conscous decision to consume less mass market movies and more indie movies, or less network TV and more cable channel TV, less TV altogether and more web video and gaming, less Metallica and more indie music of all kinds - much of it produced and self-distributed by acts who don't have a record label deal and probably never will have. We're doing all this already, so we just have to consciously do a little more of it.
Surely any actual Democrat with a functioning brain stem (and that does exclude a number of them, admittedly) realizes that Newt Gingrich is a far more beatable opponent than many of the other Republican choices. If the people behind newtgingrich.com are really Democrats, they are doing something incredibly self-defeating by using their site to knock Gingrich down. They can save the smears for the actual election campaign - right now, it's in every Democrat's best interests to promote Gingrich's nomination, not prevent it.
In fact, running an anti-Gingrich site would be so stupid for a Democrat that I think the people behind the site are actually closet supporters of Mitt Romney, or maybe Ron Paul. Wait - how about Michelle Bachmann supporters? Yean, Bachmann supporters - that's the ticket. I'll buy that conspiracy theory!:)
Unlike a certain dictatorial and litigious cellphone manufacturer, Google is giving their users a choice. Flash haters certainly have reason for their dislike, but I think the decision of whether to use it or not should be left in the hands of users and webmasters, where it belongs. Good move on this, Google.
So only "rich people" can afford hobbies? Only "rich people" are motivated to do something for any reason beyond financial gain? What a dreadfully perverted view of human nature you have. The existence of legions of unpublished or published-but-financially-unsuccessful authors out there is proof of how wrong you are. People have been motivated to create things for far longer than the relatively recent existence of mass media.
Creators who are prospering in a the internet and digital economy are learning ways of making a living that do not depend on charging a fee for every digital copy of their work that exists. Cory Doctorow himself is a success story in the digital economy. The geek-chic musician Jonathan Coulton is another. Neither man will ever have the riches of a Stephen King, say, or a Paul McCartney. But do we really want to cripple the distribution of digital copies of all their work with DRM, solely to create the artificial scarcity to give them a chance - and only a chance, mind - at King-like riches?
Today the music industry is dying, mostly because they add little to the success of a musician in a digital world. The physical product the have traditionally depended on for their income - a circular disc of plastic housed inside an annoying plastic case that is too easily broken - holds little intrinsic appeal for most people. Hence the success of downloadable distribution for music - including both legal distribution through iTunes and friends and illicit distribution through bittorrent and peer-to-peer networks.
The book publishing industry is in a lot better shape, solely because the physical product they depend on has a lot more intrinsic appeal for their customers. I, with lots of bookshelves throughout my house, can testify to that myself. As long as people find books pleasing to hold, browse through, or cuddle up with, book publishers will be all right despite the existence of the Kindle and its competitors.
They rolled Steve out of his iron lung for this tame stuff? Even the fanboys must have been falling asleep at the event. Today's non-news was very much of a piece with the Snow Leopard glorified-service-pack-for-$30.
C'mon Steve, give us the damn tablet already!
I was using a Dell P1130 CRT from January 2004, when I bought it used, until last January when I finally made the move to an LCD, a Samsung 2443BW. The Dell is still going strong, although not used often nowadays as it's attached to my spare desktop. I ran the Dell at 1600x1200 resolution and I was loath to give up screen real estate, especially precious vertical resolution. As I found out, almost all monitors today are widescreen to better fit today's movie and HD TV content, even though the resulting sacrifice in vertical resolution is a step backward for most uses of a computer, IMHO. A year or two ago, most 24" widescreen LCDs did 1900x1200 resolution, but starting late last year many manufacturers substituted cheaper models that do 1900x1080, matching HD TV resolution without any letterboxing.
I shopped around until I found a deal on this Samsung which does do the 1900x1200 I was looking for. And it also has vertical height adjustment, something that's very important in LCD monitors with limited viewing angles and which is getting as hard to find as 1200 vertical resolution. Caveat emptor on the Samsung, btw: they sell monitors with and without height adjustment under the same model numbers. I'm relatively satisfied with my choice some 7 months later.
My Dell CRT was a nominal 21" and its actual diagonal picture size was about 18-1/2". The Samsung is a nominal 24" and I measure its picture at 23-3/4" or so - widescreen, of course. Not only are things on screen much sharper as expected with an LCD, but they're a tad bigger as well. Colours on my LCD aren't bad but cheap TN technology LCDs don't render colours very subtly so a graphic artist or photographer would probably spring for a monitor using IPS or VA technology costing several times as much.
