Precisely, I probably should have mentioned the many downsides of the deal for Novell. Apparently the market has seen through Microsoft's dirty little scheme. The deal certainly hasn't triggered a landslide of clients for Novell. Clearly the deal has been negative enough that high level Novell executives (of which Miguel certainly is a member) can talk out openly against the deal.
However, it is hard to overlook the 350 million upsides, which is why Novell hasn't actually tried to back out.
Actually Microsoft paid Novell the $350 million dollars. Which is why Novell isn't interested in backing out of the deal.
In other words, Microsoft was willing to pay Novell $350 million dollars to put a cloud over Linux and Free Software. Novell, in return has to pay a token amount for each commercial distribution sold. Novell is as happy as can be with the situation. After all, Novell can tell its customers that it has taken care of the Microsoft patent issue. So when Microsoft starts talking trash about Free Software and patents Novell can say that it has the solution.
The real problem is that Novell relies on a lot of hackers that aren't part of Novell, and that, in many cases, actually compete against Novell. Now Novell has a deal with Microsoft that makes it look dangerous to purchase your Free Software from anyone but Novell, and that doesn't make these third party hackers happy.
Make no mistake, Novell made out like a bandit. It received well over a quarter of a billion dollars in cash, it became the "preferred Linux vendor" for Microsoft's sales associates, and SuSE Linux is now differentiated from all of the other Linux vendors because Novell has a patent deal with Microsoft. This differentiation has allowed Novell to snag some big clients that almost certainly would have gone with Red Hat otherwise. Novell doesn't have even a tiny bit of buyer's remorse. Novell just wants to be able to keep the Microsoft deal and not lose the trust of the Free Software community that it relies on for more Free Software.
I realize that this is a joke, but I can't help myself.
An important part of the food safety of sushi and other raw seafoods is a prolonged cold storage (either -20C for 7 days or -35C for 15 hours is what is required for Colorado). That kind of cold on a regular basis either requires that you live near the poles (or at high altitude I suppose) or that you have access to the kind of serious refrigeration that the greenies frown on. In fact, you'd probably be better off cooking your food.
A new viable platform emerged that the big boys ignored, so the small companies jumped in and grew with the growth of the platform. That's the story of the standard PC as well as a Linux PC. It has nothing to do with open vs. closed.
I will admit that MySQL is not the best example of a company using Free Software to succeed. For one thing MySQL was at least somewhat popular before it was Free Software. Of course, the MySQL allowed free use of the software without freeing the source, and that's accomplished many of the same goals. It is also worth noting that the popularity of MySQL increased dramatically when it was released under the GPL. If MySQL AB had not taken that step then this same story would probably be about PostgreSQL or some other Free Software database.
Any way you look at this particular story, however, there is no denying that no one would have ever heard of MySQL if it had not been Free Software. The fact of the matter is that MySQL is a crappy database. And without the InnoBase technology that gives MySQL the few useful features that it does have MySQL would be little more than a cruel joke. The InnoDB tables addition absolutely would not have happened if MySQL was not Free Software. Interestingly enough, the InnoDB technology is now owned by Oracle.
In essence MySQL is only a viable platform because it was Free Software. If it wasn't Free Software MySQL would never have become as prevalent as it is today, it wouldn't have any of its nicer features, and it wouldn't be the default database for thousands of Free Software packages that needed a data store.
Because it (usually ) doesn't work, and when it does (usually) a pay model would have secured a much bigger profit.
It's a little ironic that you'd get a comment like that attached to a story about Sun paying $1 Billion U.S. for MySQL AB. Clearly the Free Software model worked fairly well for those guys.
The fact of the matter is that if MySQL AB had decided to produce yet another proprietary database they would have gone out of business ages ago. There was no way to compete with Oracle on its own terms. Even Microsoft has problems competing with Oracle and it can leverage Windows Server, its very popular development toolset, and the rest of Microsoft's technologies.
