The cost of the reprints may seem high to someone who takes their film to the corner drug store for processing, but the cost of having a professional color lab make high quality enlargements of medium format negatives is a lot more expensive than what you pay at the drug store.
In reality, most photographers these days do make money from the reprints, but probably not as much as you might think.
I do agree, however, that given current conditions, perhaps multiple business models could be used. Many people who don't want to hassle making their own high quality scans and/or prints will still want things done the "old fashioned" way (my parents would certainly want it that way, they don't even have a computer at home), and, OTOH, more tech-savvy users will want a CD-ROM with hi-res images and then make reprints themselves (I'd prefer this myself).
A photographer could offer both models to potential customers, with the second approach being more heavily "front loaded" in terms of the fees since he/she knows that there won't be much income from reprints. One way or another, the photographer needs to get paid for their time and their artistic input to the end result, and earn an amount of money commensurate with the value associated with profesisonally taken photographs. Although I might want the option of the hi-res CD approach if it better fits my style of doing things, I shouldn't expect that it should necessarily be cheaper to get the images that way.
Although it could be debated that in some cases the government compteting with industry can be a unfair thing, in this case you have to consider the behavior of the competition (MS). Microsoft has consistenly used unfair tactics to compete, and as a result, largely nobody has been able to compete, even giving things away for free.
In this case, the government may not be trying to destroy an industry, they may just be sick and tired of paying monopoly rates, and seeing that there does not seem to be any other way to generate the competition necessary to bring those monopoly rate down by having a competitive market.
The government probably wouldn't do this with cars because there is no need to, the car market is already competitive.
You need to download a recent Linux JRE (Java Runtime Environment) from Sun and link to the included Java plug-in from your mozilla plugins directory. I believe there are more detailed instructions in one of the readme files that come with the JRE.
The Question is: Why would a Corporation by it?
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Inside Ximian
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· Score: 2
From the article and other statements they've made, they are really going after corporate desktops with their for-sale products. There's really no reason for an individual user to actually buy the CD since it can be downloaded. If I remember correctly, the whole thing is only 80Mb or so (it installs to around 200Mb), so it's possible even with a modem connection.
Corporate users who decide to adopt Linux and GNOME for their desktops may indeed decide to buy it, however. If Ximian can really provide a consistent and reliable set of applications, easy updates, and support, then corporations may perceive it as a viable alternative to the endless Microsoft license cycle. If they feel they will get timely support, painless updates, and good consistency, then they will be willing to pay for it; it will still cost them a bundle less than MS.
Although paying for free software sounds like an oxymoron, corporations are willing to do it if they perceive it buys them consistency and support.
Firstly, think globally, act locally, as the slogan says. Keep talking to your friends that pirate stuff an overly large amount. I've done with various people and sometimes it works (particularly with younger people). When I run into people who habitually use pirated software, I point them in the direction of true free software that does most or all of what they need. Many times people are surprised that so much truly free software exists. Believe it or not, many people haven't even heard of OpenOffice or StarOffice.
Secondly, some of the problem undoubtedly has to do with the fact that we fundamentally treat information differently than hard goods, even if maybe we shouldn't always do so. Unless your friend is a serious kleptomaniac, I doubt he or she would walk into a store, start stuffing items into his or her pocket, and say "Oh, I'm just stealing the items that I wouldn't buy anyway." But we tend to use this rationalization with information. Part of the reason is probably that we have always had the ability (and right) to copy information to some degree via fair use, where we have never had any right to make such "fair use" of someone else's hard goods. Since fair use already allows some copying, it's very easy to extend the boundary and rationalize your way into more widespread copying which actually goes well beyond traditional fair use. All of the sudden "I wouldn't have bought it anyway" becomes fair use in someone's mind, which clearly it isn't. On the other hand if someone downloads a tune, listens to it once, doesn't like it, and then deletes it, maybe this is fair use, akin to trying out a record in the store before buying it. The actual boundries can be gray, but Palladium will make them clear and hard, and they won't favor the end users.
Up until now, Palladium has been primarily vapor and hype, and primarily known among techno-savvy people like slashdot readers and privacy types.
Now that Intel has is planning to make it concrete and real, it will be interesting to see if the backlash is to the same level as it was for the CPU ID.
As many other posters have pointed out, $3.99 for one day is pretty steep compared to a four or five day rental at a video store for a similar price.
But the real problem is convenience. A higher price might be worth it if it was more convenient. At 1Mb/s, however (which is a very common "broadband" speed), this movie will take between 1.5 and 2 hours to download, and that's if your getting the full bandwidth of your connection. Problem is, I can drive down to the local video store and back five times in that amount of time, and then have a movie I can keep for four days, not 24 hours. The convenience is just not there at today's broadband speeds. Change the speed to 10Mb/s and things might be different.
Sure, sometimes the corner video store is out of the movie I want to rent, but that doesn't happen all that often, and I can always drive to the next video store (remember, I can drive to four or five in the two hours it will take to download the movie).
The second problem is the cost of the broadband connection, as slow as it is, which must be factored into the cost of the downloaded movies. In my area, a DSL connection costs around $35 more than a dial-up. If, for many users, the only reason they need a broadband connection is to download movies, then this overhead must be added into the cost of downloading movies, which will make them look even more expensive compared to video store rental unless you watch literally dozens of movies per month.
The overall problem is that with the current speeds and cost of broadband connections, the corner video store distribution model is still tough to compete with, both on convenience and cost. Again, when the bandwidth of broadband goes up by a factor of 10 and the price comes down as well (not likely to happen in the next few years at least), then things will change.
