I'd do it myself (currently having mod points) but the following comment seems more important:
The typical Microsoft EULA is more complicated than the GPL, and contains a lot more points that seem designed to screw the customer over. So Microsoft is at least the pot calling the kettle black;-)
In general, not supporting a 5% market segment because it would cost too much development effort may be a reasonable decision.
In this case, the real WTF was submitting the product in a bid for the vendor of said 5% market segment. And simply throwing an error if Opera is detected. That's like opening a business in a black neighborhood and putting up a sign that says "Niggers not allowed";-)
You can't give a definite "yes" or "no" - and any rational person would agree with that, including all atheists that I know; but you can certainly derive probabilities from your observations. And, for practical purposes, if, according to observations, that there is no god(s) with 99.999% likelihood, you might just as well say that there are none.
That approach may work for those religions who claim divine intervention in human affairs, maybe even with specific dates and places. In those cases, it may even be possible to disprove the miracles they believe in.
But one can always claim that God is a very hands-off being who once set the universe in motion and is content to watch how life develops, without day-to-day interference in people's life (compare deism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism ). Try disproving that, and you will find that such a belief offers very few points to attack it;-)
For the record, I grew up in a religion of the former type, but eventually dumped it because their theories were too absurd. But that does not mean I consider all forms of religion refuted.
He treats the arbitrary as on a par with the rational and evidentially supported.
Because there is no evidence that actually disproves the existence of God. Neither is there proof God exists. In the absence of certain knowledge, leaving the question "does God exist?" unanswered is actually the most rational position. Insisting on a yes or no is for small minds who cannot live with uncertainty;-)
MS wasn't going to be spending big bucks buying out anybody's startup for a couple of years - so if you'd spent two years in your garage hoping to become the next Hotmail, suddenly you were Toast, and that VC who'd been offering you Round B funding wasn't calling you any more.
If your business model depends on being bought out, you're at least taking an extreme risk. Less charitable people might say you are crazy. I think a business plan should aim to earn at least enough money to pay the bills. If $MEGACORP then offers you crazy money for your startup, fine. But don't rely on that;-)
2. It could fill a not-yet-filled void: There is a very good chance Chrome will end up dominating netbook Linux the way Android is on the way to dominating handset Linux. Android is a really nice system, and deserves to win versus most other mobile Linux alternatives. Android is accelerating the use of Linux in handsets. Chrome might be that much better than other netbook Linuxes that it, too, ends up dominating and expanding it's market segment.
It will certainly be interesting to see how Google approaches that goal.
If they do it by making the desktop environment lightweight yet capable of supporting most (if not all) Linux apps, I can see more people using it. After all, the kernel runs on a few megabytes, it's Gnome or KDE that are eating memory like popcorn. I, for one, would like having a relatively simple GUI like in Windows 2000 that saves memory to boot;-)
Considering legal liabilities, if Google can demonstrate (for instance) losing half of their income to intentional sabotage by Microsoft, Google might be able to get compensation in court. Lets look at the numbers: According to http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312509101727/d10q.htm#tx81455_4, Google had a total revenue of $ 5,508,990 (5.5 billion) in Q1 2009. If Microsoft had to reimburse them for half of that each quarter, it would hurt.
Also, Microsoft got away with a lot over the years but blocking their customers' favorite search engine might be too much. As in, reason enough to trigger a big wave of Apple and Linux migrations.
Finally, it would be a good reason for the DOJ to start a new round of anti-trust legislation. Last time, Microsoft got off easy because the DOJ under Bush was no longer interested in harsh penalties. But they cannot be sure of getting that kind of rescue again.
If one or even two of them implode, it won't be the end of the software world. There are plenty of other corporations who will take up the slack.
This said, I don't think Google is in danger here. Their profits rely mainly on advertising revenue which is not threatened by the release of more free software. Microsoft has a bit more to lose here, but if a quite user-friendly distribution like Ubuntu cannot make a large dent in Microsoft's market share, it is not that likely either that a Google OS will kill Windows.
