I very often need to have 2-3 people in the loop in addition to myself, I use "Reply to all" all the time. The problem is when you are on a huge mailing list like "Everyone in the company" and people use reply to all.
I just realized the simple solution, which doesn't require rewriting any email applications. Simply require a confirmation, like when you sign up for anything. If you take a "Reply to all" on the list, it won't actually get sent to the list. Instead you get a mail back that "This mailing list goes to [count] people. Please do not send unsubscription requests to the whole list, contact the list administrator. If you are really sure this is what you want, reply to this mail with CONFIRM in the subject." That would solve 99% of the problem.
A true democracy would have the populous vote on every decision the government makes which is far beyond manageable.
A fully direct democracy yes, but I don't think any country has that. What some countries have is a means to raise issues directly forcing a referendum to abort the passing of laws or introducing/striking laws without going through their representatives or the parliament. Like for example in Switzerland if 50,000 people object, laws must be put to a referendum. If more than 100,000 support a constitutional change, it must be put to a referendum.
This is important if the real will of the people isn't getting through because of the block division or lobbying. It's more of an emergency brake for the people to take over and manage certain important decisions rather than a desire to micromanage everything that happens there. It's after all for the people it's supposed to exist, right?
The question is whether it is just because he's one 99 cent man in a 9.99$ world or if it works just as well if the prediction comes through that all books will be 99 cents. It's highly unlikely that people on average would spend significantly more time reading books in their limited spare time and with so many other forms of education and entertainment.
That Angry Birds makes a killing at 99 cent is good for them, but it only works because they grab such a big piece of the market. On average I don't think the few extra games you buy make up for the dollar/hour burn rate going way, way down into the cents. I'm happy if a 50$ game gives me 50 hours of gameplay, that's 1$/hour. I'm not sure how many hours I've played Angry Birds but it's way lower than that. Even if you add the five games I bought and got tired of after 10 minutes to that it's still not even close to that.
Not all are too bright and the ads were pretty deceptive. I do remember reading an interview with some soccer mom that had so barely caught that this free downloading thing was illegal, so she had bought the kids Limewire Pro (or maybe one of the others, my details are vague) and thought that this was for pay, so this is legal and all that. Of course she'd gotten some copyright nastygram and was very upset and all that, couldn't understand how they were allowed to sell such a thing etc. so yes they made some sales. Funny how 30$ doesn't buy you a license to all the music and whatnot in the world, eh? Never underestimate the gullibility of many people, they might not be Nigerian scam victim-class but pretty bad anyway. The kind you see on rent-a-coder who think they'll get an iTunes clone for 200$ and such.
I think a lot can be said from the critic-user delta on metacritic...
Dragon Age II: 8.5 - 4.1 = 4.4 diff
To take a couple "normal" games like for example Bulletstorm it's 8.4 - 8.0 = 0.4. Fallout 3: New Vegas 8.5 - 8.0 = 0.5. Dead Space 2 is 8.7 - 8.5 = 0.2. Civilization which many considered a bit overrated is at 9.0 - 7.0 = 2.0. I played the demo and I was already OMGing at all the changes, if you loved DA:O you'll hate DA2. If you look at the reviews that praise DA2, they all pretty much hated DA:O. Gone are all the "annoying" parts, that is pretty much everything that makes it an RPG.
Well many religious intentionally misunderstand concepts like a model being refined. Except for the extremely theoretical lab experiments most of our models are approximations like "planetary formation", "global climate" or "evolution of life". For the most part we've continuously refined our models, sometimes hitting a blind alley or two but we're working out the details. Some just like to pretend that just because we're discussing evolutionary details of when and how X happened, it casts doubt on the whole thing. No, it doesn't. If I spot your car ten times driving up the east coast I'm not in a doubt where you came from or where you're going, but I might still work on the details of exactly what route you took.
What's even more obvious is that many religious people *do* change their opinion of how the world works, but it's all God's creation anyway. They just have some creative explanation for why the Bible says X while reality is Y, there's hardly any world you could say with certainty is not created by God. That goes for any causality between action and reaction too, why does God let rapists and serial murders run around while innocent children die in accidents? You just assume some divine reason beyond your understanding, never do they claim that "If God exists he would not allow X to happen. If it happens, there is no God." Or that there'll be some divine justice of right or wrong in the afterlife that'll set the record straight.
