"IF YOU DON'T WANT TO PAY FOR THE MUSIC, DON'T LISTEN TO IT"
I'll start paying for songs when record companies stop forcing me to buy a lot of songs I don't want for each song that I do want. It's that simple. The same goes for the practice of making you pay for songs twice (i.e. if I want song "a" on CD1 and song "b" on CD2, but song "C" is on both.. many "collection" CD's are made this way - mix old songs with new songs.)
P.S. I do have a legal CD collection of around a dozen CD's, but it is limited to a small number of artists for which I like nearly all of the songs.
Re:Do we understand the implications?
on
Microsoft Loses
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· Score: 1
"Netscape would have died a slow and ugly death anyway, with or without Microsoft's help. Let's face it, their browser sucks. It crashes way too much"
Of course, this is only looking at what did happen to Netscape under the circumstances of what MS did to them. To be fair to Netscape, Microsoft demolished their market the day they started distributing IE for "free" (up until that very day, Netscapes market share was still growing, and in fact it continued to grow for some months afterwards - they were most certainly not dying). It becomes exceedingly difficult to pay a decent team of programmers to work on a program and improve and stabilise it when the competition is giving the product away. If you can't even pay for a decent development team, then of course your program is going to be crashy.
That is precisely the whole point of the Microsoft trial: that Netscape was pushed out of the market by unfair tactics. We cannot possibly know now how successful Netscape might have been, or how stable their products may have become. You can't make assumptions based on what happened after Microsoft broke the law, to be fair, you would have to do an analysis of what might have happened if MS did not break the law.
"Believe it or not, a great deal of the expansion of the U.S. economy over the past 15 years can be attributed to Microsoft"
The computer industry would have grown explosively with or without Microsoft. He might try have you believe it, but Bill Gates was not the only person back in the early days of the PC who realized that this was "the next growth market" and that there was a helluva lot of money to be made.
The growth in IT would have been there no matter what, since it was driven by market forces. Microsoft has done absolutely nothing "special" that could not have been done by other companies, and quite possibly done better.
Increased competition in the IT industry in the various sectors where MS has essentially a monopoly (MS Office, MS Windows etc) can only be better for the US economy (and thus the stock market) in the long run.
Over the short term, though, there will probably be one or two years disruption to the IT industry. However, once that is sorted out, it will seem like nothing when compared to the 5 to 15 years that MS has arguably held back computing. (If you disagree with that, just consider (arbitrary example, there are many more) that 386 protected mode came out around 1985, and only one major OS in the world still doesn't use it properly.)
Option 1, the guy is under extreme psychosis and actually believes the tripe.
Option 2, the guy is a typical evangelist attempting to gain power and money by starting a cult by suckering gullible low-IQ poorly educated people.
Option 3, the website is merely a parody of other major religions, such as christianity (e.g. he may be parodying behaviour of many christian churches that strive to keep its people uneducated and ignorant, to maintain power/money.)
Option 4, the guy has reached a wisdom plateau above that of God, and we are all STUPID AND IGNORANT FROM BRAINWASHING FROM EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS.
If a copyright license such as the GPL can be held revokable simply because rights were not explicitly signed over, why should software EULA's be treated differently? (i.e. why is "click here to accept the terms of the license agreement") different?
We will live with the decisions made about this case for a very long time
It might not always be a speedy process, but the law does, in general, appear to be self-correcting. Over the past century or so the law has shown itself to adapt to capitalist behaviours that harm consumers, and it will continue to do so in the future. If it seems, in another 10 to 20 years, that the law no longer applies very well and has become damaging to consumers, you can be sure it will eventually be changed. So I wouldn't despair too much.
I for one would rather see the majority of MS's API's and file formats die. DirectX (for example) is without a doubt the most badly designed confusing obfuscated overcomplicated mess of an API that I have ever seen in my life. While there is a need for standard API's and fileformats for various things, Microsoft's "solutions" are the last ones I would opt for. Rather create better standard formats.
