Let's take a look at these. What do most open source project represent? First, building blocks. It is always better to have the basis of your product be open and well documented. This was always the main complaint about MS development. Although it was easy to make a good product, the standards were so hidden that only MS or a large partner could harness the full power. It was a major change in the development philosophy where previously if one did not have the code, at least one had full and thorough documentation. Open source building blocks returns us to the old ways.
The second case is mature products, and reflects the traditional product development as well. OO.org, GIMP, etc began when the product category was mature, de facto standard programming practices were in place, and all that was needed was people to do a clean room rewrite.
There are exceptions but when a new type of software is developed, something that is going to do things differently than anything else, it is likely to be closed source, even if the building blocks are open. Look at Google. Look at the top layers of Apple products. Look at Autocad Inventor.
It is easy to say that mail or a browser or a horizontal market office app should be open source. That is like saying auto manufacturers no longer hide the working of their basic internal combustion engine. But new things, in general, are closed, and part of the reason is they probably have borrowed something that violates copyright or patents. This goes all the way back to the steam engine, and probably back to the first time someone used a lever to move a rock.
To be clear, I love OSS development, and have found various products useful for all the many years I have worked with computers. However, i have always noticed I had to pay for the initial innovative product(with the exception of TeX, and emacs, and a couple other things)
First, i understand that correlation does not imply cause and effect.
But I wonder why the labels are not embracing youtube more. It seems like the same mistake with MTV in the mid 80's. This was a good time for the music industry. CDs had people paying again for music they already owned, and MTV was pushing the music without huge expense to the labels. Sure the labels had to produce the videos, but that was, of course, mostly at the artists expense. This reversed a downhill slide in music sales. Extrapolating from the late 70's sales, it is likely that current sales would be about half of what they are, and only about half the people would be buying.
What is also correlated is that as soon as MTV became less music and more television, the sales growth tapered off. Now did MTV change formats because the saw the labels could no longer push a compelling product, or did the lack of major label cooperation lead to MTV to change formats and end the cheap advertising for the labels? Who knows.
What is clear is that this decline decreased coincidently with introduction of iTunes and the iPod, and we if believe that MTV made a difference, we can see how things like YouTube might be cheap advertising as well. I have read stuff suggesting that a larger percentage of the population buy music now than ever before. I don't know if that is true. Sure they may spend less per person, but perhaps what the labels should do is concentrate more on populous advertising, rather than trying to extract ever more money out of each customers, which will only lead to the problems of the late 70's where they have few customers that are willing be so extremely monetized.
It is not a misleading server name, at least not anymore. Cognizant web users know 2o7.net, or whatever, is the cookie tracking site, and mostly blocks them. This company though liegitimate, does smell of sleaze. It was one of the first companies to use such social confusion, replacement of the '0' with 'o' so that in the days when one manually entered the domains to block, they would block the wrong domain. They are legitimate, and companies that work with them are legitimate, but the original sleaze factor is always there, and is obviously going to be transfered to clients.
This then leads to the question of why Adobe is using them for applications, which leads to think what has been aquired in the past year or so. I know. Macromedia. You know, that company that produces complicated resources hogging web content that unlike other resource hogging content cannot be filtered by most web browsers. I had hoped that Adobe might soften the rules and ship a flash player that was less user hostile, but no such new player exists. So, can we presume that instead of the user friendly Adbobe culture positively affecting the old macromedia products, that the end user hostile macromedia culture is infecting the adobe products.
OTOH, this product is a web design product, and most web designers get their money from ad revenue, so I would hardly think that the users of the product would have much problem with working with 2o7, kind of a necessary evil sort of thing. I can't imagine why adobe would use them at the design level, but overall I agree that it will be of no big deal to users of the product. To me, it is another step in the downfall of Adobe.
It seems to me that the antiques business is on par with the used car business. In both the product is subservient to the sales talent of the staff. In both total honesty results in loss of profits. Both primarily sell junk of dubious quality that the owner does not want any more. If one is talking about antiques, one is probably talking about something that no one really wanted in the first place, so it just sat around in th attic. If one is talking about curiosities, well that is another story. One has to create the illusion of value. Why is this visor more valuable than that visor. Because so guy wore it on a show? Because it was bought to be used on a show? No, it is valuable because there a people out there that will pay anything to have something they perceive to be unique and important, and in the process differentiate themselves from the crowd.
So the antiques and curiosity dealer may be different from used cars because they are in the business of making people feel unique and important. In this case, the client felt important until the perceptions generated by Christies was false. Did Christies follow all the rules, probably. Was that enough to change the perception? Not if Christies wanted to generate maximum bids. Ultimately if a star trek visor was not worth the money, then why buy it in the first place. And with regards to Mr. Spiner, who knows if it is the truth. He is going to tell anyone he sells it to that it is the real thing. Ultimately it is about perception, and perceiving that a dollar woth of sweat shop formed platic has remarkable value.
It was the JIR. It focuses more on the research that could not or should not be reprodcued, and therein lies the humor. Irreproducible research.
My favorite was the national geographic as the doomsday machine. It seems to now be a running joke. I notice on the AIR site, national geographic subscriptions are heavily pushed, so one can see on which side of science they are on.
I can think of at least two groups that would buy this machine. First are people who have a computer buy want an extra to web or mail. Second, people who want a computer for thier kids for school. The kids already have 1 or more game consoles, so gaming is not an issue. The kid need to surf and do school work. The kid can use google apps or OO.org. I have seen very average kids pick up very complex programs very quickly, so don't say that retraining is an issue. For kids, teaching them only one way to do things is the issue. makes them myopic.
