Im not quite sure, but I'll assume you're not trolling...
What's unmonetizable? They sell subscriptions at a buck a year. so they get 200-400+ million people paying a buck a year, and they need to pay 40 or so employees out of that. They don't store messages, so their server costs don't include storage. These messages by and large are small, how many are just "k", so bandwidth costs aren't huge. Line made money by selling stickers and themes, so there's that.
So, Compaq had buildings, computers in warehouses, parts all over the world, and contracts for future purchases. And people, they had a lot of workers. We used to say how big a company was based on how many employees it had.
WhatsApp has a huge list of users and maybe 30-60 people (I've heard number of engineers, not number of employees). For some reason what's been stuck in my head with the acquisitions and attempots (Snapchat) is that now employees seem to be liability not an asset. Fewer people to fire, fewer separation letters, fewer stockholders. Before we had terms like Human Resources. Now we don't even pretend that employees are an asset.
I'm not communist/socialist/back_in_my_day_get_off_my_lawn guy. I'm a systems guy. Like supercapitalist Henry Ford, I think the economy does best when people get paid and they can they then have money to buy things. I think a lot of people have lost the connection between Consumer Purchasing power and paying people a wage.
Mark hopes to see the "top 50" apps from the Android and iOS stores available for Ubuntu on mobile.
Hopes?
Hmm, RIM/Blackberry tried to throw money at this, didn't work. Magic wishes and dreams will not cause a company to spend money for a developer to work on a new style platform with unknown revenue chances.
Broadly speaking, the Republican party is really a coalition of two conservative groups, but two very different, almost diametrically opposed conservative groups.
You have the "fiscal conservatives" who think everybody should be hands off anything economically. This is the "free markets" Republican you tend to think of.
Then you have the "social conservative" who think everyone should be righteous and whatnot. They want not only themselves to be righteous, but you as well. To force you to live by a religious code that you don't follow, you sometimes need government interference. The joke being here "the Republican party wants government so small it just sleeps in bed with you and tells you No."
These groups were kind of glued together in the Nixon years, and really cemented in the Reagan years, It kind of explains some of the multiple-personality-disorderness of the current Republican Party. I'm surprised it hasn't blown up yet - do you really think a true Tea Partyer has much to talk to Rand Paul about? The doggedness of corralling "rogue" Republicans and painting them as R.I.N.O kind of keeps this all together.
That being said, many supposed fiscal conservatives really aren't so much. "Fiscal Conservative" Sarah Palin bloated a small city's spending so much she sent it into a debt spiral. The largest recent expansion of government was under Bush #43. Before that? Reagan. Wasn't the quote "Reagan proved deficits don't matter" - not very fiscally conservative. "Tax and spend" Clinton ran a fiscally responsible government and ran a surplus (which goes into the above - Bush had cash to burn, and so he did). Paul Ryan wants to gut government programs, yet he wouldn't be where he is today without them - he kind of skirted on Social Security benefits to get through college. Fiscal Conservative makes a great bumper sticker, but many Republicans seem to live by "please let everyone be fiscally conservative, well everyone but me".
You have people who disobey safety instructions and wander about the cabin when the plane is pitching and rolling, even with "Federal Law compels you to comply with all flight attendant instructions...." and you expect people to not talk because a 5'2 flight attendant asked nicely? Never gonna happen.
This is an example of "what's great for me sucks for you". For that shithead on the phone, s/he's breaking up the monotony of the flight and lack of blood flow to the legs with a fun phone call. It just hurts and annoys everyone else. Do you think at that point after being jammed into the middle seat with a seat reclining into his lap the caller is gonna care that the nice flight attendant calmly told them to knock it off?
Won't happen. Even with the Federal Law thing you'll still have people that try. And for someone who takes public transportation with "quiet cars" that depend on civility between people that is often ignored, I've seen a couple near fights on a 45 minute train ride with relatively (to airplanes) large and comfortable seats, fresh air, and the ability to walk around any time. How many fights do you think there will be on a 8 hour overland flight with Cell coverage? My body clock says it's midnight, time to sleep. This caller's clock say's it's 8AM, time for work. Do you think he's gonna back off? Do you think the cranky sleepy guy is gonna back off?
For those that say "let the market decide" this is preventing literal fistfights in the air where you'd probably need to vector 25% of those fight flights off to other airports, totally disrupting the web of flights that make up air travel today.