Sounds familiar. In 1997 I took a course in system administration, and one of the other students there told me a similar anecdote: If you believe that guy, a few years ago, DEC had fired a bunch of experienced big iron programmers (albeit with nice severance packages). Later they found that their newly hired developers were good on PCs but had not much knowledge about mainframes. DEC ended up hiring the old guys back as consultants;-)
The typical patent troll is a (usually small) company that does not produce the product itself, but only tries to cash in on the patent. So the patent troll does not violate the defensive patent, and suing them back becomes useless.
Where it works is among companies that actually produce the product in question. Which often ends up in cross-licensing as you correctly observed, and in that context patents might as well not exist at all.
ReactOS trying to build everything from scratch is probably the main reason that they are behind WINE: The ReactOS team still has to develop a lot of things where WINE can already rely on mature Linux systems. If you read the latest ReactOS newsletter, you find things like
Sound Regression
Ever so briefly, ReactOS had some minimal sound support, only to have it disappear due to a bug in the object manager.
Of course, in theory ReactOS has the better long term perspective for compatibility because it does not need to make compromises for supporting Linux drivers and applications. I just wonder if the ReactOS team can ever overtake WINE considering the extra workload.
I agree, and from a purely financial point of view the calculation is actually easy:
If you used to resell your games after a few weeks at half price (just an example), you would get to play them "effectively" at half of the first sale price for a while. Adjust this number for your actual buying and selling habits.
Enter activation, and lets make the worst case assumption that your console will break someday and the games won't run on the replacement console/next model. Now you also get to play the games "for a while", but at full first sale price.
Consequence: If you as user don't want to pay more for your games, you'll have to switch to buying only older games that are no longer in the full price category. This also means that the publisher makes the sale half a year (or more) later. I wonder how the industry will like it if people do that;-)
http://www.winehq.org/ While it does not run everything, it is always worth a try. Probably more capable at this point than ReactOS (although I have not tried ReactOS myself).
If you have a "refueling station" where you can swap the battery for a full one, fine. But TFA explicitly talks about taking the battery to your apartment for charging. And since we're talking about a battery pack to drive a vehicle (not just start the internal combustion engine), the battery will be a LOT bigger and heavier than a traditional car battery. Even with modern battery technology (some Li-ion variant) I guess the battery will be at least a 100 kg (about 220 pounds) part.
I doubt their ability to build the car, considering that they obviously don't understand the difference between power and energy. From the table in TFA:
-"Available power" given in kWh
-and three rows below a "hybrid power" for the Volt that is completely meaningless, considering that the Volt drives on electric motors and only uses the petrol engine for recharging.
Unless David Mantey, Editor, PD&D has cooked up this drivel on his own. In that case I apologize to the XP Vehicles Inc. crew and David Mantey may considered himself bashed;-)
It is frequently speculated that the OEMS get paid more for the adware than the Windows license costs them. So they can actually offer the PC with crapware cheaper.
For those with decent computer skills this means buying the PC as it is and reformatting the disk. Of course, when we are talking desktops some of us have very specific ideas of which components they want. In that case, build from components.:-)
That's not so different from the Chevrolet Volt: The main diference is that the Volt has a larger battery and an additional wall charger, so you can drive short distances entirely on battery.
The comparison to the Prius III will be interesting;-)
Assuming the transcoder kept things like variable names, I guess the Java code will be more or less as (un)readable as the original. Maybe a bit worse because of "objectification" overhead without real gain in structure.
So they saved a lot of grunt work (translating to Java without changing the functionality), but there is still a lot to do. As in, reworking the old code to take proper advantage of object orientation.
And any investor who still buys from them after this deserves to be ripped off. Personally, I would demand a really convincing public demonstration before I take Steorn seriously again. Along the lines of 1) (Optically) transparent design so I can see there are no batteries hidden inside. 2) Permanent output of energy that is used up by an external load. Like driving a bicycle dynamo with an incandescent bulb attached. And I want to see it glowing! 3) the opportunity to watch it for a while, and see if it does wind down somehow over time.