Clearly, if you can work things so that you are in Oracle's position that's ideal. However, if you can't you could do worse than follow MySQL's path. Besides, 10 years ago Linux was in the position that MySQL is in today, and Sun's Solaris business was clearly making much more money. Solaris probably still makes more money that Linux, but even Sun has to sell Linux because that is clearly where the UNIX market is going. The profit margins of the large proprietary software development houses (like Microsoft or Oracle) are not likely to be sustainable forever. There simply is too much room for a competitor to deliver something that is "good enough" at a much lower price. Eventually software business are going to have returns that are more in line with other "good" businesses. It's really only a matter of time.
I'm not surprised that Microsoft is dropping VBA support for the Mac. After all, the easiest way to kill the Mac as a viable business platform is to make it so that business applications written in VBA on top of Excel or Word no longer work on the Mac. Microsoft is starting to get a little worried about losing desktop marketshare to Apple, and a crippled or incompatible MS Office for Mac would fix that perfectly.
Forcing people to rewrite VBA applications on Windows, on the other hand, is a completely different kettle of fish. One of the primary reasons that OpenOffice.org has problems in the corporate market is that companies have invested heavily in applications written in VBA on top of Word and Excel. If Microsoft forces people to rewrite these applications then the door is suddenly wide open for MS Office replacements.
They aren't replacing Goldwings (which is good because a scooter that isn't even freeway legal is no replacement for a Goldwing). These scooters are replacing Piaggio and Yamaha scooters. In other words, they are spending $11K a pop to replace scooters that probably get between 60 and 80 mpg and they are trying to write it off as being "green" instead of just ridiculously wasteful.
Electric vehicles just aren't terribly practical yet, and replacing the most fuel efficient part of the fleet with something that costs twice as much just so you can save a little gas money makes no sense at all.
That doesn't work --- the paper doesn't really exist until someone does those extra steps, and the journals can't do it for free. That's an oversimplification, but it's basically correct.
Just about anyone that has read research has read a research paper before it was fully published. I'd be perfectly happy with the same quality of work that currently gets submitted to the publishers. Just make submitting the paper to PubMed part of the publishing process.
If the Journals really are adding as much value as they (and you) seem to believe then the only thing that will change is that the unwashed masses will have more access to the research they paid for with their taxes. Real scholars will continue to pay for access to the Journals because the extra steps are worth the price that gets paid. They'll want the version of the article that went through the extra steps, and that version of the article won't be available to everyone.
The fact that there is even an argument on this point simply shows that the publishers don't believe their own rhetoric. They are afraid of becoming obsolete in a world where merit can be judged without an artificial gatekeeper. One of the most amazing things about the Free Software movement is the people that end up participating. Before Linux actually existed no one would have ever guessed that the next big operating system wouldn't be the creation of Microsoft or IBM, but that instead it would be the work of a Finnish college undergrad. Nor would they have guessed that important contributions would come from under-educated Brazilian teenagers.
Now, I realize that the availability of computers makes it easy for random people to get involved, and that isn't necessarily the case in most sciences. However, there is little question that lowering the artificial barriers to entry is very likely to yield new sources of inspiration and research. At the very least it is likely to lead to a state in which the Journals become far less important than they currently are.
The journals can remain private if they want to take all of those extra steps. Personally, I just want the research. I want the paper on Pubmed, you can keep all the rest of the crap.
There's always the X11 version of OpenOffice.org for the Mac. To the Mac purists that is clearly suboptimal, but it works better than trying to use the current version of MS Office for the Mac with Microsoft's new MS Office formats. Of course, an updated version of MS Office for the Mac should be out soon, but then again the Aqua version of OpenOffice.org should be out eventually as well.
The fact of the matter is that if you are using Macs you will likely have compatibility issues every once in a while. For the last year or so, however, it is very hard to argue that OpenOffice.org's ODF format wasn't a better option for Mac users than Microsoft's XML format. It's also likely to be a better option in the long term. Microsoft could very well decide in the near future that it no longer wants to support MS Office on the Mac. At least with Free Software Mac users get the source code.
Re:Couple Thoughts
on
Where are Wii?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
What the heck is wrong with you? Some people like to play online games...just because you don't, you call them random losers? Having online games make a lot of sense. I can play with friends I knew from college no matter where they are now. Having friends close by is nice and I enjoy having them over as well.