For a brilliant example, take the "God hates fags" movement that Phelps is leading. The causality between homosexuals and evil they see is entirely in metaphysics. It's the same level as "because we didn't sacrifice to the rain god, he brought draught". You can make up as many metaphysical ideas of "God" as you like, and none is better than the other. So essentially you say the world is created by God, but it can look like anything and behave like anything. It doesn't really narrow it down in any meaningful way except that some versions are more popular than other. Usually the ones that promote humanity as "created in God's image" or some other self-promoting BS.
Wait, I think I heard the exact same thing yesterday in the Intel Extreme cpu comments. Why? Because you can. This is luxury, like drinking a 70$ wine over a 15$ wine, nobody needs to do it but it's to spoil yourself. It's not necessary to be able to crank the quality settings all the way up to enjoy a game, but if you can afford it it's the little extra.
Or do something to provide real competition. Around here there's at least two big fiber networks (Altibox, Telenor), two big cable providers (Canal Digital, Get), a bunch of DSL providers and a host of lesser ISPs that hasn't been crushed. I just checked at a portal and there's 110 offerings from 21 providers in my county. But then there's an active policy to make sure there is competition in place, not just a free market where one or two providers can steamroll the rest and have a monopoly/duopoly.
DVD region codes were meant to keep you from watching a movie that was unreleased in your territory (OH NOES!), not to charge poor people less.
Hahahaha, they're making tons of money on it and you think they didn't think of that little side effect? Look up "price discrimination", segmenting your market then charging different prices is a sure-fire way to increase profits. Instead of charging everybody one price that's either very expensive or very cheap they gouge each market. And yes, I got plenty examples of that just between the US and Europe without getting into the third world thing at all.
After it seems clear the rewrite count is going to hell - 5000/cell for 32 nm, 3000/cell for 25 nm, SSDs are going to have a helluva time catching up in cost/GB. People will still want huge storage disks, data centers still need storage, hard disks aren't going away. The SSDs do rock for speed and is making huge performance gains but that doesn't bring the cost down. The combination of a blazing fast 100GB SSD and huge, slow 2TB HDD seems to be the way forward.
Looks like marketers have taken over. "Bigger numbers seller better! Let's release Firefox 15 as soon as possible!"
Ah, but the "big number" thing doesn't roll around, 9 sounds more than 11. The 6990 is a much faster and higher model than the 7230. Every time you get there, you like to reset your number scheme somehow, like for example OS X. Could they have continued with 11, 12, 13 etc? Yes, but it doesn't sound that good. Instead they just "froze" the version and technically haven't had a major version upgrade in 9 years. I'm sure you all realize that is bullshit though, that "10.6" is actually OS XVI. I wager that pretty soon both IE and Chrome will change version numbering, oddly enough Opera hasn't yet...
So you pit the two browsers currently losing market share against each other? Granted IE far more than Firefox, but the standard to beat right now is Chrome. Look at the graph. There's only browser going up is Chrome. Maybe IE9 and FF4 can stop their customers bleeding away, but they have a long road to get on the offensive - particularly IE.
The value proposition is that you for most normal purposes can only use one computer at the time. You can get five $20,000 cars or one $100,000 Ferrari, but if you're only going to drive one I'd pick the Ferrari even though it's terrible "value" for getting from A to B. Even a fully loaded SLI rig can be had for a few thousand dollars, yes it's a lot but at the same time not crazy amounts of money.
I know quite a few people that spend more on their hobby, to put it that way. Like a friend of mine that's extremely into snowboarding, I'm sure he spends something like $10-20.000/year on that including trips to the Alps which is his idea of vacation. Another friend of mine got hooked on a Porsche, cost something like $80k I think. They do have well paying jobs but they're not millionaires, they just decided this is what they'd like to do with their disposable income. At that even $3k for a fully pimped out rig isn't that much.
