Exactly. The problem with Palm is that their original product was too simple and too good at what it does. If you need an organizer type product, there is no reason to ever upgrade. However, if you need an.mp3/videogame/spreadsheet PDA, then you're already better off with one of the PocketPC products. And Microsoft knows how to make people upgrade by bloating their OS with "features" that you don't realize you need...until they become part of the next generation reference specification. Want to read WordML2003 files on a PDA? Got to get a new 128MB MS PocX PC. And so on.
I could go into business as General Motors brand toilet plungers and all GM could do was bury me with legal fees in hopes that I couldn't go the distance to win the case.
That is absolutely false. You could absolutely not go into business as "General Motors" brand toilet plungers. Trademark case law refers to something called "famous" marks, i.e. trademarks which are so well-known and ubiquitous that it can be successfully argued that any use of them other than by the owner constitutes a dilution and infringment. See this link for more info.
Everyone keeps comparing this drive to the 2.88MB drives. Perhaps the correct analogy would be to compare our current 700 MB CDRs to the once popular 720 KB floppies. If you'll recall, 720 KB floppies were eventually supplanted by the hugely popular 1.44 MB floppies, which edged out their predecessors despite "only" doubling capacity. Hmmm.
And as others have pointed out, the DD-CD format has a useful niche already. They'd be great for VCDs, Terapin recordings, and DiVX:-)
Furthermore, Sony's double-wide disks would be an ideal carrier for the Chinese DVD-patent-busting Super VCD format.
Imagine if MS raised prices on Windows ME from ~$120 (about $60 for OEM's) to ~$360 (about ~$200 for OEMS). Try to predict the outcome? Do you think more people would switch to Linux? I do.
From CNET:Microsoft on Thursday revamped its software licensing program for most business customers, effectively raising the cost of upgrades by as much as 107 percent, analysts said
So Linux ought to be flying off the shelves right about now.
MS isn't a monopoly, doesn't hold monopoly power over any segment/industry, and probably never again will. They don't control OS's, they don't control browsers, they don't control anything. You can live a completely MS free existence and be happy and free (if you want).
You seem to be using a definition of "monopoly" which is only espoused by extremely laissez-faire, right-leaning economists. Under such a strict definition, there really are no monopolies, except for government-mandated ones. However, in the real world (for US residents, read "Sherman Act") a monopoly is operationally defined as a company which has such control over its market that it has the power to raise prices almost* with impunity. [*The inevitable weasel word.] One way to look at this would be to ask yourself, if a given company faced essentially an equal opponent in its market, would it still be able to charge the same prices? So, e.g. AOL charges $21.95/month, I think. However, it seems reasonable that if MSN or Earthlink grew to the same size as AOL, it would still be able to charge essentially the same rate. (I believe they all charge the same price anyway.) Its customers essentially feel they get their money's worth.
On the other hand, let's say Microsoft faced a well-equipped foe, e.g. TinyLimp, which offered basically the same range of products which were interoperable with current standards (in other words, it would sell Office and Windows clones that were fully compatible). If TL lowered the prices of the clone Wyndows and Offyce so as to increase market share, MS would have to lower its prices or lose market share. This would be a great deal for the consumer because TL would be like an AMD, spurring its larger adversary to continually innovate while lowering prices. However, there is no TinyLimp. And Microsoft has the power to make sure that there won't be one for the forseeable future. It utterly dominates its market space. It can and does frequently raise prices by some arbitrary amount, because it knows its customers are locked into Windows and Office. That's why it can be argued that MS is in fact a monopoly.
But "stealing" people's IP doesn't hurt them. They still have it. I know because the Napsterites told me so.
The two situations are not at all parallel. So-called "Napsterites" are trying to take something which is for-profit and make it free. Microsoft is trying to take something which is free and make it for-profit. (And proprietary, to boot. (And reboot. And reboot....))
The article points out that BlindRead, CloneCD and other programs can read bit for bit copies of these copy-protected CDs.
