Why should the majority (including that computerless woman being sued by the RIAA) finance a vocal minority so they can be entertained?
Because it will save everyone money? And I do mean everyone, rich and poor alike: a national rollout will have huge economies of scale.
The $200 billion that the telecoms have stolen recently would have been a nice start by the federal government on a national fiber-to-the-home infrastructure. It would have been like the interstate highway system. But no, that would be too "socialist". So now you are $200 billion poorer, and you got nothing for it. Sucker.
We buy stuff from them, do stuff to it, and then sell it back to them at a profit. You think stopping this would be a good idea because...?
Because they are not stupid, they know they are being ripped off. They know they could have built their own refineries long ago, financed easily by their huge exports of oil. They know who prevented and is still preventing them from doing it.
Why was that modded Flamebait? The grandparent poster implied that iWork's use of ODF would make a substantial difference. By asking about iWork's market share, I thought I was injecting some reality.
ODF may still win the file format war, but as part of Linux's long term victory, not because of iWork's negligible contribution.
Is it really extortion when the extorter pays off the extortee?
But who, exactly, is the extortee? Primarily, it is the Linux world that Microsoft is threatening; this world is far, far larger than Novell. So yes, Microsoft is extorting us.
And I do mean "us". In the end, Microsoft's patent extortion is threatening harm to everyone who uses Linux or Windows -- and that is probably 95 percent of the computing world.
The threat to Linux is obvious, of course.
The threat to all Windows users is less direct but should also be clear if you think a bit. If Microsoft succeeds in killing Linux, the price of Windows and Office will remain high, and every Windows user will continue to pay through the nose.
Therefore, even if you are a dedicated user of Microsoftware, you should be cheering for Linux!
No, the Anthropic Principle only says that life did happen (because we're here to ask the question). But the principle does not explain why life arose so quickly.
You are implying that a doubly unlikely event occurred on Earth: that life arose at all (very improbable, according to the original poster) AND that it arose very quickly.
An extremely low probability is not an impossibility, of course. You could argue that we won two lotteries in a row on this planet, but if you did you would probably get whacked by Occam's Razor.
Just because we can't do D+D fusion doesn't mean an advanced civilization can't. Any civilization that expands into its Oort cloud is obviously more advanced than we are.
And since the density of the Oort cloud is roughly, let's say, zero, it should be incredibly energy inefficient to collect the deuterium.
The Oort cloud consists of trillions of comets, which are basically balls of dirty water ice. The average density of the cloud is basically zero, but I can assure you that a comet's density is far greater than zero. And these comets should be easy enough to find, since water reflects radar extremely well. The net energy gain from harvesting deuterium -- when you remember the almost complete lack of gravity out there -- will be huge.
If I need to spend more on personnel to get an incremental savings in software, it ain't gonna look good.
Which is why Linux would be better for you. A lot of experience suggests that a Linux network would need far less manpower to maintain than a Windows network of similar size.
We are the ultimate result of a very low probability event, and we are alone.
If the development of life were as improbable as you say, you would have to explain why it happened so quickly. As the article notes, life took only 0.6 gigayear to arise after the Earth cooled enough to form rocks. In other words, the average galactic planet is old enough for life to arise ten times over, or more. It would be strange if Earth were the only planet on which life survived and grew.
Any civilization sufficiently advanced to come here in force from another star has solved the energy, food and mortality puzzles, which leaves conquest unlikely as a goal I should think.
I agree that conquest is unlikely. But how about backup?
Even stars have a limited life, and stability is not guaranteed within that lifespan. A major stellar flare would be a very bad day for even a strong civilization. And supernovas -- and the resulting sterilization of entire stellar neighborhoods -- are rather common on the cosmological timescale. In other words, huddling forever around one star is a bad idea.
Therefore, civilizations that really want to endure would want to back themsevles up, preferably thousands of light years away, beyond the sterilization radius of any local supernova. Of course, the backup is a huge civilization in its own right and would want its own backup, and so on.
So again we have exponential expansion into space, and we are back to Fermi's question: where are they?
LOL No, I don't work for Asus (the makers of the Eee), for any related company, or for any competitor. I am only an interested observer who can read the writing on the wall. I have been predicting the $100 computer -- and the consequent trouble for Microsoft -- for ten years, and it is almost here. We have the $200 computer now; the price will drop to $100 in two or three years. That will be when Microsoft will really start feeling some pain.
Sorry, but the American market is dominated by good and fast.
Because cheap-and-good has not been available til now. The Eee is the consequence of two developments: cheap LCDs, and low cost, high capacity nonvolatile memory. Without these two things, usable, inexpensive, portable computers would not be possible. And neither of them is more than a year or two old. With something this new and appealing, the buying patterns of the past are not necessarily predictive of the future.