Of course it's not for everybody, but say the top 5% households that earn >166k/year shouldn't have any problem blowing 7-800$ on a processor. And that still works out to some 15 million people to sell to...
It's the same as with Windows 64 bit and why we didn't saw much of it despite the prices for RAM are very low.
That's because most people don't need it. Hell, you can buy a $2000-2500 top MacBook/iMac and it doesn't have more than 4 GB standard. Me, I got 16 GB and disabled swap entirely but I don't really need it. Not even under the craziest of workloads I put on it would I break the 10 GB barrier, and that includes one app that likes to chew 2-3 GB alone + one full VM. I just like having more than enough.
Nice to see that even the Linux partisans know that the only way for Linux to have desktop success is to have no competition. Given a choice, almost no one would choose linux.
Migrate to Linux. To get people to switch to something - anything, it can't be "as good as". There has to be some specific reason to do it that you're not getting anywhere else, unless you're dealing with very idealistic/cost averse people. Running on ARM while Windows didn't could be one such thing. In fact I suspect will be one such thing, because most apps will only be x86 no matter what Microsoft does.
Personally it was the pre-SP Vista that did it, I was like "fuck if this is the way forward I'd rather grit my teeth on Linux". I stuck with it for 3.5 years too, because even though it had many quirks I kinda got used to them. But in the end I migrated back to Win7 because Microsoft fixed things while Gnome/KDE didn't. And my Windows games are now just a click rather than a reboot away.
RISC won 20 years ago, all x86 processors decode to some internal instruction set. I am certain the engineers at Intel and AMD have tested exposing the native instructions and if it could perform much faster than x86 I'm sure they'd enable applications to bypass the hardware decoder and send micro-ops directly. While they still process the instructions the really obscure ones live in microcode instead of hardware, x86_64 adjusted the number of registers etc. so most things have been tweaked. I don't need to remind you that the last attempt to do better was the Itanic...
I assume you're talking about incoming data, not the final DNA sequence. As I understand it the final result is 2 bits/base pair and about 3 billion base pairs so about a CD's worth of data per human. And if you were talking about a genetic database I guess 99%+ is common so you could just store a "reference human" and diffs against that. So at 750 MB for the first person and 7.5 MB for each additional person I guess you could store 2-300.000 full genetic profiles on a 2 TB disk. Probably the whole human race in less than 100 TB.
Apple isn't evil. It's very good at making money. What other criterion is there with which to judge the actions of a company?
You are kidding me right? So if I sell land mines and cancer sticks, the only measure of my success is my profits and if my customers come back for more? With apologies to Niemöller:
First they locked down the smart phones, and I didn't speak out because cell phones were always closed.
Then they locked down the tablets, and I didn't speak out because I didn't use tablets.
Then they locked down the Macs, and I didn't speak out because I didn't use a Mac..
Then they locked me out and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Both the corporations and the government would love to lock down your PC for profit and control. That Apple is taking their cut is one thing, but their control over the app store should be a much greater worry than the Great Firewall of China and things like that. What the consoles did to lock down games, Apple aims to do with the rest. You just wait, if the Mac App store is a success you'll soon see them introduce a new iDevice that's almost like a Mac except it only runs app store software.
That not the biggest issue, in theory the total cost could remain the same whether paid by itself or tacked onto the ISP bill. The problem is that someone will order the lobster dinner with champagne and pay just as much as the one having a light salad and a glass of water.
A movie buff would love it, it's likely to be cheaper than what he used to pay. It's everybody else paying for it. Same with everything else, just load up on Windows 7 Ultimate, MS Office, Photoshop CS5 or maybe the entire Creative Suite - after all it's "free". The more you download, the better value you get for your money.
Likewise a bunch of students sharing a house would love it, cost spread across them is minimal, same with a big family. If you're single, you are subsidizing them.
The only good thing about it is that it'd bring copyright crashing down worldwide, because all the servers would be put there and even if they add some restrictions people will VPN in there. Even though sites like TPB operate rather openly, it would be completely different to have an officially legal P2P service.
