Debian's got several cross platform compilers (like the popular avr) available to install. And it's got plenty of other support tools for the rest of the env, and you'll still have the flexibility to install your own stuff cleanly.
But before you jump in, it helps to dig through the platforms you aim to use and see what their official toolchain does, and what exactly is available for linux. GCC is definately popular with cheap embedded processor people, since it means less work for them usually, but sometimes you wind up with closed source tools in a processor gcc doesn't support. In those cases, linux binaries are a luxury. Basically do your research. p.d.o should prove valuable here; I think gentoo has something similar, and Ubuntu I know runs a similar service.
Re:The Linux Flaw
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Ubuntu Hacks
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· Score: 2, Informative
You're right. Instead you get "How to use firefox to access windows update from your pirated Windows install" or "How to schedule nightly defrags," or "how to optimize your internet settings." Not to mention that Sun's Java is now installable from multiverse / non-free (or will be eventually if the current Sun PR is to believed, I'm not sure where Debian + java currently stands).
Saying that nobody is busy addressing the "stuff like this" is a lie. The FSF and plenty of other OSS organizations join up to fight software patents, the primary cause that you can't play DVDs, listen to mp3s, or any other potentially patented function in the future with open source software legally. And plenty of other people are finding ways to work with existing patent holders to come to a workable agreement between them. For example, Fluendo recently worked with the MP3 people to join in on mp3 support. There's even more people working on alternatives to restricted software, like Vorbis and gcj. And there are people "trying to fix stuff like this," like Automatix or EasyUbunbtu; they just don't personally advertise on Slashdot where you might read it. I dislike that their solution is an addon program rather than solving the deficiencies within Ubuntu, but that's a personal opinion and there are at least some fixes that are justifiably unmergable with Ubuntu. So it is being solved, by a number of people, in a number of ways. It's just not done yet.
One of the biggest problems I see surrounding the Ubuntu support and help forums is that the "howto foo" authors are all heavily experienced in the command line, so where a GUI tool would suffice they instead jump to console. For you and I, synaptic may provide little value (perhaps that itself is a bug) over apt-get, but it represents a good improvement for the unindoctrinated. The things it does are generally unsurprising, and the features it directly presents to the users are very suitable for their needs (searching, upgrading, descriptions). Of course it isn't perfect yet, but it's far from unusable. I think if the howto authors spent some time using the GUI tools with a focus on their documentation, they'd be able to contribute some insightful advice to developers on improving it, sort of an "eat your own dogfood" scenario.
For the record Dapper is running 1.5.4. The main problem revolved around whether it was appropariate to break people's plugins or not. So far they've already pushed one upgrade to Firefox through, from 1.5.3 to 1.5.4. And it was always feasible to install firefox to your homedir (right click to extract, right click to run), if you were willing to take an adventure on plugins.
There's probably something to di with the Chinese administration's longstanding conflict with acadameia. The Tiananmen Square incident, as much as they've done to conceal it, still echoes in the minds of those old enough to have the skills and knowledge nessecary to become a professor. An old neighbor of mine was a professor from China (Mathematics, I think); he came over about five years after Tiananmen, which is probably close to how long it takes to officially immigrate to the States once the paperwork has been started.
Functions serve both as code and entry formats to the kernel. A syscall is basically a strange hardware protected function call. The change was probably implemented by simply replacing a function pointer in the kernel, so that the handler for syscall number associated with sendfile(2) is instead passed to splice. No increase in overhead, and the interface for user programs (mostly libc) remains the same.
This is pretty much what Amazon is doing. They're currently only carrying rather high margin "premium" foods. For example, there's only one Campbell's soup in the soup section (and it's currently not available), the rest is full of Wolfgang Puck's brand of soup. Basically, rather than waste their precious warehouse space on low margin foods, they'll let the local stores do that while they sell you expensive food. So if you were expecting an Amazonian discount on ramen noodles, well, I might suggest a Costco card.
Imagine you have 3 kids. Overpopulation, whatever, but you've got 3. As a parent, your primary responsibility is to ensure that they survive and provide for them. So at least one of the two (two, if you're fortunate) will have to find some form of income to put food, clothes and shelter. Simply put, these children will likely have more freetime than you. Certainly the case for the average American household at least. You expect to somehow monitor everything they could possibly be exposed to without placing them inside a small cage?
