It's not the file format that's the issue, it's everything else. Specifically, the lack of functionality and horrendous UI of RPM.
Debian's system could work exactly the same way, and use the RPM file format, and it would likely be just as good.
Or, RedHat could build a package management system that actually managed packages (rather than installing them, removing them or barfing), bolt it on top of RPM, and have a decent Linux distribution.
Furthermore, plenty of people *are* bothered by perpetual copyright extension (currently 50 years). Just look at the campaigns against perpetual post-mouse copyright in the USA.
Well, maybe they figure that they're required to have software patents by GATT.
Of course, we campaigned against that too, and they ignored us then as well.
Re:how is that different from other companies
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NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 3, Informative
Sad to say, $697,000 is peanuts for a CEO salary these days. In 2003, the average CEO raked in $9.2m.
Lou Gerstner ended his time at IBM with $2m of salary plus $1.5m annual bonus plus $12.9m of restricted stock. The year before that he got no stock, but a bonus of $8m was probably some consolation.
Similarly, the CEO of Comcast got $2m salary last year, plus a $6m bonus and $12m in stock options.
In 2001, as Cisco's stock dropped 71% and they lost a billion dollars, their CEO continued to rake in $154m total compensation. Imagine how much he would have gotten if he had done a good job.
If minimum wage had increased by the same percentage as CEO pay in the last 15 years, flipping burgers at McDonalds would be paying $15 an hour.
Dutch researchers have shown smokers may actually save society money because they do not live so long. The study, conducted by the Erasmus University Department of Public Health in Rotterdam, compared the health care costs of smokers to those of people of more advanced years.
They concluded that in the long run, if many people stopped using tobacco products, costs would actually rise as a healthier population eventually moved into nursing homes and into the relatively expensive diseases of old age.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/background_bri ef ings/smoking/86599.stm
Of course, this is in the context of an article talking about another piece of research claiming the exact opposite. Ah, science...
In fact, UK National Health Service statistics suggest that over the course of a lifetime, smokers cost society far less in healthcare costs, because they die so much sooner. If you're looking at things from the free market profitability angle, the best option is to encourage smokers to smoke more. Increased tax revenue, lowered health burden, and fewer idiots--there really is no downside.
I was a Solaris admin. I loved Solaris, even back around Solaris 2.6.
But I wouldn't touch Solaris now, because the SCO situation makes any SYSV derivative a big risk. Sure, Sun have paid their license fees to SCO, but paid-up licenses didn't stop SCO threatening IBM's AIX customers, did it?
Cable companies already subsidize their revenue stream by replacing network TV ads with their own ads. That's why you see lots of Dish ads if you have Dish network, lots of Comcast ads if you have Comcast, and so on. So I don't see that there would be any insurmountable legal hurdles to a TV manufacturer doing it. (IANAL.)
On the other hand, didn't a spyware company get sued for replacing web banners with other web banners?
I have a simple answer to the question of what should replace advertising revenue: subscription revenue or pay-per-view.
Except that obviously the cable companies would need to allow people to buy only the channels they want, because a full subscription to absolutely everything would balloon to hundreds of dollars.
And obviously, the big media corporations are rabidly against having that happen, because they wouldn't then be able to force their crappy channels on people who don't want them, and they wouldn't be able to claim ludicrously inflated statistics about how many homes get their channel.
I'd benefit, because I'd buy the half dozen channels I actually watch, and not get stuck with paying for ESPN, CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox News and other dreck.
Well, once big difference is that I can't find anything on the World Community Grid web site to say who will own the results.
Folding@Home say that the data will be released to the public. That's a start, but before I spend my CPU time on any kind of biotech project, I want a guarantee that the research won't be patented and kept from humanity the way HIV medication has been kept from people in Africa.
One barter option I've offered on free software projects is "free advertising". I put the artist's name, web address and e-mail address prominently in the READ ME file, documentation, or whatever.
So who gets to decide that "the other side" doesn't have a legitimate argument for a specific issue?
The scientific community. We're talking about science, remember?