For either group the OS makes no difference. if the machine runs and can do these simple things, that is ok. I know that this computer does not have the advanced MS features of one click changing of the background image, or one click changing of the orientation, or other critical one click hourly tasks, but for $200 I think many people can live without those luxuries.
Of course, if one needs a second computer that runs specific MS Windows only applications, then buy an MS Windows machine. But in most cases to run such applications, one will not be able to buy the cheapest machine on the market.
There was also a very brief interval in 1985 between the time that Excel was released, and proved that it could develop and deploy an arguably innovative product, and the time when MS Windows was released and conclusively proved that it could not. But the poster is correct. For the most part every time ones tries to take it seriously as a firm that innovates to helps it user, for instance MS Office 95, MS shows that such occurrences are flukes, for example MS Office 97 onward. The true purpose is to extract residuals, just like any other parasite.
I guess we learn something everyday. Most crystals I have worked with cleave, so I thought, how is this possible. The arrow will at least cleave the sapphire. But aluminum oxide, apparently, does not cleave. Cool. Now I understand why it is used for so many things.
I agree with other comments that it seemed like a pretty lame cross bow, and I wonder of which material the tip is made. It looked soft. It is still a good lesson on the strength of single crystals.
In sports and entertainment a million dollar contract does not buy you an employee, it buys you a product. A product that must be leveraged to earn several times that contract price, and that must be carefully controlled so that parents and the conservative will pay for the content as a wholesome product. Otherwise why would any pay the exorbitant fees when, at least from the point of view of the child, the band at the local club is much more entertaining and interactive. To complicate matters the sports and entertainment product is posited as a role model for children, which make PR control even more critical. If the sports product is seen as dressing, acting, and taking drugs just like the preferred, for instance, rapper, then how can the sports product be presented as superior product worthy of higher costs, even though the entertainment value is often less.
So the sports product must be controlled with dress code, drug codes etc, and when the sports product does something wrong, something that any normal person would do, the product is released so as not to tarnish the lilly white reputation. The drug thing is not about the product, it is about the image of the product. This goes to non sports products targeted as family and conservative friendly, like the Disney creation Hannah Montana who commands a premium as the product is "wholesome".
Now, if these other mental acts every become marketed as uber conservative family friendly, and the entertainers in these acts every become products, then we are likely to see them crack down on drug use, but that will be the smallest problem. Right now classical performances, art museums, indie public television, all of this type of entertainment, can get away with all sorts of stuff because they now the people who watch are not looking for the bland uber conservative family 'I am afraid of my body' entertainment. Bad or Good, the product is marketed toward a people with a wider view of the world, included families. For instance, parents send their kids off to these top rate colleges, and they must know full well that mistakes will be made in relationships and controlled substances, among other things, so there must be faith that the child has enough intelligence and a sufficiently good upbringing so the parents can let do.
Henry Ford denies that the mass produced automobile is killing the buggy whip industry. He says that lack of innovation and bloat is causing the industry to expire. To quote "If buggy whip makers would cater to the niche needs of their customers, and sell at a reasonable price, the manufacturers would have no trouble selling to the ever growing modern horse driven buggy market."
Most of us have difficulty differentiating heat and temperature. I am not even going to try to come up with a simple definition here. But, as the referred transcript states, if you have a very thin gas, temperature does, in some way, relate directly to motion. Therefore, absolute zero is approximately defined as the point where the atom in gas, where the atoms do not hit each other often, would stop moving. At present, I know of now peer review paper reporting 0 K reached, though some groups have come very close.
So the question of maximum temperature is not so silly. There are a number of ways to approach it from various definitions. If we have a few atoms in a large space, then perhaps we can drive those atoms to the speed of light, but no further. If we think of it thermodynamically, as Dr. Lienhard suggests, then we can ask is there an limit to the heat that can be driven between two systems. Such a limit would suggest a maximum temperature if we assume newtons law of cooling, which is itself is approximate, can be applied a large temperature differences, which it probably cannot.
In any case, nature, at least we way that science approaches it, appears to abhor vacuums and black holes, both of which seem to exist, but don't seem to make sense. The question is apt as we have seem that assuming infinities do us little good.
Pretty much this is not a MS Windows problem, per se, but a PC problem. Windows is merely one of the many things that set the PC market to value price over quality or usable features. For instance, any modern machine should be able to quickly import uncompressed video from a DV camera. Yet how many PCs have firewire ports? Why not? Cost. USB ports are cheap, so will have a million of them. Same for badly designed redundant keyboard ports. PCs are most often sold on the lowest price and long feature lists, not productive capability.
So, even in the late 1990's when many machines have 1+ gig RAM capacity, many machines were sold with less than 512MB capacity. This is nothing new because memory has traditionally been expensive, so MS has never supported large memory. Again, most people buy a PC with MS Windows because it is cheap. Why would the double the cost of their cheap machine by adding memory. OTOH, if one spent $1500 dollars on a computer in the late 90's, it made perfect sense to spend money on more memory, so such machines supported more memory.
We see this with the MS Vista upgrades. MS, like Wal Mart, is trying to shed their reputation as the cheap option. They want people to spend $500 on their OS. MS has a belief that if people spend $500 on MS Office, why not MS OS, yet the do not understand that very few people pay anything for MS Office. Like Wal Mart, MS is the victim of it's own success. By creating cut rate market, in which no one will pay a marked up price for anything, they have set the expectations so low that when a good product does come out, no one wants it. The only reason MS succeeds is because they have manipulated the political process and the market so they get a cut of ever PC. This does not in any way mean that customers get such innovations as 4GB of memory.
