Put it another way: it costs almost as much to build one motherboard from a particular design as it costs to build the thousands (anybody know a more precise figure?) as it costs to build just one.
It's sort of ironic: most of us depend for our livelihoods on the fact that computers are cheap. Computers would not be cheap without economies of scale. Yet few Slashdotters seem to grasp the concept. They're always complaining that nobody bothers to port their favorite game to Linux or Mac, or that off-the-shelf hardware never has the precise feature set they want. Or that they can't save money by ordering hardware that lacks commmon features they don't want.
Econonomies of scale explain why Sun is in trouble, and Bill Gates is the richest person in human history. It even explains why Enterprise was cancelled! People really need to understand the concept.
Well, PDF support is built into OS X at a very basic level (its the protocol they use to paint the screen). Add that to Apple's emphasis on usability (neglected in recent years, but still ahead of their competition), and naturally it's easier to browse PDF files on a Mac.
But no matter how easy it is browse a PDF file, it's still just a collection of page images. And that limits its utility.
...just days after Caldera purchased the Old SCO server division...
Excuse a really trivial nitpick, but Caldera didn't buy the "SCO Server Division". (If there ever was such a thing.) What they bought was most of the assets of Santa Cruz Operation, including the name. The only things held back were the company itself, and the Tarantella terminal server product, which became the sole product (and the new name) of the original SCO.
As far as I can tell, the UnixWare product that SCO still sells is pretty much the same product that the old Santa Cruz Operation used to sell, both as a server and desktop OS. The fact that they position it purely as a server product is purely a marketting decision.
I'm sure that for most people here PDFs seems so outdated and bloated and pointless. But as a designer who needs to be able to ship files across the country, to pre-press facilities, as proofs for customers, or as high-quality press kits, PDFs are unbeatable.
Actually, I'm sort of involved in publishing myself, since I write technical documentation. And you're right, Acrobat is an essential prepress tool.
But prepress is only a small part of the job Acrobat tries to do. Most consumers of PDF files are readers of online documents, and PDF absolutely sucks for that.
First of all reading PDFs is slow. Sometimes file bloat is a factor, but even small PDFs waste a lot of your time, because the Reader takes forever to start up and initialize all its plugins.
But even if the Reader started up instantly, I'd still call Acrobat an obsolete technology. Because it's built around the idea that a document is first and foremost a set of physical pages. Which makes it really hard to navigate a document of any size. They've kludged in various features hypertext and flow features that sort of help, but even when authors remember to use them, I still hate the clumsiness of navigating a PDF.
I briefly worked at Adobe as a contractor. I came away with two big impressions: (1) they have a lot of really smart people working there; (2) their technology and corporate culture is thoroughly focused on supporting the traditional publications industry. Point (2) is unsuprising, since that industry must supply most of their cash flow. But point (1) means that lots of people at Adobe must realize that they can't depend on dead tree media forever.
Yes, Adobe flagship products are doing fine. But as I said, they're too focused on dead tree media. They make a profit supporting the traditional publishing industry, and will probably continue to do so for some time. But nothing lasts forever, and everybody in publishing knows that electronic media is the future. So Adobe knows it has to make a move. The only question is, do they imitate Kodak and wait until people stop buying their products? Or do they move now, while they have plenty of cash they have to re-invest anyway?
There's isn't the slightest shred of evidence that Microsoft has even thought of buying Macromedia. Dvorak says so himself. Yet he's so in love with his own baseless speculation, he devotes an entire column to it. I've been reading -- or trying not to read -- this guy's crap for 20 years, and I've yet to hear him have one valid insight or make one correct prediction. Why does he even have a job?
Why did Adobe buy Macromedia? Adobe's products are too dead-tree oriented. Their best-known online technology, Acrobot, just displays an page image on your screen -- a totally outdated approach to online publishing. Macromedia has a lot of expertise they need and don't have. Dvorak, being totally ignorant of the very technology he pretends to cover, doesn't seem to know that.
The bandwidth is negligible, even if thousands of sites do this.
But there are millions of sites out there. Still negligible?
If DNS bandwidth were a non-issue, you wouldn't even be able to set TTL -- it would just be hardwired to a small value. But it is. Don't lapse into spammer logic: "I'm only wasting a tiny amount of resources, so it doesn't matter." But it does matter, because lots of other people are thinking the same thing.
