What scares me about this though is that from what I know of the Chinese music scene, is it's pretty much all pop garbage. There is very little diversity in mainstream music as compared with what we have in the English speaking music scene. I hate the RIAA with a passion and I'd like to see them die a gruesome death. But I just hope that we don't end up with a music scene that is only fincially viable for boy bands & Britney Spears look alikes.
At first I thought they were kinda neat. But then I realized beauty of a consistent UI and how much time was being wasted on coming up with these silly looking and useless things.
I think it should be the duty of everyone in California to use this opportunity to inflict the maximum financial damage against Microsoft. Maybe we need more details of the settlement to determine how this will be done. I have a few thoughts on it so far.
1. We MUST not let any of these funds go unclaimed. Don't forget to file your claim. Tell all your friends. Tell your friends to tell their friends.
2. Don't treat this voucher as a freebee. Only use it to purchase software that you would have purchased had you not received a voucher in the first place.
3. If you absolutely must purchase a Microsoft product, be sure and use it for something like an Xbox or something that has a high per unit production cost, not software licenses.
4. Use it to purchase software from direct Microsoft competitors.
5. If they are allowed to redeem it for cash, donate your voucher to an organization that creates free software, such as the FSF.
I hope others of you out there will have some suggestions as well.
Maybe MS wants to get a better idea of how many people are using linux on the desktop. With this kind of thing sending back your hardware info to MS, it could see what kind of system you're running, i.e. straight linux, dual boot, etc.
Over the course of a lifetime.. I don't see how propriotary software could be cheaper than Free/OSS. It's like the difference between buying the house and renting the house.
Now it could be that in certian instances, proprietary software could be cheaper in the short run. But the wonderful thing about Free/OSS is that once you build that infractructure... it's there, you don't have to keep paying for it.
In terms of support, I see two main issues as affecting the cost of support.
A) The prevelance of the software.
B) The level of competition between support houses.
Now if a propriotary product is far more prevelant than a Free one, The support may be cheaper. On the other hand, if the prevelance of 2 software packages is about equal, Free/OSS support should be cheaper since you have more choice in where you get your support.
Envision the following scenario: We are trying to decide between the freefoo and payfoo software packages. Freefoo is a barebones package. It can do what you want, but is a bit difficult and costly to set up. Payfoo on the other hand is a featureful peice of software that more than meets your needs at present. Payfoo's support is also cheaper. Seems like the obvious choice is to go with Payfoo right? But software is a dynamic product. In time, Freefoo will probably improve, become more prevelant and better supported. If you're paying someone for support, say someone who contributes code to FreeFoo for support, This improvement is only going to happen faster. This has already happened with Commercial UNIX versus Free alternatives. I believe it's just a matter of time for it to happen with other software as well.
If this is really just a matter of cost as the drive manufacturers claim rather than a reduction in quality perhaps manufacturers could sell 2 flavors of the drive. Same hardware, but just tack on an extra warranty and charge more for the drive to cover their costs.
I think the death of MP3 is long overdue and anything that speeds up that process is a good thing. I am really hoping that this will accelerate the acceptance ogg.
Does anyone know of any portable devices or car stereo devices that support ogg? I've been holding off purchasing a portable music device until i find one that supports ogg.
I have to say that this is one of the most rediculous ideas I have ever come across. Now granted, Redhat has a lot of momentum in the Linux market, but Look at the number of competing products and how similar they are to Redhat. Now how many products exist with that same level of similarity to Windows? ZERO.
I've seen people quote this "fact" all over slashdot. But has there been any hard facts? How do we know this isn't some kind of astroturf campaign to make anti-ms types think it's ok to purchase an xbox? I'd love to see someone who really knows about hardware manufacturing to do a cost rundown fo the xbox, giving conservative and liberal estimates of how much they think it costs MS to maufacture and why.
I think what they're proposing here is a far cry from using something like bluelight. My interpretation of this is that you would voluntarily subject yourself to ads on your desktop and the revenue from those ads would go to support your favorite desktop projects. I wouldn't mind doing that at all. Although if I knew how any ads I'd have to view just to get them a dollar, I might be more inclined to simply make a donation directly.
When I bought 7.2 in the store, I got it home and I followed the instructions and sent in the rebate w/ the UPC's etc. Over 6 months later, I still have yet to receive my rebate. I guess it couold have gotten lost in the mail or something, but isn't it funny how rebate offers in general get lost a lot more often than most forms of mail. I had completely forgotten about it until this story came up. Did Redhat contract an outside company to handle the rebate stuff last time? If this was a common occurence, they might want to find someone else to handle it this time.
