"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Webpages are but a piece of the world's information. Most of it is in print, video and audio. The problem is the various copyright collectives pretends that fair use doesn't exist, and this gets in the way of Google's stated mission.
Google is confronting the book publishers already and challenging their interpretation of fair use. The Youtube aquisition means the movies and television is next. Music is obviously down the road. Audio search is not as difficult as video search, but it is also not as sexy (The success of Youtube is testimony to our love affair with video).
What are your requirements? Uptime? Fault Tolerance. Ease of use? Storage? Performance?
There is a reason the proprietary solutions are expensive. There is a lot of time and effort involved, and the down side (your audience loyalty, ratings and the FCC penalties) are non-trivial.
I am sure that the tools exist for Linux (MythTV probably does most of what you want). Additionally you can fine tune a distro, and tweak the kernel to optimize performance and reliability. A LiveCD solution might even work.
Have you a configuration management system in place. Testing? Disaster recovery plan? Why Linux? Have you considered one of the BSD variants? Is there reliable and tested open source solution for Windows? Have you factored in all the costs of rolling your own solution (even if the OS is free)?
Steep is probably in the eye of the beholder. Depends on what version of Vista you want, and whether you want the Aero experience. Same for Office. Are you buying it from the vendor with a discount, or retail? It also begs the question do you only need Vista and Office or do you want to do more? Games and multimedia (with decent graphics and sound), Internet access, printer, etc. all add to the price tag.
As for the cost of owning a Mac. That too also depends. Historically Mac hardware has had good legs. Four and five year old Macs can typically run current software if the OS is upgraded. The fact that Microsoft has not upgrade their main OS in almost five years (and Office in four) is not necessarily something to brag about as the long period will force a hardware upgrade. In may cases hardware that can run Mac OS X 10.1 will run 10.4, and faster as the OS has been tweaked over time. The Intel Mac may very well break this cycle, but I suspect a 2006 Intel Mac will still be a valid system in 2010 (running Mac OS X 10.7/8). The same could probably be said for a 2006 Vista ready PC, but not a 2006 pre-Vista PC.
All PCs eventually get lifecycled, and all new PC's come with a copy of Windows (Vista starting next year) whether you like it or not. Worst case you have to upgrade from Home to Professional versions at purchase time. If you want to use your existing PC, then just pay the upgrade fee. Unless your hardware is old, it will probably run Vista with a minor memory upgrade. If your hardware is old, buy a new Vista ready PC.
Vista needs more powerful hardware. So? Once upon a time a new PC had a 286 processor and less than a 1MB of memory. By christmas most PC's will be Vista ready. If you really want the full Aero experience, upgrade the video card when you buy the PC.
Office 2007. If you already have a version of office... upgrade! Why would you buy new? If you don't have Office now, then you don't need Office 2007.
Finally. Why do you need Vista & Office 2007? For most of us XP & Office (XP or 2003) is good enough for now. Do you need Vista & Office 2007 or want Vista & Office 2007? If you are an early adopter, then its the price you pay.
Short of it. If you have never owned a PC, the cost of buying a Vista ready PC with Office 2007 is probably going to be steep. As you have no legacy requirements (how could you if you have never owned a PC?) then think Linux or Mac. Otherwise you are buying into the perpetual M$ upgrade program with both eyes open, so don't complain. If you do own a Windows PC with Office, then you are already in the loop, so upgrading is the cost of doing business.
Outsourcing is a business model intended to reduce costs, and increase profits. It works best if only one or a few do it, but not if it becomes univeral. Think taxes. If a few people cheat they benefit and life goes on for the rest of us. If everybody cheats, then nobody pays for roads, police, schools, etc. Soon your living in a third world country. Does that mean they will start outsourcing to us?
I wonder what the battery life of a Zune player is with wireless enabled. Some sites are reporting 6 hours without wireless. Users could save battery life by manually turning the wireless on and off. What about authentication? Does each user have to authenticate every other user? What about free loaders? I imagine a scenario where users meet and start pulling out their Zunes to turn on the wireless, then start asking each other what is your Zune called? 'I see ten on my list and there are only 4 of use here? Are you 'fluffybunny' or 'sk8ergirl'?
Also given M$ history, how long before users start getting their Zunes hacked.