I don't think it's strange for a parent to imagine such a rating system useful, if accurate. I think we can agree that after playing five minutes of GTA it's obvious what the M rating stood for, and that if your child is actively seeking to modify GTA for Hot Coffee, well, that kind of censorship is a losing battle. But like hell I'd sit through Xenosaga to determine whether it's appropriate for children (it's barely appropriate for human consumption). I think your approach might be akin to watching the first 10 minutes of a movie.
This is where the rating system is handy. The question is how effective the system is currently, what forces influence it, and whether the FTC is capable of implementing it better. Currently the ESRB's client is the game companies, rather than a direct relationship with consumers. I've no idea whether companies is better than taxpayers as clients.
Not that there aren't bright people over there, but I was discussing academic work ethic with a foreign exchange student from Eastern Europe. He said that many students enroll in classes and then never appear. He suggested that attendence rates at classes could be as low as 10 percent. This came up by way of mentioning the price of tuition in America. Apparently students at his home University don't pay tuition (or the price is very cheap). While tuition here is expensive, it's also a drop in the bucket as far as the budget is concerned.
I also seem to recall hearing that in many Western European nations, domestic University students enjoy a certain lifestyle paid for by the nation. As far as Graham is concerned, it may be that tuition encourages certain scholarly behaviors that starts may enjoy, like cost-benefit optimization, daily dedication to the task, etc. If you think you didn't learn anything, at the very least you likely attended the course and passed. Solving a set of problems hosted by the ACM might be prestigeous, but I might claim it's about as prestigious to the US tech startup as the World Cup is to the Midwest.
And Graham's right, if there are ultra prestigious European Universities, they've done a poor job selling themselves to the American intellectual. Can you name the university that Tanenbaum worked for while he wrote MINIX? I can't.
Firstly, Metcalf's Law amounts to little more than a sales device for the company he worked for. It's on the right track, but many suggest and support a logarithmic model, which explains why larger networks would refuse peering agreements with smaller ones. The bigger problem is your argument's inability to seperate the neutrality of the underlying network, ie The Internet, from the neutrality of individual nodes along the edge, ie Google.
The problem of net netrality is that it actually deters further investment in the network, leverages a near monopoly on consumer broadband to reverse commonly accepted business practices, and use their own customer's fickle network usability opinions against sites they like to visit (balanced by their customers inability to understand WHY it happened). All of these problem affect Google, but they also affect non-corporations. In fact, large companies like Google and Yahoo may fare best (comparatively) under such a system. Wikipedia, who's load times are already frustrating at times, could be in jeopardy, and small companies (think you and three of your close friends) could have a hard time breaking into an established market like video streaming because your competitor has bid the price of free lanes for such traffic outside your small pocketbook.
I'm a bit curious to hear how the democratic nature of the internet, where users are king, conflicts with free market capitalism. If everyone's free to vote with their feet, why is Google still successful? Perhaps the people simply don't care, as you appear willing to assert in their stead, about egalitarian publishing? Or maybe I just have a grudge about twenty year old ideas like the Semantic Web that refuse to die =(
If you really want to tap into the corpus of transcribed human knowledge, Google and the Internet is not really the end all be all. That would be Lexus-Nexus;)
From the Ubuntu front page: "The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Philosophy: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.
These freedoms make Ubuntu fundamentally different from traditional proprietary software: not only are the tools you need available free of charge, you have the right to modify your software until it works the way you want it to." emphasis added
He clicked on them, and it said "you do not have permission to access this" (because the drives are mounted by root). There was no obvious recourse (the solution being editing/etc/fstab). From that point on, selling Ubuntu to him as easy-to-use was something of a losing battle.
I hear Windows Vista is aiming to meet or beat Ubuntu on this.
Your grandma plays 3d games and downloads music from thepiratebay? The reason neither Apple nor MS (nor many commercially distributed Linux distros) have problems is that they charge money for their software. Moreover, neither Apple nor MS feel any obligation to make it easy to modify and redistribute their software the way Ubuntu does.
For a long time the argument against MP3 was pretty simple: liscencing fees were expensive. But Fluendo appears to be offering mp3 support in gstreamer free of charge. The only argument remaining is redistribution. Obviously, Ubuntu would be in a pickle if they started saying redistribution didn't matter, as that's how they operate, as a modification and redistibution of Debian. Participating in the Fluendo deal would require them to discourage people from doing the same thing they're doing. Basically, if it weren't for these "liscencing issues" Ubuntu couldn't exist in the first place.