Hence, the technology, as it now stands, only frustrates the casual pirate, not the hardcore fair use maven.
Also, N.B., the same article can be found on Salon, and in point of fact actually comes from Inside.
First of all, the statement that mathematical theory is riddled with holes is questionable. Finding an unprovable statement is a rarity that happens once every so often.
That sounds more like an indication of our own limited way of experiencing the universe. For example, if you ask a child to name a number at random, they will come up with a natural number very near zero. But that hardly proves that other numbers are rarities. It merely means that children, by and large, don't have the vocabulary to express "complicated" numbers. Even if you get that smartass junior genius child who says "a googolplex," he will still be lower than virtually all natural numbers, which themselves are an insignificant subset of R (of which the majority are nonconstructible transcendental numbers which could not be named even in principle.)
Mathematical statements are the same. Due to our own concrete finite minds, we could not possibly state, experience or comprehend the vast majority of them. And it is in that vast solution space that lie the unprovable statements Chaitin alludes to.
Most people employ a sort of "steganographic" calculus in their decision that it's not worthwhile to encrypt email to begin with. After all, there are billions of pieces of email sent every day. why would anybody want to read my message to Grandma? In essence, my daily, banal emails are hiding in plain sight.
And when it comes to more sensitive information that really does need to be encrypted, such as credit card info, it's customary to go to an SSL-enabled site to do so. So most people, I think, instinctively choose a level of security which is appropriate to their situation.
On more than one occasion I have accidentally received incorrectly addressed email intended for another recipient. In the vast majority of cases, it's like, "See you Thursday at the ball game, Michael." However, I did once receive a large (>1 MB) corporate spreadsheet with sales figures and such. I wrote back to the sender and she asked me to please delete it asap. It would certainly have been better for this person had she encrypted the message beforehand.
In actuality, it is good company policy to encrypt email. The evidence against MS would've been much weaker had they used a program like Disappearing email, which self-destructs your memos after a predetermined period of time.
For those of you who may have had trouble accessing the speech, he mentions that the fair use doctrine should be reaffirmed extended into the digital realm in six areas. He says digital copies should be allowed to facilitate:
1) distance learning
2) reselling of digital material
3) incidental reproduction (e.g. browser cache)
4) backup copies
5) in-store exemption (listening to samples)
6) my.mp3.com (or as he calls it:___________)
However, he left out the most important area of all:
Hmm, use a cool-running CPU like a 206 MHz StrongARM and you don't even need a fan. Maybe the whole thing could fit in something the size of a paperback book.
In essence, the courts are giving a greenlight to AOLTW or to AT&T-BB to carve out cable empires in the United States. Since the cost of entry into a major cable market is exorbitantly expensive (requiring permits and billions of dollars to tear up city streets) they will be assured of little competition for the forseeable future provided they are willing to not compete with each other. They'll be like mini-Microsofts, collecting a toll for every broadband access you make, while MSFT collects a.NET toll for OS/Productivity licensing. Expect your cable bills to keep creeping up.
(Digressing a moment, do you think that Microsoft's productivity software is going to be any cheaper on the pay-per-use model? Excuse me while I laugh.)
They really need to take this perversion of the DMCA to the next logical step: Instead of merely banning the offending party from the service, they should require (in the license) that any party who divulges either the usernames, IP addresses, or files held by any other party agrees to be completely liable for any damages, statutory penalties or other legal fees resulting from such action.
Re:I have had a fearful thought....
on
KDE 2.1 Is Out
·
· Score: 1
The alleged "war" between the two projects seems to be mostly fictional to me.
Except that de Icaza has gone on record saying that he thinks KDE'rs should switch to Gnome and he recognizes that "the two desktops are competing." Okay, that's not exactly a "war," but I'd interpret the entirety of the statements in his interview as being slanted against KDE. If not a battle of words, then maybe a skirmish.
I am greatly grieved by the direction our huge race relations industry is taking. It seems to be saying now that films portraying the racist discrimination of white people by black people are perfectly good, because they act as positive discrimination and right old wrongs.
