-ian and -isms are different though. "-Ism" tends to imply a religious following. "-ian" tends to imply something that's simply derived from a person or place.
It's tricky for Microsoft. In a country where the average income is a few dollars per day, charging full price isn't going to sell any software. Especially when you PCs falling in price - the OS will make up a large portion of the sale price. Companies selling there will potentially go for a free alternative. It would be a disaster for Microsoft if a country suddenly became wealthy and their computing infrastructure is based on Linux.
Selling it for a price that's affordable locally is going to mean that an enterprising company is going to make lots of money selling grey-market copies overseas. There are probably other factors involved.
So to compete with Linux, but not compete with themselves, they sell a version of Windows. But they make it considerably worse than their expensive offering.
Honestly, it's a pretty hopeless move. Linux is still cheaper and clearly better than a crippled version of Windows. Many companies have this problem when new technology comes along. They don't want to compete with themselves in a high risk market. IBM were late to the home computer market because they were worried that personal computers would dig into the mainframe market (they were right but it happened anyway). Microsoft are this decade's IBM.
Remove some of the "essentials" as well. I don't need to telnet into my Linux box. People who do most likely know how to set it up to do so. I actually would prefer not to have a swapfile. My RAM is 8 times the size of my first hard disk. It should be possible to fit a few apps in that space. Hard disks are slow and a lot of the time when apps are swapped out, they're unusable.
Does this mean that users are going to have to be inconvenienced by closing an application they're working with in order to do another important, but less regular task?
Yes! If that's that much of a problem, pay for the full version of Windows. You're getting it cheap so deal with the limitations. Happens all the time. Airlines charge more for people travelling at different times. It doesn't cost them less to fly first thing in the morning but people will pay more for a more convenient time. Supermarkets could jsut reduce prices rather than offer coupons, but people with a lot of money don't consider it worthwhile to cut out coupons, so they get to charge wealthy people more money for the same item.
Let's go with the Inq's speculation that nVidia are making an x86. I'm not sure why they'd want to get into a market with such established players, but the Inquirer tends to get some good gossip so let's assume they're right.
Do you really think they haven't worked out the licensing issues? A lot of companies have a cross licensing agreement. Given the huge number of patents developed by a typical semiconductor company, it simply makes sense to do this. nVidia is a big company. They spend a lot of money developing patentable technology. If GPU and CPUs are combined on the same chip they'll both want some of that tech.
The Inquirer is assuming that AMD and Intel will both bear a grudge against nVidia. It doesn't work like that. If nVidia can convince them that both sides can make a profit from the venture then they'll licence the technology. nVidia's past behaviour will be a factor but it isn't going to be a deal breaker.
Then I thought about the fact that people are fingerprinted upon arrest, and have been for decades. When you come down to it, there really isn't any significant difference between recording fingerprints and recording DNA. If you disagree with recording DNA there's no reason why recording fingerprints before conviction should be acceptable either.
Quite true. Fingerprints shouldn't be taken unless there are fingerprints at the crime scene. If you're innocent they should be destroyed. It's a matter of presumption of innocence.
The problem is when you have a few million entries in the database, 99.9% isn't all that good.
It depends what that 99.9% actually means. If it means that there is a 0.1% chance that my DNA matches with an arbitrary other DNA sample, then you don't need millions. In a database of 1000 there will be, on average, 1 person with a match to my DNA. In a sample of 14 people, there is a 10% chance that two people will match each other's DNA. The birthday paradox makes these high probabilities worthless.
You're still looking at orders of magnitude more expensive than email. You'll only get a thousand or so for paying someone a couple of hours minimum wage. In the same amount of time, a computer can send millions of emails.
Not saying this isn't going to work, just pointing out that you'd need several orders of magnitude higher response rate than email malware to make a profit.
Me too. Companies don't work like that in the real world. People are fallible. Processes should catch the failures. And besides, the people responsible for the failure may well have (and very probably did) missed something so obscure that nobody would have spotted. Firing them would be pointless.
