Several people have already posted about the irony of Bill Gates complaining about another company's monopoly. But I find it amusing that after years of attempts to sell music online, by companies from all over the spectrum, people seem to have chosen Apple's iTunes for its sheer end-to-end simplicity without introducing annoying DRM that gets in the user's way. Because of that, the market has rewarded them with most of the business. In other words, if they are now a monopoly, it's due to customers choosing their product, unlike Microsoft's monopoly, which was created through exclusive deals with hardware manufacturers and technological lock-in.
Linux doesn't need to be consolidated, it needs to be better. This crap about diverting resources is bunk when you're talking about GPL'd stuff. Anybody can borrow from anyone else. The one major exception I can think of for this is package management. There should be one package management system and it should be flawless. It should really be like MacOS X's bundle thing where there's one "file" that has the entire application inside it. Installing software on a Linux system is a pain in the ass compared to Windows, regardless of package management anyway. On windows, you download install.exe to your desktop, double click, answer some prompts that have common defaults, and the program is installed. If Linux is to compete with Windows (which I don't think any company even has a vested interest in anymore at this point, with RedHat getting out of the commercial desktop OS business) then it needs to be trivial to install programs and run them.
I use FC3 as my desktop PC at work and for the most part I think it's nice, but it's also way too easy to fuck things up for the average user. Deleting stuff from the panel, adding new panels, etc... Most lusers would be lost as soon as they accidentally deleted their panel.
Anyway, as I said above, I don't think the question of "why hasn't Linux hurt Microsoft" is even reasonable to ask. Apple hasn't hurt Microsoft and they have arguably the best desktop OS on the market today. There's very little corporate backing behind making Linux into a viable competitor to Windows now that RedHat has pretty much exited the market. Novell is doing good stuff with Evolution and all that, but there's still a long way to go.
The fact that IBM wouldn't be hurt by losing Apple came out within days of Apple's announcement, including the part about IBM wanting to make more headway in consoles. Why are we hearing it again?
I still cannot understand why nobody has put a stop to the wave after wave of new, meaningless top level domains that keep getting pumped out. You can't go register www.amazon.info or www.amazon.biz and open a store there, Amazon.com would sue you for trademark infringement (and probably rightfully so).
As I see it, these new TLDs are only being created to get trademark-concious companies to cough up more money for yet another domain name while having basically no value for either the company or the customer. As soon as.mobi (a ridiculously asinine name, by the way) becomes available for purchase, Amazon is going to register amazon.mobi, and every other trademark-concious brand will do the same. It's not like you're going to be able to register yahoo.mobi or redhat.mobi, or maybe you'll be able to register them, but you'll promptly be hearing from the trademark holders' lawyers.
None of the TLDs make any sense..aero? Why does aerospace get its own tld but not the Auto industry, which would seem to be much larger?.museum? a 6 character TLD? So what is the Met, met.museum? That's asinine..kids makes sense as a white-listed kid-friendly tld, parents could then restrict their comptuers to the.kids TLD maybe. No commercial sites allowed in.kids! Most of the new TLDs just add exponential layers of confusion. Was it on Amazon.biz or Buy.net or Google.info or AOL.name or Disney.kids or... etc. Just endless layers of stupidity.
On top of everything else, having a 4-character TLD for cell phones shows just how out of touch ICANN is and why they should not be given any control of the internet, and should have any existing control revoked. ICANN is inept and worthless. The cell phone TLD should be.1 or something like that, something ridiculously easy to enter on a phone.
Apologies to the master, but this sprang to mind reading your post (which for the most part I agree with).
"Now, something else I'm getting tired of is all this stupid bullshit we have to listen to all the time about children. It's all you hear in this country. "Children; help the children, what about the children, save the children." You know what I say? *Fuck* the children. Fuck 'em. They're getting entirely too much attention.
And I know what you're thinking, you say "Jesus, he's not going to attack children, is he?" Yes he is. He's going to attack children. And remember, this is Mr. Conductor talking, I know what I'm talking about.