So what? Any retailer is free to get the best price it can for the product. And there is no price fixing. That is when any manufacturer set price is the 'suggested retail price'.
The story here is that the Wii is worth so much money to some people. For that kind of money one could get a Playstation. But I have no idea how the world works. I still can't understand why some parent would spend $100+ to have their kids see some girl pretend to sing. At some pooint it seems that you tell the kids 'no', the market dries up, and the scalpers go away. But in reality there are enough compulsive people who will pay anything to be part of the in crowd so these scalpers will always have customers.
In the free world we have the right to make choices, and as well as a basic education is offered, then I say let the adults make the choices(although it has been clear that when cash is too easy to get, the system tends to break down, and more responsible people end up picking up the pieces for the less responsible).
One side would say that there are benefits to supporting only one system. One can get expertise in supporting, maintaining, and securing the system. There are cost savings in not having to maintain separate inventories. There are cost saving in being able to hire a cheaper labor who must only know the rote procedure for the system, rather than understand the basic principles that will allow the person to work on multiple systems.
However, predictability poses a significant security risk. If I know exact schedule of a patrol, I know exactly when to attack. If I know exactly how a system functions, I know exactly how to disable that system. Though security through obscurity is not a valid primary means of defense, no one said that publishing every fact and inflexibility is a valid defense either. The military, of all people, should be able to see the value of unpredictability, for instance a surprise attack.
In my opinion the issue is one you touched on. Like all arguments involving hardware platform, at some point the reality is that people are just scared for their jobs. If Windows goes away, how can they feed their family. In private industry one can justify maintaining inefficiencies, as long a profit is made. The government, however, does not have the freedom to waste public money, and entitlements cannot be continued to infinity. As much as it pains us, if at some point these Windows support personnel have to be let go, I am sure they can all be retrained so as to become productive members of society.
In it, they warn people that the best way to avoid counterfeit music is to avoid 'compilation CDs that could only exist in the dreams of a music fan'
Up until this point I believed that compilation CDs had some significant value, and I have even purchased some of them as they did contain my dream songs. I even recall television advertisements encouraging me to buy these wonderful compilations, often accompanied by dream type metaphors, in which I was told to send money to K-Tel in exchange for highly coveted collections of incredible songs. It turns out that these compilation either had little value, or were pirated music, as it is clear from the quote that label sanctioned compilations exists not to provide consumer their dream music, but to provide the labels additional revenue on stale product. In the future I will avoid all compilations, and instead just copy the tracks I wish off my previously purchased CDs.
One issue that has come up is the issue of whether the kids playing should have the protection we usually give kids, or if they should be treated like the pro players, or somewhere in between. On thing that is clear is that many NCAA players do receive some kind of compensation in excess of room, board, and classes normally awarded the top scholar, though likely not near the compensation of a pro player. Rules such as these also makes it clear that the NCAA itself behaves more like a pro sports organization than an amateur venue. On cannot, for instance, imagine an amateur musician, actor, athlete, or other entertainer limiting the press coverage of their act. The only people who wish to limit such coverage are those pro organization who need to monetize every score, stat, call, play, and image to generate the profits needed to support a pro organization.
This is why I think the distinction is important. If the NCAA is an amateur organization, then we can forgive the situation when some of the member athletes do something stupid, like hire a stripper and serve beer to underage players, then do not have the maturity to excise themselves in a graceful way. But if they are not amateurs, of if NCAA wants to have the privileges affords pro sports, then they must also take on some of the responsibilities. Which means no one can call fowl when the players, even though they are kids, and have their names plastered across all the papers everytime they do something stupid. One cool thing about college is that one can get away with stuff one could never get away with on the outside. The side thing is that kids are accepting these high levels of responsibility without even thinking of the freedoms they are giving up.
Honestly, old media is dead. This is why it matters little if the foxie nazis own the WSJ, or if every commercial radio station is owned by a few large corps. Local news can be had through, god help us, bloggers. Music can be downloaded or rented or whatever. And television, well the writers strike tells all. Back in the late 80's when the writers went on strike, everyone cared. All the shows at the time were the center of the universe for many people, and the viewers were furious. it was in the major newspapers every day. No new episodes of Moonlighting. No Bruce Willis. No Cybill Shephard. Now, there are no talks, and the biggest news is that Letterman is going to cross the picket line. People just don't depend on the old media as they used to, or if they do it Jackass type unscripted shows where we see exactly what a prostitute will do for the chance to win money.
So does it matter that radio will have to pay? Not to the listener. The reason is that old media exists to provide filler content between ads. The filler content sole purpose is to attract the consumer. So, sports are ideal as it soap operas for boys watch, and it is usually watched live. Radio is ideal because most people have radios in their car where the people are a captive audience, and radio provides a unique ability to meet local markets. Newspaper have a unique ability and infrastructure to develop, design, print, and deliver ad campaigns. The sophisticated abilities of old media just do not yet exist on the internet.
The danger with the pay to play is that will increase costs so that advertising cannot support the media. This is no danger to most consumers. If local radio commercial fails, it just means that those who want that kind radio will have to pay for satellite service. This is likely the end game that many are hoping for, as satellite radio can probably bear the payments more easily. This means that many frequencies will be be free to transmit idie content from small radio stations. Certainly no one here thinks that is a bad thing.
It is invalid to compare one random item to another random item. Quality inks vary widely, and $*K is on the top end, but common good inks cost $4-$7 if the per bottle price is straight line extrapolated. Ink is expensive. The issue is not the expense of the ink, but the waste and the collusion.