If "corporate" means large corporations (which I suspect it does by IDC's definitions), then their numbers may not be too surprising when compared to Google. In my own observations, I have seen more Macs used in small companies (e.g., storefronts, small offices) than Linux, but I would not be surprised if the tables are turned in large corporations with dedicated IT support staffs. Most large companies already use Linux on servers, and when the PCs number in the thousands, the cost of Windows based solutions becomes very significant.
Google, on the other hand, collects data from every type of user, including home, small business, and student, as well as large corporations. It's not surprising that for this much broader cross-section, Macs have higher usage than Linux. I think we're dealing mainly with a sample space issue here. Both sets of numbers probably equally "real" within their respective sample spaces.
The article also said worldwide. I suspect there are many countries, particularly some European contries and China, where the percentage of Linux usage in large companies may be higher than here in the US, and certainly higher than Macs, which must be even more expensive relateve to PCs in those countries than here in the US.
... But the real sea change will come when your age group eventually become managers in significant numbers. I own my own small business and am also an employee of another consulting firm, and we use Linux in both businesses, but my high level of interest in alternative OS's is not all that common for my age group (45). Most just prefer the status quo, if they even care about computers at all.
The good thing is that today's recent graduates have much more of an interest OSS and alternative operating systems, and when they enter management, it will almost certainly coincide with Linux being much more "desktop ready" than it currently is, and this should help the trend accelerate even faster.
Consumers used to vote with their dollars, no "balancing" was necessary
The problem is that the media and some technology corporations (like MS and Intel) are getting laws such as the DMCA passed that make voting with your dollars moot.
If it was not illegal to circumvent digital copy protection mechanisms, then there would be more such programs and devices available, and more people would have a taste of what will be taken away by something like palladium.
As it is, the DMCA makes it difficult to distribute mechanisms to bypass current DRM, so the huddled masses will see less of a difference when palladium arrives on their desktops. Most non-technical users already can't copy DRM-protected materials. Palladium will not mean much difference to them, so why should they bother voting against it with their dollars.
In addition to that, certain content will only be available on palladium, so in many cases, average non-technical users may actually have a reason to prefer it.
Ironically, it may be corporations who end up balking at palladium and potentially turning off some of the "security" features. Companies are likely to be very concerned with the idea of outside organizations having any type of "enforcement" accesss (or any other kind of access) to their computers.
I won't argue that Sun hardware isn't better than typical PC hardware, it is; but the issue is cost, both initially and in the upgrade cycle. Suns are at least two to three times more expensive (if not more) than similar performance PCs. This means that you pay a lot more initially, and it also means that you must keep the hardware longer before you can justify an upgrade. Using PCs (with Linux) lets us follow the performance curve more closely since we can upgrade hardware more often for less cost.
Using Suns wouldn't really lock us into their proprietary technology since the tools we use are available on other platforms. Again, the main issue is cost vs. benefit. Yes, the Sun hardware is better and nicer (it ought to be for the price), but the PC's get the job done for much less cash outlay, and they don't have to last as long because, in general, they will be replaced sooner anyway.
Clearly, there are places where high-end hardware is definitely preferred, where minutes of down time can cost thousands of dollars or more in lost transactions, but this situation doesn't apply to most desktop users.
As far as Athlons being garbage, it depends on what you are comparing them to. They are less costly than an equivalent performance Pentium IV, and so far are no less reliable.
Our company (admittedtly a small one - around 35 people) has done both migrations at the same time and have saved a ton of money in the process.
We are an engineering company, and used to have two computers on every desk - a UNIX workstation (combination of Suns and HPs) for the "real work", and a Windoze PC for things like email and documentation. Now, these have both been replaced by Athlon 2000+ machines running Linux. The main thing we were waiting for was the UNIX EDA software (from Mentor Graphics) to be ported to Linux. We now use mainly OpenOffice for documentation and Evolution/Kmail (depending on personal preference) for email.
The combination of ditching the expensive workstation hardware and the MS Office software has made the basic platform really cheap. The main cost, however, is still the EDA software, but even that is coming down. The added side benefit is less computer clutter and much simpler system administration.
When Red Hat released a distro with a new version of glib: Oh my God! Red Hat's the Microsoft of Linux!
When Red Hat released a distro with a new version of gcc: Oh my God! Red Hat's the Microsoft of Linux!
When Red Hat plans to release a distro with another new version of gcc: Oh my God! Red Hat's the Microsoft of Linux!
When Red Hat changes a few icons from two GPL'd Linux desktops: Oh my God! Red Hat's the Microsoft of Linux!
This is just nonsense. Red hat certainly has a large share of the corporate, commercial, and boxed Linux market, but they are far from a monopoly, and they have contributed everything they developed that goes into their normal distribution back to the open source community.
They host and support many open source projects, they regularly oppose bad laws like the DMCA or the latest Hollings drivel (including putting money where their mouth is via lobbying), and they champion Linux in schools.
Are they competing for market share? Sure. Are they trying to annihilate all competition with FUD, dirty marketing, embrace-and-extend, and illegal manipulation the PC distribution channel? Definitely not. Have they made some stupid mistakes? Of course they have, who hasn't?
I personally use Red Hat on some machines, but I use several other distros as well. That's called choice, something you don't get at all with Microsoft operating systems (unless your definition of choice is Win98, Win2000, WinXP, WinNT,or WinME).
Red Hat is definitely about competing for customers, but even if they had 90% of the boxed Linux market, they would not really have a monopoly because of the licenses which allow anyone else to produce a similar product for free. If Palladium ever succeeds, then there may be an advantage to companies who produce commercial versions of Linux, but we are still far from this situation at the moment, and it's not yet clear that business or the public will even accept it in the long run.
