While linux can be difficult, if you know how to get support it can be a lot easier. Heck if you want some help on this one, e-mail me, I've beat my head against SAMBA a few times. But look at newsgroups, IRC, and websites and you can find gobs of useful info.
Remember Linux was designed for geeks by geeks and slowly it's working its way back to being usable by normal people. There's still the occasional chink in the armor though.
I have been using Linux routinely since like 1995 and so of course I've learned the hard way to do everything. Today, when I'm dealing with friends and colleagues who have a problem with Linux I start spouting off command lines and obscure file paths. The fact of the matter is that I have no idea how to do a lot of these things the easy way. When I tell them I can sense their dread.
As an excercise in trying to be more helpful I've been trying to learn the easy way to do things. I did an out-of-the-box install of Redhat 7.2, and I'm trying very hard not to touch the command line. As it turns out I can do an amazing amount of stuff without touching a command line. The stuff I do have to do is usually obscure power user stuff that normal humans don't have to mess with.
While it within congress' perogative to establish treaties, the clauses created by those treaties can still be ruled unconstitutional. So while this makes it possible to sneak in laws that otherwise might not get passed, it doesn't do a damn thing about judicial review.
Ultimately the rules they are putting in place now like the DMCA and now this are seeking to stop casual sharing of copies, etc. Real pirates are already dealt with by the existing laws. This treaty won't change a damn thing about how they operate, it's just going to make it legitimate for somebody to sell me a movie I can only watch on certain devices, etc.
The notion that software companies lose money on piracy is a bunch of crap I suspect. I grant you, if there was rampant Chinese grade piracy they would certainly be burdened. When they price their software, they base it on how many copies they can sell, what will price people out of the market, etc. In that calculation they are accomodating for the fact that some copies will be made illegally.
When fighting priacy they suggest that they are doing good for consumers. That if all those evil pirates would cough up the money they owe Microsoft, the price could be lower on the software. If that theory was accurate, then logically wouldn't we expect the average price for their operating system to drop in its newest release? I mean if it prevents piracy, they sell more copies, therefore the price should be correspondingly lower, non? But it isn't.
Remember, Microsoft, must maintain it's growth rate in order to maintain its stock valuation. It's stock valuation is the basis of much of it's employee compenstation, etc.
Bill Gates, today, might be saying that you'll be able to use the software forever, but 5 years down the road when they are clawing for ways to keep the company growing, they may reconsider that policy.
Okay, now that's interesting. Mars is warming up, and it's not like we can blame industrialization:). So perhaps the global warming we are experiencing is actually more tied to some change in the Sun. I wonder if there is any accurate information on historic temperatures on Venus? If it was a solar phenomenon, then we should be able to see a correspondingly higher temperature change on Venus.
Of course this could be caused by some unknown geologic phenomena on Mars, but this does point out that there are things that can cause global warming besides dumb humans:)
Is anybody else here getting a little tired of the very stale "Linux is doomed" mantra? Linux gets tried out in a new environment, and surprise, it isn't immediately successful. So then a bunch of writers publish articles about Linux being doomed in whatever arena it was tried in.
Linux is doomed in the enterprise...
Linux is doomed on the desktop...
Linux is doomed in the embedded device market...
How long have all of these other RTOS's been in use and development? How long has Linux been an option it this field? A company that is making good money developing under an RTOS they've been using for years and know every quirk of isn't going to switch to Linux overnight just because it's cool. In the long run Linux may provide some advantages that will give it a better market share, but to suggest it is doomed because it hasn't been an overnight success is ludicrous.
The funny thing is that Linux can't ever be doomed because it will never go away. If Microsoft is blown up tomorrow by a government backed anti-trust commando squad, Windows will cease to be. But Linux, being GPL'd will continue to go merrily along no matter how many people conduct bad business ventures around it. I'll believe embedded Linux and enterprise Linux and desktop Linux are doomed when Linux goes out of business. Oh wait, it can't:)
You know I thought on this for a little bit and I can't think of a single thing the government can do to help. The best thing they can really do is just not meddle with it.