You might have said "not to be rude" but quite frankly, your post was rude and small minded. Everyone has friends and loved ones. Just because someone is different, doesn't make them losers. Quite frankly I find your attitude discouraging and hope your kids grow up with more tolerance than you have.
It is hard to argue with these criticisms of my post. It is one thing to be clever, and another to be clever at someone else's expense. I disagreed with the original poster's premise, but I should have been less personal in my criticism.
Sometimes a joke is so easy to make that it is hard to resist, but I still appreciate you calling me out on it.
My point is that online play against random strangers (or even against people that you know) is not the same thing as filling your living room up with people and playing together. The fact that you can get a Wii and enough controllers for a serious party for the same price as an XBox 360 with a single controller is a huge advantage for Nintendo. The original poster might believe that online play is a replacement for more traditional, put everyone in the same room and play matchups, but I don't think it is. He presented his opinion that an XBox 360 with a single controller and XBox Live is a better deal than a Nintendo Wii, three controllers, and a pile of other stuff. Quite frankly, I think he's crazy. What's more, the market appears to agree with me.
Mocking him went too far, and I sincerely apologize.
Re:Couple Thoughts
on
Where are Wii?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Not to be rude or anything, but people that are getting a Wii for Christmas have friends and loved ones. These friends probably want to play too. I know that if I was going to drop several hundred dollars on a video game system for someone there had better be enough controllers so that I can play something too.
I know that PS3 and XBox 360 owners get all excited about Internet play, but that's actually one of the signs that both Microsoft and Sony misunderstand the console market. There is a certain small but vocal subset of the market that wants to play games against random losers on the Internet. There is a much larger part of the market that wants to play games with people that they know, and they probably want to be in the same room together while they play. Sony, and to a larger extent Microsoft, have invested heavily in the random loser market, but that doesn't make this a good investment.
I realize that consoles have grown up past being something that parents buy for kids, but that's still an important part of the market. As a parent myself I can guarantee you that I wouldn't even consider letting my children participate in the "random loser" market. If you want to play video games with someone, bring them over where I can see them. I'll pitch in for the extra controllers. After all, I might want to play myself.
Syntax errors are relatively easy to fix. The parser does most of the work. It gives you an error, and a line number, the person fixing the problem just has to be able to read.
Personally, I think that you are underestimating even the worst web developers. I mean seriously, even the dimmest dim bulb would notice if he started getting XML errors on his pages.
There is no question that it would be easier to develop web pages if web pages either worked as they should or threw an error. And if you would rather spend your time trying to figure out the various quirks of IE you could always set your pages up so that they were served up as text/html.
I used to feel the same way about books, until I started one of the Baen.com ebooks online and found myself reading the whole thing in front of my computer. It turned out that this particular book had a sequel that was also part of the Baen's free library and so I downloaded that too. This time, however, I spent a little bit of time coercing the ebook into the plucker format so that I could read it on my palm.
Next thing I knew I had purchased the entire series, including the final version of the book as a $20 advanced reader copy so that I could get it before it came out in print. What's more, I realized that what I really liked was reading, not books. All of a sudden I saw used book stores for the creepy, smelly places that they really are instead of the magical place of wonder that I had built them up to be in my head.
I liked being able to fit an entire library in my pocket. I liked being able to read in the dark without waking my wife. I liked being able to search my book collection with grep. I liked the fact that I no longer got ink on my hands from a cheap paperback, or had to worry about breaking the spine of a book. Most of all I liked the fact that I no longer had to plan time to read. I always had my palm with me, and so whenever I got a bit of time, even just a few minutes, I could make progress on whatever it was that I was reading. You can't do that with a book, unless you happen to be a security guard.
