In real life their are trade offs in design. Things that were cheap before, on different systems can become expensive. That's one of the primary issues with porting. Nothing unique to Linux there.
I don't see how this answer doesn't conflict with your previous criticism of the FCC. In any case, it appears at least you agree with how the FCC regulates the utility commissions that regulate your local providers.
As for whether local vs. federal government is more or less democratic: a) At the federal level you have very high levels of knowledge and participation, approaching 3/4s of all eligible voters, while at the local level knowledge and participation is down around 20%.
b) For those people involved the local government is far more accessible and changeable than the federal government.
States however seem to combine the worst of both (a) and (b) being neither easily accessible and changeable nor inspiring broad public participation.
As for one step removed, removing the states removes a step.
As I recall, though, the reason it was a dumb move (again, my opinion) was because what people were looking for was Red Hat Certification. If you'd paid and passed a Mandrake course, it was hard to imagine getting a job off of that. But everyone had heard of Red Hat.
That Red Hat certification was for server. Mandrake's certification program was directed at companies that were using Mandrake and wanted certified administrators. I don't know if they existed.
When I talk about education I mean the actual initiatives in France primarily involving selling to primary and secondary schools partnering with educational software vendors. Not professional education.
As for desktop Linux, that's an old argument that has been rehashed here a million times. Again, who knows? If Microsoft hadn't been so dominant (and hadn't so actively crushed anything that looked like competition), I think Mandrake might have been a contender.
I agree. Mandrake had a great desktop system to grow from. Had their been an opportunity they well positioned. Once XP was successful in moving the home crowd over to the NT kernel, it made sense to go after niches.
I don't think they were inexplicable. There is no money in Linux desktop sales. Mandrake was not going to beat RedHat or United Linux (Suse, Caldera, Turbo, Conectiva) in the enterprise market. They had always been a desktop product so they couldn't move strongly into servers. So going into specialized desktop areas makes sense. With Apple being weak, the education market was, and remains wide open. Had they executed better, and had Microsoft not been willing to lose money to keep this niche they could very easily have become a dominant player in the education market.
I don't think because it didn't work out it was the wrong choice. Quite often you are getting the pot odds to make the play whether it worked out or not.
If that's not what the FCC should be regulating, what is?!
What you are talking about are rate and terms of service changes. That falls under your state utility commission, or possibly local (depending on your state) that's not Federal. The FCC is concerned about issues like availability they don't regulate your local cable company's rates. They do regulate your local cable company's handoff to the national internet.
As for whether it should be like this. I honestly wouldn't mind getting rid of states and just having the federal government and the county/city governments. I don't see that extra layer as being necessary in which case utility regulation likely would be federal.
The original claim was about high usage and business importance and how people with high usage should use land. Obviously in your car you might over-the-air data. But you should responsible, or pay for a large allocation if you are going to be driving a with heavy data usage.
About 2 years ago the numbers was over 98% and growing of Americans that had broadband access. 99% still means 3m don't. Ultimately there are places that just don't make sense to build telecommunications infrastructure. But achieving something like a 95% reduction in places without broadband is a heck of an accomplishment.
As for your broadband costing more. Assuming you are in a mainstream location, that's not an FCC issue.
Show me some evidence that your precious democrats give a flying fuck about your internet connection. http://www.broadband.gov/
Obama: "As president, I will set a simple goal: Every American should have the highest-speed broadband access—no matter where you live or how much money you have." -- Flint, Mich. JUNE 16, 2008
Your carrier should be willing to handle the spike better than they are doing. Something is wrong on their side. You could try complaining to the utility commission to get their intention. Most likely they stopped investing in their DSL infrastructure years ago, and just don't care. Ultimately that might work but you aren't assured of anything.
If you want guaranteed bandwidth though you have to go for a premium solution: T1/DS1. But a DSL add on is often $10 / mo while even a cheap T1 is still going to be around $200 / mo; and in a rural location could be as much as $550 / mo. So assuming you aren't going that route you need to look for another inexpensive broadband solution. The FCC has been taxing all Americans to bring broadband to America. There are also things like satellite internet which are reasonable at the $40-100 / mo range.