If you don't like Red Hat, then don't use it, but calling them the Microsoft of Linux everytime they freakin fart is just pure paranoia.
True enough. I probably wasn't clear enough about it, but my main point was that most of the radical change has been things like basic information exchange, as opposed to the buying and selling of products (which occurs, but not to the degree people had hoped it would). Yes, there is some profit in information exchange (Google sells their search technology for example), but a large percentage of this information exchange is available at no extra charge to end users once they pay for their internet connection. Same thing goes for IRC - it's also primarily non-economic information exchange.
Three years ago, the internet (the web in particular) was hyped into being the biggest change to society since the printing press.
Obviously most of the hype has not materialized. Although it does make some money for some people, the web has basically returned to what it was in the first place: a massive and highly efficient facilitator of information exchange. Much of this is business to business and is behind the scenes, but some of it, such as email, eclectic news sites, file sharing, and software distribution are in public view. Probably 90% of the non-computer-geeks that I know use the web for little more than email, reading news, and occasional shopping. And much of the shopping is from retailers that also have a brick-and-morter establishment.
Probably the biggest single effect of the internet is that more non-mainstream information reaches more people than ever before. This primarily non-economic use has been the major revolution brought about by the web. Although porn and spam are more prevalent than they used to be, they were always there, even before the big web hype bubble.
You are technically correct, the problem is that users want both technical interoperability and consisetncy, and Red Hat must be hearing this in spades, otherwise why would they be doing something that they know is virtually guaranteed to piss off a large number of both KDE and GNOME evangelists?
Both issues are problems that the Linux community is going to need to solve if average corporate Windows users are to be happy accepting Linux as an alternative.
Both issues are very pervasive. The consistency issue affects desktop UIs, app UIs, font handling, printing, system configuration, and I'm sure several others.
Interoperability still has a long way to go too. When I answer previous Windows users' document embedding questions by telling them that Linux has no consistent document embedding mechanism that works across all applications, they are typically pretty surprised.
For many of these users (primarily the ones just want to get their work done and don't have a technical interest in computers), their systems may crash less, but the interoperability and consistency problems make their overall experience less pleasant than it was with Windows. As long as this is the case, Linux has an uphill battle.
Cool! Now we Have the KNOME Desktop!...
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KDE Gets The Hat
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· Score: 3, Funny
Or should we call it GDE?
Here's my list of favorite apps:
Gonqueror Gapital Kimp Knumeric Knucash Gil lustrator Gword Kaleon Givio
Agreed: Why did it take Red Hat to do this?
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KDE Gets The Hat
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Many people have been calling (and some working on) interoperability between desktops for some time. Both the GNOME and KDE developers have been paying lip service to this for years, and the result has been a little bit of drag-n-drop interoperability and a few minor theme tweaks. Finally, Red Hat is actually doing something significant about it. Why? Because Red Hat actually has a financial stake in listening to their users.
Unlike KDE developers, who hear primarily from people regarding KDE issues, and GNOME developers, who hear primarily from people regarding GNOME issues, Red Hat hears from everyone, including people who use both GNOME and KDE and have to put up with the highly inconsistent desktop and app interfaces. In addition to my normal tasks, I also support desktop Linux users at work, and regardless of how we geeks think, average users, even otherwise technical people who just aren't computer geeks, are annoyed and confused by the wildly different interfaces between GNOME, KDE, and various other applications (such as OO). It may sound strange to many here, but I've been asked several times why you can't embed a DIA drawing in an OpenOffice document. It's a real-world problem and Red Hat is actually trying to do something about it, at least at the desktop level. Unfortunately, they can't as easily do much about the apps themselves.
The open source development model has been very good at producing software that is of high functional quality, but it has been much less successful in several areas of consistency, such as user interfaces, printing, and font handling. This is one area where high level integrators like distro vendors can help make a difference. Whether or not you like the icons, it's good that Red Hat is taking this step, knowing full well that it will be controversial among the more hardcore Linux community.
True! But as was mentioned in the article, why lobby to make it an option - if the tweak is truly better, make it the default!
I agree with this if you can show that the tweak is clearly a *better* way of doing it. There are many cases where this would work. The problem arises, particularly with desktop environments because they are used by almost everyone and personal taste varies so much, when the tweak is not so much a better way of doing something, but a different way of doing it based solely on personal taste. One man's crack might be another man's bread and butter.
A good example might be the mouse focus issue that others have brought up. I may prefer focus-follows-mouse and Havoc may prefer click-to-focus, but I really don't think you can unequivocally say that one is *better* than the other. Which one is more productive and easier to use (i.e., "just works") is really dependent on the user. In areas like this, where there are several equally useful but different ways to do something, and neither one is clearly "better", preferences should remain.
Now, even though I prefer focus-follows-mouse, I think the default should be click-to-focus because many newbies will be migrating from Windows, and focus-follows-mouse would be likely to confuse them while click-to-focus would give them the feeling that things "just work".
We can acknowledge that a lot of software has too many options and preferences without having to carry it all the way to the other extreme and sacrifice almost all configurability to the holy grail of extreme simplicity. As with most things, the right place is probably somewhere in the middle - a balance between complexity and configurability - and there are ways of hiding the extra complexity from newbies by using layers and intelligent defaults.
I just read the document you referred to, and I do agree with most of it in most cases. There are a few cases where I would disagree, however.
First of all, while I agree that too many preferences can be a usability problem for new or less technically savvy users (e.g., the "too many clocks" problem), you won't get around the fact that a lot of more advanced users want tweakability. In fact, in my own experience, the more I use a particular application, the more I find I want to tweak things here and there. As a result, I disagree with Havoc that the layered preferences approach (beginner, intermediate, advanced) used in Nautilus 1.x is a bad thing. If done properly, and applied on a global scale (all of GNOME, for example), I think this can be a good solution to the problem. The added preferences still add complexity, however, so it clearly doesn't solve all of the problems with preferences.
