Our manufacturing base in the US is growing. You must be listening to misguided politicians saying we need to expand it to provide more jobs (notably Santorum), when manufacturing provides fewer and fewer jobs. We are losing manufacturing jobs worldwide, and China (a scapegoat for taking our jobs) is losing jobs at a faster rate than us. It's generally cheaper to manufacture in the US than China, and companies are taking notice.
With the growth of new manufacturing technology, such as small scale CNC lathes, 3D printers and cheap/free 3D software (e.g. Google Sketchup), the means of small scale production are becoming cheap enough for anyone industrious. It's a second industrial revolution. One where you don't have the service of a local factory telling you things they'll pay you to do, but you get to control production. If you learn to design and build something that people want to buy, you can make a rather good income running a factory out of your garage. If you quickly become more popular than you can handle, then you can buy manufacturing services for your design. If you give up on all the a generic education in a college degree (or get a 2nd job), you'll save plenty of money to get started.
If I don't have a free market, then how do you explain Google Fiber? Unlimited, uncapped, dedicated to the Internet backbone, 1Gbit/s, symmetric, fiber connection for $70 (US) per month, and it comes with a decent looking router. If you don't need the speed yet, then you can get at least 7 years of 5/1Mbit for just an install fee of 12 payments of $25 (or all $300 up front). They weren't one of the 2 exclusive providers in the area.
Google makes their own network equipment and their customer facing network is larger than all but 1 ISP. I'm betting they know how to roll this stuff out for the install fee. Hopefully Kansas City doesn't break the Internet backbone. I'm betting that businesses subscribing to non-Google ISP's will be choked by AT&T, Verizon, etc. overselling their 100Gbit backbone.
Microsoft broke the web about a decade ago, and many/most sites failed to work unless you were running MS Windows and Internet Explorer. It all started on open standards and MS tools to develop for the standards.
They are getting very agressive at pushing web tech again. It would surprise me if they never started adding proprietary MS extensions that are "standard" (only having support from Microsoft and whomever they paid to support it, with no access for anyone else to support it). I will never trust them again until they show decades of good behavior and apologize for breaking the web previously.
Kansas City has a rather low population density, and Google is deploying 1Gbps (each direction) fiber to the home for a similar price to Time Warner's 15/1Mbps service. Each home will be wired to a "fiber hut," which will be on the Internet backbone. Installation is $300 (waived for a 1 yr Gbit contract or payable over 12 months), then service is $70/month for 1Gbps or free for 5/1Mbps (guaranteed for 7 years), and it comes with a nice router. Their next phase of roll out will include areas with fewer than 350 people per sq mi.
Service cost is a matter of population density and infrastructure. Unless upgrades require different cabling, the level of bandwidth included in the service generally costs per port, not mile.
I have had rather few problems with NVIDIA chips and their closed source driver. VDPAU was buggy w/ Compiz and 256MB video RAM (now works except for low RAM issues), and I have to turn off desktop effects in KDE with a GeForce Go 6150. That's about it. Intel has given me a lot of problems with video drivers over the years, despite drivers being open source, and I always avoid them.
Open source drivers have no reason to be better than closed source drivers with good support. In fact, closed source drivers can contain technology licensed from other companies that they may not have the rights to release under the GPL (e.g. NVIDIA signed a deal with SGI several years ago).
A qbit is a quantum binary digit, so there will only two states by definition. Otherwise, it's not a binary digit. Eventually, we might find a way to pack more than 1 qbit per physical device, but we're having enough trouble just getting a usable number of qbits.
On the other hand, regular transistors are a technology that is quite mature, and most people don't realize they're actually analog devices. We just pick a threshold current, where anything above is on and anything below is off, in order to make them binary, but it can be divided into more categories. Flash memory is currently storing 2, 4 or 8 different values per transistor to get 1 (SLC), 2 (MLC) or 3 (TLC) bits per transistor.
Sometimes it's cheaper to settle than fight in court. Everyone laugh at Google for fighting Viacom on accusations of copyright infringements. Google correctly insisted they were right, and eventually won in court. In the process, people in the media called them foolish for wasting so money on legal fees and all suggested that settling would be cheaper. Something is seriously wrong when you can be falsely accused, and your best option is to pay them off.
Yeah, we all know how lacking Linux is in databases and operational infrastructure, and how limited it is at running cloud computing. I think you've finally found why Linux isn't catching on.
As a developer, I must say that Linux platforms have been much more stable and reliable, and Qt is much better designed than anything I've seen from Microsoft. If you throw in the vastly superior Linux shell (bash) and the large and wonderful ecosystem of command line utilities and languages, Microsoft is rather unpleasant development environment. However, the large array of good, free applications in Linux may be the biggest downside.
It's hard to operate a business without selling something, and it's hard to sell something when everyone knows others are giving away something similar and almost as good (switching an OS is a little more involved than switching word processors). When your livelihood isn't on the line, there's not as much incentive to cross the line into greatness. For example, all the Linux media players I can find have intermittent problems with menus on an occasional DVD, but if that was revealed in reviews of PowerDVD, they'd have trouble collecting their $50-$125 from new customers to make payroll.