TO Mr. Raikes, the company's third-longest-serving executive, after Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer, the Google challenge is an attack on Microsoft that is both misguided and arrogant. "The focus is on competitive self-interest; it's on trying to undermine Microsoft, rather than what customers want to do," he says.
If we need proof that MS is the new IBM, i.e. delusional in the belief that it is the one and only solution for the customer, this is it.
It is certain that MS now has one of the best solution for corporate on the PC. It is equally certain due to the overhead incurred to defend and maintain the PC, MS does not have the best solution for the home PC. By maintaining the applications on a central server, for free or nearly free, Google has the benefits of the central server in IBM days with the cost benefit that MS supplied. Add to that the idea that many people would now would be happy with an appliance, recall that many people do not work in an office, and one has an opportunity for competition. MS is not doing well in the living room, only in the game room.
I wonder if MS can live in a world where it does not get a cut out of every PC sold. Where more machines, like the OLPC, are not designed to run MS Windows, and therefore cannot be catagorized as a pirate's dream machine if sold naked, or with a non-MS OS. I wonder how many web designers are going to continue to design IE only websites if only 10% of the population browse using a non-MS compatible hardware.
MS creates adequate products, but like IBM they have it wrong. Google is not the arrogant company. MS is. By creating a new os that costs more than the computer. By not suppling IE to all major OS. By waiting 5 years to admit that multiplatform means more than just running on different versions of MS Windows, and interoperability is not bad for the end user.
Let me also say that I would not use Google Apps, not for anything important, but I am not the target audience. I can maintain my own machine and download and install OSS. The world where everyone uses google is not much less scary than the world we are in now. OTOH, at least my office might not tell me that everyone uses MS, and that is all they will support on the website.
So - what's the problem? Unless it's political, in which case, well, you know, *yawn*.
It's not just a matter of the political, but also a mater or the trivial, and this has been my concern with wikipedia. Some concentrate on whether the articles are factual, and do long analysis against the stalwarts, but I believe this is waste of time. Pervious encyclopedias had constraints such as high publishing costs and the ned to sell the product that prevented them from leaving trivia. OTOH, Wikipedia has no such constraints. Yet what do we find the is most prevalent content on Wikipedia? Trivia. Fact,figures, with little connection. It is like the elementary school student who can name all the dinosaurs, but is never able to synthesis the knowledge into a connected and systematic study.
I know that many will say this is what an encyclopedia is supposed to be, a list of facts so that researchers have a place to start, with references for those that want analysis. But if Wikipedia is merely about recreating knowledge in the public domain, as important as that is, it is not filling it maximum role. I have no idea why proofs would not be allowed. The mere fact that this discussion is occuring indicates that we are still stuck in the 1800s, where the technology that allowed us to put all the world trivia in one book seemed cool.
The counterpoint to this would be that a firm should stick to it's core competency, and if the core competency is publishing trivia, and if the that is working for it, the firm should be wary of extending to non-core competencies. If someone else feels qualified to pursue those additional products, then they should. And given that the there are many wikis out there, and the cost of entrance does not appear high, the logical thing might be set up wikiproofs.
To answer the original question, any valid or significant proof should be included. The purpose of a proof is not only the destination, but the journey. We learn from viewing and analyzing other's journey to a particular destination. Perhaps they should be ranked on the basis of previous knowledge required. For instance, wiewing a Feynman diagram without any background is not so useful. However not everyone who has the background has worked even trivially with such diagrams, and their presence could expose many people to the concept.
This also happened to me. I wanted to me when I wanted to transfer a domain. I tired to so do, and was not able to get a release through the web interface. No problem, i thought, i will just wait for it to almost expire. That led me to learn that I could not transfer a domain within 30 days of it expiring.
When it expired, it was immediately converted to a ad/spam/link farm type of page. After several weeks it was released and I was able to get it back.
I am not sure how businesses deal with this. On most products, one can get a 10, 50 or even 99 year lease, and if something happens to the agent, the courts protect your right. OTOH, I guess this is all part of freewheeling new economy, in which the ordinary laws of economics and physics have been suspended.
People give lots of credit to MS for changing the way we use computers, and give Apple a lot of flack for bieng "old school'm but the reality is really different.
Computers are cheap because Compaq reversed engineered the IBM PC and fought the battles against IBM. MS did supply the OS, but this was the essential issue. Compaq still had to come up with a legal BIOS, which is did. One has to imagine they could have come up with an OS as well. In any case, this started a boom, lead by the likes of pheonix technologies, to create a clone market.
In the midst of this, Apple kept it's original mission to supply a good competing computer. The architecture was different, which meant it did not IBM software, and therefore most people went with the cheap clones, which happened to have MS DOS. Those that were not attached to IBM, went to other machines. Apple competed in an environment that included many different platforms. Apple did not compete in the IBM PC market. It just had to keep prices and quality high enough so that people who were not satisfied with IBM PC market, and were looking for a better choice, would include Apple in the search.
It is a anachronistic mistake to assume the state of the world in 1980 was similar to the state of the world today. It was a much more dynamic time with competition sparking genuinely interesting innovations. Unix was still a big player, and ATT developed a Unix microcomputer which was really cool. Apple did not kill this machine, MS did not kill this machines, cheap clones did, which happened to often run MS DOS, as MS Windows was still quite a joke.
In fact in the midst of all this, Apple was a good citizen. The machines could run CP/M, for example. The machines could boot without a DOS, and one could load any number of options. The machine could buy EEPROMs. Later, when the machines were powerful enough, and the chips included a PMMU, Macintosh user could run Unix.