Because Apple's store is way too dominant for their liking and they'd rather have a bunch of stragglers fighting to sell their music at the lowest possible markup? The record companies wanted to raise prices, particularly on the one or two hits that'd otherwise sell an album but Apple refused. The only reason Amazon got to open an MP3 shop was because Apple was bullying them around.
For them it's not getting better, it's getting worse. On the iPod, Apple needed the big labels. Now many people will get an iPhone or iPad for the apps, selling music is secondary. That and digital sales have increased massively, they can't afford not to be on iTunes anymore. They don't like that Apple is becoming the gatekeeper and is fighting it, but I don't think they'll win this one.
This is a pretty good graph on where we're heading, the CD is dying and digital is taking over. The iTunes Store is looking to be the Wal-Mart of digital downloads and the big 5 the manufacturers being squeezed to the lowest possible margins. That's not a future they saw coming and are trying desperately to back out of.
Except by the logic of the article, that would make RHEL the most important, since without it there wouldn't be CentOS. But if you're first going down that line you might as well go one more step, without the individual apps there wouldn't be anything to make a distro of.
I think the article is confusing convenience with importance. As long as Debian does the job well, it's very convenient for the other distros to not do the same job and just work off that. I think many employees have discovered that as well, your job responsibilities may be important to the employer, even critical and essential but you are still replaceable.
If Debian wasn't there, most of the same people with the same interests would still be there and create a system reasonably similar to it. It's not like all the distros that "depend" on Debian would just fold up and disappear, nor would most of the packagers and such. I'd be a lot more concerned about the future of the essential packages, it's not Debian that determines how Linux / X / Gnome / KDE / OpenOffice / Firefox etc. evolves.
Has nothing at all to do with the development of anything.
That is exceedingly kind, I'm fairly sure the patent holders in various ways try influencing the development to make their patents essential to the format. Formally the MPEG-LA has nothing to do with MPEG, but I'm sure many of the companies have both experts on the MPEG group and license income from MPEG-LA.
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I very often need to have 2-3 people in the loop in addition to myself, I use "Reply to all" all the time. The problem is when you are on a huge mailing list like "Everyone in the company" and people use reply to all.
I just realized the simple solution, which doesn't require rewriting any email applications. Simply require a confirmation, like when you sign up for anything. If you take a "Reply to all" on the list, it won't actually get sent to the list. Instead you get a mail back that "This mailing list goes to [count] people. Please do not send unsubscription requests to the whole list, contact the list administrator. If you are really sure this is what you want, reply to this mail with CONFIRM in the subject." That would solve 99% of the problem.
A true democracy would have the populous vote on every decision the government makes which is far beyond manageable.
A fully direct democracy yes, but I don't think any country has that. What some countries have is a means to raise issues directly forcing a referendum to abort the passing of laws or introducing/striking laws without going through their representatives or the parliament. Like for example in Switzerland if 50,000 people object, laws must be put to a referendum. If more than 100,000 support a constitutional change, it must be put to a referendum.
This is important if the real will of the people isn't getting through because of the block division or lobbying. It's more of an emergency brake for the people to take over and manage certain important decisions rather than a desire to micromanage everything that happens there. It's after all for the people it's supposed to exist, right?
The question is whether it is just because he's one 99 cent man in a 9.99$ world or if it works just as well if the prediction comes through that all books will be 99 cents. It's highly unlikely that people on average would spend significantly more time reading books in their limited spare time and with so many other forms of education and entertainment.
That Angry Birds makes a killing at 99 cent is good for them, but it only works because they grab such a big piece of the market. On average I don't think the few extra games you buy make up for the dollar/hour burn rate going way, way down into the cents. I'm happy if a 50$ game gives me 50 hours of gameplay, that's 1$/hour. I'm not sure how many hours I've played Angry Birds but it's way lower than that. Even if you add the five games I bought and got tired of after 10 minutes to that it's still not even close to that.