Secondly, while preference overkill is a problem for many applications, user desktop environments are probably one of the types of applications where users want the most tweakability. This occurrs for two reasonts: 1) Many more (I dare say nearly all) users use some kind of desktop environment (even if it's TWM), whereas only a subset of users use any given productivity application. This means there are many more peoples' tastes and needs to deal with. 2) People use their desktops day-in-and-day-out, and as I mentioned before, the more someone uses a program, the more they are likely to find things they want to tweak.
This doesn't mean that the defaults shouldn't be chosen intellegently - they should - and it doesn't mean that every preference in the universe should be included "just because", but I think that there will always be some applications (e.g., desktop environments) where there will inherently be more demand for preferences, and if you remove too many of them, a large number of people will feel they can't get the behavior they want.
We can all certainly point out ways in which Lucas could have improved things (and there definitely are many), and any one of us would have written epsodes 1 and 2 differently. There are many valid criticisms that have been made, but on the other hand, Lucas had many more and far tougher constraints to deal with.
First and foremost was all the baggage that accompanied him from the first four movies. There are several things that created constraints here. The most difficult was that these episodes are prequels. Not only does the character and situation development have to be consistent with the pre-existing stories, but they must also converge to a single target time in some sort of consistent fashion. This is much more difficult than a sequel, where the writer has the freedom to diverge in any number of directions.
Another difficult area is public expectations. We can all point out areas where Lucas gauged things wrong in this area, and that's just the point -- it's very difficult to do, and very difficult to get right, even with sequels where there is only one pre-existing film, let alone a prequel series that follows three highly successful episodes. Any one of us could have done "better", and the film would have matched our personal expectations, but Lucas was faced with estimating the expectations of millions of fans from three generations who had already seen four previous movies -- not an easy task task by any stretch of the imagination.
Yet another area is complexity. As Katz points out, over the years, the Star Wars saga has come to deal with many kinds of social, economic, and even religious issues. Here, Lucas is being criticized for maintaining and even building on this complexity, but if he were to completely drop it, he would undoubtedly be criticized equally harshly by others. Again, the years of baggage that accompanies the Star Wars saga made it difficult for Lucas to do the right thing in everyone's eyes.
Spidey had none of this constraining baggage, other than generally following the premise of the original comic strip/cartoon series.
Granted, there were some very obvious goofs, such as the over-commercialization of the tie-in products (it certainly cheapens the saga), but given the constraints, it was very difficult (and will get even harder) for Lucas to come up with prequels that will satisfy everyone's preconceived notions of how things should be.
Of course, RedHat has to *compete* with other Linux distributions, but "screw" them? I seriously doubt it.
Red Hat is not my favorite distro (although it is one of several that I use), but It's a pisser to see all the irrational, unfounded RedHat bashing that goes on.
Red Hat is one of the biggest Linux distributors (probably *the* biggest here in the US), and many people seem to feel that just because they are big, they are also evil.
First of all, TUX (and most everything else that Red Hat has added to its Linux distro) is licensed under the GPL, and others have pointed out that the GPL provides that a free license effectively be granted for any patented part of the code. (The method and apparatus are still protected, which gives them the protections they are trying to get against MS and others using the technology in a proprietary product). On this point alone, any fears of Red Hat screwing other Linux distributions seems little more than paranoia.
Red Hat is by no means a perfect company (is there such a thing in the real world?), but they have gone out of their way many times to help and assist the goals of Linux and open source in general. Of course doing something for Linux as a whole also benefits Red Hat, but because of the nature of open source it also benefits everyone as well.
Many people don't seem to realize that because they are bigger than most Linux distributors, they have some extra reasources that others don't have to apply to general causes. For example, pushing Linux in education, lobbying to fight really bad laws like the DMCA and the Hollings Disney protection act, providing the credibility and support to get Linux into large corporations, and many other things that in the end will benefit everyone in the OSS world.
Moreover, Microsoft has shown the ability to steal ideas from others. Software patents may be bad in general, but Red Hat is actually acting responsibly to protect IP that they've licensed under the GPL. Assuming the patents are valid, which I'm admittedly not in a position to evaluate, this will give them the ability to further protect the ideas in the GPL'd code from abuses by MS and others while still making the technology transparently and freely available to the open source community. Because the code is GPL's, the patents are actually a benefit rather than a liability.
I work for a medium sized (~40) company and we are no longer MS dominated.
Disclosure: we are an engineering company, so we have been doing some things on UNIX for a long time.
Having said that, our current mix is around 85% non-MS and 15% MS. For our engineering tasks, we use software that never did come from MS (although it was supported on the Windows platform, even though we never used it on Windows). For most of our "office" tasks, we use StarOffice 5.2 and will be moving to 6.0. All of this is now running on Linux based PCs.
The 15% MS portion is mainly for certain cases where we must use the same tool as our customer, and the customer want's to use MS tools (mostly spec. and project management related).
All-in-all, it works pretty well, and it definitely shaves $$ off your overhead costs, not to mention reduced audit worries.
The big question is, of course, why China? Why not make it freely available to any school kid under 18? That would be a huge marketing move.
According to the OpenOffice web site, one of the main differences between OpenOffice and StarOffice6 is fonts, in particular, Asian fonts. Perhaps the reasoning is that OpenOffice is not as usable by Asian students because of the lack of Asian fonts. Western students, however, can use OpenOffice, which is already free.