Back in 1997, Category 5 cable for 100 Mbit was already well established in the market. If your company was installing 10 Mbit wires they probably didn't do the customers any favors. Note that the hubs and switches are a different thing, because you can upgrade those cheaper than the wires in the walls.
Don't forget the cost of re-testing critical applications on the new version, and maybe reworking those if Microsoft borked the backwards compatibility.
In some fields it is not even your choice: My last job was with a company that makes computer-controlled medical devices that run on Windows. The system as a whole was validated with a certain version of Windows, and an upgrade to a new Windows version would require a new validation process. Talk about lots of paperwork. Now do that every 18-24 months because your OS vendor feels like pushing a new version;-)
Of course it is debatable where the bandwidth cap should be, depending in the infrastructure maybe 100GB/month are actually reasonable.
But GP's point was that BT should stop whining and bill people for what they actually use. If you need more bandwidth, get a plan with a higher cap. Problem solved. I fully agree with him.
If you need the capacity but not the off road capability (which not all SUVs have anyway) the alternative is a large station wagon. My sister, for example, bought a 2008 VW Passat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VW_Passat), with the 103kW diesel engine and four wheel drive. That car is quite roomy, and in most cases the "few hundred pound of gear" would fit into the cargo space. It also can pull a two ton (about 4400 pound) trailer, which was the reason for choosing that model. Fuel consumption according to EU cycle is 6.1 liters diesel per 100km. That would be about 47 mpg, neglecting the differences between US and EU testing cycle.
I think more publicly funded research should go under similar public access policies, and the FDA should also get serious. But that alone won't be sufficient, the patents based on publicly funded research also need to be secured for the public. Otherwise you will see well documented innovations but some private corporation will have the patents.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd do it myself (currently having mod points) but the following comment seems more important:
The typical Microsoft EULA is more complicated than the GPL, and contains a lot more points that seem designed to screw the customer over. So Microsoft is at least the pot calling the kettle black ;-)
In general, not supporting a 5% market segment because it would cost too much development effort may be a reasonable decision.
In this case, the real WTF was submitting the product in a bid for the vendor of said 5% market segment. And simply throwing an error if Opera is detected. That's like opening a business in a black neighborhood and putting up a sign that says "Niggers not allowed" ;-)
You can't give a definite "yes" or "no" - and any rational person would agree with that, including all atheists that I know; but you can certainly derive probabilities from your observations. And, for practical purposes, if, according to observations, that there is no god(s) with 99.999% likelihood, you might just as well say that there are none.
That approach may work for those religions who claim divine intervention in human affairs, maybe even with specific dates and places. In those cases, it may even be possible to disprove the miracles they believe in.
But one can always claim that God is a very hands-off being who once set the universe in motion and is content to watch how life develops, without day-to-day interference in people's life (compare deism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism ). ;-)
Try disproving that, and you will find that such a belief offers very few points to attack it
For the record, I grew up in a religion of the former type, but eventually dumped it because their theories were too absurd. But that does not mean I consider all forms of religion refuted.
Leonard Peikoff erred when he wrote
He treats the arbitrary as on a par with the rational and evidentially supported.
Because there is no evidence that actually disproves the existence of God. Neither is there proof God exists. ;-)
In the absence of certain knowledge, leaving the question "does God exist?" unanswered is actually the most rational position. Insisting on a yes or no is for small minds who cannot live with uncertainty
MS wasn't going to be spending big bucks buying out anybody's startup for a couple of years - so if you'd spent two years in your garage hoping to become the next Hotmail, suddenly you were Toast, and that VC who'd been offering you Round B funding wasn't calling you any more.