Bottom line: don't be afraid of the move to LCD. You'll burn a lot less electricity than a CRT and the LCD will be much less bulky on your desktop despite being a widescreen. In my own case the biggest losers were my cats who loved to lie on the hot top of the Dell CRT and have no corresponding perch on top of my thin LCD, which runs a lot cooler anyway.
So Google's doing their own OS and partnering with Adobe, the purveyors of the biggest, buggiest and least secure bloatware on your computer. Great. Given the business Google is in - advertising, and the more of it the better - they're likely to take steps to make sure that all those slippery users out there do their patriotic duty and view all ads sent their way, no matter how obnoxious. Is there even an Adblock for Chrome?
The Conservative party consists of a large caucus holding the overwheliming majority of seats from Western Canada and a smaller rump from populous Ontario (which elects almost 1/3 of the parliamentary seats). In order to have a political future the Cons need to grow in Ontario - they can't expect much more in the West and they burned their bridges with the Quebec electorate in last December's coalition crisis. But the cabinet pickings are slim from the Ontario Con group, most of whom are cretinous hard-right retreads from the old Mike Harris provincial government in power here in the late 90s. Peter Van Loan is perhaps the dumbest of the bunch - his talent seems to consist of partisan brawling at the gutter level and not much else. Like most of the Ontario Conservative members, he represents a rural riding. Minister of Public Safety? His title should really be Minister of the Public Be Damned. I don't know what to make of Van Loan being the front man for this initiative by the Conservative government. Either his political star is rising, or the Conservatives don't really expect the initiative to pass and are hanging Van Loan out to dry since he's one of the more expendable cogs in their machine.
I think the integration and interface complexity pitch this more toward corporate users and other organized groups who want to brainstorm and develop policies together. There is growing dissatisfaction with the amount of employee time that is sucked away by email. This could make in-house discussions much more effective. For individuals I think this is a better replacement for things like message boards and email lists.
Maybe the best thing Wave has going for it it the openness and extensibility. If it does turn out to be a game changer, the change will come from outside developers who will use it in ways its inventors hadn't thought of. Twitter is simple, yes, but that simplicity limits the blue-sky possibilities compared to Wave.
Didn't Ellison and McNealy try to sell us this pig in a poke years ago? They got nowhere with their initiative, and the current "cloud computing" nonsense won't replace local apps and data any time soon, either. What stopped this tired old notion before was lack of bandwidth - lots of people were on dialup, and it would have been painfully slow for them. Nowadays most are on broadband, but how much bandwidth do we REALLY have to play with? Not all that much, according to the Comcasts, Rogers, Bell Canadas and Verizons of this world. Do we really want to rely on online access going through an ISP which is counting every kilobyte of traffic and choking it off as it sees fit? Not to mention spyong on its customers on behalf of various shadowy government agencies.
Also, isn't the browser itself becoming another big choke point in all this? Security vulnerabilities, remote exploits, memory hogging, reliance on add-on technologies like Flash and Java with their own security problems - and of course, all this is built on the shaky foundations of browser scripting, which can never be made completely secure.
Especially when it comes to laptops I'd agree with you. Or I would have until I saw how slowly Google Earth ran on my niece's otherwise perfectly capable 1-1/2 year old laptop with integrated Intel video. It was unuseable. My own 4 year old Toshiba Tecra M3 laptop, on the other hand, has Nvidia video - the modestly-performing GeForce Go 6200. Google Earth runs very well on it. And there's other good stuff coming to make use of the graphics chip - Nvidia's VDPAU for video playback is a good example.
No, $150 is more midrange than budget, at least in my book. In the Tom's Hardware article I cited, they mention an ATI Radeon HD 4670 for $65 and an Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT for $80. Those are today's budget cards. I've had a 9600GT myself for a little over a year now and it gives me all the performance I need. I paid considerably more than $80 for mine a year ago - the price drop wouldn't have happened without the stiff competition from the HD 4670 and other ATI cards. The point is that we're getting a lot more bang for the buck now than we were a year ago.