An idea I think would be cool is to offer some kind of diff or something to patch the ISO and offer the new checksums to the ISOs. That way, you could have your own updated redhat ISO's without pounding their ftp servers too hard. they could even put the updated ISO's on there a couple weeks later just so that ppl would go for the diffs first and not destroy redhat's bandwitdth like what happens when they make a new release.
I wonder how well xdelta would work for 600+ MB files?:-)
I'm not quite sure your criticism.. are you saying that it is not an accurate cross section?
my statisics are a bit rusty, but I believe that
9688 samples will usually get you a pretty tight confidence interval.
I am very sorry to hear this about LWN. I always look forward to reading the new version every Thursday. I hope this will not mean the end for LWN. Maybe they can pull out of this.
as I understand it, MS won a case against apple years ago because "look and feel" were not considered copyrightable. now if these developers are pulling images from screenshots of the aqua gui and then copying those in to themes for other OS, that would be a clear cut copyright violation.. however I seriously doubt that is the case. It seems that this is just another case of big companies sicking their lawyers on the little guy. The little guy usually concedes because he doesn't have the money or the time to fight it.
It seems that the Steve Jobs dick mentality continues to permeate through apple.
I really feel that the H1-B situation puts tech workers at a serious disadvantage. Why hire local labor when you can hire slave labor for half the price?
I think it's fine for companies to look abroad, but if that newcomer can't change jobs, then he can't command the salary he deserves. It's unfair to him and it's unfair to locals because it makes them less valuable.
I'm very happy to hear that TT has come to their
senses. I always believed that the GPL was the
perfect solution from the beginning. It gives us
the fredom we need, but still prevents non-free apps from linking and therefore does not cut off
their revenue stream as would the LGPL. It's more
risky from a business perspective because there is
a danger of forking, but as long as TT does a good
job of maintainang qt and makes enough people happy, history has shown it is not a common problem. I hope that more companies who produce libraries consider this as a viable business model.
Slashdot Mirror
What scares me about this though is that from what I know of the Chinese music scene, is it's pretty much all pop garbage. There is very little diversity in mainstream music as compared with what we have in the English speaking music scene. I hate the RIAA with a passion and I'd like to see them die a gruesome death. But I just hope that we don't end up with a music scene that is only fincially viable for boy bands & Britney Spears look alikes.
At first I thought they were kinda neat. But then I realized beauty of a consistent UI and how much time was being wasted on coming up with these silly looking and useless things.
That's my sig. Aleister Crowley was a real nut. It's kind of like quoting Hitler.
I think it should be the duty of everyone in California to use this opportunity to inflict the maximum financial damage against Microsoft. Maybe we need more details of the settlement to determine how this will be done. I have a few thoughts on it so far.
1. We MUST not let any of these funds go unclaimed. Don't forget to file your claim. Tell all your friends. Tell your friends to tell their friends.
2. Don't treat this voucher as a freebee. Only use it to purchase software that you would have purchased had you not received a voucher in the first place.
3. If you absolutely must purchase a Microsoft product, be sure and use it for something like an Xbox or something that has a high per unit production cost, not software licenses.
4. Use it to purchase software from direct Microsoft competitors.
5. If they are allowed to redeem it for cash, donate your voucher to an organization that creates free software, such as the FSF.
I hope others of you out there will have some suggestions as well.
Maybe MS wants to get a better idea of how many people are using linux on the desktop. With this kind of thing sending back your hardware info to MS, it could see what kind of system you're running, i.e. straight linux, dual boot, etc.
I guess this is some strong evidence that all the anti-GPL stuff that MS put out has backfired.
Over the course of a lifetime.. I don't see how propriotary software could be cheaper than Free/OSS. It's like the difference between buying the house and renting the house.
Now it could be that in certian instances, proprietary software could be cheaper in the short run. But the wonderful thing about Free/OSS is that once you build that infractructure... it's there, you don't have to keep paying for it.
In terms of support, I see two main issues as affecting the cost of support.
A) The prevelance of the software.
B) The level of competition between support houses.
Now if a propriotary product is far more prevelant than a Free one, The support may be cheaper. On the other hand, if the prevelance of 2 software packages is about equal, Free/OSS support should be cheaper since you have more choice in where you get your support.