Your phone works over wifi. I use Pandora over wifi all the time. They expect you to be responsible enough to use those services in places where you are pulling data by landline.
The 5g data cap applies to over the air, which is an ultra premium service for getting small amounts of data as desired. If you want large quantities of data use a land connection. They shouldn't care about why you want the data. They care about how much you cost them to service.
I think by 2000 Java has already overtaken C as the most popular programming language. You are looking far too late. Apache BTW is around '94/95 not '99.
If you are looking at the Windows community, IIS is dominant not Apache. Active-X is allowing for web distributed clients, and enterprise stuff is mainly using SQL Server / Visual Basic.
If you are looking for the cause on the Windows side, around 2000, it was the release of Visual Basic.NET. By dropping compatibility it obsoleted a huge number of developer's skills. They moved over to Java to avoid being locked in, as MIcrosoft was starting to raise the cost of their server products while Linux was viable.
Anyway GCC does not require you to give away your code. Anything you compile with GCC is fully yours.
This whole portability thing is mostly nonsense and a myth Porting was a very big deal during the 1990s as workstation vendors and server vendors were dying like flies. Here are the 1980s workstation vendors:
Apollo Computer Ardent Computer Callan Data Systems Computervision Digital Equipment Corporation (VMS and Digital Unix) Evans & Sutherland Intergraph InterPro MIPS Computer Systems NeXT Silicon Graphics Stardent Inc. Sun Microsystems Three Rivers Computer Corporation Torch Computers Xworks Interactive
Think about how many had gone broke during the 1990s. Things were much smoother for Windows people you didn't care if your hardware vendor went bust because they were all on the Microsoft/Intel/Western Digital Standard.
There isn't really that much of a swing if you do an apples to apples comparison. It works out to about $10 / mo for the cut rate vs. the brand names once you add everything back in. That's not a bad swing if you are OK with lower quality customer service when there is a problem and slightly more frequent problems.
Operating systems like BSD and Linux don't need to be under the GPL, because, by nature, the developers want the spread of the software.
That's not actually necessarily true. It depends whether the developers are making money, generally indirectly, from selling services or from selling hardware. In the case of hardware, hardware / software combinations are very powerful value adds. The developers don't necessarily want to spread the software to competitors. They might want to use an open source system as a base. If they are selling services then generally they are happy to give away the code. But even here often under a restrictive licenses since they might have competitors that are selling hardware / software combinations.
This is exactly what we saw with the Linux kernel. The big box Unix guys who wanted to get out of the OS business were willing to port their stuff to Linux but not BSDs because their competitors who were still in the software / hardware business (Sun primarily) couldn't use it.
In fact I'd use the example of the failure of X, where the MIT version of X did set a standard but was worthless for end users who used proprietary Xs with OS specific features that were closed source.
In other situations, there needs to be a trust relationship. If we need to force a company to release the source, then we might as well use the GPL.
Exactly and frequently there is no trust relationship and the company does need to be forced.
If Apple thinks they are gonna get the entire industry to pick TB over USB 3? I'm sorry, not gonna happen. It'll be FW all over again, with very few things that support it and all WAY overpriced.
First off Apple is also going USB 3. TB is for monitors, SSD, HDD, ethernet... Things that are too fast for USB.
In terms of could Apple pull it off. Market share is much higher now that it for FW. They have over 90% of the over $1000 laptop crowd. That is very high market share among the profitable segments of the market. So yes I think Apple could drive Thunderbolt as an industry standard for higher end hardware easily. TB combines better functionality, higher margins, and lockin; what's not for Apple to love?
Besides it isn't so much the computer industry as other industries like corporate IT departments or business hotels being willing to order TB drives that plug into TB monitors that.... This allows Apple's external stuff to stop competing directly with the inexpensive x86 line. It creates a walled hardware guarden and potentially Apple can sell directly, take a percentage and guarantee quality on Apple specific accessories.
