The NYT article concerns electronics and implies no one pays retail. Some of the items there are big ticket A/V products, and I assure you, it does get sold at retail at quality A/V shops, just not at Best Buy (which is, after all, a *discounter* as is Sears, etc).
Given the choice of paying $3500 online or at Best Buy or $4000 at a home theater shop, a buyer should seriously consider paying the $4000. The product may be the same, but the service isn't.
Mandrake puts a lot of patches in the kernel too. I think both Mandrake and Redhat tended to base their kernels off of the -ac series rather than the vanilla Linus kernel.
However, you are absolutely right that Mandrake focuses on ease of use and new desktop-like features while Red Hat focuses on stability at the expense of "coolness."
Both can be frustrating if they're used in the "wrong" places.
Your jibe would carry more weight if only you could surf the internet without using Microsoft internet software in some way, be it a browser, streaming media format, or web server.
Hardly. For one, I do exactly what you say. Microsoft has, as you say, used their monopoly power to dominate the net. And, of course, they've done a great deal to popularize it too. Would the.com explosion have happened without them? Maybe, we'll never know.
However, they haven't innovated anything:
Browsers? First there was Mosaic, then Netscape, then IE.
Streaming? First there was Real, then Windows Media Player
Servers? First there was NCSA and Apache, then IIS. (And here Apache and to a lesser extent Unix (not Windows) play a more important role than MS products in providing the internet "experience.")
I find AOL/TW less scary than MS, at least on a personal level.
Sure, I watch CNN. Maybe I pick up Time occasionally, but I'm aware of who they are and what they are doing. If I want to avoid their media conglomeration entirely, I can. And if I do, it doesn't affect me. (Of course it affects the society around me.)
Maybe I don't hear the incessant ads for AOL on CNN, maybe I have to use a smaller ISP. I think I can live without those things.
Microsoft, on the other hand, by trying to extend its monopolies, is targeting my ability to communicate with other people. I can choose not to run Powerpoint or Word, but if 90% of the people around me only speak that "language" I can't see what they're saying. I can choose not to run IE, but if I can't read half the web because of it, I've lost. If I choose not to use Window's Media Whatever-its-called, I might not be able to hear the music I want to. And of course if I choose to run Linux, I can't even choose not to use all these MS products.
When this happens, I've not just lost out on being able to use MS's products, but on a larger part of my world.
AOL/TW is trying to control the content. MS is trying to control the underlying language. I find MS's intrusions more threatening to my lifestyle.
Here's a link to discussion of "Internet Strategy Day," but all archived info on MS's sites is missing. Did they forget to save it, or did it seem dated?
Is this in the same vein as the day Bill Gates ordered everyone at MS to stop what they were working on and concentrate on how the Internet would affect their products?
Of course, by that I mean Microsoft finally understanding something several years after the rest of the world "gets it?"
According to page 18, the very experienced users (more than 5 years online) are 40% MORE likely to download music. And about 1/4 as likely to use a chat room and 1/2 as likely to play games.
Of course, this is all as a percentage of time spent online, so if the very experienced spend more time online, all bets are off....
For those of us who have rear-projection sets or CRT video projectors, these logos, especially the bright ones like the Weather Channel, NBC, etc., can damage the sets. If you leave it on the same channel too long, you get burn-in.
His Thomas Covenant books are, too me, simply amazing. The depth with which the characters are developed in unmatched by other fantasy writers.
For instance, I liked Jordan's earlier books, but now they just drag on and on. Lot of things "happen," but it never seems to matter and I never get the feeling that I understand what drives any of the characters.
So intel's plan to bolster their flagging market share is to introduce an entirely new platform that's not backwards compatible? I'm not exactly hardware-techno-geeky, but it seems to me this means none of your software is going to run (It would be like running a mac program on windows.) It seems to me there's got to be a way to have an intermediate step somewhere down the line that support both architectures. But then again, I could be an idiot on this point.
Itanium/McKinley will be backwards compatible with the Pentium series, just not very fast since it emulates the instructions.
Remember, Apple did something similar with PowerPC except it was emulated in software. What happens is, the OS and the major applications (Office, Photoshop, etc.) are ported over to the new instruction set. Then, who cares if your Winamp is actually running in emulation mode? Most of what you do is running in native mode.
The Itanium is targeted at servers first where a limited number of apps are needed. Then expect to see it on business desktops with a few more apps and finally percolating down to the home user in 2004/2005 (?)