Well, sounds like excite is acting as nothing more than a stop gap measure for the remaining users of it's service until they can get their own networks up and running. So it's safe to say that excite@home will not be an ongoing concern in a few months. Will anybody really notice though?
The problem is that let's say Tivo does sue. What, two years before they even get into court and in the meantime paying retainers to expensive lawyers. Then after the court battlet, IF they win, the case can be appealed. So we've got another couple years going through appeals.
Then let's say that Tivo wins. What do they win? They nullify ReplayTV's patent. So they are basically right back where they started but now they just paid millions of dollars to lawyers.
Now, what if Tivo loses? Then the patent is set in stone by the court which means that Tivo has absolutely no baragaing room for prices. Sonicblue can choose to charge them any price or even refuse to license the patent all together.
Lawsuits are expensive. Why would Tivo spend millions of dollars and years in court tangling with SonicBlue when they can just pay them a few bucks per unit in royalties and pass that on to the customers?
Now conceivably Sonicblue could try to monopolize the market by refusing to license to Tivo but it's not like they want a huge court battle either. It's in their financial best interest to license it to Tivo. Lawsuits might come up as a negotiating strategy but I think it's very unlikely this will ever end up in court.
Remember, when you go to court the only people that win are lawyers.
I'd be very surprised if a lawsuite comes out of this except as a tactic to leverage a little better price on patent royalties. Sonicblue will give Tivo a call that goes a little something like this:
Sonicblue: Hi, Tivo, we were thinking you might want to license this patent from us for $X.
Tivo: But that's not a valid patent, we've been doing that for years.
Sonicblue: Well, you can fight us if you'd like. I'm sure your lawyers will only charge you 10-100 times $X.
Tivo: hmmmm... okay, where do we send the money. We can always pass the cost on to the customer anyhow
Okay, so let's assume for the moment that excite shuts down. Fine, AT&T loses some money there because they are an investor, but suddenly all of their cable competitors don't really have an Internet service alternative. On the other hand it sounds like AT&T has been building up their own network infrastructure for a while now. So this could put them in the position of selling services direct to their competitors which puts them in an awfully good position.
EVIL CORPORATE PLAN B:
Now, if AT&T can pick up excite for a song, then they end up in the exact same position but it works out even better for them financially because then they've got an already existing infrastructure and with the built in connections to their competitors. This short cuts the hassles that would be involved in EVIL CORPORATE PLAN A.
Now on to my personal rant...
The thing that bothers me in all of this is that AT&T, in the interests of "maximizing shareholder value" should play the game this way. And I'm sure that any of the other competitors would be happy to play the game that way if they had the opportunity to. I'm just so sick of the whole "screw everybody out of their money" game that corporate american seems to have evolved into. It'd be nice if I could watch a commercial by AT&T or SBC or any of the other big telecom companies, that talked about customer service and quality and not spit out my drink from laughing so hard.
I just read the article on news.com which discusses this ruling but it seemed to make clear two things:
1) that the parties must go back to the bargaining table
2) that the service being disconnected was unlikely
What it sounds like happened is that the judge said they can cut the contracts but there is nothing right now saying affirmatively that the service will be shut off. Basically this just means it is legal for excite to cancel the existing contracts so that they can re-negotiate them.
They take a risk with the odd ones because they know everybody will show up anyhow in the hopes that maybe THIS time they'll finally break the pattern. It of course flops, and then they have to work hard to make a good one to make sure that people don't just give up all together.
Currently, if a terrorist wanted to block a wireless service (say, television or 802.11b), he would use a transmitter that is easy to locate through triangulation, and only focuses on one particular service. If, however, spectrum is shared amongst many services, that terrorist could take out all of those services and it would be almost impossible to tell which transmitter was his, and which belonged to legitimate users.
How do they "take it out". While certainly they could render services useless in a certain specific geographic area by turning up the power, to do so on a wider basis would require more power which would make them real obvious. I don't really see how a change to more spread spectrum would make a terrorists job easier.