Insert normal whine about downmodding here, but it's gotta be running SOMETHING right?
I mean if we had union of all "what's the weirdest place you've seen {MacOSX,Windows,WindowsCE,Linux,FreeDOS,OS/2} you'd get a good chunk of all the odd devices. Though in the future, they all might run Android, then we'll debate if that's Linux (Linux kernel, non-stock everything else)
Geek moment - on a recent United flight, I remember trying to read the device driver names as it rebooted right before takeoff.
The system kind of sucked. It was X, meaning it kind of was designed with a mouse with a single pixel "Hotspot" in mind. My not very sausage-y fingers and my wife's even-less-sausage-y fingers had a hard time navigating the touchscreen.
Luckily enough, for what this is used for, start a crappy movie and sit for 2 hours, it didn't frustrate us that much.
I know Debian is pretty tightly bound to GNU, but they're using cycles for compatibility for these two systems that are barely not-quite-vaporware?
Oddly I'm not trolling. I'm a developer and I'd groan if my boss gave me the constraint "make sure you're compatible with these systems that represent.0001% of the installed base"
1) Not sure why you're that worried about it, it seems to be to be just a comment, like one odd thing that they saw.
2) Mild irony, for Taiwan it is also year 103. Go to any Post office, official office, or even read an expiration date on an item you just bought. Why 103? Sun-Yat-Sen and Chinese Democracy. Yes, Chinese democracy wasn't just a bad Guns and Roses album, but a real thing, at least until outside forces messed with it. And like you had year 10 of the Qing Dynasty here, now you have year 103 of the era of democracy. So, they at least are honoring the democratic era of mainland China.
Studies have shown that people almost never inquire why someone is on a registry. Instead they just assume the worst.
I know here in Chicago, if you're drunk and you decide to relieve yourself in an alley someplace, even away from the street, a cop may and sometimes will bust you for public indecent exposure, a sex offense. So, for one night of drinking, you're on the same registry as a rapist.
The best analysis of this seems to be ArsTechnica, which looks into the conflict with Samsung. Even in the beginning of the deal, people were furrowing brows on how Google can be competing on hardware with the rest of Android.
I live in Chicago. I have a relative in Motorola. Google spent a lot of cash to get people to move to the Merchandise Mart downtown, spending a huge wad of cash to lease out an entire floor of the Mart. This was very disruptive for the teams, and only would pay longer term benefits. This doesn't seem to me to be a strip-and-dump purchase by Google, but the Samsung-Tizen thing kind of forced their hand. People were worrying about Android fragmentation, and the sale of Motorola was the pound of flesh that Google needed to give up to stop a huge split with Samsung.
Honest question: what if she was given the option of releasing those cells or not, and she said no? How would you explain that to someone who could have benefited from them being researched?
Honest followup: what if someone has money and you don't, and the only way you can get money is to steal it. Does that justify stealing?
Life will always have some problems and issues. What are you entitled to?
I'd say that Early is relative. I meant "early compared to today", and "early relative to start of the variant". For most people, the 68K days are two whole CPU architectures ago:
Intel x86 => (PA-RISC/SPARC/MIPS) => 68000.
SunOS & HP/UX were last on 68K in early 1990's. That's early enough for most people, and may predate the existence of a great number of Slashdot readers.
I miss George Carlin this was part of such a good bit. Too much focus on kids and totally ignoring that adults should think and acting as if children should be infinitely protected.
To be honest, Stallman doesn't use this argument. He's not concerned with slow movement of codebases - witness gcc being forked because of slowness in movement, witness emacs being forked for essentially the same, witness the hurd still not out.
It's about ideological purity,, which in effect means Stalman forcing his vision on developers. Understandably some object to being told what to do based on a sole individual's view of freedom.
The only code that helps us and not our adversaries is copylefted code.
Either you believe exactly as I believe or you're an enemy. This doesn't help much.
I'm also reminded that the original gcc development stalled under Stalman's/FSF leadership. It barely made it out of 2.7.x, had a barely usable 2.8 release. The egcs project was born out of the fact that the mainline compiler for most Free UNIX was both broken and incomplete. If he wants people to use FSF code, he has to make them best of breed, or at least close to that. Though he'd hate that the quote came from Steve Jobs, he'd be best to heed "Real artists ship".
