Wait no it hasn't, not if it's counted as different products.
So, to get around the
threshold, simply stop
selling the sw before the threshold is reached,
and sell a new version instead. If keeping the
older version on the market is mandated, simply
find a way to lock customers into the new version,
just as vendors do now with the proprietary model.
For example, who even buys Windows, personally, now? The way a vendor with an almost totally
monopoly in a platform product (once they can get one) sells products is up to the vendor.
99.999% of windows sales are from OEMs, who are forced
to use the latest version, or none at all, in
their licensing contracts.
(and forced not to distribute any sw that
challenges MS's platform monopoly enough;
forced
to arrange the desktop in a specific way;
forced
to ship keyboards with extra control keys that
force touch typists to look down when hitting alt, or ctrl, and to miss the spacebar;
forced to leave out boot options, or sometimes
even boot loaders, when they are even allowed to
ship dual-boot systems,
etc.) (Read the Findings
of Fact from the MS DOJ case.)
Ok, so I digressed into an anti-monopoly rant.
I was on topic for a while...
Get your physical property to last
as long as megacorps' control of culture!
Copyright your house and lobby congress
to get an extension on your house every 20 years.
One linked article compared the bots to ants,
one to "ants and bees". Why did you call them
cyberbees? They don't fly. Thanks for the
sensationalism I thought someone had
made 4.5 inch flyers. That would have been
a huge deal. Bigger deal than further
study of swarm algorithms.
"I'll be out there tomorrow for the Golden Penguin
Bowl, as well as judging exhibitors. Busy day."
Yah, must suck to be Taco. Damn, glad I don't
get to go to all the shows for free, am not just married,
etc, etc.
Maybe I'm just being negative, and "Busy day." Is
intended to be positive. But seldom does anyone
say "busy day" and mean it amelioratively. Perhaps
"Finally, a day where I do something other than
sit on my fat ass, not correct misspellings,
and double post old stories!!!" would have been
more clear.
It happened a lot before perl and others, but
perl forces you to release code. You can rewrite
perl in something else, but I see a lot of people
not bothering.
How in the world would you force a banner ad on a
a browser using open languages on an open application protocol on an open transport protocol, etc?
You would have to make people download some
stuff that would run as root before they could
get on your net. Or you would have to disallow
forwarding on your gateway and make some sort of
page forwarder on your web server, that would
only be accessible through a page with the banner
ad in, say, one frame at the top, and the forwarded page below. But then you couldn't
use the network for anything but surfing and certain
kinds of surfing wouldn't work i bet. Well, actually, you could disallow forwarding on just
port 80, then people could do other things besides surf. Hmm, maybe you could do this. I'm
scaring myself, maybe I should go help the
fascists in Beijing lock down the PRC internet.
blech.
Maybe joining a network
like Sputnik
might enable a more sane solution.
Re:If it were a Windows machine...
on
Crushing Experience
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually, every time you eat at a restaurant, you are paying people's salaries and wages. Ditto vacation, etc. So, wasting time and stuff: bad. Wasting money: ?
Well, there are whole industries that benefit from people doing that. See also Velbein.
The submission says stronger, but I honestly can't
tell from this article. It only says the 'field' is
getting flatter.
There are lots of ways to visualize a force field.
Does the 'flatter' field with more distance (in the
field visualization, not the earth now) from the
center at the equator mean a greater intensity, or
less?
I would think that is the case, but the way the
article describes whats happening to the earth,
geometrically, I would think the opposite. (I would
also be saying the submitter is mistaken when he
says the the field is getting "stronger at the
equator.")
Tangentially, in basic engineering core physics,
in order to get good numbers in lab, you
learn that g is smaller at lower latitudes (closer
to the equator) because of, presumably, centrifugal
force due to the rotation of the earth, and increased distance to the center of the earth (because the earth is flattened, because of the
centrifugal force already mentioned).
(9.81something m/s^2 at 90 degrees, 9.79something
at 0 degrees, were the numbers I was routinely
given, and they worked well (well, the number
for my latitude, within that range, worked well.).)
This is probably a relatively huge and constant variation, independent of everything talked about in the article, but I just thought I would mention
it as a way the variable gravitational field
is known to many readers here, and the postulations
developed to explain the variation.
Secondly, the article says that, post glacially
(in this current era),
ice shelfs are
decreasing, letting the crust rise at the poles.
So, postglacially, the distance from the center of
the earth at the poles is increasing, and the amount of mass under a person at the poles is decreasing (mountains of ice are leaving the area,
melting, and distributing themselves more evenly).