The reason RAM for PC's is so amazingly cheap is based on two reasons that don't really apply to things like Cisco routers. The first is that the supply is huge and the demand has been relatively low. The second is that because of the vastness of the PC market, the components are more readily made in bulk and thus can be made for cheaper. If you look at RAM for just about anything else, the price for what you get has fallen a little over time but has stayed pretty consistent. That is, if it cost you $200 to have an adequate amount of RAM before, it still costs you $200 to have an adequate amount of RAM.
Now, I'm not a network engineer, but another factor to possibly consider is the specifications required for router memory. Does it require a higher level of performance, error correction, etc, than the average PC? If it does, then that will also raise the cost.
Star Trek I - Rather cheezy looking and overall not that good of a movie
Star Trek II - KHAAAAAAAAAN! Still one of the best Start Trek movies
Star Trek III - The search for spock. It had some good moments but overall kinda dull. Not bad, but not great
Star Trek IV - Okay, the environmentalism was layed on thick, but overall a very different style from the other movies (much more humor), and quite a bit of fun
Star Trek V - Today red shirted ensigns we are going to go find God on some funky planet in the middle of nowhere. Set phasers on CRAP!
Start Trek VI - My personal favorite. Lots of good drama between Federation and the Klingons. The big fairwell for most of the original cast.
Star Trek VII - a crossover between the old and new, and the movie clearly suffered for trying to force that.
Star Trek VIII - We get to see the old federation, a borg trying to seduce Data, and overall a fun and action packed movie.
Star Trek VIX - Ummmm.. what was this movie again. I know I saw it, but I don't recall it having anything worth remembering. Something about somebody rebelling I think but I forget.
So, back to an even number and so we can reasonably assume it will be good. It seems like they screw up, and then work hard to get the next one right. Then they rest on their laurels and screw up again.
Slashdot Mirror
While linux can be difficult, if you know how to get support it can be a lot easier. Heck if you want some help on this one, e-mail me, I've beat my head against SAMBA a few times. But look at newsgroups, IRC, and websites and you can find gobs of useful info.
Remember Linux was designed for geeks by geeks and slowly it's working its way back to being usable by normal people. There's still the occasional chink in the armor though.
I have been using Linux routinely since like 1995 and so of course I've learned the hard way to do everything. Today, when I'm dealing with friends and colleagues who have a problem with Linux I start spouting off command lines and obscure file paths. The fact of the matter is that I have no idea how to do a lot of these things the easy way. When I tell them I can sense their dread.
As an excercise in trying to be more helpful I've been trying to learn the easy way to do things. I did an out-of-the-box install of Redhat 7.2, and I'm trying very hard not to touch the command line. As it turns out I can do an amazing amount of stuff without touching a command line. The stuff I do have to do is usually obscure power user stuff that normal humans don't have to mess with.
Don't trample the little shred of hope I have left :)
While it within congress' perogative to establish treaties, the clauses created by those treaties can still be ruled unconstitutional. So while this makes it possible to sneak in laws that otherwise might not get passed, it doesn't do a damn thing about judicial review.
Ultimately the rules they are putting in place now like the DMCA and now this are seeking to stop casual sharing of copies, etc. Real pirates are already dealt with by the existing laws. This treaty won't change a damn thing about how they operate, it's just going to make it legitimate for somebody to sell me a movie I can only watch on certain devices, etc.
You can still speek freely all you want. It's just reading, viewing, listening or installing somebody else's speech that's at issue.
The notion that software companies lose money on piracy is a bunch of crap I suspect. I grant you, if there was rampant Chinese grade piracy they would certainly be burdened. When they price their software, they base it on how many copies they can sell, what will price people out of the market, etc. In that calculation they are accomodating for the fact that some copies will be made illegally.
When fighting priacy they suggest that they are doing good for consumers. That if all those evil pirates would cough up the money they owe Microsoft, the price could be lower on the software. If that theory was accurate, then logically wouldn't we expect the average price for their operating system to drop in its newest release? I mean if it prevents piracy, they sell more copies, therefore the price should be correspondingly lower, non? But it isn't.