Not all are too bright and the ads were pretty deceptive. I do remember reading an interview with some soccer mom that had so barely caught that this free downloading thing was illegal, so she had bought the kids Limewire Pro (or maybe one of the others, my details are vague) and thought that this was for pay, so this is legal and all that. Of course she'd gotten some copyright nastygram and was very upset and all that, couldn't understand how they were allowed to sell such a thing etc. so yes they made some sales. Funny how 30$ doesn't buy you a license to all the music and whatnot in the world, eh? Never underestimate the gullibility of many people, they might not be Nigerian scam victim-class but pretty bad anyway. The kind you see on rent-a-coder who think they'll get an iTunes clone for 200$ and such.
I think a lot can be said from the critic-user delta on metacritic...
Dragon Age II: 8.5 - 4.1 = 4.4 diff
To take a couple "normal" games like for example Bulletstorm it's 8.4 - 8.0 = 0.4. Fallout 3: New Vegas 8.5 - 8.0 = 0.5. Dead Space 2 is 8.7 - 8.5 = 0.2. Civilization which many considered a bit overrated is at 9.0 - 7.0 = 2.0. I played the demo and I was already OMGing at all the changes, if you loved DA:O you'll hate DA2. If you look at the reviews that praise DA2, they all pretty much hated DA:O. Gone are all the "annoying" parts, that is pretty much everything that makes it an RPG.
Uh, I don't know what game you played but both in the party camp AND spread across the map were DLC quests. So a little more than once, I would say.
Well many religious intentionally misunderstand concepts like a model being refined. Except for the extremely theoretical lab experiments most of our models are approximations like "planetary formation", "global climate" or "evolution of life". For the most part we've continuously refined our models, sometimes hitting a blind alley or two but we're working out the details. Some just like to pretend that just because we're discussing evolutionary details of when and how X happened, it casts doubt on the whole thing. No, it doesn't. If I spot your car ten times driving up the east coast I'm not in a doubt where you came from or where you're going, but I might still work on the details of exactly what route you took.
What's even more obvious is that many religious people *do* change their opinion of how the world works, but it's all God's creation anyway. They just have some creative explanation for why the Bible says X while reality is Y, there's hardly any world you could say with certainty is not created by God. That goes for any causality between action and reaction too, why does God let rapists and serial murders run around while innocent children die in accidents? You just assume some divine reason beyond your understanding, never do they claim that "If God exists he would not allow X to happen. If it happens, there is no God." Or that there'll be some divine justice of right or wrong in the afterlife that'll set the record straight.
For a brilliant example, take the "God hates fags" movement that Phelps is leading. The causality between homosexuals and evil they see is entirely in metaphysics. It's the same level as "because we didn't sacrifice to the rain god, he brought draught". You can make up as many metaphysical ideas of "God" as you like, and none is better than the other. So essentially you say the world is created by God, but it can look like anything and behave like anything. It doesn't really narrow it down in any meaningful way except that some versions are more popular than other. Usually the ones that promote humanity as "created in God's image" or some other self-promoting BS.
Wait, I think I heard the exact same thing yesterday in the Intel Extreme cpu comments. Why? Because you can. This is luxury, like drinking a 70$ wine over a 15$ wine, nobody needs to do it but it's to spoil yourself. It's not necessary to be able to crank the quality settings all the way up to enjoy a game, but if you can afford it it's the little extra.
Or do something to provide real competition. Around here there's at least two big fiber networks (Altibox, Telenor), two big cable providers (Canal Digital, Get), a bunch of DSL providers and a host of lesser ISPs that hasn't been crushed. I just checked at a portal and there's 110 offerings from 21 providers in my county. But then there's an active policy to make sure there is competition in place, not just a free market where one or two providers can steamroll the rest and have a monopoly/duopoly.
DVD region codes were meant to keep you from watching a movie that was unreleased in your territory (OH NOES!), not to charge poor people less.
Hahahaha, they're making tons of money on it and you think they didn't think of that little side effect? Look up "price discrimination", segmenting your market then charging different prices is a sure-fire way to increase profits. Instead of charging everybody one price that's either very expensive or very cheap they gouge each market. And yes, I got plenty examples of that just between the US and Europe without getting into the third world thing at all.
After it seems clear the rewrite count is going to hell - 5000/cell for 32 nm, 3000/cell for 25 nm, SSDs are going to have a helluva time catching up in cost/GB. People will still want huge storage disks, data centers still need storage, hard disks aren't going away. The SSDs do rock for speed and is making huge performance gains but that doesn't bring the cost down. The combination of a blazing fast 100GB SSD and huge, slow 2TB HDD seems to be the way forward.