And I also know all you single dads and soccer moms who think you're such fucking heroes aren't going to like this but somebody's got to tell you for your own good; your children are overrated and overvalued, you've turned them into little cult objects, you have a child fetish, and it's not healthy. And don't give me that weak shit, "Well, I love my children!"; Fuck you. Everybody loves their chidren, it doesn't make you special. John Wayne Gacey loved his children; kept them all right out in the yard near the garage. That's *not* what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is this constant mindless yammering in the media; this neurotic fixation that somehow everything, *everything*, has to be revolved around children. It's completely out of balance.
Listen, there are a couple of things about children that you have to remember: First of all, they're not all cute, okay? In fact if you look at them close, some of them are rather unpleasant looking. And a lot of them don't smell to good either; the little ones in particular seem to have this kind of urine and sour milk combination or something.
Stay with me on this; the sooner you face it, the better of you're going to be.
Second premise, not all children are smart and clever, got that? Kids are like any other group of people, a few winners; a whole lot of losers. There are a lot of loser kids out there who simple aren't going anywhere, and you can't save them all. You got to let them go, you got to cut them loose, you got to stop over protecting them cause you're making them too soft. Today's kids are way too soft.
For one thing, there's too much emphasis on safety. Child-proof medicine bottles and fire-proof pajamas, child restraints and car seats and helmets. Bicycle, skateboard, baseball helmets; kids have to wear helmets now a days for everything but jerking off! Grownups have taken all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives. It's *pathetic*. What's happening is these baby boomers; these soft fruity baby boomers are raising an entire generation of soft fruity kids who aren't even allowed to have hazardous toys for Christ sakes.
Hazardous toys, shit, whatever happened to natural selection? Survival of the fittest? The kid who swallows too many marbles doesn't grow up to have kids of his own. Simple as that. Simple, nature knows best. We're saving entirely too many lives in this country, of all ages, nature should be allowed to do it's job of killing off the weak and sickly and ignorant people without interference from airbags and batting helmets. Just think of it as passive eugenics, okay?"
I think your ISP may disagree when half their customers start saturating their pipes 24 hours a day so that they can watch a new movie each night.
Especially if your ISP is a Cable company, and the downloading of movies puts their TV service subscription at risk. When they face higher cost with lower revenue you know something's going to break.
Doom 3 was a great game, imo, however people's complaints about the whole flashlight mechanism were justified, and I can see how it would detract from the entertainment value. Id's goal was to make a scary game, and if you played the game with the swapped-in flashlight as they intended, it was indeed scary. The lighting was better than in any game I'd played at that point and created an unparalleled atmosphere of creepiness.
That being said, the idea that in "the mysterious future" you wouldn't be able to hold both a flashlight and a gun hurt the game's credibility. And going for the cheap scare so many times did tend to get old.
They were also determined to make D3 a single-player game in a field now dominated by multiplayer and massively-multiplayer games. I would have thought that they'd have realized this better than anyone, given that they practically created the market for multiplayer FPS gaming, but they chose to make Doom 3 a single player game, and between that and the whole flashlight deal, many people decided the game was a dud, and thus its fate was sealed.
I'd have to argue that Blogging is neither an OSS creation, nor an "innovation" at all. It's just a personal website with an easier interface. And Apple's choosing BSD as the core for OS X doesn't have anything to do with innovation, it has to do with stability and reliability, and credibility - Mac OS 9.x and before were the industry joke: I had a Mac crash 37 times in 6 hours once. If they didn't choose a core that had a reputation for reliability they'd have had a lot more work to do to convince people these were real computers to be used for real tasks.
To me, the Free Software/Open Source sector's greatest innovation is the notion of a free operating system itself. In an industry built around lock-in, giving the user the ultimate control over his computer is a pretty innovative idea. Maybe that should be abstracted another level to say that Free Software itself is an innovation. Certainly more innovative than "Trusted Computing" or fucking subscription-based software, or whatever lame scheme MS is trying to lay down this week.