Both of those things would make the gravity at the poles *decrease*.
Now, supposing that a postglacial decrease in polar
gravity corresponds to an increase everywhere else,
then a *reverse* of the postglacial trend would
mean a *decrease* of gravity at the equator, the
opposite of the what the submission, and the
articles "flattening field" visualization might
indicate.
Which is it? I dunno.
To add to this confusion, does the graphic at the
top of the article indicate the delta of the movement
of the field-as-a-surrounding-surface (flattening field) or the delta of the force itself? I mean,
an arrow away from the earth, as seen on the
articles graphic at the equators, seems to indicate a
lessening in gravity, not an increase, again
running counter to the submission's statement. And
vice versa at the poles. Oy.
they have lost some of my good will.
Before it was like "Hey! Thanks for the free
service!!"
Now its "Err, yah, thanks for the free service,
or whatever."
Good will may
not be worth value in an annual report (as it
actually was in the 90s) but its absence is still
a cost. Hooray for Yahoo, sending a huge amount of surplus brand respect down the pooper.
So, read the articles, right?;p
The dataplay discs hold 500MB.
I can't remember how much a minidisc was the last
time I priced one, but I know it was high, and
I realized it would never drop like such things
are supposed to, because it's a format owned by
Sony. Same reason I disdain memstick.
These Dataplay disks are supposedly to be sold for $10-12.
If these can be used for purposes other than
fair-use denying media consumption, more power
to them. They're small, high density, and
cheap. But they're not rewritable. Ok, I
agree with you all, screw 'em;p
It should be noted that I would not be
serving this to the world, just me. I would
require a name/password (.htaccess I guess).
So anyone who thinks this is one more instance
of technology making it impossible for people
to make money on copyright can chill (and while
you're at it, chill
about every other thing that makes you think that,
too)
I wouldn't
want to be targeted by copyright narcs (but it
would be incredibly interesting to see if this
could be considered like cable tv; I think that would
actually be the default; the lawyers of anyone who
sued me would have to argue *against* precedent).
Wouldn't want to have my server DOS'ed by a
gazillion ppl.
Wouldn't want to have my link constantly filled by a
gazillion ppl, and my ISP kindly ask me to
purchase a more expensive service plan.
Most importantly, my upstream bandwidth is really pathetic; only one person could watch
at a time in any case.
Oh yah, can only watch one channel
at a time. Who would control the channel
if there were a dozen ppl watching?;p
So I wanted a tv card for my second pc, since my
TV went on the fritz, and it would be cheaper to
get a tv card and move the pc to the den.
I go to Walmart of all places and get an ATI TV
Wonder VE for $47, and plug it into, of all things,
my second box with only a K6-500 in it.
After fighting with windows to get all the hw resources sorted out, I get the sw that came with
the card working. And it encodes, MPEG2, any quality,
DVD, VCD, or any crappy bitrate/vid quality/sound
quality/size I define. It does this in realtime.
I can't find any avis it leaves around as an
intermediary step, and the mpeg file saves and is
there instantaneously when I stop recording.
This k6 is very hot when recording, the tv card
isnt (well, more than usual), and there's no bloody
space on the card for an encoder.
I don't trust using Windows
crappy scheduling to record shows, so
I switched the tuner to the linux box I'm typing this
on.
I WANT, I HAVE TO find a ported version of
whatever the heck wonderful realtime (ON A K6!!!) sw encoder ATI licensed for this thing!
Picture an mpeg stream at somehting conservative
like 176x144 coming off your webserver, with channel
and even encoding volume control right in the
web page interface...my tv anywhere i want;p
Thats my plan..
Selecting something and pasting it with the middle button is less intuitive than ctrl-c, ctrl-v? I don't think so. And its terrifically fast.
Next weakness?
Seriously, you're right, if we did this
for some time, you
would eventually hit upon something thats better
in Windows. Eventually;p
And I would admit the demerit of Linux
in that regard, and perhaps
in a while Linux would be improved in that regard
or I would find feature or program I didn't know about that already makes Linux better in that regard;
that's how Microsoft looks at things, anyway.
("We'll eventually fix it. I mean, we own the
OEMs, we aren't soon going to be thrown out
by them. Given we will be around
forever, we are destined to fix every
problem and come out with the perfect OS.
Just be patient.")
Ask them what Microsoft's platform can do that
they think Linux/Unix can't or can't do easily;
What are the perceived shortcomings.
Then you can calmly and easily blow any
misconceptions out of the water.
In fact, the other way around; sales of content
are certainly spurred by sharing copies.