The fundamnetal problem is that MP3s are patented. As long as Ubuntu is dedicated to giving out free and liberated software, they'll be at odds with the patent holders who hold the right ensure that neither of those goals is possible. Recently there have been attempts to work within the patent holder's framework to provide something legal and acceptable, but the closest we have is Fluendo's licencing program, which explicitly doesn't allow for redistribution, one of the key things in the GPL's operation. For example, Ubuntu can mail you a 6.06 CD containing the mp3 plugin, but it's legally questionable for you to redistribute those CDs to your friends. And MEPIS would certainly be in trouble, unless they also secured such a contract. Ubuntu represents it's distro as a "people should be able to modify and share changes" aka a Free Software distro. This contract goes against this ideal, and if MEPIS isn't aware of this contract, and chooses to modify Ubuntu in other ways, then Ubuntu's exposed the people they told could modify the software, people like they guy behind MEPIS, to hidden legal liabilities.
Well, not that I'm considering a laptop quite this monsterous, but there were several people who brought their laptop to the last LAN party I attended.
What about the fundamentals here? You keep claiming you understand Wall Street better than the rest of us and then bring up freshman level supply and demand, but there's some pretty straight forward math involved in valuating a company; calculations that drive much of the "demand" side of the equalibrium. I'm sure an enlightened individual such as yourself is aware of these invisible guides, but allow me to educate those other readers who may be still in the dark: price reflects the overall value of the company, including current assets and future income. If a company creates a new share and sells it at market value, it's theorized that the price of the stock should remain constant. The additional shares outstanding reduces the current shareholder's valuation some, but this is offset by the new assets the sale produced. In a market with a few of bright competitive participants, the valuations should align with the fundamentals. I posit that there are at least a couple of such people.
This is what allows an IPO to occur, but what happens if you sell stock above market price? If market value kept the price in balance, any excess should drive fundamental valuation, and therefor price, up. At a 5 dollar markup, current shareholders would be hard to argue against such an action, especially if they also paid such a price. Because demand is largely a function of underlying valuation, either you or your theory is full of shit.
The truth is that if Vonage lets people off the hook, the people who held their end of an unsavory bargain were defrauded. These people signed a contract, even the anarchic libertarians should agree that contracts are vital to a society. The concept of fairness, both real and percieved, are vital to a thriving market. Fortunately, the SEC appears to back me up here, which is why Vonage is back-pedaling. You might say the SEC represents those companies in the future that might IPO, fighting to stop people from abusing the IPO system and causing a severe distrust (and therefore, lower demand) in the offerings.
The fly in the ointment here is the reality surrounding this particular IPO. It's quite a challenge to be fair in the Vonage IPO scenario. Someone really screwed it up. Not in the "everyone lost money" or "zOMG look at that price fall" sense, but in the 5-minutes-after-market-close "btw, we sold you these shares, pay up" sense. Such people were at a huge disadvantage, and were given discriminatory treatment via that late notification.
Bottom line, at this point pushing sales at the IPO price is good for one group--VC who are using the IPO to cash out and get out of the Vonage business. They want max money now and don't care what happens tomorrow. If you have any continuing relationship with Vonage, then it is a bad idea.
What about the investors who agreed to pay 17 dollars for something worth twelve and didn't back out of the deal? I'm pretty sure the perception of a fair market offering is important to these people.
It's even more retarded than you present it. Currently, companies like Google and Yahoo and Archive.org pay for every byte they send. Yes, there's the issue of who is charged, reciever or sender, and Tiered Internet changes this some. But currently, if you use more packets, you pay more money. Net neutrality isn't about paying more for sending or recieving more. It's about selling "priority routing." Your average bandwidth likely remains the same, but worst case latency could be much improved. Say you're a large company with a good income stream from selling VoIP products. What the ISPs want to sell you is the right for your packets to be served before everyone else's. If you're the only person in line, it's a great advantage, your packets will all have low latency, and packet loss would be minimal. You would be able to corner the market quickly, either by paying the ISPs for the exclusive right for priority, or simply by being among the few who choose to pay for the privledge. This division of packets among customers (customers who've already paid per byte) is what has been labelled a Tiered Internet.
Nobody knows how the ISPs plan to implement this Tiered Internet from a business perspective. Some people fear ISPs like the Bells will use this to crush the threat VoIP represents to their phone networks. Some people think that it could be used as a competitive advantage for ISPs to enter content markets by giving themselves higest priority reguardless of bids on the table. Some people worry that priority creates a false scarcity and bidding war that leaves the larger players well served and squeezes out the traditionally vital role small new players have had in Internet applications; the consumer ISPs represent such a huge and critical market that companies can't risk losing them, and everyone ends up paying for privledges. Others have said that optimizing the Internet for one particular role (streaming media) deoptimizes it for all others.