Hmm... is there actually an open standard for a word processing file format? It seems to me that there is most certainly a need for one.
"You may think he harmed software development, but that again is a personal opinion of yours"
Maybe so, but it is exactly what Judge Jackson's pending ruling will boil down to. Once the ruling is made, it is no longer just "somebody's own opinion". If the law means anything at all, it becomes a "fact" (as decided by the US justice system, appeals notwithstanding.)
"More specifically, what hardware drivers, APIs and libraries need to be improved to make Linux a better gaming platform than that other OS?"
There are quite a number of API's out there that have Linux support (clanlib, SDL, GGI to name a few.) Most of them are pretty good, but my personal feeling is that SDL is the way to go. Its a nice clean design, there is a version 1.0, and its already very cross-platform. It definitely has the potential to become a cross-platform equivalent of Microsofts DirectX. Version 1.0 doesn't have 3D, but version 1.5 (which is in development) will support OpenGL.
OpenGL is definitely the right choice of 3D API. However, Direct3D is showing signs of seriously overtaking Direct3D in terms of functionality, so we should not complacently accept that OpenGL has "won". Some entity/organization needs to take OpenGL "by the balls" and seriously work on a decent OpenGL version 2.00, with most 1.2 extensions wrapped up into the API, and API access to new functionality (hardware bumpmapping, texture compression, maybe access to texture/surface memory buffers for dynamic/procedural textures.) As far as I can tell, SGI isn't making any real effort to do this. Someone needs to take OpenGL and update it to tackle Direct3D head-on.
The other thing that needs to happen with OpenGL on Linux is that there needs to be a standard driver interface for graphics card vendors to write drivers.
So to sum it up, in my opinion, "only" three things need to happen:
The Linux community should stop quibbling over the hundreds of unfinished gaming API's (and stop creating more), and just pick one and make it as good as they can make it. No API is ever perfect, and those programmers who feel that they simply have to create their own one because "this one lacks that" or "that one lacks this" should just get over it. Rather contribute to making future versions of an existing API (like SDL) better. Pick one and standardize!
Someone needs to come to the realization that OpenGL is going to lose its lead in the 3D API market if it is further allowed to stagnate.
Graphics card vendors must be able to create standardized drivers for acceleration.
That should take care of the technical side of things... hmm..
I'm afraid that from my vantage point in South Africa, considering this latest nonsense from Clinton, and considering the DMCA, and UCITA (etc etc etc), one can't help but get the impression that the American people currently have no control over their goverment.
Most of the movies and TV shows that arrive here from the US completely reek of pro-USA brainwashing propaganda, so I wouldn't be surprised if the majority "mainstream" culture is to "be a couch potato while the government does whatever they want". However, it is clear that a small (more intelligent) minority is more wary of what the government is doing. Somehow the public should have more power over policy making.. the infrastructure of the government should be modified such that it simply does not allow a tiny handful of power-hungry individuals to control the lives and freedom of some 250-million people.
I wonder if this would work on people who are already key software developers in the OpenSource community, as an arbitrary example, offering someone like Alexandre Julliard (of Wine fame) to quit his job, work for a somewhat lower wage, and work full-time on Wine.
I'm not sure I'd want to do that though if it were me. I happen to enjoy my paying job, I don't think I'd want to quit it.
I've noticed in the past MS has announced and advertised a number of things as being available in their latest OS offerings, that were never heard of again, or seen. Whenever any new MS OS hits the markets, rumours and myths tend to run wild about the wonderful amazing things this OS is doing (things like "Windows 98 moves your most commonly used program files to the sectors closest to the center of your hard disk for quicker loading" and "Windows 98 has better crash recovery" (haha) and a variety of other zany claims.)
Anyway, despite the commotion around SIS on/. , and despite the horrible marketing trash about this new "feature", has anyone actually found where you can enable or disable this in Win2K? Has anyone actually seen evidence of this automated symlink daemon in action?