No, no. Not trying to suggest that at all. Just observing that the factors that encourage people to buy lots of media are the same as those that encourage them to pirate lots.
I doubt one causes the other to any degree. But it does suggest that just because people can pirate everything doesn't mean they will.
An unscientific look at my friends seems to suggest that the people who buy the most also pirate the most. There actually seems to be a fairly consistent ration between amount downloaded and amount purchased.
On the face of it, it's illogical for them to buy anything but clearly there's some good reason for them to do so.
This is where ogg is doing well. Complete applications that do their own recording can use any compression format they like, and vorbis is convenient, fairly well supported, and free. Its free nature has meant it has found a niche in games as well as audio recorders of the type you mentioned. It's som,ething of a niche format but usefully common enough that there are tools that can handle the format.
mp3 pretty much owns the market for digital music players, and its ubiquitous support will make it pretty unlikely that any other format will take over, especially since the Fraunhofer Society are sensible enough not to price themselves out of the market.
Modern motors and batteries are great! We can make a car with perfectly acceptable range and have been able to for a few year now.
It's all about recharge times! Most people want a car that can get them from where they are to wherever they want to go, and get them back again. Having to stop overnight for a recharge is a seriously major issue.
Surely most of the system resources should be going to the resource hungry game. And DX calls shouldn't have a huge overhead. Why is there ever more than a half percent difference?
The attitude seems to be "OMG! They invented a user interface! But user interfaces have been around forever!!!!!"
Doesn't work like that.
This is not a patent on touch screens, or user interfaces. Inventions are incremental. Nobody has previously invented a UI that does exactly what Apple's one does in exactly the same way. this is a patent on a specific implementation of a touchscreen user interface that allows specific functionality and handles noisy input in a specific way. Most touch screens don't do this. They simply detect The centre of the touched locations.
Rasterization is relatively constant in the number of pixels, and O(complexity).
Surely not. Okay - you'll need to spend the same amount of time with geometry whatever the resolution, but you still have a certain number of texture lookups per pixel, and a certain number of Z tests, and blend operations.
PowerVR is a fantastic technology (I used to work in STMicro's Graphics department with PowerVR so maybe I'm biased). The thing is, the STG 4500 (i.e. Kyro 2) was a pretty sizable chip. This means fewer chips to a wafer and so you can't make them quite as cheaply.
Kyro 2 was put against the low end GeForce chips. It was a decent chip capable of playing most modern games. So Why did STMicro closed their graphics division? Because they can't compete with the might of nVidia. Guillemot and Imagination Technologies were the only companies making boards. Guillemot because they were big enough to not to worry about upsetting nVidia, and Imagination Technologies because they're part the people who developed PowerVR.
Presumably Intel don't want any of this hassle. They make their chips as small and cheap as possible and sell them to companies that don't need a chip to do anything except draw some pixels.
The Kyro 3, had it ever gone into production, would have knocked the socks off the rivals.
From my understanding Windows is fully integrated with IE. Meaning removing IE would require a huge reworking to windows.
All they really need to do is remove the executable. While the executable is little more than a wrapper for the HTML rendering library and most of the code that makes IE what it is is in this library, they could remove the executable, and probably satisfy the EU (and Opera for that matter). Microsoft like to fudge the issue by suggesting that any library that IE uses is part of IE, but really that's just to suggest it's more tightly integrated with the OS than it actually is.
Slashdot Mirror
-ian and -isms are different though. "-Ism" tends to imply a religious following. "-ian" tends to imply something that's simply derived from a person or place.
It's tricky for Microsoft. In a country where the average income is a few dollars per day, charging full price isn't going to sell any software. Especially when you PCs falling in price - the OS will make up a large portion of the sale price. Companies selling there will potentially go for a free alternative. It would be a disaster for Microsoft if a country suddenly became wealthy and their computing infrastructure is based on Linux.