This has nothing to do with what bus is supported. Hammer is continuing and expanding on the x86 instruction set. It has nothing to do with the old ISA (Industry Standard Architecture bus).
Motherboard makers are free (or not) to put an ISA bus on the board. I'd be surprised at the time of Hammer to see such a board, though
Yes, but now they are decreasing the accuracy just in the Afganistan area with what they call Selective Availability.
Clinton issued the order to discontinue this obfuscation of the signal because of the SA capability and because he realized the benefits to businesses and ordinary people of doing it.
As a side note, during Desert Storm the GPS system became more accurate because most of the troops had off the shelf GPS units, not the military grade units.
Right, I guess my question is "Why aren't businesses scratching their itches?" They spend so much developing in house software, I would think that improving open source software that is "almost there" would be a no-brainer.
This article only touched briefly on Open/Free source, but here's an idea I've wondered about for a long time. Why don't large companies fund Free software.
Big business (non-computer businesses) might find that in the long run its better to fund open source development than to continue funding commercial software development.
For instance, lets say Ford uses Linux/Apache from Windows/IIS (no idea what they use now). Now, lets say they figure this saves them $2 million. Why not see the future and say "Hey, lets invest half of that money in Open Office and maybe in a few years we can completely drop MS Office and save $10 million a year" or whatever the numbers are.
The point is, big companies who aren't directly involved in computer software could have an enourmous impact. Why should IBM/Sun/etc. be the sole funders of development for software that they are just going to give away.
Besides which, Ford could use this as leverage to get the features they really want.
This is probably the only way we will ever see certain types of free software be competitive. (Business accounting comes to mind.)
They switched, but not from Windows. They used Unix before, so this is a much easier transition.
Has anyone tried to upgrade (not fresh install)?
on
Mandrake 8.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
In the past trying to do this was pretty much a mess. Things broke and it took the better part of the day as my CDROM drive churned. Has it gotten better? Does anyone have experience doing this recently? Say from 8.0 to 8.1?
I probably just care about getting the latest KDE.
1) This is a HUGE company that controls an enourmous amount of the listening public. Many others have commented on this. Any action like this should be made very carefully, given the amount of influence/power they have.
2) The list is assine. Fine, some of this might incite violence and Clearchannel is probably within its duty to suggest its stations think twice about airing this, but "American Pie?"
Clearchannel: something everyone should know about
on
ClearChannel Plays It Safe
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Salon.com (referenced in the editors comments) has done a great job covering Clearchannel and radio payola in general. The full set of articles can be found here.
If you care about music and still think that songs become popular because lots of people like them, you owe it to yourself to read some of this.
Back to the subject at hand, when a major corporate conglomerate decides that the country shouldn't be listening to "Bridge over Troubled Water" it is a sad day.
Towards the end of the article, Raymond attacks RMS and the FSF saying "Hypothetically, if they could pass a law that would make proprietary software illegal, they would". A hypothetical condition which has never even been discussed before being the basis for discrediting what they have to say???
Actually the two relevant quotes from the article are:
But now let's suppose that, after years of lobbying, messrs Kuhn and Stallman get a law passed that makes proprietary licenses illegal. We are now in the world of the FSF's premise.
and
[asking RMS and Kuhn] Here's the first and most important one: if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it?
Neither of these quotes says what you say they do.
Personally I think that if you read what RMS really has to say, he would like to pass just such a law. Code is essential information, not a "product" or "art." (Although he seems pretty opposed to restricting piracy of art too.)
Bottom line, Eric is saying "You made it, you decide what to do with it. If I don't like it that's my problem, not yours." Better than the alternatives IMO.
Ahh, I thought they weren't supposed to be reinfected on reboot. And considering the worm reboots the machine, they should avoid propagating for all of about 10 minutes/day.
Question is, will the people who own these machines think it is strange that they are rebooting every day, or just think its par for the Win2K course.
Everything I've read about Code Red II says that each infected machine is only supposed to try to infect new machines for 24 hours. Considering that CRII exploded Sunday evening and judging from the number of hits I've gotten on my @HOME machine, everyone should have been infected within an hour.
My machine seems to be getting hit just as hard as ever. Surely these can't be recent infections? Do we really have to wait until October 1 for this storm to pass?