In terms of weight and Apple. I think Apple has a pretty good track record on balancing out the various issues like: weight, battery life, quality of video.... I'm not going to second guess their engineering intelligence. I'm going to take it as a given that they might approximately the right tradeoffs regarding weight as an issue.
I've been using OSX for a dozen years. I'm well familiar with those buttons and like the fact that viewing and typing are separated. It is essentially like the old fashioned modal editors.
Huh, so a Windows keyboard works, but an Apple-brand one doesn't? So much for that legendary "it all just works!" thing.
No a Windows brand keyboard and an Apple brand keyboard both work fine. Grandparent was just describing this terribly. Turns out that what the grandparent wanted to do was not remap the keyboard but assign multiple letters to a single keypress and was upset he had to modify (indirectly) his termcap.
Besides: does this "ease of use" explain why I had to enter in fucking arcane escape sequences into the configs to make the Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys on my keyboard work?
Those keys work fine for me out of the box using a Windows keyboard. The escape sequences are how keyboards have been mapped for decades if the the mappings don't match up. That would be the same on any system if you wanted to remap a keyboard.
Don't confuse sales with profits. Apple for many years, since their market share hit about 7% has had most of the profits from PC hardware. In terms of sales they are up there with Dell, Toshiba, HP but around 4-5th place... Their share has come down quite a bit as most of the manufacturers aren't fighting for market share at the expense of profits and their has been substantial growth in the emerging world where Apple is not as popular. But they still are a huge winner on profits
Slashdot Mirror
In real life their are trade offs in design. Things that were cheap before, on different systems can become expensive. That's one of the primary issues with porting. Nothing unique to Linux there.
and competing implementations were welcomed
If Google can prove such promises were made publicly they win both parts. You can't waive you rights publicly and then enforce them.
I don't see how this answer doesn't conflict with your previous criticism of the FCC. In any case, it appears at least you agree with how the FCC regulates the utility commissions that regulate your local providers.
As for whether local vs. federal government is more or less democratic:
a) At the federal level you have very high levels of knowledge and participation, approaching 3/4s of all eligible voters, while at the local level knowledge and participation is down around 20%.
b) For those people involved the local government is far more accessible and changeable than the federal government.
States however seem to combine the worst of both (a) and (b) being neither easily accessible and changeable nor inspiring broad public participation.
As for one step removed, removing the states removes a step.
As I recall, though, the reason it was a dumb move (again, my opinion) was because what people were looking for was Red Hat Certification. If you'd paid and passed a Mandrake course, it was hard to imagine getting a job off of that. But everyone had heard of Red Hat.
That Red Hat certification was for server. Mandrake's certification program was directed at companies that were using Mandrake and wanted certified administrators. I don't know if they existed.
When I talk about education I mean the actual initiatives in France primarily involving selling to primary and secondary schools partnering with educational software vendors. Not professional education.
As for desktop Linux, that's an old argument that has been rehashed here a million times. Again, who knows? If Microsoft hadn't been so dominant (and hadn't so actively crushed anything that looked like competition), I think Mandrake might have been a contender.
I agree. Mandrake had a great desktop system to grow from. Had their been an opportunity they well positioned. Once XP was successful in moving the home crowd over to the NT kernel, it made sense to go after niches.
I don't think they were inexplicable. There is no money in Linux desktop sales. Mandrake was not going to beat RedHat or United Linux (Suse, Caldera, Turbo, Conectiva) in the enterprise market. They had always been a desktop product so they couldn't move strongly into servers. So going into specialized desktop areas makes sense. With Apple being weak, the education market was, and remains wide open. Had they executed better, and had Microsoft not been willing to lose money to keep this niche they could very easily have become a dominant player in the education market.
I don't think because it didn't work out it was the wrong choice. Quite often you are getting the pot odds to make the play whether it worked out or not.