Wired Magazine was sold to Conde Nast a few years ago, with Wired.com (Wired Digital, I think it was) and HotWired, and WebMonkey being sold separately to Lycos. I think part of the sale was that the wired magazine would be able to have space on the wired.com domain. But the basic gist is that Wired magazine is not cool anymore. I personally lost all faith in Wired when Y2K rolled around and the world didn't end - they were so adamant about it happening... I just got pissed.
Doom 3 was a great game, imo, however people's complaints about the whole flashlight mechanism were justified, and I can see how it would detract from the entertainment value. Id's goal was to make a scary game, and if you played the game with the swapped-in flashlight as they intended, it was indeed scary. The lighting was better than in any game I'd played at that point and created an unparalleled atmosphere of creepiness.
That being said, the idea that in "the mysterious future" you wouldn't be able to hold both a flashlight and a gun hurt the game's credibility. And going for the cheap scare so many times did tend to get old.
They were also determined to make D3 a single-player game in a field now dominated by multiplayer and massively-multiplayer games. I would have thought that they'd have realized this better than anyone, given that they practically created the market for multiplayer FPS gaming, but they chose to make Doom 3 a single player game, and between that and the whole flashlight deal, many people decided the game was a dud, and thus its fate was sealed.
$5 a CD,.50 a song. Piracy will blow away like dust in the wind, and profits will soar like never before.
I'd pay that price only if the files were in MP3 or Ogg or some other (relatively) hassle-free format. I don't like arbitrary restrictions being placed on my purchases. If I want to put my song on my Desktop, Server, Work PC, or portable player, I should be able to, with the player of my choosing.
Terminator made reference to a global computer network around the same time period. Anyway, I don't see how having one prediction realized means we should "trust" him. Making a sweeping prediction like "we will use computers more in the future" doesn't qualify one as a Nostradamus, IMO anyway. I'm still not sure whether your "we can trust him" comment was tongue-in-cheek or not.
0.13 If your wife disobeys you, you should throw her out the window?
0.13 Was Sopck a lumberjack?
0.13 Is Iola, KS a major US city?
0.13 Is Kansas bordered by the ocean?
0.13 Was Margret Thatcher suffering from Mad cow disease?
0.13 Do I live in Manitoba?
0.13 Does a bear shit in outer space?
After weeks of stealth and subterfuge, the double agent finally arrives in Moscow. As he's anxiously waiting in the lab for the equipment to decipher the data on his left index finger, he absent-mindedly bites off the data on his right finger.
What exactly is the point of that "Contact the on-duty editor" thing? There seems to be as many dupe stories as ever. I don't get it, it seems like a pretty straightforward thing to do - for any story, search Google for site:slashdot.org (since Slashdot's search feature is really bad) and if there's a match, don't post.
The problem with the USPTO is that they don't consider anything "obvious" if you add these three little words to the end of it: on the Internet. Just add those and everything old is new again as far as they're concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
riposte!
s hdot.org
http://www.google.com/search?q=ethanol+site%3Asla
Several people have already posted about the irony of Bill Gates complaining about another company's monopoly. But I find it amusing that after years of attempts to sell music online, by companies from all over the spectrum, people seem to have chosen Apple's iTunes for its sheer end-to-end simplicity without introducing annoying DRM that gets in the user's way. Because of that, the market has rewarded them with most of the business. In other words, if they are now a monopoly, it's due to customers choosing their product, unlike Microsoft's monopoly, which was created through exclusive deals with hardware manufacturers and technological lock-in.
Linux doesn't need to be consolidated, it needs to be better. This crap about diverting resources is bunk when you're talking about GPL'd stuff. Anybody can borrow from anyone else. The one major exception I can think of for this is package management. There should be one package management system and it should be flawless. It should really be like MacOS X's bundle thing where there's one "file" that has the entire application inside it. Installing software on a Linux system is a pain in the ass compared to Windows, regardless of package management anyway. On windows, you download install.exe to your desktop, double click, answer some prompts that have common defaults, and the program is installed. If Linux is to compete with Windows (which I don't think any company even has a vested interest in anymore at this point, with RedHat getting out of the commercial desktop OS business) then it needs to be trivial to install programs and run them.