I don't think this film was officially approved by the "race relations industry." It was put out by Hollywood, for which the only color that matters is green. Furthermore, a film like this stereotypes blacks as much as it does whites. Sure, it's saying that white people are corny, and goofy...and, well, rich...Hmm, that doesn't sound so bad to me. But it also cordons black people into a ghetto of jive-talking, dance-feverish, thuglike behavior, which may may seem "cool" onscreen, but in RL that sort of conduct translates to "can't keep a job." And the fact that it is shown as an attractive lifestyle choice only makes it more pernicious.
Anyway, the real culprit here is lazy screenwriting. It's easier to work with lame old stereotypes instead of to coming up with original characterizations, motivations and so on. Back in the 80's there was a TV show called "St. Elsewhere" which ran for about six seasons. One character, an "Asian" Dr. Wendy Armstrong, was gotten rid of after the first season. Why? Because the writers claimed they couldn't come up with any "Asian" storylines for her. Translation: She wasn't a madam or refugee, so they didn't have stock stereotpyed storylines to draw from. After a few years, they were able to add another "Asian", Dr. Paulette Kiem, to the storyline, but if IIRC, she was a refugee who became a doctor...
The race relations industry has become just that - an industry - and if racism were to dissappear tommorrow then they would all be out of a job. So we can see that it is in their interest to promote racism, even if they do it unconsciously, for their own wealth.
Maybe there's some truth to that, but you'd have to agree the same is true for, say, the American Lung Society, which would be out of business if everybody REALLY stopped smoking. So maybe they are secretly rooting for RJ Reynolds?
There's a reason my remark was parenthetical and that's because it is secondary to my main point: that the only common ground which would cause "hundreds" of groups to unite against the US government is the taking away of gun rights. So long as the NRA goes to bed happy, no one's going to give a damn about the EFF.
Besides that, North Vietnam and Afghanistan refer to situations where practically the entire population rose up against a foreign enemy. Also, they're hilly regions where the logistics of guerilla warfare turn in the favor of insurgencies. That hardly parallels anything likely to happen in the US, which is fairly flat, where the population is mostly urbanized, which has a national highway system engineered to double for military use, which would have complete and utter air superiority over any internal resistance, and (mostly) where people are just too fat and prosperous to give up creature comforts in exchange for their "rights."
Regardless of the aim of the "founders," it's pretty clear that today, the only abrogation of rights that would cause US citizens to take up arms en masse against the government...is the banning of their right to bear arms.
As a result, the original aim has been totailly perverted. Rather than guns being used to keep the government in check, maintaining the nominal right to bear arms is used by the gov't as a sop to pacify the citizenry into acceptance of more insidious and modern forms of dictatorship like DMCA.
(I say nominal cause the fact is that without serious firepower far in excess of what is allowed into private hands, there's no way that any group of people could seriously mount any sort of resistance against the US military. See Waco.)
I don't believe this perverse method of public pacification has a historical analogue in Oz.
I haven't been able to locate a comprehensive list of what has been updated for 1.4. As far as I can tell, along with the aforementioned Nautilus graphical shell/file manager, there is the Evolution email/groupwise/scheduling program, plus some new technologies, Gnome VFS, Bonobo/OAF which is a reusable component development system, GConf, which helps to stabilize updating and configuring applications, and Gnome Print, a printing module. Is there anything else major? Also, where are the screenshots? Also why is Gnome so far behind schedule? Aren't they supposed to be delivering 2.0 by now?
$999 and $1999 aren't intended to woo the linux geek who trying to put together Gnome Invaders 3D. It's priced for midsize and large corporations who wouldn't think twice about dropping a grand or two for VisualAge or some comparable enterprise RAD software.
