But let's assume that this OOXML thing get through the approval process... with an open standard anyone can make import/export functionality for MS Office documents in non-MS applications. From iWork to KOffice to OpenOffice and whatever else is out there, will there be any need to have MS Office in order to read, edit, and forward on "MS Office documents?" To me, it seems like MS is creating a way for everyone else to erode their market share.
A precise "smart" weapon, even if it costs more, might end up being cheaper in the end. Take the JDAM for example. The JDAM kit costs about $18,000 and is attached to a simple gravity bomb that costs on the range of $2000 to $5000. The difference between the JDAM bomb and the simple gravity bomb is that you only need to drop one JDAM to hit a target and be assured of hitting a precise coordinate as opposed to ten gravity bombs to achieve the same effect. Not only do you have the reduced requirement in terms of units of ordinance to destroy a target, but a single weapons platform can be tasked to destroy five distinct targets on one sortie rather than being assigned to half of a target for the same sortie. See the force-multiplying effect of smart weapons yet? The rail gun sounds neat and all, but for it to be practical it's going to need to be accurate, and if the plan is to lob kinetic rounds from 300+ kilometers away, then the safest place to stand will probably be the intended target coordinates.
Unless, of course, the rail gun is shooting smart devices.... then scratch my criticisms.
Is there something about RFID -- or "active" RFID -- that allows only a certain set of RFID readers to be able to read the chip? What I want to know is: how do I get an RFID reader? I want mount an RFID reader in front of my house and log all of the cars that come by, when they come by, if they are staying within "view" of the RFID reader for a certain amount of time (like, say, arriving an hour after I leave for work and leaving an hour before I return), etc. Pretty much every car is going to have RFID tagging in the near future, if only by way of the RFID chips being placed in new tired these days, so the only "hard" part will be correlating the RFID to a person's identity, but if the RFID can trigger a video recorder then this challenge is narrowed down. Also, I want RFID stickers I can surreptitiously plan on the neighborhood brat's skateboard and bike so I can confront his parents and/or press charge with evidence in hand.
And above all else: I want an RFID jammer! Why? BECAUSE I'M MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!!!!
Little-guy can't get an injunction because fees are being paid... Unless the license contains an auto-revoke clause in the case of suing to contest the underlying patent, or some similar action.
But you raise another interesting point: the ability of a licensee to essentially attack the patent-holder via law suit to try to get the little guy to buckle. Such a lawsuit is clearly unjust and there's got to be a law somewhere that covers such an aggressive move against a patent-holder. Extortion? Racketeering? The little guy ought to be able to immediately contest the lawsuit itself as being predatory, meant to bankrupt him, force him to sell his patent, or re-negotiate the license. If the lawsuit is found to be without merit and predatory, the company bringing the suit should be liable in a HUGE way at that point, ordered to pay HUGE compensation, and the executives who initiated the suit brought up on criminal charges. Otherwise, companies will be able to get away with anything they want as long as they have a bigger legal war chest than their competitors.
Gentoo would be more interesting to me if there was a distro of it that shipped with the Gnome desktop installed by default, installed as binary, and then recompiled all the vanilla binary bits from source when the machine was in screen-saver mode. Then I could be up and running right away and getting work done and the system could do its compile-from-source optimizations overnight or while I was at work.
That'd be great! It'd be awesome because then you could see the earth 2 billions years ago...Wait! it didn't exist because the world's only 6000 years old...But the rest of the universe is older...? Is that comment really flamebait? I'll buy "Offtopic" since this isn't a religious-themed message board.
Here's a question for the "young earth" creationists: the math (triangulation and distance = speed * time) used in this case shows that the universe is at least a billion years old. What is your proof that it isn't? Did God create the stars with "already traveling light" to fill in what would otherwise be a 999,994,000 gap in time and distance?
And to the astronomers (since I'm not one): how many times in astronomical history has a star suddenly appeared in the sky, suggesting that its light just arrived here for the first time? I figure it has probably happened but it's not my field of study so I don't know.
Considering how big of a job it is to make Windows secure, when the hell did the NSA find the time to tap the phone calls of Americans and "terrorists?" Something about this story sounds fishy....
Unless I am reading the Technet site wrong, the subscription gives you access to the latest software for evaluation purposes. It's not like the MSDN subscription where you get to have a production install.
Not exactly. IBM has only announced this chip and from what I have seen it's not even a PPC chip anyway. Apple is CURRENTLY shipping dual core Xeon systems and will more than likely announce quad-core systems next week, similar to systems already shipping from PC makers like Dell. By the time the Power6 makes the jump from vaporware to reality we might see an 8-core Intel chip shipping in the high end Macs.