Slashdot Mirror
The cost of the reprints may seem high to someone who takes their film to the corner drug store for processing, but the cost of having a professional color lab make high quality enlargements of medium format negatives is a lot more expensive than what you pay at the drug store.
In reality, most photographers these days do make money from the reprints, but probably not as much as you might think.
I do agree, however, that given current conditions, perhaps multiple business models could be used. Many people who don't want to hassle making their own high quality scans and/or prints will still want things done the "old fashioned" way (my parents would certainly want it that way, they don't even have a computer at home), and, OTOH, more tech-savvy users will want a CD-ROM with hi-res images and then make reprints themselves (I'd prefer this myself).
A photographer could offer both models to potential customers, with the second approach being more heavily "front loaded" in terms of the fees since he/she knows that there won't be much income from reprints. One way or another, the photographer needs to get paid for their time and their artistic input to the end result, and earn an amount of money commensurate with the value associated with profesisonally taken photographs. Although I might want the option of the hi-res CD approach if it better fits my style of doing things, I shouldn't expect that it should necessarily be cheaper to get the images that way.
Although it could be debated that in some cases the government compteting with industry can be a unfair thing, in this case you have to consider the behavior of the competition (MS). Microsoft has consistenly used unfair tactics to compete, and as a result, largely nobody has been able to compete, even giving things away for free.
In this case, the government may not be trying to destroy an industry, they may just be sick and tired of paying monopoly rates, and seeing that there does not seem to be any other way to generate the competition necessary to bring those monopoly rate down by having a competitive market.
The government probably wouldn't do this with cars because there is no need to, the car market is already competitive.
You need to download a recent Linux JRE (Java Runtime Environment) from Sun and link to the included Java plug-in from your mozilla plugins directory. I believe there are more detailed instructions in one of the readme files that come with the JRE.
From the article and other statements they've made, they are really going after corporate desktops with their for-sale products. There's really no reason for an individual user to actually buy the CD since it can be downloaded. If I remember correctly, the whole thing is only 80Mb or so (it installs to around 200Mb), so it's possible even with a modem connection.
Corporate users who decide to adopt Linux and GNOME for their desktops may indeed decide to buy it, however. If Ximian can really provide a consistent and reliable set of applications, easy updates, and support, then corporations may perceive it as a viable alternative to the endless Microsoft license cycle. If they feel they will get timely support, painless updates, and good consistency, then they will be willing to pay for it; it will still cost them a bundle less than MS.
Although paying for free software sounds like an oxymoron, corporations are willing to do it if they perceive it buys them consistency and support.
Firstly, think globally, act locally, as the slogan says. Keep talking to your friends that pirate stuff an overly large amount. I've done with various people and sometimes it works (particularly with younger people). When I run into people who habitually use pirated software, I point them in the direction of true free software that does most or all of what they need. Many times people are surprised that so much truly free software exists. Believe it or not, many people haven't even heard of OpenOffice or StarOffice.
Secondly, some of the problem undoubtedly has to do with the fact that we fundamentally treat information differently than hard goods, even if maybe we shouldn't always do so. Unless your friend is a serious kleptomaniac, I doubt he or she would walk into a store, start stuffing items into his or her pocket, and say "Oh, I'm just stealing the items that I wouldn't buy anyway." But we tend to use this rationalization with information. Part of the reason is probably that we have always had the ability (and right) to copy information to some degree via fair use, where we have never had any right to make such "fair use" of someone else's hard goods. Since fair use already allows some copying, it's very easy to extend the boundary and rationalize your way into more widespread copying which actually goes well beyond traditional fair use. All of the sudden "I wouldn't have bought it anyway" becomes fair use in someone's mind, which clearly it isn't. On the other hand if someone downloads a tune, listens to it once, doesn't like it, and then deletes it, maybe this is fair use, akin to trying out a record in the store before buying it. The actual boundries can be gray, but Palladium will make them clear and hard, and they won't favor the end users.
Up until now, Palladium has been primarily vapor and hype, and primarily known among techno-savvy people like slashdot readers and privacy types.
Now that Intel has is planning to make it concrete and real, it will be interesting to see if the backlash is to the same level as it was for the CPU ID.
As many other posters have pointed out, $3.99 for one day is pretty steep compared to a four or five day rental at a video store for a similar price.
But the real problem is convenience. A higher price might be worth it if it was more convenient. At 1Mb/s, however (which is a very common "broadband" speed), this movie will take between 1.5 and 2 hours to download, and that's if your getting the full bandwidth of your connection. Problem is, I can drive down to the local video store and back five times in that amount of time, and then have a movie I can keep for four days, not 24 hours. The convenience is just not there at today's broadband speeds. Change the speed to 10Mb/s and things might be different.
Sure, sometimes the corner video store is out of the movie I want to rent, but that doesn't happen all that often, and I can always drive to the next video store (remember, I can drive to four or five in the two hours it will take to download the movie).
The second problem is the cost of the broadband connection, as slow as it is, which must be factored into the cost of the downloaded movies. In my area, a DSL connection costs around $35 more than a dial-up. If, for many users, the only reason they need a broadband connection is to download movies, then this overhead must be added into the cost of downloading movies, which will make them look even more expensive compared to video store rental unless you watch literally dozens of movies per month.
The overall problem is that with the current speeds and cost of broadband connections, the corner video store distribution model is still tough to compete with, both on convenience and cost. Again, when the bandwidth of broadband goes up by a factor of 10 and the price comes down as well (not likely to happen in the next few years at least), then things will change.