I think there are plenty of developers who are attracted to Linux. It powers much of the internet, including most/all the largest sites (except Microsoft's which lose money hand over fist). Could you imagine Facebook trying to store 250 million photos a day (in 4 resolutions each) and serve millions of photos a second on Windows servers? It also attracts a lot of talent from Hollywood including DreamWorks, Pixar, Disney, ILM, Maya, and Sony to name a few. Lastly, in the Top 500 supercomputer list, Linux is beating Windows 462-2.
I think Microsoft claims Linux violates their patents because they are a patent whore, who is afraid of the competition. The only platform that Linux can't beat them at, desktop/laptop computing, is fading to little more than a web browser for most people. Until Microsoft discloses which patents they are, I'm calling them liars. Just because companies are settling on licensing agreements, doesn't mean there would have been a violation. Sometimes it's just cheaper than court cases. I think in Novell's case (SUSE Linux), Microsoft pays them.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Qt (KDE) is a natively object oriented design, which is a much more modern development paradigm, that allows for larger and more complex programs to be developed with less trouble. While GTK+ (GNOME) has gtkmm, it looks to me like a poor port into object oriented design. You can get flashy effects either way, but from a design and API perspective, I must say Qt beats the pants off of GTK+. I could be missing something important that exists in the rest of the KDE or GNOME development ecosystems, but it would have to be rather significant. Considering all the resources and backing that GNOME gets from distributions compared to KDE, it shows amazing design for KDE to get anywhere remotely close to feature parity.
While RH does give the product away, it does so in such a way that it encourages others send them improvements, which then encourages people to buy their software and services. For being Linux, Red Hat products aren't cheap.
A second potential damage is that someone steals RH software, patents their own little version and sues the original author. If there is a copyright violation, Red Hat may claim that Twin Peaks was only able to develop the patent because of the money from stolen software, whether it was just potential future income or actual payments.
Red Hat has asked for a permanent injunction against software that violates a copyright. Unless Twin Peaks decides to comply with the GPL, which would render any covered patents useless against RH, I wouldn't think it matters that the software is free. If they do open their mount under the GPL, it appears that would affect most of the patent. I do not have time to make a lot of sense out of something so poorly written (nor have I looked at the internals of mount and file system software), but most of the claims mention mounting or physical media devices.
They removed the CLI from my phone. I don't hear any Android users complaining that their Linux doesn't have it, but maybe you have some weird friends. I personally think the CLI is there in Linux because you can do a lot of things faster with a keyboard if you know what you're doing. Plus, it's easier for someone to follow directions that can be copied and pasted. It's also easier to type the few lines of directions than to shoot a video or capture screen shots of you fixing (and possibly even staging) a problem that doesn't exist, especially if you have to find a place to host the media and hope the forum doesn't reject the URL's. Directions for a GUI don't translate very well into plain text.
BTW, it's not all that unusual to include software updates/upgrades and even new versions in a support contract. I've run Linux for 15 years and yet to fall out of support or be forced to rebuy anything, but the Windows 98 license doesn't get me much of anything anymore. Manufacturers often have to pay to support drivers on Windows, aside from the differences in market share, why shouldn't I expect them to do so with Linux? NVIDIA can do it just fine, and there are plenty of drivers that have just required the manufacturer releasing enough specifications to the community. I'll have to take your word for it on fixing a problem with pulseaudio, since I've never once had a problem with it, but the time frame is in line with how long it takes to get my Windows install up to the level of driver and software support that comes out of the box on Linux (which installs while I'm still putting in information).
Computer software is a bit of an economic game changer from traditional communism, which makes it a rather unfair comparison. If I design a car, build a factory and create a production line to manufacture it, each copy of the car still costs a significant amount of money. I cannot keep giving the car away for free without needing others to do the same for me. If I write a program, I can post it on Google Code. It doesn't cost me a thing for 1,000,000 users to download it and do something productive with it. If I have a productive use (or just enough desire) for the software that covers my initial development cost, I may get more value in letting the community use and improve the product than the value I could get from selling and maintaining copies of it. If you have doubts that people will give away enough software products (programs or data) for free in order to build a viable community, perhaps I could introduce you to a website called YouTube(.com). It may not be big enough for you to have heard of it yet, but every second people upload 1 hour of new video and watch 1000 hours of video per second.
> "Actually, the problem is that out of the initial install it does so much less of what your average user wants it to do."
What version of Windows comes with an office suite, professional level photo editor, movie editor, DVD player, pdf viewer, rapid access to drivers for most printers, a software update system that handles all of their software, and a media player that plays more than just the formats endorsed for corporate control? What version of Windows has ever shipped with a game like Doom?
> 1. Learn how to interact with a new OS This took all of setting my wife down at the computer and showing her the start menu. All the software is categorized and labeled for what it does. From day one, there was less frustration and asking for help.
> 2. Learn how to interact with all the new programs they will have to use to "replace" the ones from their old Windows environment The high profile Linux apps tend have better laid out user interfaces, lowering the learning curve. It can be much more brutal to suffer Windows upgrades (e.g. Office 2007).