Personally this is another great M$ beta test. They can't hope to find the flaws in their DRM design, and Windows Media software, so they get users to do it. If the flaw is not obvious and no one will volunteer the info M$ needs to correct it, they send in the lawyers. Makes me wonder if they will take HP's lead and get some PI to do a black bag job on someone's house. Hey, computers get stolen all the time:)
If they do end up in court, at the very least only third party investigators should have access so as to protect the defendents trade secrets and IP. Afterward, to top it off, M$ should open itself up to verify that it isn't secretly using anything it learned in the trial without paying compensation.
The should hold a DARPA Grand Challenge style contest for the design. The top ten designs get $1,000,000 each and a year to deliver a working prototype. The winner gets a $50,000,000 contract to finish and deliver.
Cost is less than half of what they spent on the VCF system ($10 Mil for the contest + $50 Mil for the winner + $10 Mil for adminitration), and delivers in 3 years (6 months for the contest, 3 month review, 1 year for prototypes + 3 month review, and 1 year to deliver).
All reviews should be open, and for good measure discovery of a major flaw or bugs is worth $1000.
In Canada we count our ballots manually and generally have results in under two hours after polls close. The USA has more polling stations (with 10 times the population) but not necessarily more people per station. In practice, a manual counting system could be implemented with only a modest increase in people. It could probably pay for itself in time and resources saved not installing/testing/servicing voting machines, and the inevitable audit trail (does anyone still count handing chads)?.
Sound like home grown predators are more common that terrorists. So why haven't the feds spent $100B making sure all schools, playgrounds, and daycares have airport style screening? Why isn't the FBI/CIA/NSA monitoring all communications in and out of those facilities. Why isn't their a Department of SchoolYard Defence? Why isn't there a SchoolYard Predator Threat level system? Think of the children!
I will stop now, this is getting silly (the world that is).
Does MySpace, et al, have interfaces for Mobile web browsers? If they don't they should. That way little Timmy can use his cell phone to surf MySpace instead of just texting his friends.
In pre-Linux days their was plenty of sharing going on. Once upon a time mainframe types used to bring reel-reel tapes to conferences to exchange code. Later it was the UNIX/BSD developers/admins. Amazing what was being shared before OSS, GNU & Linux on licensed platforms. Now M$ is in on it. The only difference is that today we have all the GPL, BSD, etc. licensing schemes.
I would imagine that SGI has a significant portfolio of graphic and rendering patents, with some parallel processing for good measure. Just the sort of thing Intel needs for their graphics cards and bus designs.
My guess is sooner or later MySpace; et al will be subpoenaed so that the parents can track down who ever put their kids up/got into trouble for X. Where X can be teenage pregnancy, drugs, joy ridding, burning poo, etc. After all their parents told (do as I say...) them to be good and they can't BLAME CANADA forever.
Remember that Steve Jobs is a majority shareholder in Disney. This means access to content!! Remember that Apple is a 'serious computer company' and is not interested in games. Buying Nintendo would allow it to access to a less serious market without diluting the Apple brand. Lets not forget the iPod & ITMS. Imagine being able to connect your iPod to your Wii console, or playing videos (and photo slideshows) on your Wii. Best wait until WWDC and see if a PVR capability becomes available on Macs.
Personally Apple should buy Sun (or vis-versa). Sun has a lot to offer, but needs someone like Jobs to give it a will to live and produce some interesting products with all that technology they have.
Interesting how it sounds if substitute PHP/Perl/Java/etc. for VB?
I work for a small company ( 10 employees) as a software engineer. The company got its start with a software product written by the owner in PHP/Java/Perl. He hired me to assist in rewriting the software - only catch is, he's stuck on having it re-written in PHP/Java/Perl. This scares me, but I honestly can't make a good argument against PHP/Java/Perl because I'm not familiar enough with it. So my question is twofold: I am looking for some confirmation to my suspicion that PHP/Java/Perl isn't the greatest language for large projects; and If PHP/Java/Perl isn't good, arguments against using it. If it is good, what arguments would you use to argue for it (for my sake)?" If you are going to argue against a language, it is best if you do so after you become familiar with it so that you can argue fairly on its merits and deficiencies. PHP/Java/Perl, like just about every other language, has its place. For the sake of discussion however, what tasks would PHP/Java/Perl not be suited for.