Re:I wonder... a time machine and a NetBSD install
on
Apple Macintosh Turns 30
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Remember that many of the early UNIX variants (SunOS, HP/UX, some others) started out on the 68000 chip. It was a very well designed and flexible chip. Then PowerPC was supposed to be a platform. (Remember CHRP? of course not).
Macs have this image of oddball hardware, but except for NuBus it really wasn't all that true.
I found this Ars Technica article about how hard core Google is kind of interesting. Kind of made me sympathetic for all the work that Amazon has to do to get the Kindle Fire working.
Also, for those who don't know, KitKat has Google Now taking over your home screen, meaning Google now listens on your microphone 24/7 (as if it hasn't already).
Is Apple now the white knight, saving us from Android domination? No of course not, but interesting to see how quickly the idea of Google owning the world has switched. I mean, I can turn off the microphone for certain apps in iOS, but can't in Android.
I hate "Apple Tax", please use something else. This is a site ostensibly about knowledge distribution, and Apple Tax is simplistic and bad. Call it Apple Margin. Apple Luxury Price. Apple Price Gouging. Apple "Tim Cook will charge you what he wants because he fucking CAN" (which is most realistic) but not Apple Tax.
There is no Porsche Tax. You either pay what Porsche charges, or you find other transport. Nobody is pointing a gun at your head to buy it. If you think their margins are too high, you buy a Ford, or ride the bus. Same with Apple. Yeah, they charge huge margins, cause they can. Because people like their products enough that they'll pay the margin. Would you leave money on the table? If you had a product and it cost you $10 but you knew people would pay $50, would you leave the money on the table and say "no, $15 is fine". Hell, even if you would, there's no reason Apple *needs* to.
You don't like that? Cool, don't buy a Mac. Don't buy an iPhone. Both have enough people willing to pay higher margins on them that you don't have a lot of bargaining power to lower the price. But don't bitch about it, anymore than you bitch about "I want a 450HP Stuttgart car but the assholes won't sell me one for $150 - damn Porsche Tax".
The reason I hate this is there was a true Microsoft Tax. Microsoft made you pay money even if you didn't even have the product. Somehow they reasoned "we can strongarm OEMs to give us cash or no Windows licenses" and yet they skated on the monopoly charges. Apple is charging you luxury
Slashdot Mirror
Im not quite sure, but I'll assume you're not trolling...
What's unmonetizable? They sell subscriptions at a buck a year. so they get 200-400+ million people paying a buck a year, and they need to pay 40 or so employees out of that. They don't store messages, so their server costs don't include storage. These messages by and large are small, how many are just "k", so bandwidth costs aren't huge. Line made money by selling stickers and themes, so there's that.
So, Compaq had buildings, computers in warehouses, parts all over the world, and contracts for future purchases. And people, they had a lot of workers. We used to say how big a company was based on how many employees it had.
WhatsApp has a huge list of users and maybe 30-60 people (I've heard number of engineers, not number of employees). For some reason what's been stuck in my head with the acquisitions and attempots (Snapchat) is that now employees seem to be liability not an asset. Fewer people to fire, fewer separation letters, fewer stockholders. Before we had terms like Human Resources. Now we don't even pretend that employees are an asset.
I'm not communist/socialist/back_in_my_day_get_off_my_lawn guy. I'm a systems guy. Like supercapitalist Henry Ford, I think the economy does best when people get paid and they can they then have money to buy things. I think a lot of people have lost the connection between Consumer Purchasing power and paying people a wage.
Hopes?
Hmm, RIM/Blackberry tried to throw money at this, didn't work. Magic wishes and dreams will not cause a company to spend money for a developer to work on a new style platform with unknown revenue chances.
It's a split.
Broadly speaking, the Republican party is really a coalition of two conservative groups, but two very different, almost diametrically opposed conservative groups.
You have the "fiscal conservatives" who think everybody should be hands off anything economically. This is the "free markets" Republican you tend to think of.
Then you have the "social conservative" who think everyone should be righteous and whatnot. They want not only themselves to be righteous, but you as well. To force you to live by a religious code that you don't follow, you sometimes need government interference. The joke being here "the Republican party wants government so small it just sleeps in bed with you and tells you No."
These groups were kind of glued together in the Nixon years, and really cemented in the Reagan years, It kind of explains some of the multiple-personality-disorderness of the current Republican Party. I'm surprised it hasn't blown up yet - do you really think a true Tea Partyer has much to talk to Rand Paul about? The doggedness of corralling "rogue" Republicans and painting them as R.I.N.O kind of keeps this all together.