> 3. Learn how to navigate an entirely new file structure. Are you actually more confused by having a single icon labeled "7.4 GiB Removable Media" to open the 8GB memory card in your card reader than you are by having to pick from F:, G:, H:, I:, J: and K: without any indication of which one has the card? I don't know what you're using to access your drives, but it has been quite a while since I haven't been able to just naturally access all my disks and partitions under Linux. I would never call the Windows drive letters sane, and I gave up on trying to find how to navigate my way to a different drive on Vista.
> 4. Accept that a lot of old, favorite programs just don't exist and don't have substitutes on Linux. I'm still waiting for one to be named, and remember, if it runs on Android, it probably runs fine on the Linux desktop (with maybe a little setup). I'll throw out something on Linux that Windows doesn't have a substitute for, a prebuilt Live CD/DVD. Something valuable to me (and sometimes by extension, average users) is a good scripting language, which Linux beats Windows severely at. People find it wonderful, when you can easily piece together something automatic for them to address some preference or inconvenience.
Also, all (or at least most of) the high-end Hollywood software runs on Linux because it was easier to port to than Windows when leaving the high-end Unix workstations. With 95% of the major studio's servers and workstations running Linux, there's probably quite a bit of stuff that doesn't run on Windows, even if not all of it is marketed and sold. I would imagine some of the high-end engineering software falls into the same category, but I haven't checked.
> 5. Find out what of their hardware is "supported but not really" under Linux. How long ago was this? Ubuntu (which is the basis of Mythbuntu) used to be really bad about access to drivers, especially proprietary ones, but they've gotten a lot better. I've had much worse problems under Windows, having to go online to fetch everything (which can be the end of the road for network drivers). It has been a long time since I've had hardware in Linux that wasn't supported from install or added automatically with a few guided clicks. Personally, I've had more problems with unsupported hardware on Windows (e.g. won't let me upgrade from the current Windows to a faster running release or driver package too big for remaining disk space).
Ooh! I just thought of software Linux doesn't have...separate update programs from every company along with some constantly running service to help launch their software faster. I suppose you could also count Internet Explorer, as it will browse the sites on the Internet that are not web sites but only Microsoft Internet Explorer sites (if there are any left). I also ran into a VPN appliance that didn't have a Linux client, but they had 100's of pages of people complaining about th
They implemented the Ubuntu Software Center and Canonical Ltd. (the company that produces Ubuntu) has a few software projects: Launchpad, Bazaar, Landscape, Ubuntu One.
"They are NOT trying to dislodge Microsoft (or IE), as such. They want to dislodge none standards compliant browsers..."
I think that would be IE there.
Are you insinuating that IE is standards compliant? A couple of years ago, I was a web developer for a system that would only be used by a few businesses. I'm pretty sure that IE was the only browser in use, and it was so frustrating to code for, that I almost dropped support for it.
I didn't see any mention of using nice to adjust the priority. It would make a big difference to set the nice level of X11 and the game to -20, explicitly telling your scheduler that your game is important, unless of course, you think it's important to have your email server responsive while playing Q3.
Uploading my pictures to Flickr, emailing my friends pictures and videos of my soon to be born baby, sending someone a copy of the Sermon I preached a couple of weeks ago. If I have to wait 5-6 minutes on my email to send, and someone tells me I can send it in 90 seconds or less, I'm switching!
As for P2P, I don't really care if I only get 1/4 the upload. I'm mostly trying to recover a copy of a scratched CD that I haven't heard in months, and it usually goes at dial-up speeds because they're uncommon CD's. Even if I wanted to download the latest warez, I have enough of a life that I can wait a day or two for the transfer to complete and it's not like I'll be waiting for the download of the latest game to finish every week. For people wanting to constantly get the latest movies, get NetFlix or a Blockbuster unlimited rental subscription.
Gosh, the US is getting beaten in broadband by a country most of the citizens can't find on a map, and Hong Kong started offering 100Mbps residential internet years ago. My country is gonna fall apart and end up in the dark ages. I'd do more research to find out how much we suck at this, but apparently neither I nor my ISP know the IP address for en.wikipedia.org.
Well, back to work so I can save the projected $1-1.5 Million for my child to go to college, or maybe just buy her a house and trust fund.
I'm sick of paying 40 USD (soon to become 50) every month for 3 Mbps (sold as 7) downstream/.5 Mbps upstream cable, with 1 IP address and a cable modem. What's worse is that working from home, my connection gets dropped daily (logging in to a dozen or more ssh sessions and recovering half a dozen vi sessions is a pain), every 20 minutes I hit at least a 7 second lag, I have to retry loading 5-10% of the web pages I visit, YouTube videos often have to be half-downloaded before playing without interruption, and I couldn't even stream the audio from Google's conference call reporting their quarterly finances. I know the problem with work is the fault of my cable company (Time Warner) because they also operate the connection at work. The other things I can only suspect are the fault of my cable company.