What most people focus on it the Linux connection, which is philisophically opposed to the Apple philosophy. open standards, build your own box, do everything yourself, which is where we were in the 70's. This philosophy has it's place, but is not the entire world. Apple machines could run *nix, and a damn sight better than most of the PC junk, but the code is not there. Likewise, in every story about *nix, some fool always complains that *nix won't run because some driver does not exist, or it takes forever to set up. That is the whole point!. *nix is a build your own system. It offers the ultimate flexibility, but at a price. If you need a driver, write it. That is was OSS is all about!
In the end we lost a lot of good functionality due to the MS shenanigans, but also gained some accessibility. Apple is part of the old culture, which has it plan. MS is quickly becoming the Nouveau riche neighbor you wish would move away. At some point *nix will mature, and run well, and at that time it will support all the cool hardware, not just the cheap hardware. MS does a good job supporting cheap hardware. Apple does a good job supporting mid price systems. *Nix needs to find it's own niche.
According to a study done by the APS several years ago, the mobile laser solution is the best worst option. Using an ICBM to hit an ICBM has many difficulties, the most obvious of which is that it is easy enough to attack with 50 ICBMs, and only needs to get through. The less obvious problem is that the ICBM need to be destroyed in the boost phase, and early enough in the boost phase to minimize collateral damage, i.e. all parts of the missle will land in the sea, and not on land masses, especially American land masses.
Unlike physical interceptors, light travels at the speed of light. This gives the defending more time to identify and target. This reduces the changes of destroying a non threatening aircraft, perhaps with a thousand people on board. The other problem is these interceptors need to be based on non-american soil if they are to work.
In any case, the whole thing is rather whacky, as we are contemplating several of these at all times. We have just seen the defense budget go up an order of magnitude, as you know that are unwilling to give up obsolete tech in exchange.
If anyone needs anymore evidence that the modern corporation is the new communist/dictator/monarchy oppresion machine, whose sole purpose is to extort tributes from the pesants, enjoys 100% exclusions for the norms of civilized behavior, and apparently lacking a conscious that would normally make a person sympathetic to the plight of those pesants, this is it. There is no difference between Imelda Marcus enjoying a shopping holiday while the people starve, or Hussien having garages of cars while the Iraqi people have no jobs. Some might say that the difference is that a government has made a promise to care for the people, which is itself is of limited truth, but even if is true it is of no concern. Normal people do not wish inflict pain and suffering without good cause. If we look at our own lives, we see that most of us have started few fights, lawsuits, or other attacks. It is not just cost, but the natural desire for most civilized people to choose the past of least violence. Corporations, OTOH, appeared to be uncivilized entities. Even though they are attacked more often, they often conduct campaigns of violence unprovoked. And, in the best sense of the souless aristocrat, they are more often concerned with controlling the message than actually doing any real work.
This is just a level of service. We all switch to VOIP/Cell phones because it is cheaper than land lines. This phone service is cheaper because unlike land line service, there are literally no service guarantees. I also wonder how much they actually have to refund as you pay a monthly fee for a number of minutes, not a flat montly fee as in most land line service.
What scares me is the number of people with just a cable phone or just a cell phone. I don't have cable due to the lack or reliability. Cell phones are reliable, but not anywhere the near 99% uptime with landlines.
If everyone began to demand landline quality from the cell phones, there would just be uptime guarantees in cell phone contracts(no refund unless out for 48 continuous hours, 72 hours in the case of natural disaster), and prices would increase for all of us, even if we use our cell phone as a cell phone, and not a home land line.
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The second case is mature products, and reflects the traditional product development as well. OO.org, GIMP, etc began when the product category was mature, de facto standard programming practices were in place, and all that was needed was people to do a clean room rewrite.
There are exceptions but when a new type of software is developed, something that is going to do things differently than anything else, it is likely to be closed source, even if the building blocks are open. Look at Google. Look at the top layers of Apple products. Look at Autocad Inventor.
It is easy to say that mail or a browser or a horizontal market office app should be open source. That is like saying auto manufacturers no longer hide the working of their basic internal combustion engine. But new things, in general, are closed, and part of the reason is they probably have borrowed something that violates copyright or patents. This goes all the way back to the steam engine, and probably back to the first time someone used a lever to move a rock.
To be clear, I love OSS development, and have found various products useful for all the many years I have worked with computers. However, i have always noticed I had to pay for the initial innovative product(with the exception of TeX, and emacs, and a couple other things)
But I wonder why the labels are not embracing youtube more. It seems like the same mistake with MTV in the mid 80's. This was a good time for the music industry. CDs had people paying again for music they already owned, and MTV was pushing the music without huge expense to the labels. Sure the labels had to produce the videos, but that was, of course, mostly at the artists expense. This reversed a downhill slide in music sales. Extrapolating from the late 70's sales, it is likely that current sales would be about half of what they are, and only about half the people would be buying.
What is also correlated is that as soon as MTV became less music and more television, the sales growth tapered off. Now did MTV change formats because the saw the labels could no longer push a compelling product, or did the lack of major label cooperation lead to MTV to change formats and end the cheap advertising for the labels? Who knows.
What is clear is that this decline decreased coincidently with introduction of iTunes and the iPod, and we if believe that MTV made a difference, we can see how things like YouTube might be cheap advertising as well. I have read stuff suggesting that a larger percentage of the population buy music now than ever before. I don't know if that is true. Sure they may spend less per person, but perhaps what the labels should do is concentrate more on populous advertising, rather than trying to extract ever more money out of each customers, which will only lead to the problems of the late 70's where they have few customers that are willing be so extremely monetized.