I think this is a smart move by Borland. They need to find out if indeed there is a market for expensive Linux development software. They need to know if they are going to actually be able to turn a profit selling support, upgrades, etc. And if not, they will find themselves having to rethink this entire project. As you said, the dot-com revolution is over. It's time for the grey suits to get paid. Moving expensive product with rock-steady support to corporate clients is going to be how they do it, not by selling kitchen-sink gee-whiz try at your own risk patchware to college kids and spare-time coders.
This isn't a comp-sci story, but I had an Argentinian art teacher in the eighth grade named Ms. Bozzo. Once I was sick in the hospital, and she came to visit me. Before leaving, she gave me a warm passionate kiss dead on the lips. That was pretty "fun and exciting" for THIS student. Sigh!
Oh, um, yeah, she also got me interested in Klee, Miro, Picasso, whatever...
Slashdot Mirror
And this is on topic how? Oh, I get it...Nice continents on Titan, heh-heh-heh...
Exactly. The problem with Palm is that their original product was too simple and too good at what it does. If you need an organizer type product, there is no reason to ever upgrade. However, if you need an .mp3/videogame/spreadsheet PDA, then you're already better off with one of the PocketPC products. And Microsoft knows how to make people upgrade by bloating their OS with "features" that you don't realize you need...until they become part of the next generation reference specification. Want to read WordML2003 files on a PDA? Got to get a new 128MB MS PocX PC. And so on.
That is absolutely false. You could absolutely not go into business as "General Motors" brand toilet plungers. Trademark case law refers to something called "famous" marks, i.e. trademarks which are so well-known and ubiquitous that it can be successfully argued that any use of them other than by the owner constitutes a dilution and infringment. See this link for more info.
And as others have pointed out, the DD-CD format has a useful niche already. They'd be great for VCDs, Terapin recordings, and DiVX:-) Furthermore, Sony's double-wide disks would be an ideal carrier for the Chinese DVD-patent-busting Super VCD format.
From CNET:Microsoft on Thursday revamped its software licensing program for most business customers, effectively raising the cost of upgrades by as much as 107 percent, analysts said
So Linux ought to be flying off the shelves right about now.
MS isn't a monopoly, doesn't hold monopoly power over any segment/industry, and probably never again will. They don't control OS's, they don't control browsers, they don't control anything. You can live a completely MS free existence and be happy and free (if you want).
You seem to be using a definition of "monopoly" which is only espoused by extremely laissez-faire, right-leaning economists. Under such a strict definition, there really are no monopolies, except for government-mandated ones. However, in the real world (for US residents, read "Sherman Act") a monopoly is operationally defined as a company which has such control over its market that it has the power to raise prices almost* with impunity. [*The inevitable weasel word.] One way to look at this would be to ask yourself, if a given company faced essentially an equal opponent in its market, would it still be able to charge the same prices? So, e.g. AOL charges $21.95/month, I think. However, it seems reasonable that if MSN or Earthlink grew to the same size as AOL, it would still be able to charge essentially the same rate. (I believe they all charge the same price anyway.) Its customers essentially feel they get their money's worth.
On the other hand, let's say Microsoft faced a well-equipped foe, e.g. TinyLimp, which offered basically the same range of products which were interoperable with current standards (in other words, it would sell Office and Windows clones that were fully compatible). If TL lowered the prices of the clone Wyndows and Offyce so as to increase market share, MS would have to lower its prices or lose market share. This would be a great deal for the consumer because TL would be like an AMD, spurring its larger adversary to continually innovate while lowering prices. However, there is no TinyLimp. And Microsoft has the power to make sure that there won't be one for the forseeable future. It utterly dominates its market space. It can and does frequently raise prices by some arbitrary amount, because it knows its customers are locked into Windows and Office. That's why it can be argued that MS is in fact a monopoly.
The two situations are not at all parallel. So-called "Napsterites" are trying to take something which is for-profit and make it free. Microsoft is trying to take something which is free and make it for-profit. (And proprietary, to boot. (And reboot. And reboot....))
Hence, the technology, as it now stands, only frustrates the casual pirate, not the hardcore fair use maven. Also, N.B., the same article can be found on Salon, and in point of fact actually comes from Inside.