Face it, the Eee (or something like it) is the perfect Wal-Mart computer. When it comes to marketing, I doubt that you or I have anything to teach Wal-Mart.
I expect the Eee and its cousins to dominate the consumer market. Once enough people are used to Firefox and Open Office, they will naturally prefer to have similar machines at work too. And what business objects to saving money? This why I say that Linux has a shot at winning everywhere.
Ahem. You don't think Microsoft intends to keep the cheapie pricing indefinitely, do you? And even if they were dumb enough to do so, if Windows + Office were legally installable in the Eee at almost no cost, what could prevent a flood of these cheap machines from swamping the American market and seriously impacting Microsoft's Windows + Office revenues? Nothing. So of course Windows + Office will never be allowed on the cheap machines, inside or outside China.
The $200 computers will be exclusively running Linux. And these machines will dominate the Chinese market. So Bill Gates is going to be seriously disappointed: Linux will win in China.
There is even a pretty good chance that the cheap-but-good computers will take over the American market too. So Linux has a pretty strong shot at winning everywhere.
And just yesterday, we read about the oncoming tidal wave of sub-$200 computers. In a poor country like China, these little gadgets should be way more popular than computers costing $1000, don't you think? There is no way that Microsoft will be able to dominate the sub-$200 market (and still make a decent profit). So I would say that the fight for software dominance in China has barely begun.
There is no version of Windows for z Series mainframes. If not Windows or Linux, what other operating system (1) runs on the z Series, and (2) is popular enough to be worth consolidating? No, it has to be Linux. Besides, Linux is the hottest thing in the server world now.
They also cause many headaches, but for the COMMON user, they actually let them do REAL work. Linux not so much.
Define REAL work. If you mean e-mail, web browsing, word processing, and doing spreadsheets, no problem. The Eee comes with Open Office, which can read and write Microsoft Word, Excel, and Power Point documents. Firefox is one of the best web browsers around, and Thunderbird and Evolution are a damn good e-mail applications. That takes care of 90% of the "real work" for 90% of people. All this for $199 -- software and batteries included.
I don't know if Asus has any marketing ability, so the Eee may or may not succeed. But it or something like it will be a killer product.
Excellent idea. You might want to turn off the screen though, because the backlight has a limited lifetime. I don't know if there is an easy way to keep the backlight off while the unit is running.
You probably know already, so the following is for others who might be interested: the Eee has 10/100 Mbit Ethernet, so you can simply plug the laptop into your cable or ADSL modem. Then you can download any software you want from any of the Debian Linux mirrors. Debian has a ton of free software available. I should know: I'm running it right now!
Slashdot Mirror
Because it will save everyone money? And I do mean everyone, rich and poor alike: a national rollout will have huge economies of scale.
The $200 billion that the telecoms have stolen recently would have been a nice start by the federal government on a national fiber-to-the-home infrastructure. It would have been like the interstate highway system. But no, that would be too "socialist". So now you are $200 billion poorer, and you got nothing for it. Sucker.
Because they are not stupid, they know they are being ripped off. They know they could have built their own refineries long ago, financed easily by their huge exports of oil. They know who prevented and is still preventing them from doing it.
Perhaps a fee could be charged for actually using the patent in a product; the fee would be proportional to the wealth of the user.
Why was that modded Flamebait? The grandparent poster implied that iWork's use of ODF would make a substantial difference. By asking about iWork's market share, I thought I was injecting some reality.
ODF may still win the file format war, but as part of Linux's long term victory, not because of iWork's negligible contribution.
And what is the market share for iWork (relative to the entire software market, not just the Macintosh island)?
Of course, all that free land had nothing to do with the American economic boom, right?
But who, exactly, is the extortee? Primarily, it is the Linux world that Microsoft is threatening; this world is far, far larger than Novell. So yes, Microsoft is extorting us.
And I do mean "us". In the end, Microsoft's patent extortion is threatening harm to everyone who uses Linux or Windows -- and that is probably 95 percent of the computing world.
The threat to Linux is obvious, of course.
The threat to all Windows users is less direct but should also be clear if you think a bit. If Microsoft succeeds in killing Linux, the price of Windows and Office will remain high, and every Windows user will continue to pay through the nose.
Therefore, even if you are a dedicated user of Microsoftware, you should be cheering for Linux!
I think we would have noticed them by now if they were heavily established in our Oort cloud: their infra-red would be very noticeable.
You are implying that a doubly unlikely event occurred on Earth: that life arose at all (very improbable, according to the original poster) AND that it arose very quickly.