Looks like marketers have taken over. "Bigger numbers seller better! Let's release Firefox 15 as soon as possible!"
Ah, but the "big number" thing doesn't roll around, 9 sounds more than 11. The 6990 is a much faster and higher model than the 7230. Every time you get there, you like to reset your number scheme somehow, like for example OS X. Could they have continued with 11, 12, 13 etc? Yes, but it doesn't sound that good. Instead they just "froze" the version and technically haven't had a major version upgrade in 9 years. I'm sure you all realize that is bullshit though, that "10.6" is actually OS XVI. I wager that pretty soon both IE and Chrome will change version numbering, oddly enough Opera hasn't yet...
So you pit the two browsers currently losing market share against each other? Granted IE far more than Firefox, but the standard to beat right now is Chrome. Look at the graph. There's only browser going up is Chrome. Maybe IE9 and FF4 can stop their customers bleeding away, but they have a long road to get on the offensive - particularly IE.
The value proposition is that you for most normal purposes can only use one computer at the time. You can get five $20,000 cars or one $100,000 Ferrari, but if you're only going to drive one I'd pick the Ferrari even though it's terrible "value" for getting from A to B. Even a fully loaded SLI rig can be had for a few thousand dollars, yes it's a lot but at the same time not crazy amounts of money.
I know quite a few people that spend more on their hobby, to put it that way. Like a friend of mine that's extremely into snowboarding, I'm sure he spends something like $10-20.000/year on that including trips to the Alps which is his idea of vacation. Another friend of mine got hooked on a Porsche, cost something like $80k I think. They do have well paying jobs but they're not millionaires, they just decided this is what they'd like to do with their disposable income. At that even $3k for a fully pimped out rig isn't that much.
Of course it's not for everybody, but say the top 5% households that earn >166k/year shouldn't have any problem blowing 7-800$ on a processor. And that still works out to some 15 million people to sell to...
Very nice link, I'll bookmark it. If anything it just makes it ever so much clearer that the CD is dying a rapid death though.
It's the same as with Windows 64 bit and why we didn't saw much of it despite the prices for RAM are very low.
That's because most people don't need it. Hell, you can buy a $2000-2500 top MacBook/iMac and it doesn't have more than 4 GB standard. Me, I got 16 GB and disabled swap entirely but I don't really need it. Not even under the craziest of workloads I put on it would I break the 10 GB barrier, and that includes one app that likes to chew 2-3 GB alone + one full VM. I just like having more than enough.
Nice to see that even the Linux partisans know that the only way for Linux to have desktop success is to have no competition. Given a choice, almost no one would choose linux.
Migrate to Linux. To get people to switch to something - anything, it can't be "as good as". There has to be some specific reason to do it that you're not getting anywhere else, unless you're dealing with very idealistic/cost averse people. Running on ARM while Windows didn't could be one such thing. In fact I suspect will be one such thing, because most apps will only be x86 no matter what Microsoft does.
Personally it was the pre-SP Vista that did it, I was like "fuck if this is the way forward I'd rather grit my teeth on Linux". I stuck with it for 3.5 years too, because even though it had many quirks I kinda got used to them. But in the end I migrated back to Win7 because Microsoft fixed things while Gnome/KDE didn't. And my Windows games are now just a click rather than a reboot away.
RISC won 20 years ago, all x86 processors decode to some internal instruction set. I am certain the engineers at Intel and AMD have tested exposing the native instructions and if it could perform much faster than x86 I'm sure they'd enable applications to bypass the hardware decoder and send micro-ops directly. While they still process the instructions the really obscure ones live in microcode instead of hardware, x86_64 adjusted the number of registers etc. so most things have been tweaked. I don't need to remind you that the last attempt to do better was the Itanic...