Remember, Microsoft, must maintain it's growth rate in order to maintain its stock valuation. It's stock valuation is the basis of much of it's employee compenstation, etc.
Bill Gates, today, might be saying that you'll be able to use the software forever, but 5 years down the road when they are clawing for ways to keep the company growing, they may reconsider that policy.
I must have missed that registration step in my RedHat 7.2 install :)
Okay, now that's interesting. Mars is warming up, and it's not like we can blame industrialization :). So perhaps the global warming we are experiencing is actually more tied to some change in the Sun. I wonder if there is any accurate information on historic temperatures on Venus? If it was a solar phenomenon, then we should be able to see a correspondingly higher temperature change on Venus.
:)
Of course this could be caused by some unknown geologic phenomena on Mars, but this does point out that there are things that can cause global warming besides dumb humans
Is anybody else here getting a little tired of the very stale "Linux is doomed" mantra? Linux gets tried out in a new environment, and surprise, it isn't immediately successful. So then a bunch of writers publish articles about Linux being doomed in whatever arena it was tried in.
:)
Linux is doomed in the enterprise...
Linux is doomed on the desktop...
Linux is doomed in the embedded device market...
How long have all of these other RTOS's been in use and development? How long has Linux been an option it this field? A company that is making good money developing under an RTOS they've been using for years and know every quirk of isn't going to switch to Linux overnight just because it's cool. In the long run Linux may provide some advantages that will give it a better market share, but to suggest it is doomed because it hasn't been an overnight success is ludicrous.
The funny thing is that Linux can't ever be doomed because it will never go away. If Microsoft is blown up tomorrow by a government backed anti-trust commando squad, Windows will cease to be. But Linux, being GPL'd will continue to go merrily along no matter how many people conduct bad business ventures around it. I'll believe embedded Linux and enterprise Linux and desktop Linux are doomed when Linux goes out of business. Oh wait, it can't
You know I thought on this for a little bit and I can't think of a single thing the government can do to help. The best thing they can really do is just not meddle with it.
What do you want to bet that a Microsoft Rep walked in and said, "here's free software and hardware if you switch to IIS".
Well, sounds like excite is acting as nothing more than a stop gap measure for the remaining users of it's service until they can get their own networks up and running. So it's safe to say that excite@home will not be an ongoing concern in a few months. Will anybody really notice though?
and that's exactly my point: IF
The problem is that let's say Tivo does sue. What, two years before they even get into court and in the meantime paying retainers to expensive lawyers. Then after the court battlet, IF they win, the case can be appealed. So we've got another couple years going through appeals.
Then let's say that Tivo wins. What do they win? They nullify ReplayTV's patent. So they are basically right back where they started but now they just paid millions of dollars to lawyers.
Now, what if Tivo loses? Then the patent is set in stone by the court which means that Tivo has absolutely no baragaing room for prices. Sonicblue can choose to charge them any price or even refuse to license the patent all together.
Lawsuits are expensive. Why would Tivo spend millions of dollars and years in court tangling with SonicBlue when they can just pay them a few bucks per unit in royalties and pass that on to the customers?
Now conceivably Sonicblue could try to monopolize the market by refusing to license to Tivo but it's not like they want a huge court battle either. It's in their financial best interest to license it to Tivo. Lawsuits might come up as a negotiating strategy but I think it's very unlikely this will ever end up in court.
Remember, when you go to court the only people that win are lawyers.
I'd be very surprised if a lawsuite comes out of this except as a tactic to leverage a little better price on patent royalties. Sonicblue will give Tivo a call that goes a little something like this:
Sonicblue: Hi, Tivo, we were thinking you might want to license this patent from us for $X.
Tivo: But that's not a valid patent, we've been doing that for years.
Sonicblue: Well, you can fight us if you'd like. I'm sure your lawyers will only charge you 10-100 times $X.
Tivo: hmmmm... okay, where do we send the money. We can always pass the cost on to the customer anyhow
Until Linux can spread worms as well as Outlook, Linux will never be accepted as a true desktop replacement!