In the case of segregation, science comes down firmly on one side, just like it does regarding Creationism. There's simply no scientific basis for the thing we call 'race' amongst humans, nor is there any sociological basis for claims that segregation reduces crime, etc.
Anyway, it's non-viable when I can just sub in another rack of DVD's at a higher margin.
Which brings us to the real issue, which The Economist inexplicably missed: the record companies are charging too much for CDs.
e.g. Beatles "Yellow Submarine". Songtrack and soundtrack is two CDs at $12.99 each. Or, you can just buy the DVD for $25 and get the movie plus the content of the two CDs. Gee, wonder why people aren't buying the CDs?
Show me where I can buy a copy of Kraftwerk's latest ("Tour de France Soundtracks") for $12 and I'll buy it immediately. I've been looking online and offline since it was released.
Damn right. Just because Bush got elected doesn't mean all we can do is sit back and blow hot air.
I had to get a car this year, so I chose a Toyota Prius. I'm buying a house, and I'm making sure it's entirely built with high efficiency thermal insulation, zoned HVAC, and energy-reflective 'low e' windows. I work from home office rather than commuting every day.
If enough people vote with their wallets, corporations will start to notice. Notice that already Toyota can't build hybrid cars fast enough, while SUVs are cluttering dealer lots by the thousand.
In case you missed it, the EU's GDP now outstrips the US's. Of the 140 largest corporations on the Fortune 500, 61 are European, only 50 are US companies.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0817-08.htm
While you're at columbia.edu, you might want to try getting an education.
What that says about me is I don't enjoy wiping my OS and reinstalling every six months to a year, I like it being really easy to keep up to date with patches, and I don't like long and painful software installations.
However, I do think that Afghanistan was another similar case: act now or never. No time for a committee - in fact, I thought the US response was too slow as it is. Retaliatory strikes need to be in the "here and now". Not some months later.
What do retaliatory strikes have to do with bombing Afghanistan? The attacks on 9/11 were launched by Saudi Arabians.
A less polite way of putting it is that John Kerry has never taken a principled stand on anything since becoming a senator, so we have no idea what he would do about the DMCA; whereas with Bush, we know he'd do the wrong thing.
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For a mere $2m I would promise never to say anything bad about Microsoft again. How about it, Bill?
Troll. portage already works with binaries. Gentoo users just prefer not to use them.
It's not the file format that's the issue, it's everything else. Specifically, the lack of functionality and horrendous UI of RPM.
Debian's system could work exactly the same way, and use the RPM file format, and it would likely be just as good.
Or, RedHat could build a package management system that actually managed packages (rather than installing them, removing them or barfing), bolt it on top of RPM, and have a decent Linux distribution.
Furthermore, plenty of people *are* bothered by perpetual copyright extension (currently 50 years). Just look at the campaigns against perpetual post-mouse copyright in the USA.
Well, maybe they figure that they're required to have software patents by GATT.
Of course, we campaigned against that too, and they ignored us then as well.
Sad to say, $697,000 is peanuts for a CEO salary these days. In 2003, the average CEO raked in $9.2m.
Lou Gerstner ended his time at IBM with $2m of salary plus $1.5m annual bonus plus $12.9m of restricted stock. The year before that he got no stock, but a bonus of $8m was probably some consolation.
Similarly, the CEO of Comcast got $2m salary last year, plus a $6m bonus and $12m in stock options.
In 2001, as Cisco's stock dropped 71% and they lost a billion dollars, their CEO continued to rake in $154m total compensation. Imagine how much he would have gotten if he had done a good job.
If minimum wage had increased by the same percentage as CEO pay in the last 15 years, flipping burgers at McDonalds would be paying $15 an hour.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/background_br
Of course, this is in the context of an article talking about another piece of research claiming the exact opposite. Ah, science...
In fact, UK National Health Service statistics suggest that over the course of a lifetime, smokers cost society far less in healthcare costs, because they die so much sooner. If you're looking at things from the free market profitability angle, the best option is to encourage smokers to smoke more. Increased tax revenue, lowered health burden, and fewer idiots--there really is no downside.