Let's leave the Xbox 360 out of this particular discussion - I don't think anyone could argue that PC gaming is anywhere near console gaming in cost effectiveness. And there ARE other uses for accelerated video besides gaming, you know.:)
As the other components in a PC got steadily cheaper, video cards seem to have stayed stubbornly pricey until recently. But that's changing very fast. I'm astounded by the price/performance breakthroughs we've seen over the last year or so. AMD/ATI deserves full marks for taking the lead on this stuff lately, especially in using a 40 nm process for their GPUs and passing the resulting savings on to the customer.
Too bad that as a Linux user, I can't really consider running ATI video since their binary drivers seem to be of considerably lower quality than the ones turned out by their arch-rivals at Nvidia.
By the way, another great article on these new cheaper video cards is at Tom's Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-graphics,2296.html
The problem with Apple is not that they don't take security seriously. Far from it. Lots of stuff does get fixed - witness the multi-hundred megabyte download the other week. But the corporate culture at Apple is secrecy. They must figure that documenting every patch serves only to draw a roadmap for hackers. This "security through obscurity" approach is in dramatic contrast to Microsoft's. Every Windows fix gets a Knowledge Base article which the user can consult before applying the patch. In the case of this Java vulnerability, I'm stunned that Apple didn't fix it in that recent update.
As for "prettying up the OS" I'd argue that current versions of the open source Gnome and KDE desktops, with compositing enabled, are probably prettier than Mac OS in most respects. Apple's strength has always been an unwavering focus on functionality and great industrial design, and on keeping the user experience uncluttered.
This latest story only reinforces the generalization that Scripting Is Dangerous. Mac OS users can be safer by using Firefox with the NoScript extension enabled. So can everyone else, for that matter.
Slashdot Mirror
The overall impression I have of the recent relative popularity of open source licenses is that copyleft has faced a steady barrage of criticism from people favouring a BSD/MIT approach. Copyleft seems to be losing a bit of ground lately. Is my impression wrong? How can the FSF and other people who see the benefits of copyleft do a better job of explaining its benefits, and a better job of refuting some of the criticism coming from BSD/MIT advocates?
And the typical conservative or libertarian is no better. Intolerance is a fact of human nature, not a corollary of any particular political philosophy.
The only thing Stallman has done is "create more extremists in the world"? The ONLY thing???? Don't look now, Mr. AC, but the "extremist" in this thread seems to be you.
,.. so this is just more of the same from him. One of the most overrated people in the tech journalism echo chamber. While these blowhards are all busy singing off the same page, no one is pointing out the obvious fact that we've ended up in another huge tech bubble and we're overdue for a correction as severe as the one that took place in 2000.
I sure hope it won't be the geniuses who brought us the incomprehensible "new Anaconda" interface several Fedora releases ago.
I think Erdogan and his so-called "moderate Islamist" party, the AKP, are fast heading for totalitarian rule. I can't imagine the Euros accepting Turkey into their club under these circumstances. Turkey has more journalists in jail than anybody. It is now illegal for medical personnel to give medical attention to people who were injured while demonstrating against the government. And now this - Turkey is joining China, Iran, North Korea and other heavy-handed countries in clamping down on the Internet.
Meanwhile, another group of Islamists loyal to an expatriate named Fetullah Gulen who is resident in the US and is widely believed to be a CIA asset, heretofore loyal to Erdogan and the AKP, has apparently turned on them, possibly at the behest of Gulen's US hosts. These two groups of Islamists, both equally reprehensible, are now fighting it out to see in which wrong direction Turkey will head.
And the lingering rump of secularists on the political left are left to watch the Islamist infighting. They are increasingly irrelevant.
Didn't they already try that? :)
I understand why Canonical wants to do this product. The Linux desktop is, along with all desktops including Windows and Mac OS, declining in importance. Canonical needs to establish their presence on mobile and Edge us their best hope. But I don't understand why any user who is less than wealthy would want to pledge $700-$800 for a first-time device from Ubuntu. It's somewhat analogous to people wanting to pay $1500 for the Google Glass Explorer Edition, but at least Google Glass is in new territory, wearable technology. Ubuntu Edge is going to be compared to all the smartphone systems that have come before it, and I don't think very many people are going to find the case for running it very compelling.