I'd leave, but other option is AT&T Yahoo broadband 3 Mbps downstream/ 512 kbps upstream for $50 or 1.5Mbps/384kbps for $45. They advertise better options, but they disappear when I type my address in and I don't feel like harassing a sales rep about it. Also, AT&T's CEO is trying to make Google pay for using their bandwidth, after the customer has already bought it, so I won't give them a dime of my money as long as I have a choice.
AT&T is rolling out a fiber service that requires you to subscribe to cable TV, but if you're spending hours and hours scouring the internet in search of decent, reliable broadband, you probably don't care what's on TV. They're also required by law (I think through the end of next year, but I don't remember), as a condition of allowing one of their mergers, to offer a $10 "broadband" solution, that is impossible to find on their website.
Verizon FiOS is the only straight fiber optic internet service I know of. I've heard they have offerings up to 50-100 Mbps where competition requires, but they only list three tiers of service on their website: 5 Mbps up/2 Mbps down for $40/month, 15/2 for $50, and 30/5 for $180. Unfortunately, they aren't in many places. I'd pick this one if I could (2 Mbps for opening an NFS share at work would be nice), since Verizon isn't as vocal and stupid about pushing away Net Neutrality and it's a significantly better product (sharing my mp3's with myself on a 500kbps connection doesn't work very well).
I think it's well past time that somebody did something with internet access in the United States. I work with people who can only get dial-up or satellite, which is overpriced and goes out with every storm.
If I haven't paid for the bandwidth I use, then why do I have so many bank records of money going to Time Warner every month? I haven't illegally tapped into Roadrunner, and I don't transfer 72GB of data every month!!
7Mbps for an introductory price of $29.99, going up to $44.99. That's the agreement they market. I would be surprised if it wasn't oversold. I don't use an average of 5Mbps, and I don't know of anyone who does on their home broadband or business class. Roadrunner would be stupid acquire 5Mbs* bandwidth when they only need enough to reasonably meet peak requirement, but the bandwidth I use, say 2GB/month as guess, has been paid for by me. Throw in around 30 customers (at $30-$45 each) and we're paying 4 digits for 5Mbps of dedicated bandwidth. Even 15 customers would be paying in the neighborhood of $500/month. If that doesn't cover it, they would have been charging more several years ago: The networking equipment was more expensive then, they were having to deploy it everywhere, early adopters would pay a premium, they have plenty of money to keep installing this all over, and they can afford those annoying commercials for beepbeep.com.
I don't know what other equipment you would need, but the cost of the fiber doesn't seem very expensive. In a population dense area, any downtown area would suffice, you could even provide 10Mbps dedicated bandwidth to 1000 customers on a single high-end Ethernet cable (10 GbE). I've read that the cost of hardware for broadband is tiny compared to the cost of labor to install it. From what I can piece together on internetworking costs, customer bandwidth costs seem to be covered by fees charged to the customers. I want the companies to stop whining about costs, and stop trying to double-bill the bandwidth usage. If I own a long distance service through AT&T, they can't bill the remote telephone company for my long distance calling. How is this any different?!
Does anyone know if anything ever happen to Sony over their rootkit virus? Last I heard, there was only a lot of noise and some wussy NY settlement for $7.50 per CD.
I would have forced them to pay each CD purchaser 2x the standard rate of having a technician come out to your house and remove a virus, plus exchange each disc for a valid one, and jailed any exec who knew about it. They did purposefully market defective merchandise which they generally refuse to let you exchange and unleash a virus on people proven innocent. After all, you don't have the CD that installs the virus, unless you legally bought the music. On top of that, they would be required to go through a source-code audit (which courts can require) and someone, either Sony, F4I or both, would be charged a fair market rate for each copy of each stolen program they gave out, like LAME.
I'm not sure what LAME or mpglib would do with around $50 million, but DVD Jon definitely deserves his well earned $250 million for all the copies of his difficult to write DRMS (not to mention his unpaid work cracking DVD for me to watch videos in Linux).
In my case there could be a class action suit against Sony. I've got 11GB of all legal mp3's on my hard disk, from a wide variety of publishers (although about half is Sony or BMG), which I access from work via a nfs share. Theoretically I could get caught since it travels across the internet, but I would sue the pants off of them for traffic sniffing and harassment, even if it means hiring Johnnie Cochrin.
I couldn't find a clause in the DMCA giving law enforcement an exemption from copyright infringement (not that I can stand to look at it for more than a minute), so I think you have a case. Since they are going after people for making illegal copies of music, I say they should know better than to burst into someone's home, steal their hardware and make a copy of the data because they thought there might be some copyrighted music (intent to make illegal copies). It definitely deserves the full $250,000 and 5 years in jail (IIRC per incident), plus any loss of revenue by the copyright holder, up to $100,000 per copyright.
I only have 2 questions: 1) Would this be any more than a slap on the wrist? 2) How do you jail a corporation for 5 years?
Google Summer of Code 2009: 1) Find the most ridiculous and common aspects of computer programming to sneak past the US patent office. 2) Sue Microsoft into oblivion.