It's like what's been said in the past about
other forms of copying, like from the radio:
sales are spurred, at least to an extent.
Why did we just take it for granted that
filesharing falls entirely into the area of
harm and not good?
A related
point is that shared copies are quite crappy now.
Let's worry about this when copies really are perfect.
/. has covered this, but it's a very good point
to repeat to your senator. I have a list of
articles and some thoughts about it
here.
This things existence is not silly.
It *is* a PC, it even runs Linux.
But it's slightly more.
Taco is paying a fantastically huge margin
for someone to
write and set up a little software for him.
That's fine for taco, but I think I speak for
99.99999% of the readership when I say I would
never go for that. We would write a suite and
opensource it. Maybe taco will reimplement
everything he likes about this box on one of
his PCs, I dunno.
I keep wavering on whether this is ridiculous
or not.
Could taco explain what is innovative about this
box? And if the innovation is software, how
could it not be applied as a piece of software
written for any PC (that includes portables)
with the appropriate hardware? Maybe it's all
packaging & marketing, which again, 99.9999%
of the/. readership considers inconsequential.
Because some people have $1500 but not the skills to assemble, configure, and install their own components, OS, and software?
Ok, you completely ignored the fact that a
prebuilt desktop or better yet
a laptop works just
as well for the previous poster's argument.
I would bet you can
find a laptop that does 99% of what taco
says this thing does. And a laptop would
on top of all that do scads more stuff,
with a little less work than the mp3 box being
discussed might require.
Taco has too much money.;p
Because some people want a single person to call when the box up and dies, instead of having to diagnose whether to call Asus, Creative Labs, Micron, PC Power & Cooling, or Nvidia?
See above. Laptops are typically sold
by one company, just like this MP3 thing.
I dunno. Why should a lawyer buy one of these to put into his office when he can simply take a slew of billable hours out of his time to save $700 building a Frankenclone box that doesn't match his decor?
Well, a lawyer wouldn't, a lawyer would try to
play some tunes from his laptop, if he was into
mp3s at all.
I'm not saying there is no market
for this device. I'm saying the market is defined
as people who want an incredibly functional
mp3 player with *slightly* less complexity than
a PC, and who have no PC or laptop to begin
with, and has an easy $1500.
Come to think of it,
There are companies that are marketing and designing
laptops specifically to make this type of thing
easy (not complex).
I kind of touched that above when I said many
laptops easily do 99% of what this thing does.
So maybe there really is no reason for this
device to exist. O wait, I'm forgetting
the surprisingly huge market
of whimsical [harsher ribbing reserved for
karma's sake, even though it would have
been in good fun] people with way too much money.
Re:Woah! $500 for a 40 Gig HD + Ethernet...
on
LinuxWorld Summary
·
· Score: 1
duron,mobo w/ether ..$125
256M . . . . . . . . . $25
40G . . . . . . . . . $100
DVD . . . . . . . . ..$50
video . . . . . . . ..$50
keybrd, mouse . . . ..$25
No CRT . . . . . . . ..$0
assembly and margin . $125
Total . . . . . . . . $500
Wouldn't be a very good gome box,
but, get rid of the $125 margin it would
be. And it would be a fine server any case.
I agree, the Sony deal is under typical
cost, but not by much.
Alan implied that if he had any knowledge of
any deal in the works, he would have quit
already. Rob, your headline reads
"Alan Cox to Leave if RH AOL Buyout Happens?"
That seems to me like he threatened to
leave. He hasn't done that.
It's like what many say (and needs to be
said) about Microsoft; now that they're
a huge company and monopoly, they shouldn't
behave like a startup, screwing people
whenever they can. Likewise I don't
feel bad about holding the/. editors
to a higher standard now that they're
so successful.
So, anyway, this is all rumour. You guys
are all skewering each other over a
sensationalised (by our/. editor friends)
rumour.
If I had to argue though, I would argue
against a buyout.
And I could argue for pages
before I even got to any idealogical
reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait no it hasn't, not if it's counted as different products. So, to get around the threshold, simply stop selling the sw before the threshold is reached, and sell a new version instead. If keeping the older version on the market is mandated, simply find a way to lock customers into the new version, just as vendors do now with the proprietary model.
For example, who even buys Windows, personally, now? The way a vendor with an almost totally monopoly in a platform product (once they can get one) sells products is up to the vendor. 99.999% of windows sales are from OEMs, who are forced to use the latest version, or none at all, in their licensing contracts.
Ok, so I digressed into an anti-monopoly rant. I was on topic for a while...