What's more, even including the price of the pda ($70) I was actually saving money by reading ebooks. I did this by only purchasing unencrypted ebooks, which are generally priced at paperback prices (or less), and by utilizing resources like Project Gutenberg
The real reason that ebooks have not taken off to this point has nothing to do with the format, and everything to do with the price of ebooks and ebook readers. The Kindle is a perfect example. Seriously, who wants to pay $400 for a dedicated ebook reader? I will grant Amazon.com that the price of the books for the device are mostly reasonable. They are still a little steep, considering the fact that they will be delivered digitally, but not as bad as most ebook vendors. However, $400 will buy a large pile of hardback books.
Eventually, the ebook folks are going to get things right, and that will be that for books. Oh, there will still be some folks that stick to their books in the same way that some music lovers still purchase vinyl, but the mainstream will move on.
Re:You Can't Sue China
on
Spying On Tor
·
· Score: 2, Funny
with a userid that low, you'd think you would be able to identify a joke when you see one by now.
It just goes to show that age does not necessarily bring enlightenment. Thanks for the heads up:).
You Can't Sue China
on
Spying On Tor
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
You can't sue China. Therefore the license doesn't matter.
The Inca apparently didn't use the wheel, and they had no system of writing. With thousands of miles of road and no good way to share knowledge I'd basically guarantee that the Incas figured out how to build these bridges by trial and error. They'd throw a bridge across a ravine and it would work, and so next they would try and throw one across a wider ravine and it would fail (probably throwing people to their death). They would then take a good hard look at where it failed, and they would try something else next time.
Heck, I've lived in the mountains of Peru, and I would argue that Peruvians are still designing their road ways more by trial and error than through any sort of rigorous engineering. Seriously, you absolutely wouldn't believe what passes for a road in the Andes.
Of course, even in the modern first world we still do the same thing to this day. We understand a lot more about engineering than the Incas did, but that just means that when our bridges fail we probably throw more people into the ravine.
My father bought a used Digital workstation for $30K for his law office so that he could use it to automate his contract work. He later bought a second one for our home because he was able to purchase it for $5K. I learned to program that one in BASIC. He was willing to pay this kind of money for these computers because they greatly simplified his business. However, no one is surprised that Digital didn't put a computer in every home at those prices.
The same thing holds true for robots.
The Aibo didn't sell well in the U.S. because it was expensive and useless. The fact that it resembled a dog had nothing to do with it.
I would agree that in the long run it is movie sales that count, but this ain't the long run, not by a long shot.
We are still very early in the adoption phase. At this point it is all about putting players in people's houses so that they can sell them movies later. If HD DVD gets a much larger install base then the movie companies will stop producing Blu Ray content and Sony will lose.
We could do this all day, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft hasn't grown in five years, nor is it likely to grow any time soon. If you want to keep your money in MSFT, that's fine, but the glory days are long gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Precisely, I probably should have mentioned the many downsides of the deal for Novell. Apparently the market has seen through Microsoft's dirty little scheme. The deal certainly hasn't triggered a landslide of clients for Novell. Clearly the deal has been negative enough that high level Novell executives (of which Miguel certainly is a member) can talk out openly against the deal.
However, it is hard to overlook the 350 million upsides, which is why Novell hasn't actually tried to back out.
Actually Microsoft paid Novell the $350 million dollars. Which is why Novell isn't interested in backing out of the deal.
In other words, Microsoft was willing to pay Novell $350 million dollars to put a cloud over Linux and Free Software. Novell, in return has to pay a token amount for each commercial distribution sold. Novell is as happy as can be with the situation. After all, Novell can tell its customers that it has taken care of the Microsoft patent issue. So when Microsoft starts talking trash about Free Software and patents Novell can say that it has the solution.
The real problem is that Novell relies on a lot of hackers that aren't part of Novell, and that, in many cases, actually compete against Novell. Now Novell has a deal with Microsoft that makes it look dangerous to purchase your Free Software from anyone but Novell, and that doesn't make these third party hackers happy.
Make no mistake, Novell made out like a bandit. It received well over a quarter of a billion dollars in cash, it became the "preferred Linux vendor" for Microsoft's sales associates, and SuSE Linux is now differentiated from all of the other Linux vendors because Novell has a patent deal with Microsoft. This differentiation has allowed Novell to snag some big clients that almost certainly would have gone with Red Hat otherwise. Novell doesn't have even a tiny bit of buyer's remorse. Novell just wants to be able to keep the Microsoft deal and not lose the trust of the Free Software community that it relies on for more Free Software.