If "corporate" means large corporations (which I suspect it does by IDC's definitions), then their numbers may not be too surprising when compared to Google. In my own observations, I have seen more Macs used in small companies (e.g., storefronts, small offices) than Linux, but I would not be surprised if the tables are turned in large corporations with dedicated IT support staffs. Most large companies already use Linux on servers, and when the PCs number in the thousands, the cost of Windows based solutions becomes very significant.
Google, on the other hand, collects data from every type of user, including home, small business, and student, as well as large corporations. It's not surprising that for this much broader cross-section, Macs have higher usage than Linux. I think we're dealing mainly with a sample space issue here. Both sets of numbers probably equally "real" within their respective sample spaces.
The article also said worldwide. I suspect there are many countries, particularly some European contries and China, where the percentage of Linux usage in large companies may be higher than here in the US, and certainly higher than Macs, which must be even more expensive relateve to PCs in those countries than here in the US.
... But the real sea change will come when your age group eventually become managers in significant numbers. I own my own small business and am also an employee of another consulting firm, and we use Linux in both businesses, but my high level of interest in alternative OS's is not all that common for my age group (45). Most just prefer the status quo, if they even care about computers at all.
The good thing is that today's recent graduates have much more of an interest OSS and alternative operating systems, and when they enter management, it will almost certainly coincide with Linux being much more "desktop ready" than it currently is, and this should help the trend accelerate even faster.
Consumers used to vote with their dollars, no "balancing" was necessary
The problem is that the media and some technology corporations (like MS and Intel) are getting laws such as the DMCA passed that make voting with your dollars moot.
If it was not illegal to circumvent digital copy protection mechanisms, then there would be more such programs and devices available, and more people would have a taste of what will be taken away by something like palladium.
As it is, the DMCA makes it difficult to distribute mechanisms to bypass current DRM, so the huddled masses will see less of a difference when palladium arrives on their desktops. Most non-technical users already can't copy DRM-protected materials. Palladium will not mean much difference to them, so why should they bother voting against it with their dollars.
In addition to that, certain content will only be available on palladium, so in many cases, average non-technical users may actually have a reason to prefer it.
Ironically, it may be corporations who end up balking at palladium and potentially turning off some of the "security" features. Companies are likely to be very concerned with the idea of outside organizations having any type of "enforcement" accesss (or any other kind of access) to their computers.
I won't argue that Sun hardware isn't better than typical PC hardware, it is; but the issue is cost, both initially and in the upgrade cycle. Suns are at least two to three times more expensive (if not more) than similar performance PCs. This means that you pay a lot more initially, and it also means that you must keep the hardware longer before you can justify an upgrade. Using PCs (with Linux) lets us follow the performance curve more closely since we can upgrade hardware more often for less cost.
Using Suns wouldn't really lock us into their proprietary technology since the tools we use are available on other platforms. Again, the main issue is cost vs. benefit. Yes, the Sun hardware is better and nicer (it ought to be for the price), but the PC's get the job done for much less cash outlay, and they don't have to last as long because, in general, they will be replaced sooner anyway.
Clearly, there are places where high-end hardware is definitely preferred, where minutes of down time can cost thousands of dollars or more in lost transactions, but this situation doesn't apply to most desktop users.
As far as Athlons being garbage, it depends on what you are comparing them to. They are less costly than an equivalent performance Pentium IV, and so far are no less reliable.
Our company (admittedtly a small one - around 35 people) has done both migrations at the same time and have saved a ton of money in the process.
We are an engineering company, and used to have two computers on every desk - a UNIX workstation (combination of Suns and HPs) for the "real work", and a Windoze PC for things like email and documentation. Now, these have both been replaced by Athlon 2000+ machines running Linux. The main thing we were waiting for was the UNIX EDA software (from Mentor Graphics) to be ported to Linux. We now use mainly OpenOffice for documentation and Evolution/Kmail (depending on personal preference) for email.
The combination of ditching the expensive workstation hardware and the MS Office software has made the basic platform really cheap. The main cost, however, is still the EDA software, but even that is coming down. The added side benefit is less computer clutter and much simpler system administration.
When Red Hat released a distro with a new version of glib: Oh my God! Red Hat's the Microsoft of Linux!
When Red Hat released a distro with a new version of gcc: Oh my God! Red Hat's the Microsoft of Linux!
When Red Hat plans to release a distro with another new version of gcc: Oh my God! Red Hat's the Microsoft of Linux!
When Red Hat changes a few icons from two GPL'd Linux desktops: Oh my God! Red Hat's the Microsoft of Linux!
This is just nonsense. Red hat certainly has a large share of the corporate, commercial, and boxed Linux market, but they are far from a monopoly, and they have contributed everything they developed that goes into their normal distribution back to the open source community.
They host and support many open source projects, they regularly oppose bad laws like the DMCA or the latest Hollings drivel (including putting money where their mouth is via lobbying), and they champion Linux in schools.
Are they competing for market share? Sure. Are they trying to annihilate all competition with FUD, dirty marketing, embrace-and-extend, and illegal manipulation the PC distribution channel? Definitely not. Have they made some stupid mistakes? Of course they have, who hasn't?
I personally use Red Hat on some machines, but I use several other distros as well. That's called choice, something you don't get at all with Microsoft operating systems (unless your definition of choice is Win98, Win2000, WinXP, WinNT,or WinME).
Red Hat is definitely about competing for customers, but even if they had 90% of the boxed Linux market, they would not really have a monopoly because of the licenses which allow anyone else to produce a similar product for free. If Palladium ever succeeds, then there may be an advantage to companies who produce commercial versions of Linux, but we are still far from this situation at the moment, and it's not yet clear that business or the public will even accept it in the long run.