The thing I really dislike about Linux Today is that it takes two clicks to get to the story I want to read with the intermediate link being used for these talk-backs and (I presume) tracking purposes. They don't really add much in the way of new content and the talk-backs are so poorly organized and such low volume that they are essentially worthless.
I much prefer Linux Weekly New's Daily Page for finding out what's going on in the linux world and their weekly summaries for commentary.
If I want to hear what people are saying about a story, Slashdot is much more useful.
I still check LinuxToday every other day or so to see what stories fell through the cracks at LWN.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I'm enlightened! Six companies make just about every car sold in the U.S., ergo GM has a monopoly on cars!
The NYT article concerns electronics and implies no one pays retail. Some of the items there are big ticket A/V products, and I assure you, it does get sold at retail at quality A/V shops, just not at Best Buy (which is, after all, a *discounter* as is Sears, etc).
Given the choice of paying $3500 online or at Best Buy or $4000 at a home theater shop, a buyer should seriously consider paying the $4000. The product may be the same, but the service isn't.
Mandrake puts a lot of patches in the kernel too. I think both Mandrake and Redhat tended to base their kernels off of the -ac series rather than the vanilla Linus kernel.
However, you are absolutely right that Mandrake focuses on ease of use and new desktop-like features while Red Hat focuses on stability at the expense of "coolness."
Both can be frustrating if they're used in the "wrong" places.
Hardly. For one, I do exactly what you say. Microsoft has, as you say, used their monopoly power to dominate the net. And, of course, they've done a great deal to popularize it too. Would the .com explosion have happened without them? Maybe, we'll never know.
However, they haven't innovated anything:
Browsers? First there was Mosaic, then Netscape, then IE.
Streaming? First there was Real, then Windows Media Player
Servers? First there was NCSA and Apache, then IIS. (And here Apache and to a lesser extent Unix (not Windows) play a more important role than MS products in providing the internet "experience.")
Java and Javascript? Again, not MS innovations.
Sure, I watch CNN. Maybe I pick up Time occasionally, but I'm aware of who they are and what they are doing. If I want to avoid their media conglomeration entirely, I can. And if I do, it doesn't affect me. (Of course it affects the society around me.)
Maybe I don't hear the incessant ads for AOL on CNN, maybe I have to use a smaller ISP. I think I can live without those things.
Microsoft, on the other hand, by trying to extend its monopolies, is targeting my ability to communicate with other people. I can choose not to run Powerpoint or Word, but if 90% of the people around me only speak that "language" I can't see what they're saying. I can choose not to run IE, but if I can't read half the web because of it, I've lost. If I choose not to use Window's Media Whatever-its-called, I might not be able to hear the music I want to. And of course if I choose to run Linux, I can't even choose not to use all these MS products.
When this happens, I've not just lost out on being able to use MS's products, but on a larger part of my world.
AOL/TW is trying to control the content. MS is trying to control the underlying language. I find MS's intrusions more threatening to my lifestyle.
Here's a link to discussion of "Internet Strategy Day," but all archived info on MS's sites is missing. Did they forget to save it, or did it seem dated?
Is this in the same vein as the day Bill Gates ordered everyone at MS to stop what they were working on and concentrate on how the Internet would affect their products?
Of course, by that I mean Microsoft finally understanding something several years after the rest of the world "gets it?"
According to page 18, the very experienced users (more than 5 years online) are 40% MORE likely to download music. And about 1/4 as likely to use a chat room and 1/2 as likely to play games.
Of course, this is all as a percentage of time spent online, so if the very experienced spend more time online, all bets are off....
Surely it's not. AD&D is a trademark owned by Wizards of the Coast (formerly TSR).
For those of us who have rear-projection sets or CRT video projectors, these logos, especially the bright ones like the Weather Channel, NBC, etc., can damage the sets. If you leave it on the same channel too long, you get burn-in.
Sticking with the Sci-Fi fantasy theme.
His Thomas Covenant books are, too me, simply amazing. The depth with which the characters are developed in unmatched by other fantasy writers.
For instance, I liked Jordan's earlier books, but now they just drag on and on. Lot of things "happen," but it never seems to matter and I never get the feeling that I understand what drives any of the characters.
Remember, Apple did something similar with PowerPC except it was emulated in software. What happens is, the OS and the major applications (Office, Photoshop, etc.) are ported over to the new instruction set. Then, who cares if your Winamp is actually running in emulation mode? Most of what you do is running in native mode.