Yah, must suck to be Taco. Damn, glad I don't get to go to all the shows for free, am not just married, etc, etc.
Maybe I'm just being negative, and "Busy day." Is intended to be positive. But seldom does anyone say "busy day" and mean it amelioratively. Perhaps "Finally, a day where I do something other than sit on my fat ass, not correct misspellings, and double post old stories!!!" would have been more clear.
Of course, the real solution would be to not need to compile software (plug plug :)
Plug for what???
I'll take the oppurtunity and plug Debian.
you@host:~# apt-get install practically-linux-program-youve-ever-heard-of
It happened a lot before perl and others, but perl forces you to release code. You can rewrite perl in something else, but I see a lot of people not bothering.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/unix.html
... Jaguar integrates features from state-of-the-art FreeBSD 4.4...
You would have to make people download some stuff that would run as root before they could get on your net. Or you would have to disallow forwarding on your gateway and make some sort of page forwarder on your web server, that would only be accessible through a page with the banner ad in, say, one frame at the top, and the forwarded page below. But then you couldn't use the network for anything but surfing and certain kinds of surfing wouldn't work i bet. Well, actually, you could disallow forwarding on just port 80, then people could do other things besides surf. Hmm, maybe you could do this. I'm scaring myself, maybe I should go help the fascists in Beijing lock down the PRC internet. blech. Maybe joining a network like Sputnik might enable a more sane solution.
Actually, every time you eat at a restaurant, you are paying people's salaries and wages. Ditto vacation, etc. So, wasting time and stuff: bad. Wasting money: ? Well, there are whole industries that benefit from people doing that. See also Velbein.
Desert, verb. 1. To abandon.
Who else read the headline that way?
Just like the article about an autonomous robot that wandered, autonomously, out into the parking lot of a facility recently.
There are lots of ways to visualize a force field. Does the 'flatter' field with more distance (in the field visualization, not the earth now) from the center at the equator mean a greater intensity, or less?
I would think that is the case, but the way the article describes whats happening to the earth, geometrically, I would think the opposite. (I would also be saying the submitter is mistaken when he says the the field is getting "stronger at the equator.")
Tangentially, in basic engineering core physics, in order to get good numbers in lab, you learn that g is smaller at lower latitudes (closer to the equator) because of, presumably, centrifugal force due to the rotation of the earth, and increased distance to the center of the earth (because the earth is flattened, because of the centrifugal force already mentioned). (9.81something m/s^2 at 90 degrees, 9.79something at 0 degrees, were the numbers I was routinely given, and they worked well (well, the number for my latitude, within that range, worked well.).) This is probably a relatively huge and constant variation, independent of everything talked about in the article, but I just thought I would mention it as a way the variable gravitational field is known to many readers here, and the postulations developed to explain the variation.
Secondly, the article says that, post glacially (in this current era), ice shelfs are decreasing, letting the crust rise at the poles. So, postglacially, the distance from the center of the earth at the poles is increasing, and the amount of mass under a person at the poles is decreasing (mountains of ice are leaving the area, melting, and distributing themselves more evenly). Both of those things would make the gravity at the poles *decrease*.
Now, supposing that a postglacial decrease in polar gravity corresponds to an increase everywhere else, then a *reverse* of the postglacial trend would mean a *decrease* of gravity at the equator, the opposite of the what the submission, and the articles "flattening field" visualization might indicate.
Which is it? I dunno.
To add to this confusion, does the graphic at the top of the article indicate the delta of the movement of the field-as-a-surrounding-surface (flattening field) or the delta of the force itself? I mean, an arrow away from the earth, as seen on the articles graphic at the equators, seems to indicate a lessening in gravity, not an increase, again running counter to the submission's statement. And vice versa at the poles. Oy.
Very mischief-making device indeed.
they have lost some of my good will. Before it was like "Hey! Thanks for the free service!!"
Now its "Err, yah, thanks for the free service, or whatever." Good will may not be worth value in an annual report (as it actually was in the 90s) but its absence is still a cost. Hooray for Yahoo, sending a huge amount of surplus brand respect down the pooper.
this would come as no surprise.
The dataplay discs hold 500MB. I can't remember how much a minidisc was the last time I priced one, but I know it was high, and I realized it would never drop like such things are supposed to, because it's a format owned by Sony. Same reason I disdain memstick. These Dataplay disks are supposedly to be sold for $10-12.
If these can be used for purposes other than fair-use denying media consumption, more power to them. They're small, high density, and cheap. But they're not rewritable. Ok, I agree with you all, screw 'em ;p
I go to Walmart of all places and get an ATI TV Wonder VE for $47, and plug it into, of all things, my second box with only a K6-500 in it.