This then leads to the question of why Adobe is using them for applications, which leads to think what has been aquired in the past year or so. I know. Macromedia. You know, that company that produces complicated resources hogging web content that unlike other resource hogging content cannot be filtered by most web browsers. I had hoped that Adobe might soften the rules and ship a flash player that was less user hostile, but no such new player exists. So, can we presume that instead of the user friendly Adbobe culture positively affecting the old macromedia products, that the end user hostile macromedia culture is infecting the adobe products.
OTOH, this product is a web design product, and most web designers get their money from ad revenue, so I would hardly think that the users of the product would have much problem with working with 2o7, kind of a necessary evil sort of thing. I can't imagine why adobe would use them at the design level, but overall I agree that it will be of no big deal to users of the product. To me, it is another step in the downfall of Adobe.
So the antiques and curiosity dealer may be different from used cars because they are in the business of making people feel unique and important. In this case, the client felt important until the perceptions generated by Christies was false. Did Christies follow all the rules, probably. Was that enough to change the perception? Not if Christies wanted to generate maximum bids. Ultimately if a star trek visor was not worth the money, then why buy it in the first place. And with regards to Mr. Spiner, who knows if it is the truth. He is going to tell anyone he sells it to that it is the real thing. Ultimately it is about perception, and perceiving that a dollar woth of sweat shop formed platic has remarkable value.
My favorite was the national geographic as the doomsday machine. It seems to now be a running joke. I notice on the AIR site, national geographic subscriptions are heavily pushed, so one can see on which side of science they are on.
For either group the OS makes no difference. if the machine runs and can do these simple things, that is ok. I know that this computer does not have the advanced MS features of one click changing of the background image, or one click changing of the orientation, or other critical one click hourly tasks, but for $200 I think many people can live without those luxuries.
Of course, if one needs a second computer that runs specific MS Windows only applications, then buy an MS Windows machine. But in most cases to run such applications, one will not be able to buy the cheapest machine on the market.
There was also a very brief interval in 1985 between the time that Excel was released, and proved that it could develop and deploy an arguably innovative product, and the time when MS Windows was released and conclusively proved that it could not. But the poster is correct. For the most part every time ones tries to take it seriously as a firm that innovates to helps it user, for instance MS Office 95, MS shows that such occurrences are flukes, for example MS Office 97 onward. The true purpose is to extract residuals, just like any other parasite.
I agree with other comments that it seemed like a pretty lame cross bow, and I wonder of which material the tip is made. It looked soft. It is still a good lesson on the strength of single crystals.
So the sports product must be controlled with dress code, drug codes etc, and when the sports product does something wrong, something that any normal person would do, the product is released so as not to tarnish the lilly white reputation. The drug thing is not about the product, it is about the image of the product. This goes to non sports products targeted as family and conservative friendly, like the Disney creation Hannah Montana who commands a premium as the product is "wholesome".
Now, if these other mental acts every become marketed as uber conservative family friendly, and the entertainers in these acts every become products, then we are likely to see them crack down on drug use, but that will be the smallest problem. Right now classical performances, art museums, indie public television, all of this type of entertainment, can get away with all sorts of stuff because they now the people who watch are not looking for the bland uber conservative family 'I am afraid of my body' entertainment. Bad or Good, the product is marketed toward a people with a wider view of the world, included families. For instance, parents send their kids off to these top rate colleges, and they must know full well that mistakes will be made in relationships and controlled substances, among other things, so there must be faith that the child has enough intelligence and a sufficiently good upbringing so the parents can let do.
Henry Ford denies that the mass produced automobile is killing the buggy whip industry. He says that lack of innovation and bloat is causing the industry to expire. To quote "If buggy whip makers would cater to the niche needs of their customers, and sell at a reasonable price, the manufacturers would have no trouble selling to the ever growing modern horse driven buggy market."
So the question of maximum temperature is not so silly. There are a number of ways to approach it from various definitions. If we have a few atoms in a large space, then perhaps we can drive those atoms to the speed of light, but no further. If we think of it thermodynamically, as Dr. Lienhard suggests, then we can ask is there an limit to the heat that can be driven between two systems. Such a limit would suggest a maximum temperature if we assume newtons law of cooling, which is itself is approximate, can be applied a large temperature differences, which it probably cannot.
In any case, nature, at least we way that science approaches it, appears to abhor vacuums and black holes, both of which seem to exist, but don't seem to make sense. The question is apt as we have seem that assuming infinities do us little good.
So, even in the late 1990's when many machines have 1+ gig RAM capacity, many machines were sold with less than 512MB capacity. This is nothing new because memory has traditionally been expensive, so MS has never supported large memory. Again, most people buy a PC with MS Windows because it is cheap. Why would the double the cost of their cheap machine by adding memory. OTOH, if one spent $1500 dollars on a computer in the late 90's, it made perfect sense to spend money on more memory, so such machines supported more memory.
We see this with the MS Vista upgrades. MS, like Wal Mart, is trying to shed their reputation as the cheap option. They want people to spend $500 on their OS. MS has a belief that if people spend $500 on MS Office, why not MS OS, yet the do not understand that very few people pay anything for MS Office. Like Wal Mart, MS is the victim of it's own success. By creating cut rate market, in which no one will pay a marked up price for anything, they have set the expectations so low that when a good product does come out, no one wants it. The only reason MS succeeds is because they have manipulated the political process and the market so they get a cut of ever PC. This does not in any way mean that customers get such innovations as 4GB of memory.