I assume you're talking about incoming data, not the final DNA sequence. As I understand it the final result is 2 bits/base pair and about 3 billion base pairs so about a CD's worth of data per human. And if you were talking about a genetic database I guess 99%+ is common so you could just store a "reference human" and diffs against that. So at 750 MB for the first person and 7.5 MB for each additional person I guess you could store 2-300.000 full genetic profiles on a 2 TB disk. Probably the whole human race in less than 100 TB.
Apple isn't evil. It's very good at making money. What other criterion is there with which to judge the actions of a company?
You are kidding me right? So if I sell land mines and cancer sticks, the only measure of my success is my profits and if my customers come back for more? With apologies to Niemöller:
First they locked down the smart phones,
and I didn't speak out because cell phones were always closed.
Then they locked down the tablets,
and I didn't speak out because I didn't use tablets.
Then they locked down the Macs,
and I didn't speak out because I didn't use a Mac..
Then they locked me out
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Both the corporations and the government would love to lock down your PC for profit and control. That Apple is taking their cut is one thing, but their control over the app store should be a much greater worry than the Great Firewall of China and things like that. What the consoles did to lock down games, Apple aims to do with the rest. You just wait, if the Mac App store is a success you'll soon see them introduce a new iDevice that's almost like a Mac except it only runs app store software.
That not the biggest issue, in theory the total cost could remain the same whether paid by itself or tacked onto the ISP bill. The problem is that someone will order the lobster dinner with champagne and pay just as much as the one having a light salad and a glass of water.
A movie buff would love it, it's likely to be cheaper than what he used to pay. It's everybody else paying for it. Same with everything else, just load up on Windows 7 Ultimate, MS Office, Photoshop CS5 or maybe the entire Creative Suite - after all it's "free". The more you download, the better value you get for your money.
Likewise a bunch of students sharing a house would love it, cost spread across them is minimal, same with a big family. If you're single, you are subsidizing them.
The only good thing about it is that it'd bring copyright crashing down worldwide, because all the servers would be put there and even if they add some restrictions people will VPN in there. Even though sites like TPB operate rather openly, it would be completely different to have an officially legal P2P service.
You just know these usability bastards are going to show equal contempt when, having fucked-up desktops, they set their sights on the command line.
Fortunately they have a coronary just looking at it, so they don't get around to changing it.
Because Apple's store is way too dominant for their liking and they'd rather have a bunch of stragglers fighting to sell their music at the lowest possible markup? The record companies wanted to raise prices, particularly on the one or two hits that'd otherwise sell an album but Apple refused. The only reason Amazon got to open an MP3 shop was because Apple was bullying them around.
For them it's not getting better, it's getting worse. On the iPod, Apple needed the big labels. Now many people will get an iPhone or iPad for the apps, selling music is secondary. That and digital sales have increased massively, they can't afford not to be on iTunes anymore. They don't like that Apple is becoming the gatekeeper and is fighting it, but I don't think they'll win this one.
This is a pretty good graph on where we're heading, the CD is dying and digital is taking over. The iTunes Store is looking to be the Wal-Mart of digital downloads and the big 5 the manufacturers being squeezed to the lowest possible margins. That's not a future they saw coming and are trying desperately to back out of.
Except by the logic of the article, that would make RHEL the most important, since without it there wouldn't be CentOS. But if you're first going down that line you might as well go one more step, without the individual apps there wouldn't be anything to make a distro of.
I think the article is confusing convenience with importance. As long as Debian does the job well, it's very convenient for the other distros to not do the same job and just work off that. I think many employees have discovered that as well, your job responsibilities may be important to the employer, even critical and essential but you are still replaceable.
If Debian wasn't there, most of the same people with the same interests would still be there and create a system reasonably similar to it. It's not like all the distros that "depend" on Debian would just fold up and disappear, nor would most of the packagers and such. I'd be a lot more concerned about the future of the essential packages, it's not Debian that determines how Linux / X / Gnome / KDE / OpenOffice / Firefox etc. evolves.
Has nothing at all to do with the development of anything.
That is exceedingly kind, I'm fairly sure the patent holders in various ways try influencing the development to make their patents essential to the format. Formally the MPEG-LA has nothing to do with MPEG, but I'm sure many of the companies have both experts on the MPEG group and license income from MPEG-LA.