Ideally, a Tiered Internet allows us to segregate data transfers that don't require some level of QoS (downloading patches, web traffic, other non-realtime data) from applications that do benefit from it (streaming movies, VoIP, other real-time contrained things). I personally worry that the consumer internet market is not diverse enough to allow a free market to compete for the most optimal solution, nor the average consumer capable of pinpointing the troubles they may find on subtle changes to the network that the ISPs have planned but not advertised.
The dollar has been sliding pretty hard recently. Lots of commodities are all costing more per dollar; you could say it's about increased demand from China, etc., but the width and breadth of it is striking. In fact, because Nintendo holds a fair amount of dollars, they'll be operating at a profit but having an overall loss because the dollar is depreciating.
It'd be silly of them not to take into account inflation. In which case, it'd be closer to 250 than 200. The good news about all this inflation is that it makes outsourcing your job look less attractive;)
The problem is that some people percieve that giving people buggy software is somehow unacceptable. When you look at reality, this is far from the truth. People favored Ubuntu over Debian because they felt Ubuntu was newer. People intentionally run ~86 in Gentoo because they care more about newer software than the bugs that might contain. People constantly enter public betas to try out new software. Look at the number of people running Vista on their primary desktop. I'm sure you can come up with plenty more examples. People pick features over correctness.
The biggest trouble that arises from this market force is a lack of transparency. Ideally, the "release early, release often" approach treats the users as a large software testing team. Instead bug reports are difficult to submit, and almost always kept private; a publicly disclosed list of known but unfixed bugs provides critics and competing software ammunition. Current market approaches offer no incentive to turn a community software improvement practice into an established transparent process. Once I've purchased software from a vendor, the only obligation they have to fix bugs is related to PR and lawsuits of unmerchantability. Even software subscriptions as currently envisioned don't really address this. You pay a monthly fee for the right to USE the software at all, rather than the right to upgrades, patches and fixes. Stop paying and you can't use the software at all! Of course, this might also encourage companies to test even less than they do currently, and charge customers both time (to identify the problems) and money (via the update subscription) for the fix.
Well, if you're going to describe the process as a bargining situation, then he's taking his own next step. If your final goal is GPL'd Java, then when they allow you to merely redistribute the JDK, your next step is to complain that it's still not open source.
Partly, it's a matter of timing. When Progeny started, it was 2000. Perhaps the height of the.com bubble. There were a lot of competitors to Debian. Redhat was still officially supporting a free desktop OS. GNOME hadn't yet recieved a critical look via a Usability study that demonstrated that half the crap in it was not only useless, but confusing. Distributing an.iso was feasible but finding software to burn them was still arcane. Crappy modem support was still a fundamental problem. A notable constants though: Debian stable was two years old, and woudn't be out for another year.
By the time Ubuntu came out, Fedora had taken (and partly dropped) the torch, GNOME was vastly improved, KDE wasn't in danger of being placed in non-free, and a lot of Linux providers dropped out after the.com crash.
The other half of the equation was simple: goals. Shuttleworth aims to be truly successful, not just something to feed himself and his kids (*cough* his progeny *cough*). He capitalized on the fact that Debian stable was so sorely out of date that when everyone else stated they'd not be packaging xfree 4.4, debian had just gotten 4.3 into unstable. Ubuntu's release schedule is (usually) designed to be synchronized with GNOME so that, for a brief moment, Ubuntu is one of two places to go for the latest (the second being CVS). Shuttleworth recognized that a number of people didn't have access to windows based CD burning software, or perhaps the knowhow to find some, and funded ShipIt.
While Murdock was aiming for NOW (network of workstations), Ubuntu's initial focus was on laptop support. Even in 2000, the question was asked "why do you think your SSI will succeed in today's environment?" If the answer was "it's open source," well that answer clearly wasn't adaquate. NOW assumes a very specific kind of resources, and adds a lot of complexity to gain something that rapidly falls in price. It might be interesting, but you have to own more than a couple workstations to make it worth your time, and it doesn't really aid mysql or apache much.
It almost seems like Canonical learned from Progeny that half of selling Debian support was going to be making people want it, instead of capitalizing on some imaginary underserved market segment looking for ways to reduce the cost of Debian deployment. As always, sales, sales, sales!