The story here is that the Wii is worth so much money to some people. For that kind of money one could get a Playstation. But I have no idea how the world works. I still can't understand why some parent would spend $100+ to have their kids see some girl pretend to sing. At some pooint it seems that you tell the kids 'no', the market dries up, and the scalpers go away. But in reality there are enough compulsive people who will pay anything to be part of the in crowd so these scalpers will always have customers.
In the free world we have the right to make choices, and as well as a basic education is offered, then I say let the adults make the choices(although it has been clear that when cash is too easy to get, the system tends to break down, and more responsible people end up picking up the pieces for the less responsible).
However, predictability poses a significant security risk. If I know exact schedule of a patrol, I know exactly when to attack. If I know exactly how a system functions, I know exactly how to disable that system. Though security through obscurity is not a valid primary means of defense, no one said that publishing every fact and inflexibility is a valid defense either. The military, of all people, should be able to see the value of unpredictability, for instance a surprise attack.
In my opinion the issue is one you touched on. Like all arguments involving hardware platform, at some point the reality is that people are just scared for their jobs. If Windows goes away, how can they feed their family. In private industry one can justify maintaining inefficiencies, as long a profit is made. The government, however, does not have the freedom to waste public money, and entitlements cannot be continued to infinity. As much as it pains us, if at some point these Windows support personnel have to be let go, I am sure they can all be retrained so as to become productive members of society.
Up until this point I believed that compilation CDs had some significant value, and I have even purchased some of them as they did contain my dream songs. I even recall television advertisements encouraging me to buy these wonderful compilations, often accompanied by dream type metaphors, in which I was told to send money to K-Tel in exchange for highly coveted collections of incredible songs. It turns out that these compilation either had little value, or were pirated music, as it is clear from the quote that label sanctioned compilations exists not to provide consumer their dream music, but to provide the labels additional revenue on stale product. In the future I will avoid all compilations, and instead just copy the tracks I wish off my previously purchased CDs.
This is why I think the distinction is important. If the NCAA is an amateur organization, then we can forgive the situation when some of the member athletes do something stupid, like hire a stripper and serve beer to underage players, then do not have the maturity to excise themselves in a graceful way. But if they are not amateurs, of if NCAA wants to have the privileges affords pro sports, then they must also take on some of the responsibilities. Which means no one can call fowl when the players, even though they are kids, and have their names plastered across all the papers everytime they do something stupid. One cool thing about college is that one can get away with stuff one could never get away with on the outside. The side thing is that kids are accepting these high levels of responsibility without even thinking of the freedoms they are giving up.
So does it matter that radio will have to pay? Not to the listener. The reason is that old media exists to provide filler content between ads. The filler content sole purpose is to attract the consumer. So, sports are ideal as it soap operas for boys watch, and it is usually watched live. Radio is ideal because most people have radios in their car where the people are a captive audience, and radio provides a unique ability to meet local markets. Newspaper have a unique ability and infrastructure to develop, design, print, and deliver ad campaigns. The sophisticated abilities of old media just do not yet exist on the internet.
The danger with the pay to play is that will increase costs so that advertising cannot support the media. This is no danger to most consumers. If local radio commercial fails, it just means that those who want that kind radio will have to pay for satellite service. This is likely the end game that many are hoping for, as satellite radio can probably bear the payments more easily. This means that many frequencies will be be free to transmit idie content from small radio stations. Certainly no one here thinks that is a bad thing.
It is invalid to compare one random item to another random item. Quality inks vary widely, and $*K is on the top end, but common good inks cost $4-$7 if the per bottle price is straight line extrapolated. Ink is expensive. The issue is not the expense of the ink, but the waste and the collusion.
If we need proof that MS is the new IBM, i.e. delusional in the belief that it is the one and only solution for the customer, this is it.
It is certain that MS now has one of the best solution for corporate on the PC. It is equally certain due to the overhead incurred to defend and maintain the PC, MS does not have the best solution for the home PC. By maintaining the applications on a central server, for free or nearly free, Google has the benefits of the central server in IBM days with the cost benefit that MS supplied. Add to that the idea that many people would now would be happy with an appliance, recall that many people do not work in an office, and one has an opportunity for competition. MS is not doing well in the living room, only in the game room.
I wonder if MS can live in a world where it does not get a cut out of every PC sold. Where more machines, like the OLPC, are not designed to run MS Windows, and therefore cannot be catagorized as a pirate's dream machine if sold naked, or with a non-MS OS. I wonder how many web designers are going to continue to design IE only websites if only 10% of the population browse using a non-MS compatible hardware.
MS creates adequate products, but like IBM they have it wrong. Google is not the arrogant company. MS is. By creating a new os that costs more than the computer. By not suppling IE to all major OS. By waiting 5 years to admit that multiplatform means more than just running on different versions of MS Windows, and interoperability is not bad for the end user.
Let me also say that I would not use Google Apps, not for anything important, but I am not the target audience. I can maintain my own machine and download and install OSS. The world where everyone uses google is not much less scary than the world we are in now. OTOH, at least my office might not tell me that everyone uses MS, and that is all they will support on the website.
It's not just a matter of the political, but also a mater or the trivial, and this has been my concern with wikipedia. Some concentrate on whether the articles are factual, and do long analysis against the stalwarts, but I believe this is waste of time. Pervious encyclopedias had constraints such as high publishing costs and the ned to sell the product that prevented them from leaving trivia. OTOH, Wikipedia has no such constraints. Yet what do we find the is most prevalent content on Wikipedia? Trivia. Fact,figures, with little connection. It is like the elementary school student who can name all the dinosaurs, but is never able to synthesis the knowledge into a connected and systematic study.