Selling it for a price that's affordable locally is going to mean that an enterprising company is going to make lots of money selling grey-market copies overseas. There are probably other factors involved.
So to compete with Linux, but not compete with themselves, they sell a version of Windows. But they make it considerably worse than their expensive offering.
Honestly, it's a pretty hopeless move. Linux is still cheaper and clearly better than a crippled version of Windows. Many companies have this problem when new technology comes along. They don't want to compete with themselves in a high risk market. IBM were late to the home computer market because they were worried that personal computers would dig into the mainframe market (they were right but it happened anyway). Microsoft are this decade's IBM.
Remove some of the "essentials" as well. I don't need to telnet into my Linux box. People who do most likely know how to set it up to do so. I actually would prefer not to have a swapfile. My RAM is 8 times the size of my first hard disk. It should be possible to fit a few apps in that space. Hard disks are slow and a lot of the time when apps are swapped out, they're unusable.
Does this mean that users are going to have to be inconvenienced by closing an application they're working with in order to do another important, but less regular task?
Yes! If that's that much of a problem, pay for the full version of Windows. You're getting it cheap so deal with the limitations. Happens all the time. Airlines charge more for people travelling at different times. It doesn't cost them less to fly first thing in the morning but people will pay more for a more convenient time. Supermarkets could jsut reduce prices rather than offer coupons, but people with a lot of money don't consider it worthwhile to cut out coupons, so they get to charge wealthy people more money for the same item.
Let's go with the Inq's speculation that nVidia are making an x86. I'm not sure why they'd want to get into a market with such established players, but the Inquirer tends to get some good gossip so let's assume they're right.
Do you really think they haven't worked out the licensing issues? A lot of companies have a cross licensing agreement. Given the huge number of patents developed by a typical semiconductor company, it simply makes sense to do this. nVidia is a big company. They spend a lot of money developing patentable technology. If GPU and CPUs are combined on the same chip they'll both want some of that tech.
The Inquirer is assuming that AMD and Intel will both bear a grudge against nVidia. It doesn't work like that. If nVidia can convince them that both sides can make a profit from the venture then they'll licence the technology. nVidia's past behaviour will be a factor but it isn't going to be a deal breaker.
Then I thought about the fact that people are fingerprinted upon arrest, and have been for decades. When you come down to it, there really isn't any significant difference between recording fingerprints and recording DNA. If you disagree with recording DNA there's no reason why recording fingerprints before conviction should be acceptable either.
Quite true. Fingerprints shouldn't be taken unless there are fingerprints at the crime scene. If you're innocent they should be destroyed. It's a matter of presumption of innocence.
The problem is when you have a few million entries in the database, 99.9% isn't all that good.
It depends what that 99.9% actually means. If it means that there is a 0.1% chance that my DNA matches with an arbitrary other DNA sample, then you don't need millions. In a database of 1000 there will be, on average, 1 person with a match to my DNA. In a sample of 14 people, there is a 10% chance that two people will match each other's DNA. The birthday paradox makes these high probabilities worthless.
You can't get that information from a DNA fingerprint!
And if you want that information, it's quite readily available anyway.
You're still looking at orders of magnitude more expensive than email. You'll only get a thousand or so for paying someone a couple of hours minimum wage. In the same amount of time, a computer can send millions of emails.
Not saying this isn't going to work, just pointing out that you'd need several orders of magnitude higher response rate than email malware to make a profit.
He'll be able to give you a description of the random dude. Possibly a name and an address.
Me too.
Who says Slashdot isn't a site for informed debate:)
Wow! I was expecting a twist. You mean that's the ad and not a parody!
Sounds reasonable.
My satnav runs Linux (I think). If I have a problem with it I'm going to expect the manufacturers to fix it. Not Linus Torvalds.
I would bet a lot of money that won't happen.
