what you fail to take into account here is that Red Hat's distro comes with all the software you'd want to run on it - a copy of windows2000 is meaningless for a business without also buying other server products on top of that, most of which cost more than the OS itself.
Something that I've been thinking over the last while, was how much 'efficiency' can we be getting out of computer systems. And in a society so driven by economics as ours, how long can innefficiencies be allowed to last? That being said, isn't microsoft cutting off its own ear to spite its face?
Lets put this into perspective. Lets look a bit at the large scale, macroscopic level, not the microcosm of what seems to be the short term benefits of person a vs. person b. but the long term scale of movements and currents of society. Computers are supposed to give us more efficient means of managing our information, and so in turn they are supposed to yield greater efficiency and productivity in organizations. That's the theory, most of us never bother to question it, but its still just a theory. Microsoft achieved its power, wealth and success because little billy g once had the good insight to see something of the potential computers would have as a consumeable item. This being said, it would be in the best interests of any computer company to enhance the efficiency that computers bring, because this not only means a good product for the company in terms of short term goals, but a long term advantage that the "ecological niche" of that company - ie. the overall position of computers in society - benefits that company.
Now if microsoft is working to make computers less productive, less efficient to the users of those computers, aren't they just working to deteriorate their own market? These forces need not even be in the computers themselves, but all the implementation and administrative costs associated with using the computers. The more they make it inefficient to use their own products - the more they will scare away their own business.
Well, go to it, is all I can say, if that's the case, I love to see M$ digging its own grave.
good point, but of course the key distinction is the ease of replication - nobody worries about enforcing chair ownership because chairs are not infinitely reproduceable the way that software is.
Perhaps someday in the future office workers will have the ability to pull exact duplicates of the chairs they've been sitting on out of their butts, then perhaps the chair manufacturers will license their chairs instead of selling them.
Yes, I didn't think you were defending the current system. I just like to point out that there are always alternatives. All to often when people say something like "well it's nobodies fault, the system just works that way, theirs nothing we can do about it", people just shrug their shoulders and seem to accept it. Naturally the flaw in this is that there are always things we can do about it, because it is ( in theory anyway ) us who make the laws.
I too am sick and tired of knee-jerk geek community responses. I should think that a community that prides itself on being so intelligent, a little more thorough thought would be given to matters before crying conspiracy. Although I am impressed that the responses to this article have largely been to point out the flaws with the attitude, and that the person in question here did not bother to defend his domains in the WIPO proceedures despite being asked to do so. He obviously cared less about these domains than the writer of the article blaiming WIPO.
As for the established vs. new trademarks situation, I think that the amount of legitimate copying of a given trademark that would arise would be proportionate to how established that trademark is. A new trademark is not likely to receive any fandom, because it hasn't been around long enough. In any case I don't think that this constitutes any real problem for the trademark.
Yes, but lets not forget that this is a symptom of a primarily screwed-up American system. Trademark law is not the same everywhere in the world, and it is primarily a symptom of American Trademark law that these kinds of situations arise. In Japan for instance, infringement upon a trademark by people for purposes or parody, fandom, or other purposes that do not in anyway attempt to subvert the use of the trademark from its role as a trademark don't risk the ownership of that trademark. in the US they do, so corporations are forced to act in a manner that seems to be big brotherish whether they want to or not.
The same goes for Disney attacking its own fans for producing fan art of mickey mouse. Why would any sane corporation want to attack its own customers for what amounts to praise? because they have to. Japanese cartoon companies are in no way in danger of losing ownership of their trademarked and copyrighted material by letting their fans create fan art - so the subculture grows and actually increases the profitability of the original work in question.
What surprises me is that american corporations haven't done anything of their own accord to change these trademark laws, seeing as the potential for increasing the recognition of their brands increases dramatically by allowing the public to create their own work referring to it.
It's amazing what some reporters will build a story out of. Anyone else notice the total lack of this guy to commit to anything?
...more than 20 new patents "suggests" Intel Corp. is expanding...
Some experts "wonder" whether Intel...
...the company "appears to be", in effect, trying to patent...
Not that I'm saying that it isn't possible that Intel is doing this, but the fact that they suddenly submitted a bunch of patents hardly constitutes evidence. Not to mention the fact that the reporter hasn't even gotten anyone to go on the record to claim authorship of this pondering. So basically its all just suppositions. Certainly always possible, and knowing computer corp. strategies even likely, but shoddy journalism is still shoddy journalism.
Today my sky is a bluish-grey. Somedays it is a light blue, somedays it is almost white, some almost black. At certain times it can even go strongly red, orange and purple - I like it when it does that.