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Our manufacturing base in the US is growing. You must be listening to misguided politicians saying we need to expand it to provide more jobs (notably Santorum), when manufacturing provides fewer and fewer jobs. We are losing manufacturing jobs worldwide, and China (a scapegoat for taking our jobs) is losing jobs at a faster rate than us. It's generally cheaper to manufacture in the US than China, and companies are taking notice.
With the growth of new manufacturing technology, such as small scale CNC lathes, 3D printers and cheap/free 3D software (e.g. Google Sketchup), the means of small scale production are becoming cheap enough for anyone industrious. It's a second industrial revolution. One where you don't have the service of a local factory telling you things they'll pay you to do, but you get to control production. If you learn to design and build something that people want to buy, you can make a rather good income running a factory out of your garage. If you quickly become more popular than you can handle, then you can buy manufacturing services for your design. If you give up on all the a generic education in a college degree (or get a 2nd job), you'll save plenty of money to get started.
Abraham Lincoln or FDR
If I don't have a free market, then how do you explain Google Fiber? Unlimited, uncapped, dedicated to the Internet backbone, 1Gbit/s, symmetric, fiber connection for $70 (US) per month, and it comes with a decent looking router. If you don't need the speed yet, then you can get at least 7 years of 5/1Mbit for just an install fee of 12 payments of $25 (or all $300 up front). They weren't one of the 2 exclusive providers in the area.
Google makes their own network equipment and their customer facing network is larger than all but 1 ISP. I'm betting they know how to roll this stuff out for the install fee. Hopefully Kansas City doesn't break the Internet backbone. I'm betting that businesses subscribing to non-Google ISP's will be choked by AT&T, Verizon, etc. overselling their 100Gbit backbone.
I'd agree with you, except I can't think of an open standard they supported without perverting to their advantage when they had the chance.
Microsoft broke the web about a decade ago, and many/most sites failed to work unless you were running MS Windows and Internet Explorer. It all started on open standards and MS tools to develop for the standards.
They are getting very agressive at pushing web tech again. It would surprise me if they never started adding proprietary MS extensions that are "standard" (only having support from Microsoft and whomever they paid to support it, with no access for anyone else to support it). I will never trust them again until they show decades of good behavior and apologize for breaking the web previously.
Did you factor in population density?
Kansas City has a rather low population density, and Google is deploying 1Gbps (each direction) fiber to the home for a similar price to Time Warner's 15/1Mbps service. Each home will be wired to a "fiber hut," which will be on the Internet backbone. Installation is $300 (waived for a 1 yr Gbit contract or payable over 12 months), then service is $70/month for 1Gbps or free for 5/1Mbps (guaranteed for 7 years), and it comes with a nice router. Their next phase of roll out will include areas with fewer than 350 people per sq mi.
Service cost is a matter of population density and infrastructure. Unless upgrades require different cabling, the level of bandwidth included in the service generally costs per port, not mile.
I have had rather few problems with NVIDIA chips and their closed source driver. VDPAU was buggy w/ Compiz and 256MB video RAM (now works except for low RAM issues), and I have to turn off desktop effects in KDE with a GeForce Go 6150. That's about it. Intel has given me a lot of problems with video drivers over the years, despite drivers being open source, and I always avoid them.
Open source drivers have no reason to be better than closed source drivers with good support. In fact, closed source drivers can contain technology licensed from other companies that they may not have the rights to release under the GPL (e.g. NVIDIA signed a deal with SGI several years ago).
A qbit is a quantum binary digit, so there will only two states by definition. Otherwise, it's not a binary digit. Eventually, we might find a way to pack more than 1 qbit per physical device, but we're having enough trouble just getting a usable number of qbits.
On the other hand, regular transistors are a technology that is quite mature, and most people don't realize they're actually analog devices. We just pick a threshold current, where anything above is on and anything below is off, in order to make them binary, but it can be divided into more categories. Flash memory is currently storing 2, 4 or 8 different values per transistor to get 1 (SLC), 2 (MLC) or 3 (TLC) bits per transistor.
Guess it died as soon as people found you could call something terorist.
If we don't arrest everyone who sounds scary, the terrists have won!
If we do arrest everyone who sounds scary, the terrists have won!
Sometimes it's cheaper to settle than fight in court. Everyone laugh at Google for fighting Viacom on accusations of copyright infringements. Google correctly insisted they were right, and eventually won in court. In the process, people in the media called them foolish for wasting so money on legal fees and all suggested that settling would be cheaper. Something is seriously wrong when you can be falsely accused, and your best option is to pay them off.
Yeah, we all know how lacking Linux is in databases and operational infrastructure, and how limited it is at running cloud computing. I think you've finally found why Linux isn't catching on.
As a developer, I must say that Linux platforms have been much more stable and reliable, and Qt is much better designed than anything I've seen from Microsoft. If you throw in the vastly superior Linux shell (bash) and the large and wonderful ecosystem of command line utilities and languages, Microsoft is rather unpleasant development environment. However, the large array of good, free applications in Linux may be the biggest downside.
It's hard to operate a business without selling something, and it's hard to sell something when everyone knows others are giving away something similar and almost as good (switching an OS is a little more involved than switching word processors). When your livelihood isn't on the line, there's not as much incentive to cross the line into greatness. For example, all the Linux media players I can find have intermittent problems with menus on an occasional DVD, but if that was revealed in reviews of PowerDVD, they'd have trouble collecting their $50-$125 from new customers to make payroll.