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uCLinux doesn't support my ATmega128 chips, yet I'm able to program to them just fine...
Debian's got several cross platform compilers (like the popular avr) available to install. And it's got plenty of other support tools for the rest of the env, and you'll still have the flexibility to install your own stuff cleanly.
But before you jump in, it helps to dig through the platforms you aim to use and see what their official toolchain does, and what exactly is available for linux. GCC is definately popular with cheap embedded processor people, since it means less work for them usually, but sometimes you wind up with closed source tools in a processor gcc doesn't support. In those cases, linux binaries are a luxury. Basically do your research. p.d.o should prove valuable here; I think gentoo has something similar, and Ubuntu I know runs a similar service.
You're right. Instead you get "How to use firefox to access windows update from your pirated Windows install" or "How to schedule nightly defrags," or "how to optimize your internet settings." Not to mention that Sun's Java is now installable from multiverse / non-free (or will be eventually if the current Sun PR is to believed, I'm not sure where Debian + java currently stands).
Saying that nobody is busy addressing the "stuff like this" is a lie. The FSF and plenty of other OSS organizations join up to fight software patents, the primary cause that you can't play DVDs, listen to mp3s, or any other potentially patented function in the future with open source software legally. And plenty of other people are finding ways to work with existing patent holders to come to a workable agreement between them. For example, Fluendo recently worked with the MP3 people to join in on mp3 support. There's even more people working on alternatives to restricted software, like Vorbis and gcj. And there are people "trying to fix stuff like this," like Automatix or EasyUbunbtu; they just don't personally advertise on Slashdot where you might read it. I dislike that their solution is an addon program rather than solving the deficiencies within Ubuntu, but that's a personal opinion and there are at least some fixes that are justifiably unmergable with Ubuntu. So it is being solved, by a number of people, in a number of ways. It's just not done yet.
One of the biggest problems I see surrounding the Ubuntu support and help forums is that the "howto foo" authors are all heavily experienced in the command line, so where a GUI tool would suffice they instead jump to console. For you and I, synaptic may provide little value (perhaps that itself is a bug) over apt-get, but it represents a good improvement for the unindoctrinated. The things it does are generally unsurprising, and the features it directly presents to the users are very suitable for their needs (searching, upgrading, descriptions). Of course it isn't perfect yet, but it's far from unusable. I think if the howto authors spent some time using the GUI tools with a focus on their documentation, they'd be able to contribute some insightful advice to developers on improving it, sort of an "eat your own dogfood" scenario.
For the record Dapper is running 1.5.4. The main problem revolved around whether it was appropariate to break people's plugins or not. So far they've already pushed one upgrade to Firefox through, from 1.5.3 to 1.5.4. And it was always feasible to install firefox to your homedir (right click to extract, right click to run), if you were willing to take an adventure on plugins.
There's probably something to di with the Chinese administration's longstanding conflict with acadameia. The Tiananmen Square incident, as much as they've done to conceal it, still echoes in the minds of those old enough to have the skills and knowledge nessecary to become a professor. An old neighbor of mine was a professor from China (Mathematics, I think); he came over about five years after Tiananmen, which is probably close to how long it takes to officially immigrate to the States once the paperwork has been started.
Functions serve both as code and entry formats to the kernel. A syscall is basically a strange hardware protected function call. The change was probably implemented by simply replacing a function pointer in the kernel, so that the handler for syscall number associated with sendfile(2) is instead passed to splice. No increase in overhead, and the interface for user programs (mostly libc) remains the same.
This is pretty much what Amazon is doing. They're currently only carrying rather high margin "premium" foods. For example, there's only one Campbell's soup in the soup section (and it's currently not available), the rest is full of Wolfgang Puck's brand of soup. Basically, rather than waste their precious warehouse space on low margin foods, they'll let the local stores do that while they sell you expensive food. So if you were expecting an Amazonian discount on ramen noodles, well, I might suggest a Costco card.
Imagine you have 3 kids. Overpopulation, whatever, but you've got 3. As a parent, your primary responsibility is to ensure that they survive and provide for them. So at least one of the two (two, if you're fortunate) will have to find some form of income to put food, clothes and shelter. Simply put, these children will likely have more freetime than you. Certainly the case for the average American household at least. You expect to somehow monitor everything they could possibly be exposed to without placing them inside a small cage?