An extremely low probability is not an impossibility, of course. You could argue that we won two lotteries in a row on this planet, but if you did you would probably get whacked by Occam's Razor.
Okie Dokie! :)
Just because we can't do D+D fusion doesn't mean an advanced civilization can't. Any civilization that expands into its Oort cloud is obviously more advanced than we are.
And since the density of the Oort cloud is roughly, let's say, zero, it should be incredibly energy inefficient to collect the deuterium.
The Oort cloud consists of trillions of comets, which are basically balls of dirty water ice. The average density of the cloud is basically zero, but I can assure you that a comet's density is far greater than zero. And these comets should be easy enough to find, since water reflects radar extremely well. The net energy gain from harvesting deuterium -- when you remember the almost complete lack of gravity out there -- will be huge.
Which is why Linux would be better for you. A lot of experience suggests that a Linux network would need far less manpower to maintain than a Windows network of similar size.
If the development of life were as improbable as you say, you would have to explain why it happened so quickly. As the article notes, life took only 0.6 gigayear to arise after the Earth cooled enough to form rocks. In other words, the average galactic planet is old enough for life to arise ten times over, or more. It would be strange if Earth were the only planet on which life survived and grew.
I agree that conquest is unlikely. But how about backup?
Even stars have a limited life, and stability is not guaranteed within that lifespan. A major stellar flare would be a very bad day for even a strong civilization. And supernovas -- and the resulting sterilization of entire stellar neighborhoods -- are rather common on the cosmological timescale. In other words, huddling forever around one star is a bad idea.
Therefore, civilizations that really want to endure would want to back themsevles up, preferably thousands of light years away, beyond the sterilization radius of any local supernova. Of course, the backup is a huge civilization in its own right and would want its own backup, and so on.
So again we have exponential expansion into space, and we are back to Fermi's question: where are they?
Should be lots of deuterium there.
Ideally, the whole world will be using Linux. :)
The above posting was mine. (Forgot to log in....)
LOL
No, I don't work for Asus (the makers of the Eee), for any related company, or for any competitor. I am only an interested observer who can read the writing on the wall. I have been predicting the $100 computer -- and the consequent trouble for Microsoft -- for ten years, and it is almost here. We have the $200 computer now; the price will drop to $100 in two or three years. That will be when Microsoft will really start feeling some pain.
Because cheap-and-good has not been available til now. The Eee is the consequence of two developments: cheap LCDs, and low cost, high capacity nonvolatile memory. Without these two things, usable, inexpensive, portable computers would not be possible. And neither of them is more than a year or two old. With something this new and appealing, the buying patterns of the past are not necessarily predictive of the future.
Face it, the Eee (or something like it) is the perfect Wal-Mart computer. When it comes to marketing, I doubt that you or I have anything to teach Wal-Mart.
I expect the Eee and its cousins to dominate the consumer market. Once enough people are used to Firefox and Open Office, they will naturally prefer to have similar machines at work too. And what business objects to saving money? This why I say that Linux has a shot at winning everywhere.
The $200 computers will be exclusively running Linux. And these machines will dominate the Chinese market. So Bill Gates is going to be seriously disappointed: Linux will win in China.
There is even a pretty good chance that the cheap-but-good computers will take over the American market too. So Linux has a pretty strong shot at winning everywhere.
And just yesterday, we read about the oncoming tidal wave of sub-$200 computers. In a poor country like China, these little gadgets should be way more popular than computers costing $1000, don't you think? There is no way that Microsoft will be able to dominate the sub-$200 market (and still make a decent profit). So I would say that the fight for software dominance in China has barely begun.
There is no version of Windows for z Series mainframes. If not Windows or Linux, what other operating system (1) runs on the z Series, and (2) is popular enough to be worth consolidating? No, it has to be Linux. Besides, Linux is the hottest thing in the server world now.
Define REAL work. If you mean e-mail, web browsing, word processing, and doing spreadsheets, no problem. The Eee comes with Open Office, which can read and write Microsoft Word, Excel, and Power Point documents. Firefox is one of the best web browsers around, and Thunderbird and Evolution are a damn good e-mail applications. That takes care of 90% of the "real work" for 90% of people. All this for $199 -- software and batteries included.
I don't know if Asus has any marketing ability, so the Eee may or may not succeed. But it or something like it will be a killer product.
Excellent idea. You might want to turn off the screen though, because the backlight has a limited lifetime. I don't know if there is an easy way to keep the backlight off while the unit is running.
You probably know already, so the following is for others who might be interested: the Eee has 10/100 Mbit Ethernet, so you can simply plug the laptop into your cable or ADSL modem. Then you can download any software you want from any of the Debian Linux mirrors. Debian has a ton of free software available. I should know: I'm running it right now!