Oh thank you for taking the bait -- I was hoping someone would walk into this!
Let's start with Cinelerra. In short, it's crapware but getting better. This is superb news if you're a programmer on the project, but totally unacceptable if you're the average user who just wants to download video from your camcorder and edit into a DVD or web clip to send to grandma. Check out a recent review of Cinelerra here. My favorite part of the review is: "The only crashes I encountered while writing this article were during the rendering phase, which I found frustrating; no doubt, if I had all of the required codecs installed, this would be smoother sailing, but it should be the application's job to detect that rather than mine." Indeed! The minute Joe Windows-Refugee has to go out to sourceforge or elsewhere to find the right codecs to keep the program from crashing is the minute he says "screw it" and heads back to Windows. And thank you for taking the Windows MovieMaker bait; you're right in saying that it isn't all that great but you can pull video from your camcorder, edit it, and send it to grandma. Minimal features, but it gets the job done, which is more than Cinelerra can say for now.
Next: K3b. Okay, sure... I'll grant that it works better than Ubuntu's default burning scheme. However, you have to go out and get it on the net. It doesn't come bundled with your Lite-On DVD-RW drive, and I'll bet you $50 that an Ubuntu newbie will see the "made for KDE" part and say "Well that won't work... Ubuntu uses Gnome." You and I both know that's you can use a KDE app on Gnome, but do you think Ubuntu newcomers know that? At this point, we're still assuming that they even know K3b exists and they should use it, and that's assuming quite a bit, my friend!
And lastly: Amarok. One question: does it come with Ubuntu -- or any distribution -- by default? Can you buy music with it? Can you sync your iPod or Zune with it? These are the things average users want. If it cannot deliver, guess which app just got added to the "ignore" list?
The whole point of my previous post was that if the average new-comer from Windows finds that everything doesn't "just work" then they aren't going to stay. Ubuntu is getting close, but it's just not there yet. I hope it gets a lot better and soon... we need the competition in the marketplace.
Since when does a parody of a more serious post earn a mod score of 5? The original 5-point list (six if you count the video comments) addresses common issues that are going to be on the short list of complaints of anyone who is looking to switch from Windows to Linux for more than a few hours. And make no mistake: the benchmark by which Linux will be measured a success or failure as a desktop O/S will be how would-be refugees from Windows take to the experience.
Addressing only at this point the home users, if prospective Linux adopters can't do trivial things like burn CD's without jumping through hoops, then you have problems. What about some basic "life" applications? The Songbird project is a nice idea, but it's not ready yet and certainly nowhere near the level of iTunes and it almost certainly won't support Windows or Apple DRM, so any purchased tracks will either be lost or will have to be burned to CD and re-ripped into your music library. Video editing: there is nothing that remotely approaches Windows Movie Maker, much less iMovie.
Ubuntu is a nice O/S, but it's not quite there yet.
There are the persistent rumors that the YellowBox technology from NextSTEP is still alive and well on the Apple Campus, and is just waiting for The Steve to give the "And one more thing..." signal for it to come back into the light. But whom does that help, exactly?
Is this the software that was programmed by ES&S for their machine or is this the code that was inserted onto the machines by the hired hackers of the evil, election stealing politicians, as demonstrated on HBO? I've got to know these things...
Does this mean that we might see native-code compilers for java bytecode? I would really like the option of running an app as either interpreted bytecode or as native binary code. Also, does this mean that we'll see faster adoption of non-JVM technologies like OpenGL for Java?
Am I the only person salivating at the possibility of writing code that will compile down to full binary on any platform and make use of hardware for graphics acceleration now, and possibly other things (GPU computational engines, anyone?) later?
Speaking of the Novell deal, what are the odds that we'll see a distro called "Redmond Linux" as an option for PCs, the poor man's Windows with Wine, Mono, and some other stuff meant to make one say "Geez -- I wish I just simply had Windows!"
In theory, WiMax could be used to send backups to a remote storage facility "miles away" -- providing that there is a WiMax network that is actually in operation. But outside of select areas in select cities (like in Canada), where is this WiMax network of which the author speaks?
What are the odds that Microsoft has language in the contract of the deal which allows them to break/undo/shift blame if Novell can't stay clear of GPL legal issues? Anyone who thinks Microsoft is really interested in helping out Linux is forgetting that MS is a company that has been found guilty -- as a point of law -- of using their monopoly position to hurt other companies. Do you think Balmer had a change of heart or something, or that The Microsoft Memo was real and not make believe? Microsoft cannot be trusted -- end of story.