Remind me not to eat at your house.
I realize that this is a joke, but I can't help myself.
An important part of the food safety of sushi and other raw seafoods is a prolonged cold storage (either -20C for 7 days or -35C for 15 hours is what is required for Colorado). That kind of cold on a regular basis either requires that you live near the poles (or at high altitude I suppose) or that you have access to the kind of serious refrigeration that the greenies frown on. In fact, you'd probably be better off cooking your food.
Oh no. The fad will have to last 5 whole days before they can use Google Adwords. The Horror.
I will admit that MySQL is not the best example of a company using Free Software to succeed. For one thing MySQL was at least somewhat popular before it was Free Software. Of course, the MySQL allowed free use of the software without freeing the source, and that's accomplished many of the same goals. It is also worth noting that the popularity of MySQL increased dramatically when it was released under the GPL. If MySQL AB had not taken that step then this same story would probably be about PostgreSQL or some other Free Software database.
Any way you look at this particular story, however, there is no denying that no one would have ever heard of MySQL if it had not been Free Software. The fact of the matter is that MySQL is a crappy database. And without the InnoBase technology that gives MySQL the few useful features that it does have MySQL would be little more than a cruel joke. The InnoDB tables addition absolutely would not have happened if MySQL was not Free Software. Interestingly enough, the InnoDB technology is now owned by Oracle.
In essence MySQL is only a viable platform because it was Free Software. If it wasn't Free Software MySQL would never have become as prevalent as it is today, it wouldn't have any of its nicer features, and it wouldn't be the default database for thousands of Free Software packages that needed a data store.
It's a little ironic that you'd get a comment like that attached to a story about Sun paying $1 Billion U.S. for MySQL AB. Clearly the Free Software model worked fairly well for those guys.
The fact of the matter is that if MySQL AB had decided to produce yet another proprietary database they would have gone out of business ages ago. There was no way to compete with Oracle on its own terms. Even Microsoft has problems competing with Oracle and it can leverage Windows Server, its very popular development toolset, and the rest of Microsoft's technologies.
Clearly, if you can work things so that you are in Oracle's position that's ideal. However, if you can't you could do worse than follow MySQL's path. Besides, 10 years ago Linux was in the position that MySQL is in today, and Sun's Solaris business was clearly making much more money. Solaris probably still makes more money that Linux, but even Sun has to sell Linux because that is clearly where the UNIX market is going. The profit margins of the large proprietary software development houses (like Microsoft or Oracle) are not likely to be sustainable forever. There simply is too much room for a competitor to deliver something that is "good enough" at a much lower price. Eventually software business are going to have returns that are more in line with other "good" businesses. It's really only a matter of time.
I'm not surprised that Microsoft is dropping VBA support for the Mac. After all, the easiest way to kill the Mac as a viable business platform is to make it so that business applications written in VBA on top of Excel or Word no longer work on the Mac. Microsoft is starting to get a little worried about losing desktop marketshare to Apple, and a crippled or incompatible MS Office for Mac would fix that perfectly.
Forcing people to rewrite VBA applications on Windows, on the other hand, is a completely different kettle of fish. One of the primary reasons that OpenOffice.org has problems in the corporate market is that companies have invested heavily in applications written in VBA on top of Word and Excel. If Microsoft forces people to rewrite these applications then the door is suddenly wide open for MS Office replacements.
They aren't replacing Goldwings (which is good because a scooter that isn't even freeway legal is no replacement for a Goldwing). These scooters are replacing Piaggio and Yamaha scooters. In other words, they are spending $11K a pop to replace scooters that probably get between 60 and 80 mpg and they are trying to write it off as being "green" instead of just ridiculously wasteful.
Electric vehicles just aren't terribly practical yet, and replacing the most fuel efficient part of the fleet with something that costs twice as much just so you can save a little gas money makes no sense at all.