I use FC3 as my desktop PC at work and for the most part I think it's nice, but it's also way too easy to fuck things up for the average user. Deleting stuff from the panel, adding new panels, etc... Most lusers would be lost as soon as they accidentally deleted their panel.
Anyway, as I said above, I don't think the question of "why hasn't Linux hurt Microsoft" is even reasonable to ask. Apple hasn't hurt Microsoft and they have arguably the best desktop OS on the market today. There's very little corporate backing behind making Linux into a viable competitor to Windows now that RedHat has pretty much exited the market. Novell is doing good stuff with Evolution and all that, but there's still a long way to go.
Should I be charged twice the parking fee because my 2001 Excursion has twice as many cylinders as the car beside it?
Just as a point of interest, I have seen places that charge per-axle.
One single letter prevents this story from being a dupe. ONE LETTER!
/ 134220&from=rss
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/07
YOU HAVEN'T HEARD THE LAST OF ME, SLASHDOT!
The fact that IBM wouldn't be hurt by losing Apple came out within days of Apple's announcement, including the part about IBM wanting to make more headway in consoles. Why are we hearing it again?
I still cannot understand why nobody has put a stop to the wave after wave of new, meaningless top level domains that keep getting pumped out. You can't go register www.amazon.info or www.amazon.biz and open a store there, Amazon.com would sue you for trademark infringement (and probably rightfully so).
.mobi (a ridiculously asinine name, by the way) becomes available for purchase, Amazon is going to register amazon.mobi, and every other trademark-concious brand will do the same. It's not like you're going to be able to register yahoo.mobi or redhat.mobi, or maybe you'll be able to register them, but you'll promptly be hearing from the trademark holders' lawyers.
.aero? Why does aerospace get its own tld but not the Auto industry, which would seem to be much larger? .museum? a 6 character TLD? So what is the Met, met.museum? That's asinine. .kids makes sense as a white-listed kid-friendly tld, parents could then restrict their comptuers to the .kids TLD maybe. No commercial sites allowed in .kids! Most of the new TLDs just add exponential layers of confusion. Was it on Amazon.biz or Buy.net or Google.info or AOL.name or Disney.kids or ... etc. Just endless layers of stupidity.
.1 or something like that, something ridiculously easy to enter on a phone.
As I see it, these new TLDs are only being created to get trademark-concious companies to cough up more money for yet another domain name while having basically no value for either the company or the customer. As soon as
None of the TLDs make any sense.
On top of everything else, having a 4-character TLD for cell phones shows just how out of touch ICANN is and why they should not be given any control of the internet, and should have any existing control revoked. ICANN is inept and worthless. The cell phone TLD should be
(c) George Carlin, Reprinted without permission.
I think your ISP may disagree when half their customers start saturating their pipes 24 hours a day so that they can watch a new movie each night.
Especially if your ISP is a Cable company, and the downloading of movies puts their TV service subscription at risk. When they face higher cost with lower revenue you know something's going to break.
You'd think this would be so difficult:
s ite%3Aslashdot.org
http://www.google.com/search?q=id+Lost+Its+Crown+
Duped story so I'll dupe my comment.
Doom 3 was a great game, imo, however people's complaints about the whole flashlight mechanism were justified, and I can see how it would detract from the entertainment value. Id's goal was to make a scary game, and if you played the game with the swapped-in flashlight as they intended, it was indeed scary. The lighting was better than in any game I'd played at that point and created an unparalleled atmosphere of creepiness.
That being said, the idea that in "the mysterious future" you wouldn't be able to hold both a flashlight and a gun hurt the game's credibility. And going for the cheap scare so many times did tend to get old.
They were also determined to make D3 a single-player game in a field now dominated by multiplayer and massively-multiplayer games. I would have thought that they'd have realized this better than anyone, given that they practically created the market for multiplayer FPS gaming, but they chose to make Doom 3 a single player game, and between that and the whole flashlight deal, many people decided the game was a dud, and thus its fate was sealed.
I still thought it was a great game though!