In Win2K an application has a choice of using the system dlls, which are protected and can't be written over except by a service pack, or it's own private version of a DLL. So if your app requires a specific version of msvcrt.dll, you can install it in the application directory and it will use that copy instead of the system copy
Windows has always done this, from Win95 is as far back as I can remember. As developers we've encountered the dreaded MFC42.DLL(and family) incompatibility problems, and in some cases we "solved" this by dumping the DLL's in the app directory.
My typical compile times for stuff I work on is not on the speed extremes. The time I spend waiting for compiles is too short to do anything useful in (unless I do a rebuild all, which doesn't happen too often.. even so thats normally in the order of maybe 10 minutes), but long enough to hurt productivity.
You might argue, as you did, that with shorted compile times you compile more often, "trying stuff out". True.. but I moved from development on a Celeron333 to a PentiumIII450, and I could feel a noticeable productivity boost, both from faster compile times, and from the applications we develop loading faster (and especially, as is the case with developing on Win98, REBOOTING FASTER!!!:/ ).
Similarly, I also have both the MS compilers installed as well as the Intel C++ compilers installed. Intel compilers produce faster code, but take on average maybe 3 times longer to compile. I only use the Intel compiler when doing optimizing.. the slower compiles impact way too much on productivity.
I'm with you on the compile-time thing, nothing seems to compile fast enough.
But there are also plenty of consumer-market applications that we are "still waiting for", such as speech recognition and AI software that will make computers a cinch for the public to use one day in the future, when they'll just be able to talk to their computers. (I emphasize the "still waiting for" because a certain company has been making a lot of noise publicly for the past 3 or 4 years about how much work its research department has been doing on speech recognition, but magically haven't come up with a single product.. I am assuming that either it is because there is no real competition in specific field, or it is because current CPU's are still too slow (I remember doing some speech rec stuff back on my pentium120) or it is because software hasn't quite caught up with the concept.. or maybe its a combination of all of these..)
03/04/2004 - Intel today announced that the PentiumXII will now be available at 40GHz.
Many consumers are looking at the price and asking "whats the point?" Many users feel that their computers run their voice recognition software, video-phone software, neural-net/genetic algorithm AI agent software, applications just fine at around 35 GHz. Apparently these vision-less users see computer software as something that has already reached its peak, that there are no more useful applications that can be developed that will make use of this extra speed, thus making computers more useful.
Personally I think computers can never be fast enough. There are still hundreds of potentially useful applications to be developed for which todays computers (and network bandwidth:/) are hopelessly too slow.
.. to appear as if they are an innovative company, for the antitrust trial and in the eye of the public. How many times did they use the word "innovate" in this article? Its nothing but a fluffed up marketing FUD piece packed with lies. Its just self-appraising repetition of "This innovation that we've personally innovated here at the innovative Microsoft Research department shows once again how innovative our companies many innovations continue to be (innovate innovate innovate). Innovate innovate.. blah blah.. innovate.."
And this paragraph: The result is a feature that frees up as much as 80 to 90 percent of the space on a server, allowing users to store as much as five to 10 times the information as they could before. "The bottom line is that it saves the administrator time, which is why it's part of Zero Administration for Windows," Bolosky said. "It's designed to ease the lives of the technical support staff."
Is that supposed to be some sort of spontaneous testimonial? It sounds more phoney than the phoney testimonials in mail order catalogs. And I would bet my car on testing their implication that they are going to save 80 to 90% of disk space like that (and without any OS overhead at all, ha!). Even if this thing is a much fancier version of the ancient symlink (eg automatic detection of clusters of data that are the same) you still end up with nothing more than an overblown Stacker, with maybe 20 to 40 % compression if you're really lucky.
In spite of the fact that they spend the whopping sum of 5 Billion US$ a year on research, the best they've managed to do is repackage various ideas as their own, tout that they've "assisted with IPv6", and of course they came up with a dancing paperclip. You have to be pretty damn un-innovative to manage to throw away $5000000000 like that.