I don't think it's strange for a parent to imagine such a rating system useful, if accurate. I think we can agree that after playing five minutes of GTA it's obvious what the M rating stood for, and that if your child is actively seeking to modify GTA for Hot Coffee, well, that kind of censorship is a losing battle. But like hell I'd sit through Xenosaga to determine whether it's appropriate for children (it's barely appropriate for human consumption). I think your approach might be akin to watching the first 10 minutes of a movie.
This is where the rating system is handy. The question is how effective the system is currently, what forces influence it, and whether the FTC is capable of implementing it better. Currently the ESRB's client is the game companies, rather than a direct relationship with consumers. I've no idea whether companies is better than taxpayers as clients.
Forgive me for my ignorance, but how much do normal bike frames weigh?
See, that's what I thought, but when I looked it up, it's apparently vrije Universitait. Which is based in Amsterdamn, so we're close at least.
Not that there aren't bright people over there, but I was discussing academic work ethic with a foreign exchange student from Eastern Europe. He said that many students enroll in classes and then never appear. He suggested that attendence rates at classes could be as low as 10 percent. This came up by way of mentioning the price of tuition in America. Apparently students at his home University don't pay tuition (or the price is very cheap). While tuition here is expensive, it's also a drop in the bucket as far as the budget is concerned.
I also seem to recall hearing that in many Western European nations, domestic University students enjoy a certain lifestyle paid for by the nation. As far as Graham is concerned, it may be that tuition encourages certain scholarly behaviors that starts may enjoy, like cost-benefit optimization, daily dedication to the task, etc. If you think you didn't learn anything, at the very least you likely attended the course and passed. Solving a set of problems hosted by the ACM might be prestigeous, but I might claim it's about as prestigious to the US tech startup as the World Cup is to the Midwest.
And Graham's right, if there are ultra prestigious European Universities, they've done a poor job selling themselves to the American intellectual. Can you name the university that Tanenbaum worked for while he wrote MINIX? I can't.
Firstly, Metcalf's Law amounts to little more than a sales device for the company he worked for. It's on the right track, but many suggest and support a logarithmic model, which explains why larger networks would refuse peering agreements with smaller ones. The bigger problem is your argument's inability to seperate the neutrality of the underlying network, ie The Internet, from the neutrality of individual nodes along the edge, ie Google.
;)
The problem of net netrality is that it actually deters further investment in the network, leverages a near monopoly on consumer broadband to reverse commonly accepted business practices, and use their own customer's fickle network usability opinions against sites they like to visit (balanced by their customers inability to understand WHY it happened). All of these problem affect Google, but they also affect non-corporations. In fact, large companies like Google and Yahoo may fare best (comparatively) under such a system. Wikipedia, who's load times are already frustrating at times, could be in jeopardy, and small companies (think you and three of your close friends) could have a hard time breaking into an established market like video streaming because your competitor has bid the price of free lanes for such traffic outside your small pocketbook.
I'm a bit curious to hear how the democratic nature of the internet, where users are king, conflicts with free market capitalism. If everyone's free to vote with their feet, why is Google still successful? Perhaps the people simply don't care, as you appear willing to assert in their stead, about egalitarian publishing? Or maybe I just have a grudge about twenty year old ideas like the Semantic Web that refuse to die =(
If you really want to tap into the corpus of transcribed human knowledge, Google and the Internet is not really the end all be all. That would be Lexus-Nexus
From the Ubuntu front page:
"The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Philosophy: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.
These freedoms make Ubuntu fundamentally different from traditional proprietary software: not only are the tools you need available free of charge, you have the right to modify your software until it works the way you want it to."
emphasis added
I hear Windows Vista is aiming to meet or beat Ubuntu on this.
Your grandma plays 3d games and downloads music from thepiratebay? The reason neither Apple nor MS (nor many commercially distributed Linux distros) have problems is that they charge money for their software. Moreover, neither Apple nor MS feel any obligation to make it easy to modify and redistribute their software the way Ubuntu does.
For a long time the argument against MP3 was pretty simple: liscencing fees were expensive. But Fluendo appears to be offering mp3 support in gstreamer free of charge. The only argument remaining is redistribution. Obviously, Ubuntu would be in a pickle if they started saying redistribution didn't matter, as that's how they operate, as a modification and redistibution of Debian. Participating in the Fluendo deal would require them to discourage people from doing the same thing they're doing. Basically, if it weren't for these "liscencing issues" Ubuntu couldn't exist in the first place.