Microsoft's 'Designed for Windows XP' just means that the software meets certain criteria, and does not mean well designed, well written or bug free.
One would assume that Microsoft Internet Explorer and Office Word are 'Designed for Windows XP'. I also suspect that some spyware, viruses and trojans could pass if the authors paid to have it cerified as 'Designed for Windows XP'.
Most people only budget a specific amount per year for gaming.
If they budget $150, that can be 2 x 75$ new games, or 5 x $30 games, etc.
If the can sell games, they can buy 2 x $75 new, sell both for 2 x $30, and buy another new game for $60. All adds up to $150.
Not allowing resales will reduce the number of new games sold, and definitely kill any future PS3 to PS4 upgrades as no one will buy old consoles without games. Sony will have to cut prices if it wants to sell more games. It will also erode the PS2->PS3 upgrades as many people will not want PS3 lock in.
Does anyone know of another product where this has been profitable beyond year one?
which by definition is one who argues against a cause or position, not as a committed opponent but simply for the sake of argument or to determine the validity of the cause or position.
So that would make him the Bush Administrations Person in charge of telling the public what a good job they are doing on Civil Rights. Just like Rumsfeld lets us know how well things are going in Iraq, Rice on Foreign relations, etc.
A little know clause in NAFTA allows a company to sue a country if that countries fails to keep things fair. It was intended punish countries from talking private property (think the Hilton in Havana). In this case the US government is quilty of not fixing the patent process. It sound better if they wait until after all of NTP's patents are thrown out, and RIM is still paying because a judge wouldn't wait for the USPTO's final ruling.
So the FBI pressured congress into making it illegal. Suspect they will need to centralize all radio and landline communications to make sure everyone has safe government approved communications. Damn my VCR won't stop blinking 19:84.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a direct quote from the Google corporate site http://www.google.com/corporate/.
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Webpages are but a piece of the world's information. Most of it is in print, video and audio. The problem is the various copyright collectives pretends that fair use doesn't exist, and this gets in the way of Google's stated mission.
Google is confronting the book publishers already and challenging their interpretation of fair use. The Youtube aquisition means the movies and television is next. Music is obviously down the road. Audio search is not as difficult as video search, but it is also not as sexy (The success of Youtube is testimony to our love affair with video).
Can you use Linux? The question is irrelevant.
You are putting the cart before the horse.
What are your requirements? Uptime? Fault Tolerance. Ease of use? Storage? Performance?
There is a reason the proprietary solutions are expensive. There is a lot of time and effort involved, and the down side (your audience loyalty, ratings and the FCC penalties) are non-trivial.
I am sure that the tools exist for Linux (MythTV probably does most of what you want). Additionally you can fine tune a distro, and tweak the kernel to optimize performance and reliability. A LiveCD solution might even work.
Have you a configuration management system in place. Testing? Disaster recovery plan? Why Linux? Have you considered one of the BSD variants? Is there reliable and tested open source solution for Windows? Have you factored in all the costs of rolling your own solution (even if the OS is free)?
Point taken.
Steep is probably in the eye of the beholder. Depends on what version of Vista you want, and whether you want the Aero experience. Same for Office. Are you buying it from the vendor with a discount, or retail? It also begs the question do you only need Vista and Office or do you want to do more? Games and multimedia (with decent graphics and sound), Internet access, printer, etc. all add to the price tag.
As for the cost of owning a Mac. That too also depends. Historically Mac hardware has had good legs. Four and five year old Macs can typically run current software if the OS is upgraded. The fact that Microsoft has not upgrade their main OS in almost five years (and Office in four) is not necessarily something to brag about as the long period will force a hardware upgrade. In may cases hardware that can run Mac OS X 10.1 will run 10.4, and faster as the OS has been tweaked over time. The Intel Mac may very well break this cycle, but I suspect a 2006 Intel Mac will still be a valid system in 2010 (running Mac OS X 10.7/8). The same could probably be said for a 2006 Vista ready PC, but not a 2006 pre-Vista PC.
Here is the reality.