EVIL CORPORATE PLAN A:
Okay, so let's assume for the moment that excite shuts down. Fine, AT&T loses some money there because they are an investor, but suddenly all of their cable competitors don't really have an Internet service alternative. On the other hand it sounds like AT&T has been building up their own network infrastructure for a while now. So this could put them in the position of selling services direct to their competitors which puts them in an awfully good position.
EVIL CORPORATE PLAN B:
Now, if AT&T can pick up excite for a song, then they end up in the exact same position but it works out even better for them financially because then they've got an already existing infrastructure and with the built in connections to their competitors. This short cuts the hassles that would be involved in EVIL CORPORATE PLAN A.
Now on to my personal rant...
The thing that bothers me in all of this is that AT&T, in the interests of "maximizing shareholder value" should play the game this way. And I'm sure that any of the other competitors would be happy to play the game that way if they had the opportunity to. I'm just so sick of the whole "screw everybody out of their money" game that corporate american seems to have evolved into. It'd be nice if I could watch a commercial by AT&T or SBC or any of the other big telecom companies, that talked about customer service and quality and not spit out my drink from laughing so hard.
I just read the article on news.com which discusses this ruling but it seemed to make clear two things:
1) that the parties must go back to the bargaining table
2) that the service being disconnected was unlikely
What it sounds like happened is that the judge said they can cut the contracts but there is nothing right now saying affirmatively that the service will be shut off. Basically this just means it is legal for excite to cancel the existing contracts so that they can re-negotiate them.
So I don't think excite is out yet...
They take a risk with the odd ones because they know everybody will show up anyhow in the hopes that maybe THIS time they'll finally break the pattern. It of course flops, and then they have to work hard to make a good one to make sure that people don't just give up all together.
Currently, if a terrorist wanted to block a wireless service (say, television or 802.11b), he would use a transmitter that is easy to locate through triangulation, and only focuses on one particular service. If, however, spectrum is shared amongst many services, that terrorist could take out all of those services and it would be almost impossible to tell which transmitter was his, and which belonged to legitimate users.
How do they "take it out". While certainly they could render services useless in a certain specific geographic area by turning up the power, to do so on a wider basis would require more power which would make them real obvious. I don't really see how a change to more spread spectrum would make a terrorists job easier.
Sorry, just got in the habit of putting V in front of all of it :).
The reason RAM for PC's is so amazingly cheap is based on two reasons that don't really apply to things like Cisco routers. The first is that the supply is huge and the demand has been relatively low. The second is that because of the vastness of the PC market, the components are more readily made in bulk and thus can be made for cheaper. If you look at RAM for just about anything else, the price for what you get has fallen a little over time but has stayed pretty consistent. That is, if it cost you $200 to have an adequate amount of RAM before, it still costs you $200 to have an adequate amount of RAM.
Now, I'm not a network engineer, but another factor to possibly consider is the specifications required for router memory. Does it require a higher level of performance, error correction, etc, than the average PC? If it does, then that will also raise the cost.
Let's look at the brief history:
Star Trek I - Rather cheezy looking and overall not that good of a movie
Star Trek II - KHAAAAAAAAAN! Still one of the best Start Trek movies
Star Trek III - The search for spock. It had some good moments but overall kinda dull. Not bad, but not great
Star Trek IV - Okay, the environmentalism was layed on thick, but overall a very different style from the other movies (much more humor), and quite a bit of fun
Star Trek V - Today red shirted ensigns we are going to go find God on some funky planet in the middle of nowhere. Set phasers on CRAP!
Start Trek VI - My personal favorite. Lots of good drama between Federation and the Klingons. The big fairwell for most of the original cast.
Star Trek VII - a crossover between the old and new, and the movie clearly suffered for trying to force that.
Star Trek VIII - We get to see the old federation, a borg trying to seduce Data, and overall a fun and action packed movie.
Star Trek VIX - Ummmm.. what was this movie again. I know I saw it, but I don't recall it having anything worth remembering. Something about somebody rebelling I think but I forget.
So, back to an even number and so we can reasonably assume it will be good. It seems like they screw up, and then work hard to get the next one right. Then they rest on their laurels and screw up again.