I've worked with enough MS crap (for my work) now to know that this is clearly not the case. Many MS products do not work with each other at all (For example I tried installing Visual Studio service pack 3 onto Visual Studio with the Windows CE Toolkit installed, and it popped up a message box which stated very explicitly something like "This product conflicts with the Windows CE Toolkit and cannot be installed" - bam, you can either have the CE toolkit, or you can have the bugfixes, but not both.) There are literally hundreds more examples of this sort of braindamaged crap pouring out of Redmond every day. Moreover, much of what they design, if not incompatible, is just plain "broken". For example the ActiveSync program for communicating with CE devices makes incredibly ludicrous assumptions such as that you are only ever going to want to connect one CE device to your computer at one time. Whoever decided that in the software design phase, I can only imagine, was on crack. The documentation for the CE toolkit quite literally does not correspond at all to the actual API distributed with the product either. Of course, the CE emulator only works on NT as well. NT only understands NTFS. Windows98 only understands FAT32. The upshot of all this is that I have to have two development hard disks, one with NT for CE and one with 98 for the other stuff i do (I can't use Win2000 because nvidias directx drivers for tnt2 aren't quite ready yet) and literally plug in a different hard disk depending on what I have to work on.
I could probably write several pages here for each piece of MS software I've ever used (SourceSafe, NT, Windows2000, Windows 98, Visual C++ to name a few) but I'm sure most of you know the drill.
This whole Amazon one-click patent schpiel has probably quadrupled the amount of press coverage of Amazon. I'm sure their sales are through the roof. No wonder they applied for some more over-broard obvious patents. Its no doubt cheaper than advertising. All the mass-market consumer droids will ever be able to remember a few weeks from now is that there was "something in the media about Amazon a few weeks ago, wasn't there?.. say, lets go buy some stuff from them". Most people couldn't care less about the moral issues behind the patents, or the potentially harmful longterm effects. It's too much effort for them to actually think.
It does depend on your motives, i.e. do you want to invest capital to make money back, or do you just want to generously support opensource?
*If* I had vast resources of money to burn, I would definitely hire a small team of programmers to work on a few opensource projects that I think are worthwhile. This is, of course, scalable. If you don't have all that much money, you can only afford one or two programmers.
Naturally this would be totally altruistic, philanthropic, non-profit, Mother Teresa, 'throw your money down the drain' behaviour (unless you want to take a big chance and try do a "RedHat".)
Optionally you could try create and actually sell an OpenSource product, tricky as that may be. But that would be like trying to start a business around OpenSource, which doesn't sound like what you want to do.
Another option might be to try some sort of education scheme. For example, you could buy Linux (or FreeBSD or whatever) CD's/PC's and donate them to schools, etc. Of course, these things normally require maintenance, which normally requires someone who already knows what they are doing, so that makes it difficult for some organizations to get off the ground. (In my experience these things fizzle out if there isn't anyone with Linux knowledge around to keep these things up n running.)
You could also market, ie, order (and dish out) lots of OpenSource paraphernalia (T shirts, mugs etc)
I forgot to include the usual standard disclaimers that apply.
CutNPaste Standard Disclaimer: My preceding arguments were what is known as a "generalisation" and were not meant to be taken as applying to every single member of the group of people identified but rather just the majority of them.
Naturally this was already obvious to most people, most people are smart enough to figure it out, but I forgot about the small percentage people who need disclaimers (and warnings such as 'this coffee is hot, it can burn you)...
"South America, South Africa, same difference .."
on
Quake Wedding
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· Score: 1
It seems to me that Americans believe that the world is divided into two major parts: (1) North America, and (2) the insignificant "rest of the world".
This is the perception that Americans very often give of themselves, and it is incredibly arrogant. As a South African, I'm pretty insulted that this happened, especially since it happened at slashdot, whose community is supposed to be a bit more intelligent than that. Perhaps my perception is wrong, but somehow nobody has ever done anything to disprove that perception.
Another arbitrary example, Americans seem to have absolutely no concept of time zones.. I often work late, and we'll get calls from America at 1:00 a.m.