The fundamnetal problem is that MP3s are patented. As long as Ubuntu is dedicated to giving out free and liberated software, they'll be at odds with the patent holders who hold the right ensure that neither of those goals is possible. Recently there have been attempts to work within the patent holder's framework to provide something legal and acceptable, but the closest we have is Fluendo's licencing program, which explicitly doesn't allow for redistribution, one of the key things in the GPL's operation. For example, Ubuntu can mail you a 6.06 CD containing the mp3 plugin, but it's legally questionable for you to redistribute those CDs to your friends. And MEPIS would certainly be in trouble, unless they also secured such a contract. Ubuntu represents it's distro as a "people should be able to modify and share changes" aka a Free Software distro. This contract goes against this ideal, and if MEPIS isn't aware of this contract, and chooses to modify Ubuntu in other ways, then Ubuntu's exposed the people they told could modify the software, people like they guy behind MEPIS, to hidden legal liabilities.
Well, not that I'm considering a laptop quite this monsterous, but there were several people who brought their laptop to the last LAN party I attended.
What about the fundamentals here? You keep claiming you understand Wall Street better than the rest of us and then bring up freshman level supply and demand, but there's some pretty straight forward math involved in valuating a company; calculations that drive much of the "demand" side of the equalibrium. I'm sure an enlightened individual such as yourself is aware of these invisible guides, but allow me to educate those other readers who may be still in the dark: price reflects the overall value of the company, including current assets and future income. If a company creates a new share and sells it at market value, it's theorized that the price of the stock should remain constant. The additional shares outstanding reduces the current shareholder's valuation some, but this is offset by the new assets the sale produced. In a market with a few of bright competitive participants, the valuations should align with the fundamentals. I posit that there are at least a couple of such people.
This is what allows an IPO to occur, but what happens if you sell stock above market price? If market value kept the price in balance, any excess should drive fundamental valuation, and therefor price, up. At a 5 dollar markup, current shareholders would be hard to argue against such an action, especially if they also paid such a price. Because demand is largely a function of underlying valuation, either you or your theory is full of shit.
The truth is that if Vonage lets people off the hook, the people who held their end of an unsavory bargain were defrauded. These people signed a contract, even the anarchic libertarians should agree that contracts are vital to a society. The concept of fairness, both real and percieved, are vital to a thriving market. Fortunately, the SEC appears to back me up here, which is why Vonage is back-pedaling. You might say the SEC represents those companies in the future that might IPO, fighting to stop people from abusing the IPO system and causing a severe distrust (and therefore, lower demand) in the offerings.
The fly in the ointment here is the reality surrounding this particular IPO. It's quite a challenge to be fair in the Vonage IPO scenario. Someone really screwed it up. Not in the "everyone lost money" or "zOMG look at that price fall" sense, but in the 5-minutes-after-market-close "btw, we sold you these shares, pay up" sense. Such people were at a huge disadvantage, and were given discriminatory treatment via that late notification.
What about the investors who agreed to pay 17 dollars for something worth twelve and didn't back out of the deal? I'm pretty sure the perception of a fair market offering is important to these people.
It's even more retarded than you present it. Currently, companies like Google and Yahoo and Archive.org pay for every byte they send. Yes, there's the issue of who is charged, reciever or sender, and Tiered Internet changes this some. But currently, if you use more packets, you pay more money. Net neutrality isn't about paying more for sending or recieving more. It's about selling "priority routing." Your average bandwidth likely remains the same, but worst case latency could be much improved. Say you're a large company with a good income stream from selling VoIP products. What the ISPs want to sell you is the right for your packets to be served before everyone else's. If you're the only person in line, it's a great advantage, your packets will all have low latency, and packet loss would be minimal. You would be able to corner the market quickly, either by paying the ISPs for the exclusive right for priority, or simply by being among the few who choose to pay for the privledge. This division of packets among customers (customers who've already paid per byte) is what has been labelled a Tiered Internet.
Nobody knows how the ISPs plan to implement this Tiered Internet from a business perspective. Some people fear ISPs like the Bells will use this to crush the threat VoIP represents to their phone networks. Some people think that it could be used as a competitive advantage for ISPs to enter content markets by giving themselves higest priority reguardless of bids on the table. Some people worry that priority creates a false scarcity and bidding war that leaves the larger players well served and squeezes out the traditionally vital role small new players have had in Internet applications; the consumer ISPs represent such a huge and critical market that companies can't risk losing them, and everyone ends up paying for privledges. Others have said that optimizing the Internet for one particular role (streaming media) deoptimizes it for all others.