All PCs eventually get lifecycled, and all new PC's come with a copy of Windows (Vista starting next year) whether you like it or not. Worst case you have to upgrade from Home to Professional versions at purchase time. If you want to use your existing PC, then just pay the upgrade fee. Unless your hardware is old, it will probably run Vista with a minor memory upgrade. If your hardware is old, buy a new Vista ready PC.
Vista needs more powerful hardware. So? Once upon a time a new PC had a 286 processor and less than a 1MB of memory. By christmas most PC's will be Vista ready. If you really want the full Aero experience, upgrade the video card when you buy the PC.
Office 2007. If you already have a version of office... upgrade! Why would you buy new? If you don't have Office now, then you don't need Office 2007.
Finally. Why do you need Vista & Office 2007? For most of us XP & Office (XP or 2003) is good enough for now. Do you need Vista & Office 2007 or want Vista & Office 2007? If you are an early adopter, then its the price you pay.
Short of it. If you have never owned a PC, the cost of buying a Vista ready PC with Office 2007 is probably going to be steep. As you have no legacy requirements (how could you if you have never owned a PC?) then think Linux or Mac. Otherwise you are buying into the perpetual M$ upgrade program with both eyes open, so don't complain. If you do own a Windows PC with Office, then you are already in the loop, so upgrading is the cost of doing business.
Outsourcing is a business model intended to reduce costs, and increase profits. It works best if only one or a few do it, but not if it becomes univeral. Think taxes. If a few people cheat they benefit and life goes on for the rest of us. If everybody cheats, then nobody pays for roads, police, schools, etc. Soon your living in a third world country. Does that mean they will start outsourcing to us?
I wonder what the battery life of a Zune player is with wireless enabled. Some sites are reporting 6 hours without wireless. Users could save battery life by manually turning the wireless on and off. What about authentication? Does each user have to authenticate every other user? What about free loaders? I imagine a scenario where users meet and start pulling out their Zunes to turn on the wireless, then start asking each other what is your Zune called? 'I see ten on my list and there are only 4 of use here? Are you 'fluffybunny' or 'sk8ergirl'?
Also given M$ history, how long before users start getting their Zunes hacked.
Personally this is another great M$ beta test. They can't hope to find the flaws in their DRM design, and Windows Media software, so they get users to do it. If the flaw is not obvious and no one will volunteer the info M$ needs to correct it, they send in the lawyers. Makes me wonder if they will take HP's lead and get some PI to do a black bag job on someone's house. Hey, computers get stolen all the time :)
If they do end up in court, at the very least only third party investigators should have access so as to protect the defendents trade secrets and IP. Afterward, to top it off, M$ should open itself up to verify that it isn't secretly using anything it learned in the trial without paying compensation.
The should hold a DARPA Grand Challenge style contest for the design. The top ten designs get $1,000,000 each and a year to deliver a working prototype. The winner gets a $50,000,000 contract to finish and deliver.
Cost is less than half of what they spent on the VCF system ($10 Mil for the contest + $50 Mil for the winner + $10 Mil for adminitration), and delivers in 3 years (6 months for the contest, 3 month review, 1 year for prototypes + 3 month review, and 1 year to deliver).
All reviews should be open, and for good measure discovery of a major flaw or bugs is worth $1000.
In Canada we count our ballots manually and generally have results in under two hours after polls close. The USA has more polling stations (with 10 times the population) but not necessarily more people per station. In practice, a manual counting system could be implemented with only a modest increase in people. It could probably pay for itself in time and resources saved not installing/testing/servicing voting machines, and the inevitable audit trail (does anyone still count handing chads)?.
I am suprised they aren't mandating backdoors in every piece of costumer electronics.
Sound like home grown predators are more common that terrorists. So why haven't the feds spent $100B making sure all schools, playgrounds, and daycares have airport style screening? Why isn't the FBI/CIA/NSA monitoring all communications in and out of those facilities. Why isn't their a Department of SchoolYard Defence? Why isn't there a SchoolYard Predator Threat level system? Think of the children!
I will stop now, this is getting silly (the world that is).
Does MySpace, et al, have interfaces for Mobile web browsers? If they don't they should. That way little Timmy can use his cell phone to surf MySpace instead of just texting his friends.
In pre-Linux days their was plenty of sharing going on. Once upon a time mainframe types used to bring reel-reel tapes to conferences to exchange code. Later it was the UNIX/BSD developers/admins. Amazing what was being shared before OSS, GNU & Linux on licensed platforms. Now M$ is in on it. The only difference is that today we have all the GPL, BSD, etc. licensing schemes.