That being said, many supposed fiscal conservatives really aren't so much. "Fiscal Conservative" Sarah Palin bloated a small city's spending so much she sent it into a debt spiral. The largest recent expansion of government was under Bush #43. Before that? Reagan. Wasn't the quote "Reagan proved deficits don't matter" - not very fiscally conservative. "Tax and spend" Clinton ran a fiscally responsible government and ran a surplus (which goes into the above - Bush had cash to burn, and so he did). Paul Ryan wants to gut government programs, yet he wouldn't be where he is today without them - he kind of skirted on Social Security benefits to get through college. Fiscal Conservative makes a great bumper sticker, but many Republicans seem to live by "please let everyone be fiscally conservative, well everyone but me".
You have people who disobey safety instructions and wander about the cabin when the plane is pitching and rolling, even with "Federal Law compels you to comply with all flight attendant instructions...." and you expect people to not talk because a 5'2 flight attendant asked nicely? Never gonna happen.
This is an example of "what's great for me sucks for you". For that shithead on the phone, s/he's breaking up the monotony of the flight and lack of blood flow to the legs with a fun phone call. It just hurts and annoys everyone else. Do you think at that point after being jammed into the middle seat with a seat reclining into his lap the caller is gonna care that the nice flight attendant calmly told them to knock it off?
Won't happen. Even with the Federal Law thing you'll still have people that try. And for someone who takes public transportation with "quiet cars" that depend on civility between people that is often ignored, I've seen a couple near fights on a 45 minute train ride with relatively (to airplanes) large and comfortable seats, fresh air, and the ability to walk around any time. How many fights do you think there will be on a 8 hour overland flight with Cell coverage? My body clock says it's midnight, time to sleep. This caller's clock say's it's 8AM, time for work. Do you think he's gonna back off? Do you think the cranky sleepy guy is gonna back off?
For those that say "let the market decide" this is preventing literal fistfights in the air where you'd probably need to vector 25% of those fight flights off to other airports, totally disrupting the web of flights that make up air travel today.
Louis: Looking good, Billy Ray!
Billy Ray: Feeling good, Louis!
Now to corner the market on more Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice.
:) and i blew my chance at modding "Funny" by posting...
Insert normal whine about downmodding here, but it's gotta be running SOMETHING right?
I mean if we had union of all "what's the weirdest place you've seen {MacOSX,Windows,WindowsCE,Linux,FreeDOS,OS/2} you'd get a good chunk of all the odd devices. Though in the future, they all might run Android, then we'll debate if that's Linux (Linux kernel, non-stock everything else)
Geek moment - on a recent United flight, I remember trying to read the device driver names as it rebooted right before takeoff.
The system kind of sucked. It was X, meaning it kind of was designed with a mouse with a single pixel "Hotspot" in mind. My not very sausage-y fingers and my wife's even-less-sausage-y fingers had a hard time navigating the touchscreen.
Luckily enough, for what this is used for, start a crappy movie and sit for 2 hours, it didn't frustrate us that much.
I noticed this:
2. Support for Hurd/kFreeBSD
I know Debian is pretty tightly bound to GNU, but they're using cycles for compatibility for these two systems that are barely not-quite-vaporware?
Oddly I'm not trolling. I'm a developer and I'd groan if my boss gave me the constraint "make sure you're compatible with these systems that represent .0001% of the installed base"
1) Not sure why you're that worried about it, it seems to be to be just a comment, like one odd thing that they saw.
2) Mild irony, for Taiwan it is also year 103. Go to any Post office, official office, or even read an expiration date on an item you just bought. Why 103? Sun-Yat-Sen and Chinese Democracy. Yes, Chinese democracy wasn't just a bad Guns and Roses album, but a real thing, at least until outside forces messed with it. And like you had year 10 of the Qing Dynasty here, now you have year 103 of the era of democracy. So, they at least are honoring the democratic era of mainland China.
I know here in Chicago, if you're drunk and you decide to relieve yourself in an alley someplace, even away from the street, a cop may and sometimes will bust you for public indecent exposure, a sex offense. So, for one night of drinking, you're on the same registry as a rapist.
I'd just tag it as apocryphal then... it's still a great quote, especially after the trillions of the Bush years.
The best analysis of this seems to be ArsTechnica, which looks into the conflict with Samsung. Even in the beginning of the deal, people were furrowing brows on how Google can be competing on hardware with the rest of Android.