I think there are plenty of developers who are attracted to Linux. It powers much of the internet, including most/all the largest sites (except Microsoft's which lose money hand over fist). Could you imagine Facebook trying to store 250 million photos a day (in 4 resolutions each) and serve millions of photos a second on Windows servers? It also attracts a lot of talent from Hollywood including DreamWorks, Pixar, Disney, ILM, Maya, and Sony to name a few. Lastly, in the Top 500 supercomputer list, Linux is beating Windows 462-2.
I think Microsoft claims Linux violates their patents because they are a patent whore, who is afraid of the competition. The only platform that Linux can't beat them at, desktop/laptop computing, is fading to little more than a web browser for most people. Until Microsoft discloses which patents they are, I'm calling them liars. Just because companies are settling on licensing agreements, doesn't mean there would have been a violation. Sometimes it's just cheaper than court cases. I think in Novell's case (SUSE Linux), Microsoft pays them.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Qt (KDE) is a natively object oriented design, which is a much more modern development paradigm, that allows for larger and more complex programs to be developed with less trouble. While GTK+ (GNOME) has gtkmm, it looks to me like a poor port into object oriented design. You can get flashy effects either way, but from a design and API perspective, I must say Qt beats the pants off of GTK+. I could be missing something important that exists in the rest of the KDE or GNOME development ecosystems, but it would have to be rather significant. Considering all the resources and backing that GNOME gets from distributions compared to KDE, it shows amazing design for KDE to get anywhere remotely close to feature parity.
While RH does give the product away, it does so in such a way that it encourages others send them improvements, which then encourages people to buy their software and services. For being Linux, Red Hat products aren't cheap.
A second potential damage is that someone steals RH software, patents their own little version and sues the original author. If there is a copyright violation, Red Hat may claim that Twin Peaks was only able to develop the patent because of the money from stolen software, whether it was just potential future income or actual payments.
Red Hat has asked for a permanent injunction against software that violates a copyright. Unless Twin Peaks decides to comply with the GPL, which would render any covered patents useless against RH, I wouldn't think it matters that the software is free. If they do open their mount under the GPL, it appears that would affect most of the patent. I do not have time to make a lot of sense out of something so poorly written (nor have I looked at the internals of mount and file system software), but most of the claims mention mounting or physical media devices.
They removed the CLI from my phone. I don't hear any Android users complaining that their Linux doesn't have it, but maybe you have some weird friends. I personally think the CLI is there in Linux because you can do a lot of things faster with a keyboard if you know what you're doing. Plus, it's easier for someone to follow directions that can be copied and pasted. It's also easier to type the few lines of directions than to shoot a video or capture screen shots of you fixing (and possibly even staging) a problem that doesn't exist, especially if you have to find a place to host the media and hope the forum doesn't reject the URL's. Directions for a GUI don't translate very well into plain text.
BTW, it's not all that unusual to include software updates/upgrades and even new versions in a support contract. I've run Linux for 15 years and yet to fall out of support or be forced to rebuy anything, but the Windows 98 license doesn't get me much of anything anymore. Manufacturers often have to pay to support drivers on Windows, aside from the differences in market share, why shouldn't I expect them to do so with Linux? NVIDIA can do it just fine, and there are plenty of drivers that have just required the manufacturer releasing enough specifications to the community. I'll have to take your word for it on fixing a problem with pulseaudio, since I've never once had a problem with it, but the time frame is in line with how long it takes to get my Windows install up to the level of driver and software support that comes out of the box on Linux (which installs while I'm still putting in information).
Computer software is a bit of an economic game changer from traditional communism, which makes it a rather unfair comparison. If I design a car, build a factory and create a production line to manufacture it, each copy of the car still costs a significant amount of money. I cannot keep giving the car away for free without needing others to do the same for me. If I write a program, I can post it on Google Code. It doesn't cost me a thing for 1,000,000 users to download it and do something productive with it. If I have a productive use (or just enough desire) for the software that covers my initial development cost, I may get more value in letting the community use and improve the product than the value I could get from selling and maintaining copies of it. If you have doubts that people will give away enough software products (programs or data) for free in order to build a viable community, perhaps I could introduce you to a website called YouTube(.com). It may not be big enough for you to have heard of it yet, but every second people upload 1 hour of new video and watch 1000 hours of video per second.
> "Actually, the problem is that out of the initial install it does so much less of what your average user wants it to do."
What version of Windows comes with an office suite, professional level photo editor, movie editor, DVD player, pdf viewer, rapid access to drivers for most printers, a software update system that handles all of their software, and a media player that plays more than just the formats endorsed for corporate control? What version of Windows has ever shipped with a game like Doom?
> 1. Learn how to interact with a new OS
This took all of setting my wife down at the computer and showing her the start menu. All the software is categorized and labeled for what it does. From day one, there was less frustration and asking for help.