If you don't like Red Hat, then don't use it, but calling them the Microsoft of Linux everytime they freakin fart is just pure paranoia.
True enough. I probably wasn't clear enough about it, but my main point was that most of the radical change has been things like basic information exchange, as opposed to the buying and selling of products (which occurs, but not to the degree people had hoped it would). Yes, there is some profit in information exchange (Google sells their search technology for example), but a large percentage of this information exchange is available at no extra charge to end users once they pay for their internet connection. Same thing goes for IRC - it's also primarily non-economic information exchange.
Three years ago, the internet (the web in particular) was hyped into being the biggest change to society since the printing press.
Obviously most of the hype has not materialized. Although it does make some money for some people, the web has basically returned to what it was in the first place: a massive and highly efficient facilitator of information exchange. Much of this is business to business and is behind the scenes, but some of it, such as email, eclectic news sites, file sharing, and software distribution are in public view. Probably 90% of the non-computer-geeks that I know use the web for little more than email, reading news, and occasional shopping. And much of the shopping is from retailers that also have a brick-and-morter establishment.
Probably the biggest single effect of the internet is that more non-mainstream information reaches more people than ever before. This primarily non-economic use has been the major revolution brought about by the web. Although porn and spam are more prevalent than they used to be, they were always there, even before the big web hype bubble.
You are technically correct, the problem is that users want both technical interoperability and consisetncy, and Red Hat must be hearing this in spades, otherwise why would they be doing something that they know is virtually guaranteed to piss off a large number of both KDE and GNOME evangelists?
Both issues are problems that the Linux community is going to need to solve if average corporate Windows users are to be happy accepting Linux as an alternative.
Both issues are very pervasive. The consistency issue affects desktop UIs, app UIs, font handling, printing, system configuration, and I'm sure several others.
Interoperability still has a long way to go too. When I answer previous Windows users' document embedding questions by telling them that Linux has no consistent document embedding mechanism that works across all applications, they are typically pretty surprised.
For many of these users (primarily the ones just want to get their work done and don't have a technical interest in computers), their systems may crash less, but the interoperability and consistency problems make their overall experience less pleasant than it was with Windows. As long as this is the case, Linux has an uphill battle.
Or should we call it GDE?
l lustrator
Here's my list of favorite apps:
Gonqueror
Gapital
Kimp
Knumeric
Knucash
Gi
Gword
Kaleon
Givio
Many people have been calling (and some working on) interoperability between desktops for some time. Both the GNOME and KDE developers have been paying lip service to this for years, and the result has been a little bit of drag-n-drop interoperability and a few minor theme tweaks. Finally, Red Hat is actually doing something significant about it. Why? Because Red Hat actually has a financial stake in listening to their users.
Unlike KDE developers, who hear primarily from people regarding KDE issues, and GNOME developers, who hear primarily from people regarding GNOME issues, Red Hat hears from everyone, including people who use both GNOME and KDE and have to put up with the highly inconsistent desktop and app interfaces. In addition to my normal tasks, I also support desktop Linux users at work, and regardless of how we geeks think, average users, even otherwise technical people who just aren't computer geeks, are annoyed and confused by the wildly different interfaces between GNOME, KDE, and various other applications (such as OO). It may sound strange to many here, but I've been asked several times why you can't embed a DIA drawing in an OpenOffice document. It's a real-world problem and Red Hat is actually trying to do something about it, at least at the desktop level. Unfortunately, they can't as easily do much about the apps themselves.
The open source development model has been very good at producing software that is of high functional quality, but it has been much less successful in several areas of consistency, such as user interfaces, printing, and font handling. This is one area where high level integrators like distro vendors can help make a difference. Whether or not you like the icons, it's good that Red Hat is taking this step, knowing full well that it will be controversial among the more hardcore Linux community.
1. Mono is a separate project from GNOME
2. KDE and QT are also developing bindings for MONO
What are you going to do now? Switch to TWM?
True! But as was mentioned in the article, why lobby to make it an option - if the tweak is truly better, make it the default!
I agree with this if you can show that the tweak is clearly a *better* way of doing it. There are many cases where this would work. The problem arises, particularly with desktop environments because they are used by almost everyone and personal taste varies so much, when the tweak is not so much a better way of doing something, but a different way of doing it based solely on personal taste. One man's crack might be another man's bread and butter.
A good example might be the mouse focus issue that others have brought up. I may prefer focus-follows-mouse and Havoc may prefer click-to-focus, but I really don't think you can unequivocally say that one is *better* than the other. Which one is more productive and easier to use (i.e., "just works") is really dependent on the user. In areas like this, where there are several equally useful but different ways to do something, and neither one is clearly "better", preferences should remain.
Now, even though I prefer focus-follows-mouse, I think the default should be click-to-focus because many newbies will be migrating from Windows, and focus-follows-mouse would be likely to confuse them while click-to-focus would give them the feeling that things "just work".
We can acknowledge that a lot of software has too many options and preferences without having to carry it all the way to the other extreme and sacrifice almost all configurability to the holy grail of extreme simplicity. As with most things, the right place is probably somewhere in the middle - a balance between complexity and configurability - and there are ways of hiding the extra complexity from newbies by using layers and intelligent defaults.
I just read the document you referred to, and I do agree with most of it in most cases. There are a few cases where I would disagree, however.
First of all, while I agree that too many preferences can be a usability problem for new or less technically savvy users (e.g., the "too many clocks" problem), you won't get around the fact that a lot of more advanced users want tweakability. In fact, in my own experience, the more I use a particular application, the more I find I want to tweak things here and there. As a result, I disagree with Havoc that the layered preferences approach (beginner, intermediate, advanced) used in Nautilus 1.x is a bad thing. If done properly, and applied on a global scale (all of GNOME, for example), I think this can be a good solution to the problem. The added preferences still add complexity, however, so it clearly doesn't solve all of the problems with preferences.