Just about anyone that has read research has read a research paper before it was fully published. I'd be perfectly happy with the same quality of work that currently gets submitted to the publishers. Just make submitting the paper to PubMed part of the publishing process.
If the Journals really are adding as much value as they (and you) seem to believe then the only thing that will change is that the unwashed masses will have more access to the research they paid for with their taxes. Real scholars will continue to pay for access to the Journals because the extra steps are worth the price that gets paid. They'll want the version of the article that went through the extra steps, and that version of the article won't be available to everyone.
The fact that there is even an argument on this point simply shows that the publishers don't believe their own rhetoric. They are afraid of becoming obsolete in a world where merit can be judged without an artificial gatekeeper. One of the most amazing things about the Free Software movement is the people that end up participating. Before Linux actually existed no one would have ever guessed that the next big operating system wouldn't be the creation of Microsoft or IBM, but that instead it would be the work of a Finnish college undergrad. Nor would they have guessed that important contributions would come from under-educated Brazilian teenagers.
Now, I realize that the availability of computers makes it easy for random people to get involved, and that isn't necessarily the case in most sciences. However, there is little question that lowering the artificial barriers to entry is very likely to yield new sources of inspiration and research. At the very least it is likely to lead to a state in which the Journals become far less important than they currently are.
The journals can remain private if they want to take all of those extra steps. Personally, I just want the research. I want the paper on Pubmed, you can keep all the rest of the crap.
There's always the X11 version of OpenOffice.org for the Mac. To the Mac purists that is clearly suboptimal, but it works better than trying to use the current version of MS Office for the Mac with Microsoft's new MS Office formats. Of course, an updated version of MS Office for the Mac should be out soon, but then again the Aqua version of OpenOffice.org should be out eventually as well.
The fact of the matter is that if you are using Macs you will likely have compatibility issues every once in a while. For the last year or so, however, it is very hard to argue that OpenOffice.org's ODF format wasn't a better option for Mac users than Microsoft's XML format. It's also likely to be a better option in the long term. Microsoft could very well decide in the near future that it no longer wants to support MS Office on the Mac. At least with Free Software Mac users get the source code.
It is hard to argue with these criticisms of my post. It is one thing to be clever, and another to be clever at someone else's expense. I disagreed with the original poster's premise, but I should have been less personal in my criticism.
Sometimes a joke is so easy to make that it is hard to resist, but I still appreciate you calling me out on it.
My point is that online play against random strangers (or even against people that you know) is not the same thing as filling your living room up with people and playing together. The fact that you can get a Wii and enough controllers for a serious party for the same price as an XBox 360 with a single controller is a huge advantage for Nintendo. The original poster might believe that online play is a replacement for more traditional, put everyone in the same room and play matchups, but I don't think it is. He presented his opinion that an XBox 360 with a single controller and XBox Live is a better deal than a Nintendo Wii, three controllers, and a pile of other stuff. Quite frankly, I think he's crazy. What's more, the market appears to agree with me.
Mocking him went too far, and I sincerely apologize.
Not to be rude or anything, but people that are getting a Wii for Christmas have friends and loved ones. These friends probably want to play too. I know that if I was going to drop several hundred dollars on a video game system for someone there had better be enough controllers so that I can play something too.
I know that PS3 and XBox 360 owners get all excited about Internet play, but that's actually one of the signs that both Microsoft and Sony misunderstand the console market. There is a certain small but vocal subset of the market that wants to play games against random losers on the Internet. There is a much larger part of the market that wants to play games with people that they know, and they probably want to be in the same room together while they play. Sony, and to a larger extent Microsoft, have invested heavily in the random loser market, but that doesn't make this a good investment.
I realize that consoles have grown up past being something that parents buy for kids, but that's still an important part of the market. As a parent myself I can guarantee you that I wouldn't even consider letting my children participate in the "random loser" market. If you want to play video games with someone, bring them over where I can see them. I'll pitch in for the extra controllers. After all, I might want to play myself.
Syntax errors are relatively easy to fix. The parser does most of the work. It gives you an error, and a line number, the person fixing the problem just has to be able to read.