If that's not what the FCC should be regulating, what is?!
What you are talking about are rate and terms of service changes. That falls under your state utility commission, or possibly local (depending on your state) that's not Federal. The FCC is concerned about issues like availability they don't regulate your local cable company's rates. They do regulate your local cable company's handoff to the national internet.
As for whether it should be like this. I honestly wouldn't mind getting rid of states and just having the federal government and the county/city governments. I don't see that extra layer as being necessary in which case utility regulation likely would be federal.
Incremental cost of product is one of the primary drivers in any economic model. Of course customers are burdons. They are also the source of profits.
The original claim was about high usage and business importance and how people with high usage should use land. Obviously in your car you might over-the-air data. But you should responsible, or pay for a large allocation if you are going to be driving a with heavy data usage.
About 2 years ago the numbers was over 98% and growing of Americans that had broadband access. 99% still means 3m don't. Ultimately there are places that just don't make sense to build telecommunications infrastructure. But achieving something like a 95% reduction in places without broadband is a heck of an accomplishment.
As for your broadband costing more. Assuming you are in a mainstream location, that's not an FCC issue.
The first link was to his initiative. He did follow up on it.
Show me some evidence that your precious democrats give a flying fuck about your internet connection.
http://www.broadband.gov/
Obama: "As president, I will set a simple goal: Every American should have the highest-speed broadband access—no matter where you live or how much money you have." -- Flint, Mich. JUNE 16, 2008
Your carrier should be willing to handle the spike better than they are doing. Something is wrong on their side. You could try complaining to the utility commission to get their intention. Most likely they stopped investing in their DSL infrastructure years ago, and just don't care. Ultimately that might work but you aren't assured of anything.
If you want guaranteed bandwidth though you have to go for a premium solution: T1/DS1. But a DSL add on is often $10 / mo while even a cheap T1 is still going to be around $200 / mo; and in a rural location could be as much as $550 / mo. So assuming you aren't going that route you need to look for another inexpensive broadband solution. The FCC has been taxing all Americans to bring broadband to America. There are also things like satellite internet which are reasonable at the $40-100 / mo range.
Your phone works over wifi. I use Pandora over wifi all the time. They expect you to be responsible enough to use those services in places where you are pulling data by landline.
The 5g data cap applies to over the air, which is an ultra premium service for getting small amounts of data as desired. If you want large quantities of data use a land connection. They shouldn't care about why you want the data. They care about how much you cost them to service.
I think by 2000 Java has already overtaken C as the most popular programming language. You are looking far too late. Apache BTW is around '94/95 not '99.
If you are looking at the Windows community, IIS is dominant not Apache. Active-X is allowing for web distributed clients, and enterprise stuff is mainly using SQL Server / Visual Basic.
If you are looking for the cause on the Windows side, around 2000, it was the release of Visual Basic .NET. By dropping compatibility it obsoleted a huge number of developer's skills. They moved over to Java to avoid being locked in, as MIcrosoft was starting to raise the cost of their server products while Linux was viable.
Anyway GCC does not require you to give away your code. Anything you compile with GCC is fully yours.
This whole portability thing is mostly nonsense and a myth
Porting was a very big deal during the 1990s as workstation vendors and server vendors were dying like flies. Here are the 1980s workstation vendors:
Apollo Computer
Ardent Computer
Callan Data Systems
Computervision
Digital Equipment Corporation (VMS and Digital Unix)
Evans & Sutherland
Intergraph
InterPro
MIPS Computer Systems
NeXT
Silicon Graphics
Stardent Inc.
Sun Microsystems
Three Rivers Computer Corporation
Torch Computers
Xworks Interactive
Think about how many had gone broke during the 1990s. Things were much smoother for Windows people you didn't care if your hardware vendor went bust because they were all on the Microsoft/Intel/Western Digital Standard.
There isn't really that much of a swing if you do an apples to apples comparison. It works out to about $10 / mo for the cut rate vs. the brand names once you add everything back in. That's not a bad swing if you are OK with lower quality customer service when there is a problem and slightly more frequent problems.