Yes, Edge is supposed to be one device that does it all, but that has been tried before, most notably by Motorola and Asus, and their devices turned out to be expensive and didn't sell especially well. I don't think substituting Ubuntu's phone system for the Moto/Asus devices' Android would have made much difference. Solving all the hardware problems of the do-everything Edge is going to be the hard part, no matter what OS it runs. And there's the biggest hurdle. Ubuntu is not a hardware company. They are a comparatively small software distributor for desktop Linux with no known experience in hardware, mobile or otherwise. They are a big fish in the desktop Linux pond, but that's a very, very small pond.
What seems to appeal most about the Edge is that nifty slide-from-the-left launcher. I think instead of going all in with a new device with very difficult to solve hardware design problems, Ubuntu could have set their sights lower by offering their user interface design as an add-on launcher on Android. If that went well, they could fork Android the way Amazon has, to offer their own user experience, development environment and app market.
By trying to do the difficult-to-design hardware of the Edge along with selling people on their software, I think Canonical is trying to do much too much at once, and unless they get very lucky with the hardware, the odds have to be heavily against them.
Cedega was _not_ done by the same people who contribute to Wine. They forked their code from Wine when Wine was under a more liberal license that didn't require contributing your code back. Therefore their proprietary mouse driver fix died with them. The commercial outfit that DOES contribute - and contribute a great deal - to Wine is Codeweavers, who sell their commercial version of wine as various versions of CrossOver. Generally, bleeding edge code goes into Wine first and appears in a subsequent CrossOver if it stands the test of time. I don't think you're being at all fair in characterizing Linux people as being unwilling to pay for stuff. I think every Humble Bundle with Linux support has seen Linux users pay appreciably more than Windows and Mac users. I think our problem with Nvidia is one of educating the company's management to see the benefits of going open source. Thus far we've failed. Linus's "outburst" might get their attention, although the Nvidia response shows that they still don't get it. We have to keep trying. We'll persuade them yet.
that Obama and his Department of (In)Justice are more in the pockets of Dodd and his Hollywood masters than the most venal member of Congress, let those doubts disappear now. We can expect no more from a gutless president and a DOJ staffed from the RIAA and MPAA's "let's sue children for a living" legal teams.
The best way to bring down Hollywood is to shrink their business by consuming less and less of their product. We're seeing this happen already - the hit TV shows of the past decade have included many cable series produced on a shoestring (compared to network TV) budget - Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Weeds, The Wire, etc. etc. Hollywood is already on the way down not because of filesharing but because of their own lack of creativity and aversion to risk. They would rather crank out a Cars 2 or a Transformers 3 than come up with compelling new ideas. We're already moving away from Hollywood - first to the current hit cable series and eventually to web based shows that let us leave cable TV behind altogether. The days of a mass audience are passing quickly, together with the big-budget (expensive production values and very higly paid actors) Hollywood system providing entertainment to that audience. Will the sitcom of the future be populated with computer-generated characters? We're not there yet (crossing the "Uncanny Valley"), but we will be soon. We can best hurry the process along by making a conscous decision to consume less mass market movies and more indie movies, or less network TV and more cable channel TV, less TV altogether and more web video and gaming, less Metallica and more indie music of all kinds - much of it produced and self-distributed by acts who don't have a record label deal and probably never will have. We're doing all this already, so we just have to consciously do a little more of it.
Surely any actual Democrat with a functioning brain stem (and that does exclude a number of them, admittedly) realizes that Newt Gingrich is a far more beatable opponent than many of the other Republican choices. If the people behind newtgingrich.com are really Democrats, they are doing something incredibly self-defeating by using their site to knock Gingrich down. They can save the smears for the actual election campaign - right now, it's in every Democrat's best interests to promote Gingrich's nomination, not prevent it. In fact, running an anti-Gingrich site would be so stupid for a Democrat that I think the people behind the site are actually closet supporters of Mitt Romney, or maybe Ron Paul. Wait - how about Michelle Bachmann supporters? Yean, Bachmann supporters - that's the ticket. I'll buy that conspiracy theory! :)
Unlike a certain dictatorial and litigious cellphone manufacturer, Google is giving their users a choice. Flash haters certainly have reason for their dislike, but I think the decision of whether to use it or not should be left in the hands of users and webmasters, where it belongs. Good move on this, Google.