After fighting with windows to get all the hw resources sorted out, I get the sw that came with the card working. And it encodes, MPEG2, any quality, DVD, VCD, or any crappy bitrate/vid quality/sound quality/size I define. It does this in realtime. I can't find any avis it leaves around as an intermediary step, and the mpeg file saves and is there instantaneously when I stop recording.
This k6 is very hot when recording, the tv card isnt (well, more than usual), and there's no bloody space on the card for an encoder.
I don't trust using Windows crappy scheduling to record shows, so I switched the tuner to the linux box I'm typing this on.
I WANT, I HAVE TO find a ported version of whatever the heck wonderful realtime (ON A K6!!!) sw encoder ATI licensed for this thing! Picture an mpeg stream at somehting conservative like 176x144 coming off your webserver, with channel and even encoding volume control right in the web page interface...my tv anywhere i want ;p
Thats my plan..
Next weakness?
Seriously, you're right, if we did this for some time, you would eventually hit upon something thats better in Windows. Eventually ;p
And I would admit the demerit of Linux in that regard, and perhaps in a while Linux would be improved in that regard or I would find feature or program I didn't know about that already makes Linux better in that regard; that's how Microsoft looks at things, anyway. ("We'll eventually fix it. I mean, we own the OEMs, we aren't soon going to be thrown out by them. Given we will be around forever, we are destined to fix every problem and come out with the perfect OS. Just be patient.")
Ask them what Microsoft's platform can do that they think Linux/Unix can't or can't do easily; What are the perceived shortcomings. Then you can calmly and easily blow any misconceptions out of the water.
This things existence is not silly. It *is* a PC, it even runs Linux. But it's slightly more. Taco is paying a fantastically huge margin for someone to write and set up a little software for him. That's fine for taco, but I think I speak for 99.99999% of the readership when I say I would never go for that. We would write a suite and opensource it. Maybe taco will reimplement everything he likes about this box on one of his PCs, I dunno.
I keep wavering on whether this is ridiculous or not. Could taco explain what is innovative about this box? And if the innovation is software, how could it not be applied as a piece of software written for any PC (that includes portables) with the appropriate hardware? Maybe it's all packaging & marketing, which again, 99.9999% of the /. readership considers inconsequential.
Ok, you completely ignored the fact that a prebuilt desktop or better yet a laptop works just as well for the previous poster's argument. I would bet you can find a laptop that does 99% of what taco says this thing does. And a laptop would on top of all that do scads more stuff, with a little less work than the mp3 box being discussed might require. Taco has too much money. ;p
See above. Laptops are typically sold by one company, just like this MP3 thing.
Well, a lawyer wouldn't, a lawyer would try to play some tunes from his laptop, if he was into mp3s at all.
I'm not saying there is no market for this device. I'm saying the market is defined as people who want an incredibly functional mp3 player with *slightly* less complexity than a PC, and who have no PC or laptop to begin with, and has an easy $1500.
Come to think of it, There are companies that are marketing and designing laptops specifically to make this type of thing easy (not complex). I kind of touched that above when I said many laptops easily do 99% of what this thing does.
So maybe there really is no reason for this device to exist. O wait, I'm forgetting the surprisingly huge market of whimsical [harsher ribbing reserved for karma's sake, even though it would have been in good fun] people with way too much money.
- duron,mobo w/ether .
.$125
- 256M . . . . . . . . . $25
- 40G . . . . . . . . . $100
- DVD . . . . . . . . .
.$50
- video . . . . . . . .
.$50
- keybrd, mouse . . . .
.$25
- No CRT . . . . . . . .
.$0
- assembly and margin . $125
- Total . . . . . . . . $500
Wouldn't be a very good gome box, but, get rid of the $125 margin it would be. And it would be a fine server any case.I agree, the Sony deal is under typical cost, but not by much.
Alan implied that if he had any knowledge of any deal in the works, he would have quit already. Rob, your headline reads "Alan Cox to Leave if RH AOL Buyout Happens?" That seems to me like he threatened to leave. He hasn't done that.
It's like what many say (and needs to be said) about Microsoft; now that they're a huge company and monopoly, they shouldn't behave like a startup, screwing people whenever they can. Likewise I don't feel bad about holding the /. editors
to a higher standard now that they're
so successful.
So, anyway, this is all rumour. You guys are all skewering each other over a sensationalised (by our /. editor friends)
rumour.
If I had to argue though, I would argue
against a buyout.
And I could argue for pages
before I even got to any idealogical
reasons.