Operating systems like BSD and Linux don't need to be under the GPL, because, by nature, the developers want the spread of the software.
That's not actually necessarily true. It depends whether the developers are making money, generally indirectly, from selling services or from selling hardware. In the case of hardware, hardware / software combinations are very powerful value adds. The developers don't necessarily want to spread the software to competitors. They might want to use an open source system as a base. If they are selling services then generally they are happy to give away the code. But even here often under a restrictive licenses since they might have competitors that are selling hardware / software combinations.
This is exactly what we saw with the Linux kernel. The big box Unix guys who wanted to get out of the OS business were willing to port their stuff to Linux but not BSDs because their competitors who were still in the software / hardware business (Sun primarily) couldn't use it.
In fact I'd use the example of the failure of X, where the MIT version of X did set a standard but was worthless for end users who used proprietary Xs with OS specific features that were closed source.
In other situations, there needs to be a trust relationship. If we need to force a company to release the source, then we might as well use the GPL.
Exactly and frequently there is no trust relationship and the company does need to be forced.
I do respond and I was asked once and I responded NPD which computes sales figures.
http://betanews.com/2009/07/22/apple-has-91-of-market-for-1-000-pcs-says-npd/
If Apple thinks they are gonna get the entire industry to pick TB over USB 3? I'm sorry, not gonna happen. It'll be FW all over again, with very few things that support it and all WAY overpriced.
First off Apple is also going USB 3. TB is for monitors, SSD, HDD, ethernet... Things that are too fast for USB.
In terms of could Apple pull it off. Market share is much higher now that it for FW. They have over 90% of the over $1000 laptop crowd. That is very high market share among the profitable segments of the market. So yes I think Apple could drive Thunderbolt as an industry standard for higher end hardware easily. TB combines better functionality, higher margins, and lockin; what's not for Apple to love?
Besides it isn't so much the computer industry as other industries like corporate IT departments or business hotels being willing to order TB drives that plug into TB monitors that.... This allows Apple's external stuff to stop competing directly with the inexpensive x86 line. It creates a walled hardware guarden and potentially Apple can sell directly, take a percentage and guarantee quality on Apple specific accessories.
In terms of weight and Apple. I think Apple has a pretty good track record on balancing out the various issues like: weight, battery life, quality of video.... I'm not going to second guess their engineering intelligence. I'm going to take it as a given that they might approximately the right tradeoffs regarding weight as an issue.
I've been using OSX for a dozen years. I'm well familiar with those buttons and like the fact that viewing and typing are separated. It is essentially like the old fashioned modal editors.
Huh, so a Windows keyboard works, but an Apple-brand one doesn't? So much for that legendary "it all just works!" thing.
No a Windows brand keyboard and an Apple brand keyboard both work fine. Grandparent was just describing this terribly. Turns out that what the grandparent wanted to do was not remap the keyboard but assign multiple letters to a single keypress and was upset he had to modify (indirectly) his termcap.
Here is the link to NPD, http://www.npd.com/
They are a well known firm. Just google for the NPD results they are all over the place.
Oh I see. Thanks. I didn't get that from his description at all I thought he was having trouble mapping his keys and was using termcap.
Besides: does this "ease of use" explain why I had to enter in fucking arcane escape sequences into the configs to make the Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys on my keyboard work?
Those keys work fine for me out of the box using a Windows keyboard. The escape sequences are how keyboards have been mapped for decades if the the mappings don't match up. That would be the same on any system if you wanted to remap a keyboard.
Don't confuse sales with profits. Apple for many years, since their market share hit about 7% has had most of the profits from PC hardware. In terms of sales they are up there with Dell, Toshiba, HP but around 4-5th place... Their share has come down quite a bit as most of the manufacturers aren't fighting for market share at the expense of profits and their has been substantial growth in the emerging world where Apple is not as popular. But they still are a huge winner on profits