Well, speaking as someone who also used Linux before learning about GNU, and knowing others who did also, I find it hard to believe that anyone can use it for very long without realizing the significance of GNU in its development. After all you can't really get by without man pages, and you really can't read man pages without seeing the name GNU everywhere.
Yes, I agree there are people like that out there, but I find it hard to believe that they could possibly use Linux long without learning how wrong their initial misconceptions are. Unless they're clinically stupid. That's always another option =)
Yes, I'm very curious to see what happens at the point when online content, and by extension cultural content is truly produced proportionally to the consuming markets.
There are so many strange twists in the history of language that english may remain the "international" language regardless of what the actual %s of native speakers are. This could be likely because currently it is the second language of choice for people all over the world to speak, and the number of resources available in any country for learning english far outnumber any other non-native language. Throughout my travels I have often found that people for whom english is not native will use it to communicate when there is no other common language. ie. I have often heard French and German speakers communicating with each other in broken english, as it is a natural common ground.
Or one may see a natural drift towards learning the more dominant languages - being Chinese and Hindi variations.
Or, my own personal supposition, we may see the rise of several true english dialects. Despite the strong variations throughout the world of english speakers there aren't currently many true dialects of english. The few that do exist - I think of the Scottish dialect, the Creole of the Southern U.S. and the "Rastafarian" dialect of Jamaica - are not very largely used. The variations between U.S. english, U.K. english and those of Australia, N.Z. and Canada are not strong enough to qualify as dialects. However we may very likely see an emergence of true dialects, as the convenience of english as a common language mixes with the native languages of large markets to produce a mix optimized for ease of communication. 20 years from now will there be a Chinese-english and a Hindi-english that will be wide spread enough to be learned and studies as seperate languages in their own right?
Time will tell I guess, but its going to be very interesting.
Well slap me in an oven and call me a poppyseed bagel! if that don't just beat all.
I see what you mean, although it might not be actually a straight correspondance, there's probably a higher percentage who have / use computers and don't also have internet access. I know that in N.A. at this point it seems like having a computer and not having the internet is sort of a paradox, but even throughout most of europe, the internet is only just now starting to get the kind of attention it did in N.A. around '97. but I take your point.
I thought you were talking about something else originally.
Yes, I think we can agree that english is the defacto "international" language. This of course has nothing to do with the number of people who speak it as a mother tongue, but because the last 200 years of world history has had english speaking countries as the most powerful. The brits built a big frigging empire that spread english bullies all over the place, and created footholds where the americans could start selling stuff as the brits declined in power. Currently the bulk of economic power in the world is in the hands of english speaking nations ( 4 out of the 7 G7 nations are dominantly english speaking ), and what with the incredibly persistent sales of cheap american media everywhere, its no wonder its so popular.
nobody's arguing that most of the world speaks english as a mother tongue, but everywhere in the world it is the #1 choice for a second language. I've realized this over the last few months as an english speaker in central europe.
But I think we can see that as the international economy continues to develop, this power is going to shift dramatically. After all, one must cater to the consumer, which has currently been mostly english speakers who had the means to be serious consumers. But currently Chinese and Indian languages are the most popular. As these people become more and more able to buy the products that the corps. want to sell, you'll see more and more a shift towards them as the consumer of choice. As more and more of them get cable tv and internet access, you'll see more and more content appearing in Chinese and Sanskrit.
Just a little prediction of my own, and good help the environment when 2 billion ppl are all clammoring for nikes and big macs.
very interesting figures, although I notice they've completely left out Indian languages.
considering that after China, India is the next largest populated country in the world, I would think that this would be an important language group to keep track of. Unless they've made the stupid mistake of putting Indian internet users into the english category because the official language of the country is English. That would seriously tilt the figures of the whole report the wrong way, because almost no Indians speak English as a mother tongue, and English is the official language of the government in order to have some semblance of national order in government.
Try being a canadian trying to install a canadian dictionary on a word processor ( not going to name names here *cough* MSWORD *cough*, excuse me ), only to discover that despite the fact that they give very clear instructions on how to install and set up the dictionary as default - the changes refuse to take.
Anyone get the feeling that this particular game reporter is a bit isolated in his ivory tower of gaming excellence. Since when has a 700Mhz machine been low-end??
Perhaps if I had a company buying me a new system everytime a new processor came out I'd feel the same way, but I have to work for a living here. Geesh.
Speaking from a long experience of playing UT, Q3 and counterstrike on a 300Mhz celeron with only a voodoo1, and regularly coming out in the top 3 or 5 at the end of a match, I can testify that you don't need fast hardware to be good.
ya, as for wanting some glory for GNU, I can see where he's coming from, but on the other hand, I can also see that this is childish next to the need for greater openness.