Ideally, a Tiered Internet allows us to segregate data transfers that don't require some level of QoS (downloading patches, web traffic, other non-realtime data) from applications that do benefit from it (streaming movies, VoIP, other real-time contrained things). I personally worry that the consumer internet market is not diverse enough to allow a free market to compete for the most optimal solution, nor the average consumer capable of pinpointing the troubles they may find on subtle changes to the network that the ISPs have planned but not advertised.
The dollar has been sliding pretty hard recently. Lots of commodities are all costing more per dollar; you could say it's about increased demand from China, etc., but the width and breadth of it is striking. In fact, because Nintendo holds a fair amount of dollars, they'll be operating at a profit but having an overall loss because the dollar is depreciating.
;)
It'd be silly of them not to take into account inflation. In which case, it'd be closer to 250 than 200. The good news about all this inflation is that it makes outsourcing your job look less attractive
The problem is that some people percieve that giving people buggy software is somehow unacceptable. When you look at reality, this is far from the truth. People favored Ubuntu over Debian because they felt Ubuntu was newer. People intentionally run ~86 in Gentoo because they care more about newer software than the bugs that might contain. People constantly enter public betas to try out new software. Look at the number of people running Vista on their primary desktop. I'm sure you can come up with plenty more examples. People pick features over correctness.
The biggest trouble that arises from this market force is a lack of transparency. Ideally, the "release early, release often" approach treats the users as a large software testing team. Instead bug reports are difficult to submit, and almost always kept private; a publicly disclosed list of known but unfixed bugs provides critics and competing software ammunition. Current market approaches offer no incentive to turn a community software improvement practice into an established transparent process. Once I've purchased software from a vendor, the only obligation they have to fix bugs is related to PR and lawsuits of unmerchantability. Even software subscriptions as currently envisioned don't really address this. You pay a monthly fee for the right to USE the software at all, rather than the right to upgrades, patches and fixes. Stop paying and you can't use the software at all! Of course, this might also encourage companies to test even less than they do currently, and charge customers both time (to identify the problems) and money (via the update subscription) for the fix.
Well, lets face it, Sun's doing a good enough job making sure there won't be a Sun at all even without open sourcing things.
Well, if you're going to describe the process as a bargining situation, then he's taking his own next step. If your final goal is GPL'd Java, then when they allow you to merely redistribute the JDK, your next step is to complain that it's still not open source.
Partly, it's a matter of timing. When Progeny started, it was 2000. Perhaps the height of the .com bubble. There were a lot of competitors to Debian. Redhat was still officially supporting a free desktop OS. GNOME hadn't yet recieved a critical look via a Usability study that demonstrated that half the crap in it was not only useless, but confusing. Distributing an .iso was feasible but finding software to burn them was still arcane. Crappy modem support was still a fundamental problem. A notable constants though: Debian stable was two years old, and woudn't be out for another year.
.com crash.
By the time Ubuntu came out, Fedora had taken (and partly dropped) the torch, GNOME was vastly improved, KDE wasn't in danger of being placed in non-free, and a lot of Linux providers dropped out after the
The other half of the equation was simple: goals. Shuttleworth aims to be truly successful, not just something to feed himself and his kids (*cough* his progeny *cough*). He capitalized on the fact that Debian stable was so sorely out of date that when everyone else stated they'd not be packaging xfree 4.4, debian had just gotten 4.3 into unstable. Ubuntu's release schedule is (usually) designed to be synchronized with GNOME so that, for a brief moment, Ubuntu is one of two places to go for the latest (the second being CVS). Shuttleworth recognized that a number of people didn't have access to windows based CD burning software, or perhaps the knowhow to find some, and funded ShipIt.
While Murdock was aiming for NOW (network of workstations), Ubuntu's initial focus was on laptop support. Even in 2000, the question was asked "why do you think your SSI will succeed in today's environment?" If the answer was "it's open source," well that answer clearly wasn't adaquate. NOW assumes a very specific kind of resources, and adds a lot of complexity to gain something that rapidly falls in price. It might be interesting, but you have to own more than a couple workstations to make it worth your time, and it doesn't really aid mysql or apache much.
It almost seems like Canonical learned from Progeny that half of selling Debian support was going to be making people want it, instead of capitalizing on some imaginary underserved market segment looking for ways to reduce the cost of Debian deployment. As always, sales, sales, sales!