Another arbitrary example is when major American software (and other) vendors market internationally new product releases as appearing "this summer" or "next fall". Even big companies commonly make this mistake. Movies also. Surely you people should have learnt very early in your school career that the seasons differ depending on where on the planet you are? Not to mention that not all parts of the world use the word "fall" for autumn.
Another common American assumption is that if you weren't born in America, then you somehow can't really be happy, and that you must somehow be impoverished or oppressed. (American tourist: "these people live without electricity.. and they're *actually happy*.. can you believe that?")
Doesn't it bother you Americans that you appear so arrogant and stupid to the rest of the world?
Slashdot Mirror
"IF YOU DON'T WANT TO PAY FOR THE MUSIC, DON'T LISTEN TO IT"
I'll start paying for songs when record companies stop forcing me to buy a lot of songs I don't want for each song that I do want. It's that simple. The same goes for the practice of making you pay for songs twice (i.e. if I want song "a" on CD1 and song "b" on CD2, but song "C" .. many "collection" CD's are made this way - mix old songs with new songs.)
is on both
P.S. I do have a legal CD collection of around a dozen CD's, but it is limited to a small number of artists for which I like nearly all of the songs.
"Netscape would have died a slow and ugly death anyway, with or without Microsoft's help. Let's face it, their browser sucks. It crashes way too much"
Of course, this is only looking at what did happen to Netscape under the circumstances of what MS did to them. To be fair to Netscape, Microsoft demolished their market the day they started distributing IE for "free" (up until that very day, Netscapes market share was still growing, and in fact it continued to grow for some months afterwards - they were most certainly not dying). It becomes exceedingly difficult to pay a decent team of programmers to work on a program and improve and stabilise it when the competition is giving the product away. If you can't even pay for a decent development team, then of course your program is going to be crashy.
That is precisely the whole point of the Microsoft trial: that Netscape was pushed out of the market by unfair tactics. We cannot possibly know now how successful Netscape might have been, or how stable their products may have become. You can't make assumptions based on what happened after Microsoft broke the law, to be fair, you would have to do an analysis of what might have happened if MS did not break the law.
"Believe it or not, a great deal of the expansion of the U.S. economy over the past 15 years can be attributed to Microsoft"
The computer industry would have grown explosively with or without Microsoft. He might try have you believe it, but Bill Gates was not the only person back in the early days of the PC who realized that this was "the next growth market" and that there was a helluva lot of money to be made.
The growth in IT would have been there no matter what, since it was driven by market forces. Microsoft has done absolutely nothing "special" that could not have been done by other companies, and quite possibly done better.
Increased competition in the IT industry in the various sectors where MS has essentially a monopoly (MS Office, MS Windows etc) can only be better for the US economy (and thus the stock market) in the long run.
Over the short term, though, there will probably be one or two years disruption to the IT industry. However, once that is sorted out, it will seem like nothing when compared to the 5 to 15 years that MS has arguably held back computing. (If you disagree with that, just consider (arbitrary example, there are many more) that 386 protected mode came out around 1985, and only one major OS in the world still doesn't use it properly.)
Option 1, the guy is under extreme psychosis and actually believes the tripe.
Option 2, the guy is a typical evangelist attempting to gain power and money by starting a cult by suckering gullible low-IQ poorly educated people.
Option 3, the website is merely a parody of other major religions, such as christianity (e.g. he may be parodying behaviour of many christian churches that strive to keep its people uneducated and ignorant, to maintain power/money.)
Option 4, the guy has reached a wisdom plateau above that of God, and we are all STUPID AND IGNORANT FROM BRAINWASHING FROM EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS.
Hard to say, really.
If a copyright license such as the GPL can be held revokable simply because rights were not explicitly signed over, why should software EULA's be treated differently? (i.e. why is "click here to accept the terms of the license agreement") different?
We will live with the decisions made about this case for a very long time
It might not always be a speedy process, but the law does, in general, appear to be self-correcting. Over the past century or so the law has shown itself to adapt to capitalist behaviours that harm consumers, and it will continue to do so in the future. If it seems, in another 10 to 20 years, that the law no longer applies very well and has become damaging to consumers, you can be sure it will eventually be changed. So I wouldn't despair too much.