A nice hack, but kind of beside the point. Outdated DNS information is pretty unimportant to most web users. How many people routinely access sites that routinely change their IP numbers? Who it matters to is web providers, who are effectively offline if their site names don't resolve properly. A savvy user can work around this kind of problem (if nothing else, by entering the IP number). But only a tiny fraction of users are that savvy.
The whole thing about the web is it's based on trust.
You're correct -- if you mean "the Internet" instead of "the web". Is the confusion of ordinary people between Web and Internet creeping into techspeak?
Hey, if you want to fight back, tell us the name of your county. Publicity can't hurt.
I'm a little suprised that none of the third-party DSL providers have tried to move into your area. There may be technical issues. Or it may just be that Verizon has done a good job of locking them out.
I'd like to see a feature that will automatically consult an automatic database (similar to CDDB) to get "kosherized" titles for web sites that I bookmark.
Have you looked at the titles in CDDB? They're a mess! Not an argument for letting strangers name your bookmarks. Easier to just take a second and edit them yourself.
Note the importance of this. There must be a lot of unused copper pairs in Verizons service area for them to even consider doing this. It suggests that a good fraction of the people living in the northeast are dispensing with landlines. In other words, Verizon's core business, which has been the biggest industry in the U.S. for over a century, is dying.
And where is it available? I'm guessing that Verizon hasn't gotten around to digging up every street in America yet. Whereas their DSL service is available to anyone within a certain distance of one of their switches.
Actually, you can embed fonts in web pages and word processor files too. But people usually don't.
I certainly accept that embedding a GPLed font in any file, including a document, is a use governed by the GPL. But that's not the issue. From the post that started the Scribus thread (and this whole discussion):
... using gpl licensed fonts
in a document makes the document a derived work of the font and
therefore, subject to the gpl.
Is simply referencing a font name in a file (which is what "using a font" usually means), "derivation"? That's absurd.
And you don't have to actively agree to it - but if you don't, by default under copyright law you have no right to copy, distribute, or derive from the work.
So I don't have the right to copy, distribute, or derive GPLed fonts. The question is, am I doing any of those things just by saying <font face="Stallman Bold">? I submit the answer is "no".
The only quibble I have with that is that it's classified as an "exception". In order to be bound by the GPL, you have to somehow actively agree to it. Like when you download GPL software, you're tacitly agreeing to the GPL in exchange for using the software.
Now, when you use a font in a document, you don't usually embed that font file in your document file. (In some cases, this is possible, for the sake of portability, but it's not a widely-used feature.) Usually, "using a font" just means adding the font name to your document file. If a simple reference to GPLed software is enough to require a license, then Bill Gates assents to the GPL every time he uses the word "Linux". Which is absurd.
That's expensive. You can get a 2GB Intel-based machine for maybe 1/3 of that. OK, maybe not one that upgrades to the amount of RAM this guy needs. But if he were able to spend $4K just get some extra RAM slots, he wouldn't be having this discussion.
Many distributions have moved away from boot floppy support, indicating that the 2.6 kernel is just too big. This distribution proves that where there's a will, there's a way.
Why should there be a will? Not every group of users is worth the amount of effort it takes to support them.
He did make it clear that cost was an issue. I don't know how much more expensive the V40z is than equivalent AMD-based boxes -- but the extra cost of SPARC-based systems is the main reason Sun is in trouble.
OK, let me see if I follow your logic. You think sloppy English is stupid, because it causes people to start stupid threads, so you started one of those threads, because you didn't realize that you started the thread in response to a joke, because the joke wasn't funny.
Slashdot Mirror
It's sort of ironic: most of us depend for our livelihoods on the fact that computers are cheap. Computers would not be cheap without economies of scale. Yet few Slashdotters seem to grasp the concept. They're always complaining that nobody bothers to port their favorite game to Linux or Mac, or that off-the-shelf hardware never has the precise feature set they want. Or that they can't save money by ordering hardware that lacks commmon features they don't want.
Econonomies of scale explain why Sun is in trouble, and Bill Gates is the richest person in human history. It even explains why Enterprise was cancelled! People really need to understand the concept.
...is an absolute classic. So much so that Doctor Dobbs continues to get complaints about it from VB lovers who find it online.
But no matter how easy it is browse a PDF file, it's still just a collection of page images. And that limits its utility.