Yes, when you work really hard at something that is a great benefit to others its nice to get some praise, and I think GNU really deserves it. But its another thing to sacrifice your principles in order to acquire such praise.
After all, where would Linux be today if it weren't for the foundational work GNU has done, essentially providing the fundamental guts that makes the current explosion of free and open source software possible. Anybody who's used any version of linux, and most versions of unix is well acquainted with GNU, and I'm sure thinks highly of it. What greater reward is there than that of making a lasting impression upon people?
As for the ideal society - well everybody's got their own definitions. My definition happens to be where everybody gives up on having the "right" answer, and simply agrees that one can live by whatever method one chooses to, so long as you don't mess with anyone elses way of doing things. This is very much along the lines of a GPLesque philosophy, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that the GPL is the constitution of utopia or anything like that. Unfortunately I think that most institutions today ( and I include the very concepts of nation-states here ) are simply too large and slow to serve well under the current social situation.
true enough - I actually did a little looking into this, and found quite a few ppl using this Jefferson quote, so you're probably right about that. especially considering they were pretty similar thinkers in a close group etc.
actually I like the Jefferson version better, because it has the sense that not only does the society not deserve both - it is an inevitable consequence of the dynamics of society that such a deprevation of liberty will yield no benefits in terms of security.
in a world where everybody's going to have a computer in their own home, everybody needs to have access to these tools to maintain home security. Unless the thought police need secret doors into your personal stuff, then they have a "legitimate" reason to access your machine, and a "legitimate" reason to limit the access to those tools to people who bear their seal of approval.
There are millions of good reasons why,
most of them are green with the faces of dead presidents on them. If you need a license that means you need to be educated at an institution approved to do such licensing, which means a nice tidy way to restrict knowledge to those with the $$ to buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
and as we all know - the NSA can get into DES anyday they want to anyway.
what you fail to take into account here is that Red Hat's distro comes with all the software you'd want to run on it - a copy of windows2000 is meaningless for a business without also buying other server products on top of that, most of which cost more than the OS itself.
Something that I've been thinking over the last while, was how much 'efficiency' can we be getting out of computer systems. And in a society so driven by economics as ours, how long can innefficiencies be allowed to last? That being said, isn't microsoft cutting off its own ear to spite its face?
Lets put this into perspective. Lets look a bit at the large scale, macroscopic level, not the microcosm of what seems to be the short term benefits of person a vs. person b. but the long term scale of movements and currents of society. Computers are supposed to give us more efficient means of managing our information, and so in turn they are supposed to yield greater efficiency and productivity in organizations. That's the theory, most of us never bother to question it, but its still just a theory. Microsoft achieved its power, wealth and success because little billy g once had the good insight to see something of the potential computers would have as a consumeable item. This being said, it would be in the best interests of any computer company to enhance the efficiency that computers bring, because this not only means a good product for the company in terms of short term goals, but a long term advantage that the "ecological niche" of that company - ie. the overall position of computers in society - benefits that company.
Now if microsoft is working to make computers less productive, less efficient to the users of those computers, aren't they just working to deteriorate their own market? These forces need not even be in the computers themselves, but all the implementation and administrative costs associated with using the computers. The more they make it inefficient to use their own products - the more they will scare away their own business.
Well, go to it, is all I can say, if that's the case, I love to see M$ digging its own grave.
good point, but of course the key distinction is the ease of replication - nobody worries about enforcing chair ownership because chairs are not infinitely reproduceable the way that software is.
Perhaps someday in the future office workers will have the ability to pull exact duplicates of the chairs they've been sitting on out of their butts, then perhaps the chair manufacturers will license their chairs instead of selling them.
Yes, I didn't think you were defending the current system. I just like to point out that there are always alternatives. All to often when people say something like "well it's nobodies fault, the system just works that way, theirs nothing we can do about it", people just shrug their shoulders and seem to accept it. Naturally the flaw in this is that there are always things we can do about it, because it is ( in theory anyway ) us who make the laws.
I too am sick and tired of knee-jerk geek community responses. I should think that a community that prides itself on being so intelligent, a little more thorough thought would be given to matters before crying conspiracy. Although I am impressed that the responses to this article have largely been to point out the flaws with the attitude, and that the person in question here did not bother to defend his domains in the WIPO proceedures despite being asked to do so. He obviously cared less about these domains than the writer of the article blaiming WIPO.
As for the established vs. new trademarks situation, I think that the amount of legitimate copying of a given trademark that would arise would be proportionate to how established that trademark is. A new trademark is not likely to receive any fandom, because it hasn't been around long enough. In any case I don't think that this constitutes any real problem for the trademark.