I for one would rather see the majority of MS's API's and file formats die. DirectX (for example) is without a doubt the most badly designed confusing obfuscated overcomplicated mess of an API that I have ever seen in my life. While there is a need for standard API's and fileformats for various things, Microsoft's "solutions" are the last ones I would opt for. Rather create better standard formats.
Hmm
"You may think he harmed software development, but that again is a personal opinion of yours"
Maybe so, but it is exactly what Judge Jackson's pending ruling will boil down to. Once the ruling is made, it is no longer just "somebody's own opinion". If the law means anything at all, it becomes a "fact" (as decided by the US justice system, appeals notwithstanding.)
Guess I wasn't concentrating .. there I go blabbing on and on, forgetting this was "Ask Loki President" not "Ask David" ..
"More specifically, what hardware drivers, APIs and libraries need to be improved to make Linux a better gaming platform than that other OS?"
There are quite a number of API's out there that have Linux support (clanlib, SDL, GGI to name a few.) Most of them are pretty good, but my personal feeling is that SDL is the way to go. Its a nice clean design, there is a version 1.0, and its already very cross-platform. It definitely has the potential to become a cross-platform equivalent of Microsofts DirectX. Version 1.0 doesn't have 3D, but version 1.5 (which is in development) will support OpenGL.
OpenGL is definitely the right choice of 3D API. However, Direct3D is showing signs of seriously overtaking Direct3D in terms of functionality, so we should not complacently accept that OpenGL has "won". Some entity/organization needs to take OpenGL "by the balls" and seriously work on a decent OpenGL version 2.00, with most 1.2 extensions wrapped up into the API, and API access to new functionality (hardware bumpmapping, texture compression, maybe access to texture/surface memory buffers for dynamic/procedural textures.) As far as I can tell, SGI isn't making any real effort to do this. Someone needs to take OpenGL and update it to tackle Direct3D head-on.
The other thing that needs to happen with OpenGL on Linux is that there needs to be a standard driver interface for graphics card vendors to write drivers.
So to sum it up, in my opinion, "only" three things need to happen:
That should take care of the technical side of things ... hmm ..
I'm afraid that from my vantage point in South Africa, considering this latest nonsense from Clinton, and considering the DMCA, and UCITA (etc etc etc), one can't help but get the impression that the American people currently have no control over their goverment.
Most of the movies and TV shows that arrive here from the US completely reek of pro-USA brainwashing propaganda, so I wouldn't be surprised if the majority "mainstream" culture is to "be a couch potato while the government does whatever they want". However, it is clear that a small (more intelligent) minority is more wary of what the government is doing. Somehow the public should have more power over policy making
Anyway, I'm rambling now.
I wonder if this would work on people who are already key software developers in the OpenSource community, as an arbitrary example, offering someone like Alexandre Julliard (of Wine fame) to quit his job, work for a somewhat lower wage, and work full-time on Wine.
I'm not sure I'd want to do that though if it were me. I happen to enjoy my paying job, I don't think I'd want to quit it.
I've noticed in the past MS has announced and advertised a number of things as being available in their latest OS offerings, that were never heard of again, or seen. Whenever any new MS OS hits the markets, rumours and myths tend to run wild about the wonderful amazing things this OS is doing (things like "Windows 98 moves your most commonly used program files to the sectors closest to the center of your hard disk for quicker loading" and "Windows 98 has better crash recovery" (haha) and a variety of other zany claims.)
Anyway, despite the commotion around SIS on
In Win2K an application has a choice of using the system dlls, which are protected and can't be written over except by a service pack, or it's own private version of a DLL. So if your app requires a specific version of msvcrt.dll, you can install it in the application directory and it will use that copy instead of the system copy
Windows has always done this, from Win95 is as far back as I can remember. As developers we've encountered the dreaded MFC42.DLL(and family) incompatibility problems, and in some cases we "solved" this by dumping the DLL's in the app directory.