As far as I can tell, the UnixWare product that SCO still sells is pretty much the same product that the old Santa Cruz Operation used to sell, both as a server and desktop OS. The fact that they position it purely as a server product is purely a marketting decision.
But prepress is only a small part of the job Acrobat tries to do. Most consumers of PDF files are readers of online documents, and PDF absolutely sucks for that.
First of all reading PDFs is slow. Sometimes file bloat is a factor, but even small PDFs waste a lot of your time, because the Reader takes forever to start up and initialize all its plugins.
But even if the Reader started up instantly, I'd still call Acrobat an obsolete technology. Because it's built around the idea that a document is first and foremost a set of physical pages. Which makes it really hard to navigate a document of any size. They've kludged in various features hypertext and flow features that sort of help, but even when authors remember to use them, I still hate the clumsiness of navigating a PDF.
I briefly worked at Adobe as a contractor. I came away with two big impressions: (1) they have a lot of really smart people working there; (2) their technology and corporate culture is thoroughly focused on supporting the traditional publications industry. Point (2) is unsuprising, since that industry must supply most of their cash flow. But point (1) means that lots of people at Adobe must realize that they can't depend on dead tree media forever.
Yes, Adobe flagship products are doing fine. But as I said, they're too focused on dead tree media. They make a profit supporting the traditional publishing industry, and will probably continue to do so for some time. But nothing lasts forever, and everybody in publishing knows that electronic media is the future. So Adobe knows it has to make a move. The only question is, do they imitate Kodak and wait until people stop buying their products? Or do they move now, while they have plenty of cash they have to re-invest anyway?
Why did Adobe buy Macromedia? Adobe's products are too dead-tree oriented. Their best-known online technology, Acrobot, just displays an page image on your screen -- a totally outdated approach to online publishing. Macromedia has a lot of expertise they need and don't have. Dvorak, being totally ignorant of the very technology he pretends to cover, doesn't seem to know that.
If DNS bandwidth were a non-issue, you wouldn't even be able to set TTL -- it would just be hardwired to a small value. But it is. Don't lapse into spammer logic: "I'm only wasting a tiny amount of resources, so it doesn't matter." But it does matter, because lots of other people are thinking the same thing.
A nice hack, but kind of beside the point. Outdated DNS information is pretty unimportant to most web users. How many people routinely access sites that routinely change their IP numbers? Who it matters to is web providers, who are effectively offline if their site names don't resolve properly. A savvy user can work around this kind of problem (if nothing else, by entering the IP number). But only a tiny fraction of users are that savvy.
I don't get the connection (no pun intended).
I'm a little suprised that none of the third-party DSL providers have tried to move into your area. There may be technical issues. Or it may just be that Verizon has done a good job of locking them out.
Note the importance of this. There must be a lot of unused copper pairs in Verizons service area for them to even consider doing this. It suggests that a good fraction of the people living in the northeast are dispensing with landlines. In other words, Verizon's core business, which has been the biggest industry in the U.S. for over a century, is dying.
And where is it available? I'm guessing that Verizon hasn't gotten around to digging up every street in America yet. Whereas their DSL service is available to anyone within a certain distance of one of their switches.
I certainly accept that embedding a GPLed font in any file, including a document, is a use governed by the GPL. But that's not the issue. From the post that started the Scribus thread (and this whole discussion):
Is simply referencing a font name in a file (which is what "using a font" usually means), "derivation"? That's absurd.Now, when you use a font in a document, you don't usually embed that font file in your document file. (In some cases, this is possible, for the sake of portability, but it's not a widely-used feature.) Usually, "using a font" just means adding the font name to your document file. If a simple reference to GPLed software is enough to require a license, then Bill Gates assents to the GPL every time he uses the word "Linux". Which is absurd.
That's expensive. You can get a 2GB Intel-based machine for maybe 1/3 of that. OK, maybe not one that upgrades to the amount of RAM this guy needs. But if he were able to spend $4K just get some extra RAM slots, he wouldn't be having this discussion.
He did make it clear that cost was an issue. I don't know how much more expensive the V40z is than equivalent AMD-based boxes -- but the extra cost of SPARC-based systems is the main reason Sun is in trouble.
...buggy whip manufacturers call automobiles "a passing fad".
You're safe. No moderator could stay awake this long...
Do I have that right?