That sounds more like an indication of our own limited way of experiencing the universe. For example, if you ask a child to name a number at random, they will come up with a natural number very near zero. But that hardly proves that other numbers are rarities. It merely means that children, by and large, don't have the vocabulary to express "complicated" numbers. Even if you get that smartass junior genius child who says "a googolplex," he will still be lower than virtually all natural numbers, which themselves are an insignificant subset of R (of which the majority are nonconstructible transcendental numbers which could not be named even in principle.)
Mathematical statements are the same. Due to our own concrete finite minds, we could not possibly state, experience or comprehend the vast majority of them. And it is in that vast solution space that lie the unprovable statements Chaitin alludes to.
I've been putting off getting an iPaq, but now I need to know, has anybody gotten this baby to run on the PocketPC platform with Personal Java?
Most people employ a sort of "steganographic" calculus in their decision that it's not worthwhile to encrypt email to begin with. After all, there are billions of pieces of email sent every day. why would anybody want to read my message to Grandma? In essence, my daily, banal emails are hiding in plain sight.
And when it comes to more sensitive information that really does need to be encrypted, such as credit card info, it's customary to go to an SSL-enabled site to do so. So most people, I think, instinctively choose a level of security which is appropriate to their situation.
On more than one occasion I have accidentally received incorrectly addressed email intended for another recipient. In the vast majority of cases, it's like, "See you Thursday at the ball game, Michael." However, I did once receive a large (>1 MB) corporate spreadsheet with sales figures and such. I wrote back to the sender and she asked me to please delete it asap. It would certainly have been better for this person had she encrypted the message beforehand.
In actuality, it is good company policy to encrypt email. The evidence against MS would've been much weaker had they used a program like Disappearing email, which self-destructs your memos after a predetermined period of time.
00DD, ryptoc si oodg orf uttingp p3sm no imsterA!!1
For those of you who may have had trouble accessing the speech, he mentions that the fair use doctrine should be reaffirmed extended into the digital realm in six areas. He says digital copies should be allowed to facilitate:
1) distance learning
2) reselling of digital material
3) incidental reproduction (e.g. browser cache)
4) backup copies
5) in-store exemption (listening to samples)
6) my.mp3.com (or as he calls it:___________)
However, he left out the most important area of all:
7) "Slashdot Effect" mirror sites!!!
Please moderate my parent (#175) +1=informative
and moderate my grandparent (#17) -50=abhorrent (I wish!)
and M2 my grandparent's moderator -1 = you asked for it!
Hmm, use a cool-running CPU like a 206 MHz StrongARM and you don't even need a fan. Maybe the whole thing could fit in something the size of a paperback book.
(Digressing a moment, do you think that Microsoft's productivity software is going to be any cheaper on the pay-per-use model? Excuse me while I laugh.)
They really need to take this perversion of the DMCA to the next logical step: Instead of merely banning the offending party from the service, they should require (in the license) that any party who divulges either the usernames, IP addresses, or files held by any other party agrees to be completely liable for any damages, statutory penalties or other legal fees resulting from such action.
Except that de Icaza has gone on record saying that he thinks KDE'rs should switch to Gnome and he recognizes that "the two desktops are competing." Okay, that's not exactly a "war," but I'd interpret the entirety of the statements in his interview as being slanted against KDE. If not a battle of words, then maybe a skirmish.
I don't think this film was officially approved by the "race relations industry." It was put out by Hollywood, for which the only color that matters is green. Furthermore, a film like this stereotypes blacks as much as it does whites. Sure, it's saying that white people are corny, and goofy...and, well, rich...Hmm, that doesn't sound so bad to me. But it also cordons black people into a ghetto of jive-talking, dance-feverish, thuglike behavior, which may may seem "cool" onscreen, but in RL that sort of conduct translates to "can't keep a job." And the fact that it is shown as an attractive lifestyle choice only makes it more pernicious.