Envision the following scenario: We are trying to decide between the freefoo and payfoo software packages. Freefoo is a barebones package. It can do what you want, but is a bit difficult and costly to set up. Payfoo on the other hand is a featureful peice of software that more than meets your needs at present. Payfoo's support is also cheaper. Seems like the obvious choice is to go with Payfoo right? But software is a dynamic product. In time, Freefoo will probably improve, become more prevelant and better supported. If you're paying someone for support, say someone who contributes code to FreeFoo for support, This improvement is only going to happen faster. This has already happened with Commercial UNIX versus Free alternatives. I believe it's just a matter of time for it to happen with other software as well.
If this is really just a matter of cost as the drive manufacturers claim rather than a reduction in quality perhaps manufacturers could sell 2 flavors of the drive. Same hardware, but just tack on an extra warranty and charge more for the drive to cover their costs.
I think the death of MP3 is long overdue and anything that speeds up that process is a good thing. I am really hoping that this will accelerate the acceptance ogg.
Does anyone know of any portable devices or car stereo devices that support ogg? I've been holding off purchasing a portable music device until i find one that supports ogg.
I have to say that this is one of the most rediculous ideas I have ever come across. Now granted, Redhat has a lot of momentum in the Linux market, but Look at the number of competing products and how similar they are to Redhat. Now how many products exist with that same level of similarity to Windows? ZERO.
I've seen people quote this "fact" all over slashdot. But has there been any hard facts? How do we know this isn't some kind of astroturf campaign to make anti-ms types think it's ok to purchase an xbox? I'd love to see someone who really knows about hardware manufacturing to do a cost rundown fo the xbox, giving conservative and liberal estimates of how much they think it costs MS to maufacture and why.
I think what they're proposing here is a far cry from using something like bluelight. My interpretation of this is that you would voluntarily subject yourself to ads on your desktop and the revenue from those ads would go to support your favorite desktop projects. I wouldn't mind doing that at all. Although if I knew how any ads I'd have to view just to get them a dollar, I might be more inclined to simply make a donation directly.
When I bought 7.2 in the store, I got it home and I followed the instructions and sent in the rebate w/ the UPC's etc. Over 6 months later, I still have yet to receive my rebate. I guess it couold have gotten lost in the mail or something, but isn't it funny how rebate offers in general get lost a lot more often than most forms of mail. I had completely forgotten about it until this story came up. Did Redhat contract an outside company to handle the rebate stuff last time? If this was a common occurence, they might want to find someone else to handle it this time.
A brand new double-wide, a corvette and a shitload of crank.
An idea I think would be cool is to offer some kind of diff or something to patch the ISO and offer the new checksums to the ISOs. That way, you could have your own updated redhat ISO's without pounding their ftp servers too hard. they could even put the updated ISO's on there a couple weeks later just so that ppl would go for the diffs first and not destroy redhat's bandwitdth like what happens when they make a new release. :-)
I wonder how well xdelta would work for 600+ MB files?
I'm not quite sure your criticism.. are you saying that it is not an accurate cross section?
my statisics are a bit rusty, but I believe that
9688 samples will usually get you a pretty tight confidence interval.
I am very sorry to hear this about LWN. I always look forward to reading the new version every Thursday. I hope this will not mean the end for LWN. Maybe they can pull out of this.
as I understand it, MS won a case against apple years ago because "look and feel" were not considered copyrightable. now if these developers are pulling images from screenshots of the aqua gui and then copying those in to themes for other OS, that would be a clear cut copyright violation.. however I seriously doubt that is the case. It seems that this is just another case of big companies sicking their lawyers on the little guy. The little guy usually concedes because he doesn't have the money or the time to fight it.
It seems that the Steve Jobs dick mentality continues to permeate through apple.
I for one think this is the right solution. The article claims that this would be confusing to users, but I don't see how.
I think what he's getting at is that government protection of intellectual property is government intervention.
I just want to say that BoutyQuest kicks ass. This is just what the patent system needs.
Would this simple combination be in violation of their patent?
I really feel that the H1-B situation puts tech workers at a serious disadvantage. Why hire local labor when you can hire slave labor for half the price? I think it's fine for companies to look abroad, but if that newcomer can't change jobs, then he can't command the salary he deserves. It's unfair to him and it's unfair to locals because it makes them less valuable.
just dual license it.
I'm very happy to hear that TT has come to their
senses. I always believed that the GPL was the
perfect solution from the beginning. It gives us
the fredom we need, but still prevents non-free apps from linking and therefore does not cut off
their revenue stream as would the LGPL. It's more
risky from a business perspective because there is
a danger of forking, but as long as TT does a good
job of maintainang qt and makes enough people happy, history has shown it is not a common problem. I hope that more companies who produce libraries consider this as a viable business model.