Creators who are prospering in a the internet and digital economy are learning ways of making a living that do not depend on charging a fee for every digital copy of their work that exists. Cory Doctorow himself is a success story in the digital economy. The geek-chic musician Jonathan Coulton is another. Neither man will ever have the riches of a Stephen King, say, or a Paul McCartney. But do we really want to cripple the distribution of digital copies of all their work with DRM, solely to create the artificial scarcity to give them a chance - and only a chance, mind - at King-like riches?
Today the music industry is dying, mostly because they add little to the success of a musician in a digital world. The physical product the have traditionally depended on for their income - a circular disc of plastic housed inside an annoying plastic case that is too easily broken - holds little intrinsic appeal for most people. Hence the success of downloadable distribution for music - including both legal distribution through iTunes and friends and illicit distribution through bittorrent and peer-to-peer networks.
The book publishing industry is in a lot better shape, solely because the physical product they depend on has a lot more intrinsic appeal for their customers. I, with lots of bookshelves throughout my house, can testify to that myself. As long as people find books pleasing to hold, browse through, or cuddle up with, book publishers will be all right despite the existence of the Kindle and its competitors.
No need to waste time with a slow IE any more, kidz! With the all-new blazing fast IE9, your computer will be pwned in no time flat! Really!
They rolled Steve out of his iron lung for this tame stuff? Even the fanboys must have been falling asleep at the event. Today's non-news was very much of a piece with the Snow Leopard glorified-service-pack-for-$30. C'mon Steve, give us the damn tablet already!
I was using a Dell P1130 CRT from January 2004, when I bought it used, until last January when I finally made the move to an LCD, a Samsung 2443BW. The Dell is still going strong, although not used often nowadays as it's attached to my spare desktop. I ran the Dell at 1600x1200 resolution and I was loath to give up screen real estate, especially precious vertical resolution. As I found out, almost all monitors today are widescreen to better fit today's movie and HD TV content, even though the resulting sacrifice in vertical resolution is a step backward for most uses of a computer, IMHO. A year or two ago, most 24" widescreen LCDs did 1900x1200 resolution, but starting late last year many manufacturers substituted cheaper models that do 1900x1080, matching HD TV resolution without any letterboxing. I shopped around until I found a deal on this Samsung which does do the 1900x1200 I was looking for. And it also has vertical height adjustment, something that's very important in LCD monitors with limited viewing angles and which is getting as hard to find as 1200 vertical resolution. Caveat emptor on the Samsung, btw: they sell monitors with and without height adjustment under the same model numbers. I'm relatively satisfied with my choice some 7 months later. My Dell CRT was a nominal 21" and its actual diagonal picture size was about 18-1/2". The Samsung is a nominal 24" and I measure its picture at 23-3/4" or so - widescreen, of course. Not only are things on screen much sharper as expected with an LCD, but they're a tad bigger as well. Colours on my LCD aren't bad but cheap TN technology LCDs don't render colours very subtly so a graphic artist or photographer would probably spring for a monitor using IPS or VA technology costing several times as much. Bottom line: don't be afraid of the move to LCD. You'll burn a lot less electricity than a CRT and the LCD will be much less bulky on your desktop despite being a widescreen. In my own case the biggest losers were my cats who loved to lie on the hot top of the Dell CRT and have no corresponding perch on top of my thin LCD, which runs a lot cooler anyway.
So Google's doing their own OS and partnering with Adobe, the purveyors of the biggest, buggiest and least secure bloatware on your computer. Great. Given the business Google is in - advertising, and the more of it the better - they're likely to take steps to make sure that all those slippery users out there do their patriotic duty and view all ads sent their way, no matter how obnoxious. Is there even an Adblock for Chrome?
The Conservative party consists of a large caucus holding the overwheliming majority of seats from Western Canada and a smaller rump from populous Ontario (which elects almost 1/3 of the parliamentary seats). In order to have a political future the Cons need to grow in Ontario - they can't expect much more in the West and they burned their bridges with the Quebec electorate in last December's coalition crisis. But the cabinet pickings are slim from the Ontario Con group, most of whom are cretinous hard-right retreads from the old Mike Harris provincial government in power here in the late 90s. Peter Van Loan is perhaps the dumbest of the bunch - his talent seems to consist of partisan brawling at the gutter level and not much else. Like most of the Ontario Conservative members, he represents a rural riding. Minister of Public Safety? His title should really be Minister of the Public Be Damned. I don't know what to make of Van Loan being the front man for this initiative by the Conservative government. Either his political star is rising, or the Conservatives don't really expect the initiative to pass and are hanging Van Loan out to dry since he's one of the more expendable cogs in their machine.