Personally, I think that you are underestimating even the worst web developers. I mean seriously, even the dimmest dim bulb would notice if he started getting XML errors on his pages.
There is no question that it would be easier to develop web pages if web pages either worked as they should or threw an error. And if you would rather spend your time trying to figure out the various quirks of IE you could always set your pages up so that they were served up as text/html.
I used to feel the same way about books, until I started one of the Baen.com ebooks online and found myself reading the whole thing in front of my computer. It turned out that this particular book had a sequel that was also part of the Baen's free library and so I downloaded that too. This time, however, I spent a little bit of time coercing the ebook into the plucker format so that I could read it on my palm.
Next thing I knew I had purchased the entire series, including the final version of the book as a $20 advanced reader copy so that I could get it before it came out in print. What's more, I realized that what I really liked was reading, not books. All of a sudden I saw used book stores for the creepy, smelly places that they really are instead of the magical place of wonder that I had built them up to be in my head.
I liked being able to fit an entire library in my pocket. I liked being able to read in the dark without waking my wife. I liked being able to search my book collection with grep. I liked the fact that I no longer got ink on my hands from a cheap paperback, or had to worry about breaking the spine of a book. Most of all I liked the fact that I no longer had to plan time to read. I always had my palm with me, and so whenever I got a bit of time, even just a few minutes, I could make progress on whatever it was that I was reading. You can't do that with a book, unless you happen to be a security guard.
What's more, even including the price of the pda ($70) I was actually saving money by reading ebooks. I did this by only purchasing unencrypted ebooks, which are generally priced at paperback prices (or less), and by utilizing resources like Project Gutenberg
The real reason that ebooks have not taken off to this point has nothing to do with the format, and everything to do with the price of ebooks and ebook readers. The Kindle is a perfect example. Seriously, who wants to pay $400 for a dedicated ebook reader? I will grant Amazon.com that the price of the books for the device are mostly reasonable. They are still a little steep, considering the fact that they will be delivered digitally, but not as bad as most ebook vendors. However, $400 will buy a large pile of hardback books.
Eventually, the ebook folks are going to get things right, and that will be that for books. Oh, there will still be some folks that stick to their books in the same way that some music lovers still purchase vinyl, but the mainstream will move on.
It just goes to show that age does not necessarily bring enlightenment. Thanks for the heads up :).
You can't sue China. Therefore the license doesn't matter.
Precisely.
The Inca apparently didn't use the wheel, and they had no system of writing. With thousands of miles of road and no good way to share knowledge I'd basically guarantee that the Incas figured out how to build these bridges by trial and error. They'd throw a bridge across a ravine and it would work, and so next they would try and throw one across a wider ravine and it would fail (probably throwing people to their death). They would then take a good hard look at where it failed, and they would try something else next time.
Heck, I've lived in the mountains of Peru, and I would argue that Peruvians are still designing their road ways more by trial and error than through any sort of rigorous engineering. Seriously, you absolutely wouldn't believe what passes for a road in the Andes.
Of course, even in the modern first world we still do the same thing to this day. We understand a lot more about engineering than the Incas did, but that just means that when our bridges fail we probably throw more people into the ravine.
My father bought a used Digital workstation for $30K for his law office so that he could use it to automate his contract work. He later bought a second one for our home because he was able to purchase it for $5K. I learned to program that one in BASIC. He was willing to pay this kind of money for these computers because they greatly simplified his business. However, no one is surprised that Digital didn't put a computer in every home at those prices.
The same thing holds true for robots.
The Aibo didn't sell well in the U.S. because it was expensive and useless. The fact that it resembled a dog had nothing to do with it.
This story proves that BSD is dying...
I would agree that in the long run it is movie sales that count, but this ain't the long run, not by a long shot.
We are still very early in the adoption phase. At this point it is all about putting players in people's houses so that they can sell them movies later. If HD DVD gets a much larger install base then the movie companies will stop producing Blu Ray content and Sony will lose.
We could do this all day, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft hasn't grown in five years, nor is it likely to grow any time soon. If you want to keep your money in MSFT, that's fine, but the glory days are long gone.