I was a Solaris admin. I loved Solaris, even back around Solaris 2.6.
But I wouldn't touch Solaris now, because the SCO situation makes any SYSV derivative a big risk. Sure, Sun have paid their license fees to SCO, but paid-up licenses didn't stop SCO threatening IBM's AIX customers, did it?
All the Samsung DLP sets are 720p native, FYI.
Cable companies already subsidize their revenue stream by replacing network TV ads with their own ads. That's why you see lots of Dish ads if you have Dish network, lots of Comcast ads if you have Comcast, and so on. So I don't see that there would be any insurmountable legal hurdles to a TV manufacturer doing it. (IANAL.)
On the other hand, didn't a spyware company get sued for replacing web banners with other web banners?
I have a simple answer to the question of what should replace advertising revenue: subscription revenue or pay-per-view.
Except that obviously the cable companies would need to allow people to buy only the channels they want, because a full subscription to absolutely everything would balloon to hundreds of dollars.
And obviously, the big media corporations are rabidly against having that happen, because they wouldn't then be able to force their crappy channels on people who don't want them, and they wouldn't be able to claim ludicrously inflated statistics about how many homes get their channel.
I'd benefit, because I'd buy the half dozen channels I actually watch, and not get stuck with paying for ESPN, CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox News and other dreck.
Let's look at things positively, though: in a way, if it wasn't for Eisner, we never would have had "Shrek"...
Well, once big difference is that I can't find anything on the World Community Grid web site to say who will own the results.
Folding@Home say that the data will be released to the public. That's a start, but before I spend my CPU time on any kind of biotech project, I want a guarantee that the research won't be patented and kept from humanity the way HIV medication has been kept from people in Africa.
One barter option I've offered on free software projects is "free advertising". I put the artist's name, web address and e-mail address prominently in the READ ME file, documentation, or whatever.
The scientific community. We're talking about science, remember?
In the case of segregation, science comes down firmly on one side, just like it does regarding Creationism. There's simply no scientific basis for the thing we call 'race' amongst humans, nor is there any sociological basis for claims that segregation reduces crime, etc.
Which brings us to the real issue, which The Economist inexplicably missed: the record companies are charging too much for CDs.
e.g. Beatles "Yellow Submarine". Songtrack and soundtrack is two CDs at $12.99 each. Or, you can just buy the DVD for $25 and get the movie plus the content of the two CDs. Gee, wonder why people aren't buying the CDs?
Show me where I can buy a copy of Kraftwerk's latest ("Tour de France Soundtracks") for $12 and I'll buy it immediately. I've been looking online and offline since it was released.
Damn right. Just because Bush got elected doesn't mean all we can do is sit back and blow hot air.
I had to get a car this year, so I chose a Toyota Prius. I'm buying a house, and I'm making sure it's entirely built with high efficiency thermal insulation, zoned HVAC, and energy-reflective 'low e' windows. I work from home office rather than commuting every day.
If enough people vote with their wallets, corporations will start to notice. Notice that already Toyota can't build hybrid cars fast enough, while SUVs are cluttering dealer lots by the thousand.
"American economic dominance"?
In case you missed it, the EU's GDP now outstrips the US's. Of the 140 largest corporations on the Fortune 500, 61 are European, only 50 are US companies.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0817-08.htm
While you're at columbia.edu, you might want to try getting an education.
I run Gentoo and Debian, as well as OS X.
What that says about me is I don't enjoy wiping my OS and reinstalling every six months to a year, I like it being really easy to keep up to date with patches, and I don't like long and painful software installations.
What do retaliatory strikes have to do with bombing Afghanistan? The attacks on 9/11 were launched by Saudi Arabians.
There were anti-war demonstrations before the Afghanistan attack. Tens of thousands of people marched. I guess you just didn't see it on Fox News.
A less polite way of putting it is that John Kerry has never taken a principled stand on anything since becoming a senator, so we have no idea what he would do about the DMCA; whereas with Bush, we know he'd do the wrong thing.
Tell me, have Borland at least implemented all of ANSI Pascal by now? I remember they never seemed to get around to it in Turbo Pascal.