If your business model depends on being bought out, you're at least taking an extreme risk. Less charitable people might say you are crazy. ;-)
I think a business plan should aim to earn at least enough money to pay the bills. If $MEGACORP then offers you crazy money for your startup, fine. But don't rely on that
2. It could fill a not-yet-filled void: There is a very good chance Chrome will end up dominating netbook Linux the way Android is on the way to dominating handset Linux. Android is a really nice system, and deserves to win versus most other mobile Linux alternatives. Android is accelerating the use of Linux in handsets. Chrome might be that much better than other netbook Linuxes that it, too, ends up dominating and expanding it's market segment.
It will certainly be interesting to see how Google approaches that goal.
If they do it by making the desktop environment lightweight yet capable of supporting most (if not all) Linux apps, I can see more people using it. After all, the kernel runs on a few megabytes, it's Gnome or KDE that are eating memory like popcorn. ;-)
I, for one, would like having a relatively simple GUI like in Windows 2000 that saves memory to boot
Considering legal liabilities, if Google can demonstrate (for instance) losing half of their income to intentional sabotage by Microsoft, Google might be able to get compensation in court. Lets look at the numbers:
According to http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312509101727/d10q.htm#tx81455_4, Google had a total revenue of $ 5,508,990 (5.5 billion) in Q1 2009. If Microsoft had to reimburse them for half of that each quarter, it would hurt.
Also, Microsoft got away with a lot over the years but blocking their customers' favorite search engine might be too much. As in, reason enough to trigger a big wave of Apple and Linux migrations.
Finally, it would be a good reason for the DOJ to start a new round of anti-trust legislation. Last time, Microsoft got off easy because the DOJ under Bush was no longer interested in harsh penalties. But they cannot be sure of getting that kind of rescue again.
If one or even two of them implode, it won't be the end of the software world. There are plenty of other corporations who will take up the slack.
This said, I don't think Google is in danger here. Their profits rely mainly on advertising revenue which is not threatened by the release of more free software.
Microsoft has a bit more to lose here, but if a quite user-friendly distribution like Ubuntu cannot make a large dent in Microsoft's market share, it is not that likely either that a Google OS will kill Windows.
Sounds familiar. In 1997 I took a course in system administration, and one of the other students there told me a similar anecdote: ;-)
If you believe that guy, a few years ago, DEC had fired a bunch of experienced big iron programmers (albeit with nice severance packages). Later they found that their newly hired developers were good on PCs but had not much knowledge about mainframes. DEC ended up hiring the old guys back as consultants
The typical patent troll is a (usually small) company that does not produce the product itself, but only tries to cash in on the patent. So the patent troll does not violate the defensive patent, and suing them back becomes useless.
Where it works is among companies that actually produce the product in question. Which often ends up in cross-licensing as you correctly observed, and in that context patents might as well not exist at all.
In that case, selling was not the problem. Building enough to meet demand was ;-)
ReactOS trying to build everything from scratch is probably the main reason that they are behind WINE:
The ReactOS team still has to develop a lot of things where WINE can already rely on mature Linux systems. If you read the latest ReactOS newsletter, you find things like
Sound Regression
Ever so briefly, ReactOS had some minimal sound support, only to have it disappear due to a bug in the object manager.
Of course, in theory ReactOS has the better long term perspective for compatibility because it does not need to make compromises for supporting Linux drivers and applications. I just wonder if the ReactOS team can ever overtake WINE considering the extra workload.
I agree, and from a purely financial point of view the calculation is actually easy:
If you used to resell your games after a few weeks at half price (just an example), you would get to play them "effectively" at half of the first sale price for a while. Adjust this number for your actual buying and selling habits.
Enter activation, and lets make the worst case assumption that your console will break someday and the games won't run on the replacement console/next model. Now you also get to play the games "for a while", but at full first sale price.
Consequence: ;-)
If you as user don't want to pay more for your games, you'll have to switch to buying only older games that are no longer in the full price category. This also means that the publisher makes the sale half a year (or more) later.