Secondly, while preference overkill is a problem for many applications, user desktop environments are probably one of the types of applications where users want the most tweakability. This occurrs for two reasonts: 1) Many more (I dare say nearly all) users use some kind of desktop environment (even if it's TWM), whereas only a subset of users use any given productivity application. This means there are many more peoples' tastes and needs to deal with. 2) People use their desktops day-in-and-day-out, and as I mentioned before, the more someone uses a program, the more they are likely to find things they want to tweak.
This doesn't mean that the defaults shouldn't be chosen intellegently - they should - and it doesn't mean that every preference in the universe should be included "just because", but I think that there will always be some applications (e.g., desktop environments) where there will inherently be more demand for preferences, and if you remove too many of them, a large number of people will feel they can't get the behavior they want.
We can all certainly point out ways in which Lucas could have improved things (and there definitely are many), and any one of us would have written epsodes 1 and 2 differently. There are many valid criticisms that have been made, but on the other hand, Lucas had many more and far tougher constraints to deal with.
First and foremost was all the baggage that accompanied him from the first four movies. There are several things that created constraints here. The most difficult was that these episodes are prequels. Not only does the character and situation development have to be consistent with the pre-existing stories, but they must also converge to a single target time in some sort of consistent fashion. This is much more difficult than a sequel, where the writer has the freedom to diverge in any number of directions.
Another difficult area is public expectations. We can all point out areas where Lucas gauged things wrong in this area, and that's just the point -- it's very difficult to do, and very difficult to get right, even with sequels where there is only one pre-existing film, let alone a prequel series that follows three highly successful episodes. Any one of us could have done "better", and the film would have matched our personal expectations, but Lucas was faced with estimating the expectations of millions of fans from three generations who had already seen four previous movies -- not an easy task task by any stretch of the imagination.
Yet another area is complexity. As Katz points out, over the years, the Star Wars saga has come to deal with many kinds of social, economic, and even religious issues. Here, Lucas is being criticized for maintaining and even building on this complexity, but if he were to completely drop it, he would undoubtedly be criticized equally harshly by others. Again, the years of baggage that accompanies the Star Wars saga made it difficult for Lucas to do the right thing in everyone's eyes.
Spidey had none of this constraining baggage, other than generally following the premise of the original comic strip/cartoon series.
Granted, there were some very obvious goofs, such as the over-commercialization of the tie-in products (it certainly cheapens the saga), but given the constraints, it was very difficult (and will get even harder) for Lucas to come up with prequels that will satisfy everyone's preconceived notions of how things should be.
"Screw" other Linux distributions? Wow.
Of course, RedHat has to *compete* with other Linux distributions, but "screw" them? I seriously doubt it.
Red Hat is not my favorite distro (although it is one of several that I use), but It's a pisser to see all the irrational, unfounded RedHat bashing that goes on.
Red Hat is one of the biggest Linux distributors (probably *the* biggest here in the US), and many people seem to feel that just because they are big, they are also evil.
First of all, TUX (and most everything else that Red Hat has added to its Linux distro) is licensed under the GPL, and others have pointed out that the GPL provides that a free license effectively be granted for any patented part of the code. (The method and apparatus are still protected, which gives them the protections they are trying to get against MS and others using the technology in a proprietary product). On this point alone, any fears of Red Hat screwing other Linux distributions seems little more than paranoia.
Red Hat is by no means a perfect company (is there such a thing in the real world?), but they have gone out of their way many times to help and assist the goals of Linux and open source in general. Of course doing something for Linux as a whole also benefits Red Hat, but because of the nature of open source it also benefits everyone as well.
Many people don't seem to realize that because they are bigger than most Linux distributors, they have some extra reasources that others don't have to apply to general causes. For example, pushing Linux in education, lobbying to fight really bad laws like the DMCA and the Hollings Disney protection act, providing the credibility and support to get Linux into large corporations, and many other things that in the end will benefit everyone in the OSS world.
Moreover, Microsoft has shown the ability to steal ideas from others. Software patents may be bad in general, but Red Hat is actually acting responsibly to protect IP that they've licensed under the GPL. Assuming the patents are valid, which I'm admittedly not in a position to evaluate, this will give them the ability to further protect the ideas in the GPL'd code from abuses by MS and others while still making the technology transparently and freely available to the open source community. Because the code is GPL's, the patents are actually a benefit rather than a liability.
I work for a medium sized (~40) company and we are no longer MS dominated.
Disclosure: we are an engineering company, so we have been doing some things on UNIX for a long time.
Having said that, our current mix is around 85% non-MS and 15% MS. For our engineering tasks, we use software that never did come from MS (although it was supported on the Windows platform, even though we never used it on Windows). For most of our "office" tasks, we use StarOffice 5.2 and will be moving to 6.0. All of this is now running on Linux based PCs.
The 15% MS portion is mainly for certain cases where we must use the same tool as our customer, and the customer want's to use MS tools (mostly spec. and project management related).
All-in-all, it works pretty well, and it definitely shaves $$ off your overhead costs, not to mention reduced audit worries.
The big question is, of course, why China? Why not make it freely available to any school kid under 18? That would be a huge marketing move.
According to the OpenOffice web site, one of the main differences between OpenOffice and StarOffice6 is fonts, in particular, Asian fonts. Perhaps the reasoning is that OpenOffice is not as usable by Asian students because of the lack of Asian fonts. Western students, however, can use OpenOffice, which is already free.