I know that many will say this is what an encyclopedia is supposed to be, a list of facts so that researchers have a place to start, with references for those that want analysis. But if Wikipedia is merely about recreating knowledge in the public domain, as important as that is, it is not filling it maximum role. I have no idea why proofs would not be allowed. The mere fact that this discussion is occuring indicates that we are still stuck in the 1800s, where the technology that allowed us to put all the world trivia in one book seemed cool.
The counterpoint to this would be that a firm should stick to it's core competency, and if the core competency is publishing trivia, and if the that is working for it, the firm should be wary of extending to non-core competencies. If someone else feels qualified to pursue those additional products, then they should. And given that the there are many wikis out there, and the cost of entrance does not appear high, the logical thing might be set up wikiproofs.
To answer the original question, any valid or significant proof should be included. The purpose of a proof is not only the destination, but the journey. We learn from viewing and analyzing other's journey to a particular destination. Perhaps they should be ranked on the basis of previous knowledge required. For instance, wiewing a Feynman diagram without any background is not so useful. However not everyone who has the background has worked even trivially with such diagrams, and their presence could expose many people to the concept.
When it expired, it was immediately converted to a ad/spam/link farm type of page. After several weeks it was released and I was able to get it back.
I am not sure how businesses deal with this. On most products, one can get a 10, 50 or even 99 year lease, and if something happens to the agent, the courts protect your right. OTOH, I guess this is all part of freewheeling new economy, in which the ordinary laws of economics and physics have been suspended.
Computers are cheap because Compaq reversed engineered the IBM PC and fought the battles against IBM. MS did supply the OS, but this was the essential issue. Compaq still had to come up with a legal BIOS, which is did. One has to imagine they could have come up with an OS as well. In any case, this started a boom, lead by the likes of pheonix technologies, to create a clone market.
In the midst of this, Apple kept it's original mission to supply a good competing computer. The architecture was different, which meant it did not IBM software, and therefore most people went with the cheap clones, which happened to have MS DOS. Those that were not attached to IBM, went to other machines. Apple competed in an environment that included many different platforms. Apple did not compete in the IBM PC market. It just had to keep prices and quality high enough so that people who were not satisfied with IBM PC market, and were looking for a better choice, would include Apple in the search.
It is a anachronistic mistake to assume the state of the world in 1980 was similar to the state of the world today. It was a much more dynamic time with competition sparking genuinely interesting innovations. Unix was still a big player, and ATT developed a Unix microcomputer which was really cool. Apple did not kill this machine, MS did not kill this machines, cheap clones did, which happened to often run MS DOS, as MS Windows was still quite a joke.
In fact in the midst of all this, Apple was a good citizen. The machines could run CP/M, for example. The machines could boot without a DOS, and one could load any number of options. The machine could buy EEPROMs. Later, when the machines were powerful enough, and the chips included a PMMU, Macintosh user could run Unix.
What most people focus on it the Linux connection, which is philisophically opposed to the Apple philosophy. open standards, build your own box, do everything yourself, which is where we were in the 70's. This philosophy has it's place, but is not the entire world. Apple machines could run *nix, and a damn sight better than most of the PC junk, but the code is not there. Likewise, in every story about *nix, some fool always complains that *nix won't run because some driver does not exist, or it takes forever to set up. That is the whole point!. *nix is a build your own system. It offers the ultimate flexibility, but at a price. If you need a driver, write it. That is was OSS is all about!
In the end we lost a lot of good functionality due to the MS shenanigans, but also gained some accessibility. Apple is part of the old culture, which has it plan. MS is quickly becoming the Nouveau riche neighbor you wish would move away. At some point *nix will mature, and run well, and at that time it will support all the cool hardware, not just the cheap hardware. MS does a good job supporting cheap hardware. Apple does a good job supporting mid price systems. *Nix needs to find it's own niche.
Unlike physical interceptors, light travels at the speed of light. This gives the defending more time to identify and target. This reduces the changes of destroying a non threatening aircraft, perhaps with a thousand people on board. The other problem is these interceptors need to be based on non-american soil if they are to work.
In any case, the whole thing is rather whacky, as we are contemplating several of these at all times. We have just seen the defense budget go up an order of magnitude, as you know that are unwilling to give up obsolete tech in exchange.
If anyone needs anymore evidence that the modern corporation is the new communist/dictator/monarchy oppresion machine, whose sole purpose is to extort tributes from the pesants, enjoys 100% exclusions for the norms of civilized behavior, and apparently lacking a conscious that would normally make a person sympathetic to the plight of those pesants, this is it. There is no difference between Imelda Marcus enjoying a shopping holiday while the people starve, or Hussien having garages of cars while the Iraqi people have no jobs. Some might say that the difference is that a government has made a promise to care for the people, which is itself is of limited truth, but even if is true it is of no concern. Normal people do not wish inflict pain and suffering without good cause. If we look at our own lives, we see that most of us have started few fights, lawsuits, or other attacks. It is not just cost, but the natural desire for most civilized people to choose the past of least violence. Corporations, OTOH, appeared to be uncivilized entities. Even though they are attacked more often, they often conduct campaigns of violence unprovoked. And, in the best sense of the souless aristocrat, they are more often concerned with controlling the message than actually doing any real work.
What scares me is the number of people with just a cable phone or just a cell phone. I don't have cable due to the lack or reliability. Cell phones are reliable, but not anywhere the near 99% uptime with landlines.
If everyone began to demand landline quality from the cell phones, there would just be uptime guarantees in cell phone contracts(no refund unless out for 48 continuous hours, 72 hours in the case of natural disaster), and prices would increase for all of us, even if we use our cell phone as a cell phone, and not a home land line.