Anyway, the real culprit here is lazy screenwriting. It's easier to work with lame old stereotypes instead of to coming up with original characterizations, motivations and so on. Back in the 80's there was a TV show called "St. Elsewhere" which ran for about six seasons. One character, an "Asian" Dr. Wendy Armstrong, was gotten rid of after the first season. Why? Because the writers claimed they couldn't come up with any "Asian" storylines for her. Translation: She wasn't a madam or refugee, so they didn't have stock stereotpyed storylines to draw from. After a few years, they were able to add another "Asian", Dr. Paulette Kiem, to the storyline, but if IIRC, she was a refugee who became a doctor...
The race relations industry has become just that - an industry - and if racism were to dissappear tommorrow then they would all be out of a job. So we can see that it is in their interest to promote racism, even if they do it unconsciously, for their own wealth.
Maybe there's some truth to that, but you'd have to agree the same is true for, say, the American Lung Society, which would be out of business if everybody REALLY stopped smoking. So maybe they are secretly rooting for RJ Reynolds?
There's a reason my remark was parenthetical and that's because it is secondary to my main point: that the only common ground which would cause "hundreds" of groups to unite against the US government is the taking away of gun rights. So long as the NRA goes to bed happy, no one's going to give a damn about the EFF.
Besides that, North Vietnam and Afghanistan refer to situations where practically the entire population rose up against a foreign enemy. Also, they're hilly regions where the logistics of guerilla warfare turn in the favor of insurgencies. That hardly parallels anything likely to happen in the US, which is fairly flat, where the population is mostly urbanized, which has a national highway system engineered to double for military use, which would have complete and utter air superiority over any internal resistance, and (mostly) where people are just too fat and prosperous to give up creature comforts in exchange for their "rights."
Regardless of the aim of the "founders," it's pretty clear that today, the only abrogation of rights that would cause US citizens to take up arms en masse against the government...is the banning of their right to bear arms.
As a result, the original aim has been totailly perverted. Rather than guns being used to keep the government in check, maintaining the nominal right to bear arms is used by the gov't as a sop to pacify the citizenry into acceptance of more insidious and modern forms of dictatorship like DMCA.
(I say nominal cause the fact is that without serious firepower far in excess of what is allowed into private hands, there's no way that any group of people could seriously mount any sort of resistance against the US military. See Waco.)
I don't believe this perverse method of public pacification has a historical analogue in Oz.
I haven't been able to locate a comprehensive list of what has been updated for 1.4. As far as I can tell, along with the aforementioned Nautilus graphical shell/file manager, there is the Evolution email/groupwise/scheduling program, plus some new technologies, Gnome VFS, Bonobo/OAF which is a reusable component development system, GConf, which helps to stabilize updating and configuring applications, and Gnome Print, a printing module. Is there anything else major? Also, where are the screenshots? Also why is Gnome so far behind schedule? Aren't they supposed to be delivering 2.0 by now?
$999 and $1999 aren't intended to woo the linux geek who trying to put together Gnome Invaders 3D. It's priced for midsize and large corporations who wouldn't think twice about dropping a grand or two for VisualAge or some comparable enterprise RAD software. I think this is a smart move by Borland. They need to find out if indeed there is a market for expensive Linux development software. They need to know if they are going to actually be able to turn a profit selling support, upgrades, etc. And if not, they will find themselves having to rethink this entire project. As you said, the dot-com revolution is over. It's time for the grey suits to get paid. Moving expensive product with rock-steady support to corporate clients is going to be how they do it, not by selling kitchen-sink gee-whiz try at your own risk patchware to college kids and spare-time coders.
This isn't a comp-sci story, but I had an Argentinian art teacher in the eighth grade named Ms. Bozzo. Once I was sick in the hospital, and she came to visit me. Before leaving, she gave me a warm passionate kiss dead on the lips. That was pretty "fun and exciting" for THIS student. Sigh!
Oh, um, yeah, she also got me interested in Klee, Miro, Picasso, whatever...