My typical compile times for stuff I work on is not on the speed extremes. The time I spend waiting for compiles is too short to do anything useful in (unless I do a rebuild all, which doesn't happen too often .. even so thats normally in the order of maybe 10 minutes), but long enough to hurt productivity.
.. but I moved from development on a Celeron333 to a PentiumIII450, and I could feel a noticeable productivity boost, both from faster compile times, and from the applications we develop loading faster (and especially, as is the case with developing on Win98, REBOOTING FASTER!!! :/ ).
.. the slower compiles impact way too much on productivity.
You might argue, as you did, that with shorted compile times you compile more often, "trying stuff out". True
Similarly, I also have both the MS compilers installed as well as the Intel C++ compilers installed. Intel compilers produce faster code, but take on average maybe 3 times longer to compile. I only use the Intel compiler when doing optimizing
I'm with you on the compile-time thing, nothing seems to compile fast enough.
But there are also plenty of consumer-market applications that we are "still waiting for", such as speech recognition and AI software that will make computers a cinch for the public to use one day in the future, when they'll just be able to talk to their computers. (I emphasize the "still waiting for" because a certain company has been making a lot of noise publicly for the past 3 or 4 years about how much work its research department has been doing on speech recognition, but magically haven't come up with a single product .. I am assuming that either it is because there is no real competition in specific field, or it is because current CPU's are still too slow (I remember doing some speech rec stuff back on my pentium120) or it is because software hasn't quite caught up with the concept .. or maybe its a combination of all of these ..)
03/04/2004 - Intel today announced that the PentiumXII will now be available at 40GHz.
:/) are hopelessly too slow.
Many consumers are looking at the price and asking "whats the point?" Many users feel that their computers run their voice recognition software, video-phone software, neural-net/genetic algorithm AI agent software, applications just fine at around 35 GHz. Apparently these vision-less users see computer software as something that has already reached its peak, that there are no more useful applications that can be developed that will make use of this extra speed, thus making computers more useful.
Personally I think computers can never be fast enough. There are still hundreds of potentially useful applications to be developed for which todays computers (and network bandwidth
.. to appear as if they are an innovative company, for the antitrust trial and in the eye of the public. How many times did they use the word "innovate" in this article? Its nothing but a fluffed up marketing FUD piece packed with lies. Its just self-appraising repetition of "This innovation that we've personally innovated here at the innovative Microsoft Research department shows once again how innovative our companies many innovations continue to be (innovate innovate innovate). Innovate innovate .. blah blah .. innovate .."
And this paragraph: The result is a feature that frees up as much as 80 to 90 percent of the space on a server, allowing users to store as much as five to 10 times the information as they could before. "The bottom line is that it saves the administrator time, which is why it's part of Zero Administration for Windows," Bolosky said. "It's designed to ease the lives of the technical support staff."
Is that supposed to be some sort of spontaneous testimonial? It sounds more phoney than the phoney testimonials in mail order catalogs. And I would bet my car on testing their implication that they are going to save 80 to 90% of disk space like that (and without any OS overhead at all, ha!). Even if this thing is a much fancier version of the ancient symlink (eg automatic detection of clusters of data that are the same) you still end up with nothing more than an overblown Stacker, with maybe 20 to 40 % compression if you're really lucky.
In spite of the fact that they spend the whopping sum of 5 Billion US$ a year on research, the best they've managed to do is repackage various ideas as their own, tout that they've "assisted with IPv6", and of course they came up with a dancing paperclip. You have to be pretty damn un-innovative to manage to throw away $5000000000 like that.