I'd have to argue that Blogging is neither an OSS creation, nor an "innovation" at all. It's just a personal website with an easier interface. And Apple's choosing BSD as the core for OS X doesn't have anything to do with innovation, it has to do with stability and reliability, and credibility - Mac OS 9.x and before were the industry joke: I had a Mac crash 37 times in 6 hours once. If they didn't choose a core that had a reputation for reliability they'd have had a lot more work to do to convince people these were real computers to be used for real tasks.
To me, the Free Software/Open Source sector's greatest innovation is the notion of a free operating system itself. In an industry built around lock-in, giving the user the ultimate control over his computer is a pretty innovative idea. Maybe that should be abstracted another level to say that Free Software itself is an innovation. Certainly more innovative than "Trusted Computing" or fucking subscription-based software, or whatever lame scheme MS is trying to lay down this week.
Wired Magazine was sold to Conde Nast a few years ago, with Wired.com (Wired Digital, I think it was) and HotWired, and WebMonkey being sold separately to Lycos. I think part of the sale was that the wired magazine would be able to have space on the wired.com domain. But the basic gist is that Wired magazine is not cool anymore. I personally lost all faith in Wired when Y2K rolled around and the world didn't end - they were so adamant about it happening... I just got pissed.
Doom 3 was a great game, imo, however people's complaints about the whole flashlight mechanism were justified, and I can see how it would detract from the entertainment value. Id's goal was to make a scary game, and if you played the game with the swapped-in flashlight as they intended, it was indeed scary. The lighting was better than in any game I'd played at that point and created an unparalleled atmosphere of creepiness.
That being said, the idea that in "the mysterious future" you wouldn't be able to hold both a flashlight and a gun hurt the game's credibility. And going for the cheap scare so many times did tend to get old.
They were also determined to make D3 a single-player game in a field now dominated by multiplayer and massively-multiplayer games. I would have thought that they'd have realized this better than anyone, given that they practically created the market for multiplayer FPS gaming, but they chose to make Doom 3 a single player game, and between that and the whole flashlight deal, many people decided the game was a dud, and thus its fate was sealed.
I still thought it was a great game though!
Nobody young enough to be traumatized by a "sex game" should be playing any of the GTA games at all to begin with. Once again, blame parents.
Google tends to get all the hype (and all the love) because they innovate, while Yahoo has become largely stagnant in terms of features.
$5 a CD, .50 a song. Piracy will blow away like dust in the wind, and profits will soar like never before.
I'd pay that price only if the files were in MP3 or Ogg or some other (relatively) hassle-free format. I don't like arbitrary restrictions being placed on my purchases. If I want to put my song on my Desktop, Server, Work PC, or portable player, I should be able to, with the player of my choosing.
Terminator made reference to a global computer network around the same time period. Anyway, I don't see how having one prediction realized means we should "trust" him. Making a sweeping prediction like "we will use computers more in the future" doesn't qualify one as a Nostradamus, IMO anyway. I'm still not sure whether your "we can trust him" comment was tongue-in-cheek or not.
... completely and utterly lost by this post? I have no idea what it's about or what the acronym means!
in WoW:
100 copper = 1 silver
100 silver = 1 gold
After weeks of stealth and subterfuge, the double agent finally arrives in Moscow. As he's anxiously waiting in the lab for the equipment to decipher the data on his left index finger, he absent-mindedly bites off the data on his right finger.
D'oh!
This is still in my RSS feed for Slashdot:
8 21244&from=rss
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/05/1
What exactly is the point of that "Contact the on-duty editor" thing? There seems to be as many dupe stories as ever. I don't get it, it seems like a pretty straightforward thing to do - for any story, search Google for site:slashdot.org (since Slashdot's search feature is really bad) and if there's a match, don't post.
d ot.org+12+minutes&btnG=Google+Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aslash
Ooh, hard. Google has an API so you can just roll that into your story-posting script and not even go through the trouble of typing it. Or something.
The problem with the USPTO is that they don't consider anything "obvious" if you add these three little words to the end of it: on the Internet. Just add those and everything old is new again as far as they're concerned.