One morning you wake up; your not where you want to be; you are not happy; and staying means you will be in the same place in a decade.
Resigning gracefully doesn't work as people usually try to talk you out of it (which is how you got here in the first place).
Good Luck Jani
I would imagine that SGI has a significant portfolio of graphic and rendering patents, with some parallel processing for good measure. Just the sort of thing Intel needs for their graphics cards and bus designs.
My guess is sooner or later MySpace; et al will be subpoenaed so that the parents can track down who ever put their kids up/got into trouble for X. Where X can be teenage pregnancy, drugs, joy ridding, burning poo, etc. After all their parents told (do as I say...) them to be good and they can't BLAME CANADA forever.
What? You want more?
Rumours are fun.
Remember that Steve Jobs is a majority shareholder in Disney. This means access to content!! Remember that Apple is a 'serious computer company' and is not interested in games. Buying Nintendo would allow it to access to a less serious market without diluting the Apple brand. Lets not forget the iPod & ITMS. Imagine being able to connect your iPod to your Wii console, or playing videos (and photo slideshows) on your Wii. Best wait until WWDC and see if a PVR capability becomes available on Macs.
Personally Apple should buy Sun (or vis-versa). Sun has a lot to offer, but needs someone like Jobs to give it a will to live and produce some interesting products with all that technology they have.
The big question is can using the "state secrets" privilege be used to permit illegal behaviour now that a secret court exists under FISA?
Interesting how it sounds if substitute PHP/Perl/Java/etc. for VB?
I work for a small company ( 10 employees) as a software engineer. The company got its start with a software product written by the owner in PHP/Java/Perl. He hired me to assist in rewriting the software - only catch is, he's stuck on having it re-written in PHP/Java/Perl. This scares me, but I honestly can't make a good argument against PHP/Java/Perl because I'm not familiar enough with it. So my question is twofold: I am looking for some confirmation to my suspicion that PHP/Java/Perl isn't the greatest language for large projects; and If PHP/Java/Perl isn't good, arguments against using it. If it is good, what arguments would you use to argue for it (for my sake)?" If you are going to argue against a language, it is best if you do so after you become familiar with it so that you can argue fairly on its merits and deficiencies. PHP/Java/Perl, like just about every other language, has its place. For the sake of discussion however, what tasks would PHP/Java/Perl not be suited for.
Microsoft's 'Designed for Windows XP' just means that the software meets certain criteria, and does not mean well designed, well written or bug free.
One would assume that Microsoft Internet Explorer and Office Word are 'Designed for Windows XP'. I also suspect that some spyware, viruses and trojans could pass if the authors paid to have it cerified as 'Designed for Windows XP'.
Most people only budget a specific amount per year for gaming.
If they budget $150, that can be 2 x 75$ new games, or 5 x $30 games, etc.
If the can sell games, they can buy 2 x $75 new, sell both for 2 x $30, and buy another new game for $60. All adds up to $150.
Not allowing resales will reduce the number of new games sold, and definitely kill any future PS3 to PS4 upgrades as no one will buy old consoles without games. Sony will have to cut prices if it wants to sell more games. It will also erode the PS2->PS3 upgrades as many people will not want PS3 lock in.
Does anyone know of another product where this has been profitable beyond year one?
which by definition is one who argues against a cause or position, not as a committed opponent but simply for the sake of argument or to determine the validity of the cause or position.
So that would make him the Bush Administrations Person in charge of telling the public what a good job they are doing on Civil Rights. Just like Rumsfeld lets us know how well things are going in Iraq, Rice on Foreign relations, etc.
A little know clause in NAFTA allows a company to sue a country if that countries fails to keep things fair. It was intended punish countries from talking private property (think the Hilton in Havana). In this case the US government is quilty of not fixing the patent process. It sound better if they wait until after all of NTP's patents are thrown out, and RIM is still paying because a judge wouldn't wait for the USPTO's final ruling.
So the FBI pressured congress into making it illegal. Suspect they will need to centralize all radio and landline communications to make sure everyone has safe government approved communications. Damn my VCR won't stop blinking 19:84.