I live in Chicago. I have a relative in Motorola. Google spent a lot of cash to get people to move to the Merchandise Mart downtown, spending a huge wad of cash to lease out an entire floor of the Mart. This was very disruptive for the teams, and only would pay longer term benefits. This doesn't seem to me to be a strip-and-dump purchase by Google, but the Samsung-Tizen thing kind of forced their hand. People were worrying about Android fragmentation, and the sale of Motorola was the pound of flesh that Google needed to give up to stop a huge split with Samsung.
It's a pretty famous quote... and i work across the street from the Dirksen building.
Honest followup: what if someone has money and you don't, and the only way you can get money is to steal it. Does that justify stealing?
Life will always have some problems and issues. What are you entitled to?
A great book that probed the lines between cells, what makes us a human, rights to your own body, and identity. I hope they all read this.
It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.
-- Andrew Jackson
I'd say that Early is relative. I meant "early compared to today", and "early relative to start of the variant". For most people, the 68K days are two whole CPU architectures ago:
Intel x86 => (PA-RISC/SPARC/MIPS) => 68000.
SunOS & HP/UX were last on 68K in early 1990's. That's early enough for most people, and may predate the existence of a great number of Slashdot readers.
I miss George Carlin this was part of such a good bit. Too much focus on kids and totally ignoring that adults should think and acting as if children should be infinitely protected.
To be honest, Stallman doesn't use this argument. He's not concerned with slow movement of codebases - witness gcc being forked because of slowness in movement, witness emacs being forked for essentially the same, witness the hurd still not out.
It's about ideological purity,, which in effect means Stalman forcing his vision on developers. Understandably some object to being told what to do based on a sole individual's view of freedom.
Either you believe exactly as I believe or you're an enemy. This doesn't help much.
I'm also reminded that the original gcc development stalled under Stalman's/FSF leadership. It barely made it out of 2.7.x, had a barely usable 2.8 release. The egcs project was born out of the fact that the mainline compiler for most Free UNIX was both broken and incomplete. If he wants people to use FSF code, he has to make them best of breed, or at least close to that. Though he'd hate that the quote came from Steve Jobs, he'd be best to heed "Real artists ship".
Remember that many of the early UNIX variants (SunOS, HP/UX, some others) started out on the 68000 chip. It was a very well designed and flexible chip. Then PowerPC was supposed to be a platform. (Remember CHRP? of course not).
Macs have this image of oddball hardware, but except for NuBus it really wasn't all that true.
I found this Ars Technica article about how hard core Google is kind of interesting. Kind of made me sympathetic for all the work that Amazon has to do to get the Kindle Fire working.
Also, for those who don't know, KitKat has Google Now taking over your home screen, meaning Google now listens on your microphone 24/7 (as if it hasn't already).
Is Apple now the white knight, saving us from Android domination? No of course not, but interesting to see how quickly the idea of Google owning the world has switched. I mean, I can turn off the microphone for certain apps in iOS, but can't in Android.
I hate "Apple Tax", please use something else. This is a site ostensibly about knowledge distribution, and Apple Tax is simplistic and bad. Call it Apple Margin. Apple Luxury Price. Apple Price Gouging. Apple "Tim Cook will charge you what he wants because he fucking CAN" (which is most realistic) but not Apple Tax.
There is no Porsche Tax. You either pay what Porsche charges, or you find other transport. Nobody is pointing a gun at your head to buy it. If you think their margins are too high, you buy a Ford, or ride the bus. Same with Apple. Yeah, they charge huge margins, cause they can. Because people like their products enough that they'll pay the margin. Would you leave money on the table? If you had a product and it cost you $10 but you knew people would pay $50, would you leave the money on the table and say "no, $15 is fine". Hell, even if you would, there's no reason Apple *needs* to.
You don't like that? Cool, don't buy a Mac. Don't buy an iPhone. Both have enough people willing to pay higher margins on them that you don't have a lot of bargaining power to lower the price. But don't bitch about it, anymore than you bitch about "I want a 450HP Stuttgart car but the assholes won't sell me one for $150 - damn Porsche Tax".
The reason I hate this is there was a true Microsoft Tax. Microsoft made you pay money even if you didn't even have the product. Somehow they reasoned "we can strongarm OEMs to give us cash or no Windows licenses" and yet they skated on the monopoly charges. Apple is charging you luxury