> 2. Learn how to interact with all the new programs they will have to use to "replace" the ones from their old Windows environment
The high profile Linux apps tend have better laid out user interfaces, lowering the learning curve. It can be much more brutal to suffer Windows upgrades (e.g. Office 2007).
> 3. Learn how to navigate an entirely new file structure.
Are you actually more confused by having a single icon labeled "7.4 GiB Removable Media" to open the 8GB memory card in your card reader than you are by having to pick from F:, G:, H:, I:, J: and K: without any indication of which one has the card? I don't know what you're using to access your drives, but it has been quite a while since I haven't been able to just naturally access all my disks and partitions under Linux. I would never call the Windows drive letters sane, and I gave up on trying to find how to navigate my way to a different drive on Vista.
> 4. Accept that a lot of old, favorite programs just don't exist and don't have substitutes on Linux.
I'm still waiting for one to be named, and remember, if it runs on Android, it probably runs fine on the Linux desktop (with maybe a little setup). I'll throw out something on Linux that Windows doesn't have a substitute for, a prebuilt Live CD/DVD. Something valuable to me (and sometimes by extension, average users) is a good scripting language, which Linux beats Windows severely at. People find it wonderful, when you can easily piece together something automatic for them to address some preference or inconvenience.
Also, all (or at least most of) the high-end Hollywood software runs on Linux because it was easier to port to than Windows when leaving the high-end Unix workstations. With 95% of the major studio's servers and workstations running Linux, there's probably quite a bit of stuff that doesn't run on Windows, even if not all of it is marketed and sold. I would imagine some of the high-end engineering software falls into the same category, but I haven't checked.
> 5. Find out what of their hardware is "supported but not really" under Linux.
How long ago was this? Ubuntu (which is the basis of Mythbuntu) used to be really bad about access to drivers, especially proprietary ones, but they've gotten a lot better. I've had much worse problems under Windows, having to go online to fetch everything (which can be the end of the road for network drivers). It has been a long time since I've had hardware in Linux that wasn't supported from install or added automatically with a few guided clicks. Personally, I've had more problems with unsupported hardware on Windows (e.g. won't let me upgrade from the current Windows to a faster running release or driver package too big for remaining disk space).
Ooh! I just thought of software Linux doesn't have...separate update programs from every company along with some constantly running service to help launch their software faster. I suppose you could also count Internet Explorer, as it will browse the sites on the Internet that are not web sites but only Microsoft Internet Explorer sites (if there are any left). I also ran into a VPN appliance that didn't have a Linux client, but they had 100's of pages of people complaining about th
They implemented the Ubuntu Software Center and Canonical Ltd. (the company that produces Ubuntu) has a few software projects: Launchpad, Bazaar, Landscape, Ubuntu One.
"They are NOT trying to dislodge Microsoft (or IE), as such. They want to dislodge none standards compliant browsers..."
I think that would be IE there.
Are you insinuating that IE is standards compliant? A couple of years ago, I was a web developer for a system that would only be used by a few businesses. I'm pretty sure that IE was the only browser in use, and it was so frustrating to code for, that I almost dropped support for it.
I didn't see any mention of using nice to adjust the priority. It would make a big difference to set the nice level of X11 and the game to -20, explicitly telling your scheduler that your game is important, unless of course, you think it's important to have your email server responsive while playing Q3.
Uploading my pictures to Flickr, emailing my friends pictures and videos of my soon to be born baby, sending someone a copy of the Sermon I preached a couple of weeks ago. If I have to wait 5-6 minutes on my email to send, and someone tells me I can send it in 90 seconds or less, I'm switching!
As for P2P, I don't really care if I only get 1/4 the upload. I'm mostly trying to recover a copy of a scratched CD that I haven't heard in months, and it usually goes at dial-up speeds because they're uncommon CD's. Even if I wanted to download the latest warez, I have enough of a life that I can wait a day or two for the transfer to complete and it's not like I'll be waiting for the download of the latest game to finish every week. For people wanting to constantly get the latest movies, get NetFlix or a Blockbuster unlimited rental subscription.
Gosh, the US is getting beaten in broadband by a country most of the citizens can't find on a map, and Hong Kong started offering 100Mbps residential internet years ago. My country is gonna fall apart and end up in the dark ages. I'd do more research to find out how much we suck at this, but apparently neither I nor my ISP know the IP address for en.wikipedia.org.
Well, back to work so I can save the projected $1-1.5 Million for my child to go to college, or maybe just buy her a house and trust fund.
I'm sick of paying 40 USD (soon to become 50) every month for 3 Mbps (sold as 7) downstream/.5 Mbps upstream cable, with 1 IP address and a cable modem. What's worse is that working from home, my connection gets dropped daily (logging in to a dozen or more ssh sessions and recovering half a dozen vi sessions is a pain), every 20 minutes I hit at least a 7 second lag, I have to retry loading 5-10% of the web pages I visit, YouTube videos often have to be half-downloaded before playing without interruption, and I couldn't even stream the audio from Google's conference call reporting their quarterly finances. I know the problem with work is the fault of my cable company (Time Warner) because they also operate the connection at work. The other things I can only suspect are the fault of my cable company.