I wonder how the industry will like it if people do that
http://www.winehq.org/ While it does not run everything, it is always worth a try. Probably more capable at this point than ReactOS (although I have not tried ReactOS myself).
If you have a "refueling station" where you can swap the battery for a full one, fine.
But TFA explicitly talks about taking the battery to your apartment for charging. And since we're talking about a battery pack to drive a vehicle (not just start the internal combustion engine), the battery will be a LOT bigger and heavier than a traditional car battery.
Even with modern battery technology (some Li-ion variant) I guess the battery will be at least a 100 kg (about 220 pounds) part.
I doubt their ability to build the car, considering that they obviously don't understand the difference between power and energy. From the table in TFA:
-"Available power" given in kWh
-and three rows below a "hybrid power" for the Volt that is completely meaningless, considering that the Volt drives on electric motors and only uses the petrol engine for recharging.
Unless David Mantey, Editor, PD&D has cooked up this drivel on his own. In that case I apologize to the XP Vehicles Inc. crew and David Mantey may considered himself bashed ;-)
It is frequently speculated that the OEMS get paid more for the adware than the Windows license costs them. So they can actually offer the PC with crapware cheaper.
For those with decent computer skills this means buying the PC as it is and reformatting the disk. Of course, when we are talking desktops some of us have very specific ideas of which components they want. In that case, build from components. :-)
That's not so different from the Chevrolet Volt:
The main diference is that the Volt has a larger battery and an additional wall charger, so you can drive short distances entirely on battery.
The comparison to the Prius III will be interesting ;-)
Assuming the transcoder kept things like variable names, I guess the Java code will be more or less as (un)readable as the original. Maybe a bit worse because of "objectification" overhead without real gain in structure.
So they saved a lot of grunt work (translating to Java without changing the functionality), but there is still a lot to do. As in, reworking the old code to take proper advantage of object orientation.
And any investor who still buys from them after this deserves to be ripped off.
Personally, I would demand a really convincing public demonstration before I take Steorn seriously again. Along the lines of
1) (Optically) transparent design so I can see there are no batteries hidden inside.
2) Permanent output of energy that is used up by an external load. Like driving a bicycle dynamo with an incandescent bulb attached. And I want to see it glowing!
3) the opportunity to watch it for a while, and see if it does wind down somehow over time.
Back in 1997, Category 5 cable for 100 Mbit was already well established in the market. If your company was installing 10 Mbit wires they probably didn't do the customers any favors.
Note that the hubs and switches are a different thing, because you can upgrade those cheaper than the wires in the walls.
Don't forget the cost of re-testing critical applications on the new version, and maybe reworking those if Microsoft borked the backwards compatibility.
In some fields it is not even your choice: ;-)
My last job was with a company that makes computer-controlled medical devices that run on Windows. The system as a whole was validated with a certain version of Windows, and an upgrade to a new Windows version would require a new validation process. Talk about lots of paperwork. Now do that every 18-24 months because your OS vendor feels like pushing a new version
Of course it is debatable where the bandwidth cap should be, depending in the infrastructure maybe 100GB/month are actually reasonable.
But GP's point was that BT should stop whining and bill people for what they actually use. If you need more bandwidth, get a plan with a higher cap. Problem solved. I fully agree with him.
If you need the capacity but not the off road capability (which not all SUVs have anyway) the alternative is a large station wagon.
My sister, for example, bought a 2008 VW Passat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VW_Passat), with the 103kW diesel engine and four wheel drive. That car is quite roomy, and in most cases the "few hundred pound of gear" would fit into the cargo space. It also can pull a two ton (about 4400 pound) trailer, which was the reason for choosing that model. Fuel consumption according to EU cycle is 6.1 liters diesel per 100km. That would be about 47 mpg, neglecting the differences between US and EU testing cycle.
I think more publicly funded research should go under similar public access policies, and the FDA should also get serious.
But that alone won't be sufficient, the patents based on publicly funded research also need to be secured for the public. Otherwise you will see well documented innovations but some private corporation will have the patents.