Yes, but lets not forget that this is a symptom of a primarily screwed-up American system. Trademark law is not the same everywhere in the world, and it is primarily a symptom of American Trademark law that these kinds of situations arise. In Japan for instance, infringement upon a trademark by people for purposes or parody, fandom, or other purposes that do not in anyway attempt to subvert the use of the trademark from its role as a trademark don't risk the ownership of that trademark. in the US they do, so corporations are forced to act in a manner that seems to be big brotherish whether they want to or not.
The same goes for Disney attacking its own fans for producing fan art of mickey mouse. Why would any sane corporation want to attack its own customers for what amounts to praise? because they have to. Japanese cartoon companies are in no way in danger of losing ownership of their trademarked and copyrighted material by letting their fans create fan art - so the subculture grows and actually increases the profitability of the original work in question.
What surprises me is that american corporations haven't done anything of their own accord to change these trademark laws, seeing as the potential for increasing the recognition of their brands increases dramatically by allowing the public to create their own work referring to it.
Some experts "wonder" whether Intel...
Not that I'm saying that it isn't possible that Intel is doing this, but the fact that they suddenly submitted a bunch of patents hardly constitutes evidence. Not to mention the fact that the reporter hasn't even gotten anyone to go on the record to claim authorship of this pondering. So basically its all just suppositions. Certainly always possible, and knowing computer corp. strategies even likely, but shoddy journalism is still shoddy journalism.
Today my sky is a bluish-grey. Somedays it is a light blue, somedays it is almost white, some almost black. At certain times it can even go strongly red, orange and purple - I like it when it does that.
Well, speaking as someone who also used Linux before learning about GNU, and knowing others who did also, I find it hard to believe that anyone can use it for very long without realizing the significance of GNU in its development. After all you can't really get by without man pages, and you really can't read man pages without seeing the name GNU everywhere.
Yes, I agree there are people like that out there, but I find it hard to believe that they could possibly use Linux long without learning how wrong their initial misconceptions are. Unless they're clinically stupid. That's always another option =)
Yes, I'm very curious to see what happens at the point when online content, and by extension cultural content is truly produced proportionally to the consuming markets.
There are so many strange twists in the history of language that english may remain the "international" language regardless of what the actual %s of native speakers are. This could be likely because currently it is the second language of choice for people all over the world to speak, and the number of resources available in any country for learning english far outnumber any other non-native language. Throughout my travels I have often found that people for whom english is not native will use it to communicate when there is no other common language. ie. I have often heard French and German speakers communicating with each other in broken english, as it is a natural common ground.
Or one may see a natural drift towards learning the more dominant languages - being Chinese and Hindi variations.
Or, my own personal supposition, we may see the rise of several true english dialects. Despite the strong variations throughout the world of english speakers there aren't currently many true dialects of english. The few that do exist - I think of the Scottish dialect, the Creole of the Southern U.S. and the "Rastafarian" dialect of Jamaica - are not very largely used. The variations between U.S. english, U.K. english and those of Australia, N.Z. and Canada are not strong enough to qualify as dialects. However we may very likely see an emergence of true dialects, as the convenience of english as a common language mixes with the native languages of large markets to produce a mix optimized for ease of communication. 20 years from now will there be a Chinese-english and a Hindi-english that will be wide spread enough to be learned and studies as seperate languages in their own right?
Time will tell I guess, but its going to be very interesting.
Well slap me in an oven and call me a poppyseed bagel! if that don't just beat all.
I see what you mean, although it might not be actually a straight correspondance, there's probably a higher percentage who have / use computers and don't also have internet access. I know that in N.A. at this point it seems like having a computer and not having the internet is sort of a paradox, but even throughout most of europe, the internet is only just now starting to get the kind of attention it did in N.A. around '97. but I take your point.
I thought you were talking about something else originally.
LOL - that's a good one !
Yes, I think we can agree that english is the defacto "international" language. This of course has nothing to do with the number of people who speak it as a mother tongue, but because the last 200 years of world history has had english speaking countries as the most powerful. The brits built a big frigging empire that spread english bullies all over the place, and created footholds where the americans could start selling stuff as the brits declined in power. Currently the bulk of economic power in the world is in the hands of english speaking nations ( 4 out of the 7 G7 nations are dominantly english speaking ), and what with the incredibly persistent sales of cheap american media everywhere, its no wonder its so popular.
nobody's arguing that most of the world speaks english as a mother tongue, but everywhere in the world it is the #1 choice for a second language. I've realized this over the last few months as an english speaker in central europe.