The Itanium is targeted at servers first where a limited number of apps are needed. Then expect to see it on business desktops with a few more apps and finally percolating down to the home user in 2004/2005 (?)
This has nothing to do with what bus is supported. Hammer is continuing and expanding on the x86 instruction set. It has nothing to do with the old ISA (Industry Standard Architecture bus).
Motherboard makers are free (or not) to put an ISA bus on the board. I'd be surprised at the time of Hammer to see such a board, though
Yes, but now they are decreasing the accuracy just in the Afganistan area with what they call Selective Availability.
Clinton issued the order to discontinue this obfuscation of the signal because of the SA capability and because he realized the benefits to businesses and ordinary people of doing it.
As a side note, during Desert Storm the GPS system became more accurate because most of the troops had off the shelf GPS units, not the military grade units.
Right, I guess my question is "Why aren't businesses scratching their itches?" They spend so much developing in house software, I would think that improving open source software that is "almost there" would be a no-brainer.
This article only touched briefly on Open/Free source, but here's an idea I've wondered about for a long time. Why don't large companies fund Free software.
Big business (non-computer businesses) might find that in the long run its better to fund open source development than to continue funding commercial software development.
For instance, lets say Ford uses Linux/Apache from Windows/IIS (no idea what they use now). Now, lets say they figure this saves them $2 million. Why not see the future and say "Hey, lets invest half of that money in Open Office and maybe in a few years we can completely drop MS Office and save $10 million a year" or whatever the numbers are.
The point is, big companies who aren't directly involved in computer software could have an enourmous impact. Why should IBM/Sun/etc. be the sole funders of development for software that they are just going to give away.
Besides which, Ford could use this as leverage to get the features they really want.
This is probably the only way we will ever see certain types of free software be competitive. (Business accounting comes to mind.)
They switched, but not from Windows. They used Unix before, so this is a much easier transition.
In the past trying to do this was pretty much a mess. Things broke and it took the better part of the day as my CDROM drive churned. Has it gotten better? Does anyone have experience doing this recently? Say from 8.0 to 8.1?
I probably just care about getting the latest KDE.
Notice I said "shouldn't," not "can't."
My problems with this are two-fold:
1) This is a HUGE company that controls an enourmous amount of the listening public. Many others have commented on this. Any action like this should be made very carefully, given the amount of influence/power they have.
2) The list is assine. Fine, some of this might incite violence and Clearchannel is probably within its duty to suggest its stations think twice about airing this, but "American Pie?"
If you care about music and still think that songs become popular because lots of people like them, you owe it to yourself to read some of this.
Back to the subject at hand, when a major corporate conglomerate decides that the country shouldn't be listening to "Bridge over Troubled Water" it is a sad day.
Initial request
and
Actual work.
This is to get SVG into the main develpment line, it seems things are mostly working in branches.
Mozilla also has quite good PNG support.
Actually the two relevant quotes from the article are:
But now let's suppose that, after years of lobbying, messrs Kuhn and Stallman get a law passed that makes proprietary licenses illegal. We are now in the world of the FSF's premise.
and
[asking RMS and Kuhn] Here's the first and most important one: if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it?
Neither of these quotes says what you say they do.
Personally I think that if you read what RMS really has to say, he would like to pass just such a law. Code is essential information, not a "product" or "art." (Although he seems pretty opposed to restricting piracy of art too.)
Bottom line, Eric is saying "You made it, you decide what to do with it. If I don't like it that's my problem, not yours." Better than the alternatives IMO.
Ahh, I thought they weren't supposed to be reinfected on reboot. And considering the worm reboots the machine, they should avoid propagating for all of about 10 minutes/day.
Question is, will the people who own these machines think it is strange that they are rebooting every day, or just think its par for the Win2K course.
Everything I've read about Code Red II says that each infected machine is only supposed to try to infect new machines for 24 hours. Considering that CRII exploded Sunday evening and judging from the number of hits I've gotten on my @HOME machine, everyone should have been infected within an hour.
My machine seems to be getting hit just as hard as ever. Surely these can't be recent infections? Do we really have to wait until October 1 for this storm to pass?
I much prefer Linux Weekly New's Daily Page for finding out what's going on in the linux world and their weekly summaries for commentary.
If I want to hear what people are saying about a story, Slashdot is much more useful.
I still check LinuxToday every other day or so to see what stories fell through the cracks at LWN.