All of MS's products work with MS products
I've worked with enough MS crap (for my work) now to know that this is clearly not the case. Many MS products do not work with each other at all (For example I tried installing Visual Studio service pack 3 onto Visual Studio with the Windows CE Toolkit installed, and it popped up a message box which stated very explicitly something like "This product conflicts with the Windows CE Toolkit and cannot be installed" - bam, you can either have the CE toolkit, or you can have the bugfixes, but not both.) There are literally hundreds more examples of this sort of braindamaged crap pouring out of Redmond every day. Moreover, much of what they design, if not incompatible, is just plain "broken". For example the ActiveSync program for communicating with CE devices makes incredibly ludicrous assumptions such as that you are only ever going to want to connect one CE device to your computer at one time. Whoever decided that in the software design phase, I can only imagine, was on crack. The documentation for the CE toolkit quite literally does not correspond at all to the actual API distributed with the product either. Of course, the CE emulator only works on NT as well. NT only understands NTFS. Windows98 only understands FAT32. The upshot of all this is that I have to have two development hard disks, one with NT for CE and one with 98 for the other stuff i do (I can't use Win2000 because nvidias directx drivers for tnt2 aren't quite ready yet) and literally plug in a different hard disk depending on what I have to work on.
I could probably write several pages here for each piece of MS software I've ever used (SourceSafe, NT, Windows2000, Windows 98, Visual C++ to name a few) but I'm sure most of you know the drill.
Useful for mp3 search engines.
This whole Amazon one-click patent schpiel has probably quadrupled the amount of press coverage of Amazon. I'm sure their sales are through the roof. No wonder they applied for some more over-broard obvious patents. Its no doubt cheaper than advertising. All the mass-market consumer droids will ever be able to remember a few weeks from now is that there was "something in the media about Amazon a few weeks ago, wasn't there?
It does depend on your motives, i.e. do you want to invest capital to make money back, or do you just want to generously support opensource?
*If* I had vast resources of money to burn, I would definitely hire a small team of programmers to work on a few opensource projects that I think are worthwhile. This is, of course, scalable. If you don't have all that much money, you can only afford one or two programmers.
Naturally this would be totally altruistic, philanthropic, non-profit, Mother Teresa, 'throw your money down the drain' behaviour (unless you want to take a big chance and try do a "RedHat".)
Optionally you could try create and actually sell an OpenSource product, tricky as that may be. But that would be like trying to start a business around OpenSource, which doesn't sound like what you want to do.
Another option might be to try some sort of education scheme. For example, you could buy Linux (or FreeBSD or whatever) CD's/PC's and donate them to schools, etc. Of course, these things normally require maintenance, which normally requires someone who already knows what they are doing, so that makes it difficult for some organizations to get off the ground. (In my experience these things fizzle out if there isn't anyone with Linux knowledge around to keep these things up n running.)
You could also market, ie, order (and dish out) lots of OpenSource paraphernalia (T shirts, mugs etc)
Anyway, I'm rambling a bit.
I forgot to include the usual standard disclaimers that apply.
CutNPaste Standard Disclaimer: My preceding arguments were what is known as a "generalisation" and were not meant to be taken as applying to every single member of the group of people identified but rather just the majority of them.
Naturally this was already obvious to most people, most people are smart enough to figure it out, but I forgot about the small percentage people who need disclaimers (and warnings such as 'this coffee is hot, it can burn you) ...
It seems to me that Americans believe that the world is divided into two major parts: (1) North America, and (2) the insignificant "rest of the world".
This is the perception that Americans very often give of themselves, and it is incredibly arrogant. As a South African, I'm pretty insulted that this happened, especially since it happened at slashdot, whose community is supposed to be a bit more intelligent than that. Perhaps my perception is wrong, but somehow nobody has ever done anything to disprove that perception.
Another arbitrary example, Americans seem to have absolutely no concept of time zones
Another arbitrary example is when major American software (and other) vendors market internationally new product releases as appearing "this summer" or "next fall". Even big companies commonly make this mistake. Movies also. Surely you people should have learnt very early in your school career that the seasons differ depending on where on the planet you are? Not to mention that not all parts of the world use the word "fall" for autumn.
Another common American assumption is that if you weren't born in America, then you somehow can't really be happy, and that you must somehow be impoverished or oppressed. (American tourist: "these people live without electricity
Doesn't it bother you Americans that you appear so arrogant and stupid to the rest of the world?