But I think we can see that as the international economy continues to develop, this power is going to shift dramatically. After all, one must cater to the consumer, which has currently been mostly english speakers who had the means to be serious consumers. But currently Chinese and Indian languages are the most popular. As these people become more and more able to buy the products that the corps. want to sell, you'll see more and more a shift towards them as the consumer of choice. As more and more of them get cable tv and internet access, you'll see more and more content appearing in Chinese and Sanskrit.
Just a little prediction of my own, and good help the environment when 2 billion ppl are all clammoring for nikes and big macs.
what's the matter with you? I use SQL in daily speach all the time. After all, english is a dynamic language ; )
very interesting figures, although I notice they've completely left out Indian languages.
considering that after China, India is the next largest populated country in the world, I would think that this would be an important language group to keep track of. Unless they've made the stupid mistake of putting Indian internet users into the english category because the official language of the country is English. That would seriously tilt the figures of the whole report the wrong way, because almost no Indians speak English as a mother tongue, and English is the official language of the government in order to have some semblance of national order in government.
dough head!
look at the figures - if 50.4% of the internet users are non-English speakers it means they must have access to a computer! duh !
UK meaning of "fag" : cigarette
US meaning of "fag" : homosexual
not the sort of mistake you want to make in new york to ask someone:
"can I bum a fag off of you?"
Try being a canadian trying to install a canadian dictionary on a word processor ( not going to name names here *cough* MSWORD *cough*, excuse me ), only to discover that despite the fact that they give very clear instructions on how to install and set up the dictionary as default - the changes refuse to take.
Anyone get the feeling that this particular game reporter is a bit isolated in his ivory tower of gaming excellence. Since when has a 700Mhz machine been low-end??
Perhaps if I had a company buying me a new system everytime a new processor came out I'd feel the same way, but I have to work for a living here. Geesh.
Speaking from a long experience of playing UT, Q3 and counterstrike on a 300Mhz celeron with only a voodoo1, and regularly coming out in the top 3 or 5 at the end of a match, I can testify that you don't need fast hardware to be good.
yes, I know - I don't mind looking silly =)
ya, as for wanting some glory for GNU, I can see where he's coming from, but on the other hand, I can also see that this is childish next to the need for greater openness.
Yes, when you work really hard at something that is a great benefit to others its nice to get some praise, and I think GNU really deserves it. But its another thing to sacrifice your principles in order to acquire such praise.
After all, where would Linux be today if it weren't for the foundational work GNU has done, essentially providing the fundamental guts that makes the current explosion of free and open source software possible. Anybody who's used any version of linux, and most versions of unix is well acquainted with GNU, and I'm sure thinks highly of it. What greater reward is there than that of making a lasting impression upon people?
As for the ideal society - well everybody's got their own definitions. My definition happens to be where everybody gives up on having the "right" answer, and simply agrees that one can live by whatever method one chooses to, so long as you don't mess with anyone elses way of doing things. This is very much along the lines of a GPLesque philosophy, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that the GPL is the constitution of utopia or anything like that. Unfortunately I think that most institutions today ( and I include the very concepts of nation-states here ) are simply too large and slow to serve well under the current social situation.
true enough - I actually did a little looking into this, and found quite a few ppl using this Jefferson quote, so you're probably right about that. especially considering they were pretty similar thinkers in a close group etc.
actually I like the Jefferson version better, because it has the sense that not only does the society not deserve both - it is an inevitable consequence of the dynamics of society that such a deprevation of liberty will yield no benefits in terms of security.
do you really get a lot of these? sorry =)
just one note - I noticed you're using the same quote as me ( or almost the same ) - but It's a Benjamin Franklin quote, not Thomas Jefferson. See: Bartlett's Familiar Quotations - Benjamin Franklin
in a world where everybody's going to have a computer in their own home, everybody needs to have access to these tools to maintain home security. Unless the thought police need secret doors into your personal stuff, then they have a "legitimate" reason to access your machine, and a "legitimate" reason to limit the access to those tools to people who bear their seal of approval.
There are millions of good reasons why,
most of them are green with the faces of dead presidents on them. If you need a license that means you need to be educated at an institution approved to do such licensing, which means a nice tidy way to restrict knowledge to those with the $$ to buy it.
does microsoft certification ring any bells here?
complexity + ignorance = fear
therefore the most effective way to decrease fear is to? everybody together now...
DECREASE IGNORANCE. NOT RAISE IGNORANCE.
this treaty has a strong resemblance to
"if we make it so that nobody can see the complexity of computers, maybe the complexity will just go away."
since when has knowledge been a bad thing?