I'd leave, but other option is AT&T Yahoo broadband 3 Mbps downstream/ 512 kbps upstream for $50 or 1.5Mbps/384kbps for $45. They advertise better options, but they disappear when I type my address in and I don't feel like harassing a sales rep about it. Also, AT&T's CEO is trying to make Google pay for using their bandwidth, after the customer has already bought it, so I won't give them a dime of my money as long as I have a choice.
AT&T is rolling out a fiber service that requires you to subscribe to cable TV, but if you're spending hours and hours scouring the internet in search of decent, reliable broadband, you probably don't care what's on TV. They're also required by law (I think through the end of next year, but I don't remember), as a condition of allowing one of their mergers, to offer a $10 "broadband" solution, that is impossible to find on their website.
Verizon FiOS is the only straight fiber optic internet service I know of. I've heard they have offerings up to 50-100 Mbps where competition requires, but they only list three tiers of service on their website: 5 Mbps up/2 Mbps down for $40/month, 15/2 for $50, and 30/5 for $180. Unfortunately, they aren't in many places. I'd pick this one if I could (2 Mbps for opening an NFS share at work would be nice), since Verizon isn't as vocal and stupid about pushing away Net Neutrality and it's a significantly better product (sharing my mp3's with myself on a 500kbps connection doesn't work very well).
I think it's well past time that somebody did something with internet access in the United States. I work with people who can only get dial-up or satellite, which is overpriced and goes out with every storm.
If I haven't paid for the bandwidth I use, then why do I have so many bank records of money going to Time Warner every month? I haven't illegally tapped into Roadrunner, and I don't transfer 72GB of data every month!!
7Mbps for an introductory price of $29.99, going up to $44.99. That's the agreement they market. I would be surprised if it wasn't oversold. I don't use an average of 5Mbps, and I don't know of anyone who does on their home broadband or business class. Roadrunner would be stupid acquire 5Mbs* bandwidth when they only need enough to reasonably meet peak requirement, but the bandwidth I use, say 2GB/month as guess, has been paid for by me. Throw in around 30 customers (at $30-$45 each) and we're paying 4 digits for 5Mbps of dedicated bandwidth. Even 15 customers would be paying in the neighborhood of $500/month. If that doesn't cover it, they would have been charging more several years ago: The networking equipment was more expensive then, they were having to deploy it everywhere, early adopters would pay a premium, they have plenty of money to keep installing this all over, and they can afford those annoying commercials for beepbeep.com.
I don't know what other equipment you would need, but the cost of the fiber doesn't seem very expensive. In a population dense area, any downtown area would suffice, you could even provide 10Mbps dedicated bandwidth to 1000 customers on a single high-end Ethernet cable (10 GbE). I've read that the cost of hardware for broadband is tiny compared to the cost of labor to install it. From what I can piece together on internetworking costs, customer bandwidth costs seem to be covered by fees charged to the customers. I want the companies to stop whining about costs, and stop trying to double-bill the bandwidth usage. If I own a long distance service through AT&T, they can't bill the remote telephone company for my long distance calling. How is this any different?!
Does anyone know if anything ever happen to Sony over their rootkit virus? Last I heard, there was only a lot of noise and some wussy NY settlement for $7.50 per CD.
I would have forced them to pay each CD purchaser 2x the standard rate of having a technician come out to your house and remove a virus, plus exchange each disc for a valid one, and jailed any exec who knew about it. They did purposefully market defective merchandise which they generally refuse to let you exchange and unleash a virus on people proven innocent. After all, you don't have the CD that installs the virus, unless you legally bought the music. On top of that, they would be required to go through a source-code audit (which courts can require) and someone, either Sony, F4I or both, would be charged a fair market rate for each copy of each stolen program they gave out, like LAME.
I'm not sure what LAME or mpglib would do with around $50 million, but DVD Jon definitely deserves his well earned $250 million for all the copies of his difficult to write DRMS (not to mention his unpaid work cracking DVD for me to watch videos in Linux).
In my case there could be a class action suit against Sony. I've got 11GB of all legal mp3's on my hard disk, from a wide variety of publishers (although about half is Sony or BMG), which I access from work via a nfs share. Theoretically I could get caught since it travels across the internet, but I would sue the pants off of them for traffic sniffing and harassment, even if it means hiring Johnnie Cochrin.
I couldn't find a clause in the DMCA giving law enforcement an exemption from copyright infringement (not that I can stand to look at it for more than a minute), so I think you have a case. Since they are going after people for making illegal copies of music, I say they should know better than to burst into someone's home, steal their hardware and make a copy of the data because they thought there might be some copyrighted music (intent to make illegal copies). It definitely deserves the full $250,000 and 5 years in jail (IIRC per incident), plus any loss of revenue by the copyright holder, up to $100,000 per copyright.
I only have 2 questions:
1) Would this be any more than a slap on the wrist?
2) How do you jail a corporation for 5 years?
Google Summer of Code 2009:
1) Find the most ridiculous and common aspects of computer programming to sneak past the US patent office.
2) Sue Microsoft into oblivion.