I think the integration and interface complexity pitch this more toward corporate users and other organized groups who want to brainstorm and develop policies together. There is growing dissatisfaction with the amount of employee time that is sucked away by email. This could make in-house discussions much more effective. For individuals I think this is a better replacement for things like message boards and email lists.
Maybe the best thing Wave has going for it it the openness and extensibility. If it does turn out to be a game changer, the change will come from outside developers who will use it in ways its inventors hadn't thought of. Twitter is simple, yes, but that simplicity limits the blue-sky possibilities compared to Wave.
Didn't Ellison and McNealy try to sell us this pig in a poke years ago? They got nowhere with their initiative, and the current "cloud computing" nonsense won't replace local apps and data any time soon, either. What stopped this tired old notion before was lack of bandwidth - lots of people were on dialup, and it would have been painfully slow for them. Nowadays most are on broadband, but how much bandwidth do we REALLY have to play with? Not all that much, according to the Comcasts, Rogers, Bell Canadas and Verizons of this world. Do we really want to rely on online access going through an ISP which is counting every kilobyte of traffic and choking it off as it sees fit? Not to mention spyong on its customers on behalf of various shadowy government agencies.
Also, isn't the browser itself becoming another big choke point in all this? Security vulnerabilities, remote exploits, memory hogging, reliance on add-on technologies like Flash and Java with their own security problems - and of course, all this is built on the shaky foundations of browser scripting, which can never be made completely secure.
Forget it, boys. This turkey STILL won't fly.
Especially when it comes to laptops I'd agree with you. Or I would have until I saw how slowly Google Earth ran on my niece's otherwise perfectly capable 1-1/2 year old laptop with integrated Intel video. It was unuseable. My own 4 year old Toshiba Tecra M3 laptop, on the other hand, has Nvidia video - the modestly-performing GeForce Go 6200. Google Earth runs very well on it. And there's other good stuff coming to make use of the graphics chip - Nvidia's VDPAU for video playback is a good example.
No, $150 is more midrange than budget, at least in my book. In the Tom's Hardware article I cited, they mention an ATI Radeon HD 4670 for $65 and an Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT for $80. Those are today's budget cards. I've had a 9600GT myself for a little over a year now and it gives me all the performance I need. I paid considerably more than $80 for mine a year ago - the price drop wouldn't have happened without the stiff competition from the HD 4670 and other ATI cards. The point is that we're getting a lot more bang for the buck now than we were a year ago.
Let's leave the Xbox 360 out of this particular discussion - I don't think anyone could argue that PC gaming is anywhere near console gaming in cost effectiveness. And there ARE other uses for accelerated video besides gaming, you know. :)
As the other components in a PC got steadily cheaper, video cards seem to have stayed stubbornly pricey until recently. But that's changing very fast. I'm astounded by the price/performance breakthroughs we've seen over the last year or so. AMD/ATI deserves full marks for taking the lead on this stuff lately, especially in using a 40 nm process for their GPUs and passing the resulting savings on to the customer.
Too bad that as a Linux user, I can't really consider running ATI video since their binary drivers seem to be of considerably lower quality than the ones turned out by their arch-rivals at Nvidia.
By the way, another great article on these new cheaper video cards is at Tom's Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-graphics,2296.html
The problem with Apple is not that they don't take security seriously. Far from it. Lots of stuff does get fixed - witness the multi-hundred megabyte download the other week. But the corporate culture at Apple is secrecy. They must figure that documenting every patch serves only to draw a roadmap for hackers. This "security through obscurity" approach is in dramatic contrast to Microsoft's. Every Windows fix gets a Knowledge Base article which the user can consult before applying the patch. In the case of this Java vulnerability, I'm stunned that Apple didn't fix it in that recent update.
As for "prettying up the OS" I'd argue that current versions of the open source Gnome and KDE desktops, with compositing enabled, are probably prettier than Mac OS in most respects. Apple's strength has always been an unwavering focus on functionality and great industrial design, and on keeping the user experience uncluttered.
This latest story only reinforces the generalization that Scripting Is Dangerous. Mac OS users can be safer by using Firefox with the NoScript extension enabled. So can everyone else, for that matter.