Me too. Companies don't work like that in the real world. People are fallible. Processes should catch the failures. And besides, the people responsible for the failure may well have (and very probably did) missed something so obscure that nobody would have spotted. Firing them would be pointless.
No, no. Not trying to suggest that at all. Just observing that the factors that encourage people to buy lots of media are the same as those that encourage them to pirate lots.
I doubt one causes the other to any degree. But it does suggest that just because people can pirate everything doesn't mean they will.
An unscientific look at my friends seems to suggest that the people who buy the most also pirate the most. There actually seems to be a fairly consistent ration between amount downloaded and amount purchased.
On the face of it, it's illogical for them to buy anything but clearly there's some good reason for them to do so.
You know, the not so important things still have to be dealt with as well as the important things.
This is where ogg is doing well. Complete applications that do their own recording can use any compression format they like, and vorbis is convenient, fairly well supported, and free. Its free nature has meant it has found a niche in games as well as audio recorders of the type you mentioned. It's som,ething of a niche format but usefully common enough that there are tools that can handle the format.
mp3 pretty much owns the market for digital music players, and its ubiquitous support will make it pretty unlikely that any other format will take over, especially since the Fraunhofer Society are sensible enough not to price themselves out of the market.
Modern motors and batteries are great! We can make a car with perfectly acceptable range and have been able to for a few year now.
It's all about recharge times! Most people want a car that can get them from where they are to wherever they want to go, and get them back again. Having to stop overnight for a recharge is a seriously major issue.
Surely most of the system resources should be going to the resource hungry game. And DX calls shouldn't have a huge overhead. Why is there ever more than a half percent difference?
The attitude seems to be "OMG! They invented a user interface! But user interfaces have been around forever!!!!!"
Doesn't work like that.
This is not a patent on touch screens, or user interfaces. Inventions are incremental. Nobody has previously invented a UI that does exactly what Apple's one does in exactly the same way. this is a patent on a specific implementation of a touchscreen user interface that allows specific functionality and handles noisy input in a specific way. Most touch screens don't do this. They simply detect The centre of the touched locations.
No. Because it isn't a patent on the concept of the touchscreen itself.
Doing the same thing is not prior art. Doing the same thing in the same way is. Did the touch enabled computer allow you to scroll and zoom?
It probably couldn't even distinguish between one finger and two.
Rasterization is relatively constant in the number of pixels, and O(complexity).
Surely not. Okay - you'll need to spend the same amount of time with geometry whatever the resolution, but you still have a certain number of texture lookups per pixel, and a certain number of Z tests, and blend operations.
PowerVR is a fantastic technology (I used to work in STMicro's Graphics department with PowerVR so maybe I'm biased). The thing is, the STG 4500 (i.e. Kyro 2) was a pretty sizable chip. This means fewer chips to a wafer and so you can't make them quite as cheaply.
Kyro 2 was put against the low end GeForce chips. It was a decent chip capable of playing most modern games. So Why did STMicro closed their graphics division? Because they can't compete with the might of nVidia. Guillemot and Imagination Technologies were the only companies making boards. Guillemot because they were big enough to not to worry about upsetting nVidia, and Imagination Technologies because they're part the people who developed PowerVR.
Presumably Intel don't want any of this hassle. They make their chips as small and cheap as possible and sell them to companies that don't need a chip to do anything except draw some pixels.
The Kyro 3, had it ever gone into production, would have knocked the socks off the rivals.
You'd use whatever browser the OEM included on your PC.
From my understanding Windows is fully integrated with IE. Meaning removing IE would require a huge reworking to windows.
All they really need to do is remove the executable. While the executable is little more than a wrapper for the HTML rendering library and most of the code that makes IE what it is is in this library, they could remove the executable, and probably satisfy the EU (and Opera for that matter). Microsoft like to fudge the issue by suggesting that any library that IE uses is part of IE, but really that's just to suggest it's more tightly integrated with the OS than it actually is.