This should have been a really easy case in which prove a lack of harm to the marketplace: simply copy the GPL software released by IBM, Red Hat, and Novell onto a DVD, write your own label on the disk with a Sharpie (Sam's Software Stack, perhaps?) and then sell it to someone right there in the court room and ask the judge and the defendants if there is anything in the GPL license or the law which makes that act illegal. Case closed.
Seding out copies on physical media becomes a monumental risk if you're dealing with information that is confidential, especially if that data is covered by Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA. Remote sessions either by VPN, Apple Remote Desktop (the author said it's a Mac server, right? MS Remote Desktop if not) would side-step the distrobution problem, plus the DBA's can lock down access via ACL so users only get at the data they need/are allowed.
I see Apple isn't on the list. Does anyone know if Apple does non-profit discounts, or are you S.O.L. if you want to user iWork or Final Cut or Aperture at your non-profit?
The "black" part of the art: the inability of managers to adequately know everything they need to know about the projects for which they are responsible.
You're assuming everyone votes on the day of the election. Some states offer "early voting" up to a couple weeks before the voting date, and all of them offer absentee ballots.
Personally, I think voting shouldn't be a single day but should last for eleven days; for example: from the first Friday in November until the end of the Monday eleven days hence, with "the count so far" results being published at noon on days 4 (Monday), 7 (Thursday), and 10 (Sunday), with final (as much as possible, anyway) number announced at noon the day following the close of the polls (Tuesday, day 12). This would provide a whole lot more incentive for folks who haven't voted yet to get off their lazy buts when the preliminary numbers are published and their candidate/issue is behind. I bet we'll get 80+ percent turnout on most elections this way.
Isn't Verizon installing fiber to the premises these days? And what about hybrid-fiber-coax, especially when accessing remote terminals in your neighborhood that have fiber connections back to the service provider (which is what my cable company does)?
And if you don't think the elections in this country are rigged, then don't take my word for it... watch the documentary evidence of it on Google Video.
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That is exactly what I thought at first as well!
But let's assume that this OOXML thing get through the approval process... with an open standard anyone can make import/export functionality for MS Office documents in non-MS applications. From iWork to KOffice to OpenOffice and whatever else is out there, will there be any need to have MS Office in order to read, edit, and forward on "MS Office documents?" To me, it seems like MS is creating a way for everyone else to erode their market share.
A precise "smart" weapon, even if it costs more, might end up being cheaper in the end. Take the JDAM for example. The JDAM kit costs about $18,000 and is attached to a simple gravity bomb that costs on the range of $2000 to $5000. The difference between the JDAM bomb and the simple gravity bomb is that you only need to drop one JDAM to hit a target and be assured of hitting a precise coordinate as opposed to ten gravity bombs to achieve the same effect. Not only do you have the reduced requirement in terms of units of ordinance to destroy a target, but a single weapons platform can be tasked to destroy five distinct targets on one sortie rather than being assigned to half of a target for the same sortie. See the force-multiplying effect of smart weapons yet? The rail gun sounds neat and all, but for it to be practical it's going to need to be accurate, and if the plan is to lob kinetic rounds from 300+ kilometers away, then the safest place to stand will probably be the intended target coordinates.
Unless, of course, the rail gun is shooting smart devices.... then scratch my criticisms.
Is there something about RFID -- or "active" RFID -- that allows only a certain set of RFID readers to be able to read the chip? What I want to know is: how do I get an RFID reader? I want mount an RFID reader in front of my house and log all of the cars that come by, when they come by, if they are staying within "view" of the RFID reader for a certain amount of time (like, say, arriving an hour after I leave for work and leaving an hour before I return), etc. Pretty much every car is going to have RFID tagging in the near future, if only by way of the RFID chips being placed in new tired these days, so the only "hard" part will be correlating the RFID to a person's identity, but if the RFID can trigger a video recorder then this challenge is narrowed down. Also, I want RFID stickers I can surreptitiously plan on the neighborhood brat's skateboard and bike so I can confront his parents and/or press charge with evidence in hand.
And above all else: I want an RFID jammer! Why? BECAUSE I'M MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!!!!
But you raise another interesting point: the ability of a licensee to essentially attack the patent-holder via law suit to try to get the little guy to buckle. Such a lawsuit is clearly unjust and there's got to be a law somewhere that covers such an aggressive move against a patent-holder. Extortion? Racketeering? The little guy ought to be able to immediately contest the lawsuit itself as being predatory, meant to bankrupt him, force him to sell his patent, or re-negotiate the license. If the lawsuit is found to be without merit and predatory, the company bringing the suit should be liable in a HUGE way at that point, ordered to pay HUGE compensation, and the executives who initiated the suit brought up on criminal charges. Otherwise, companies will be able to get away with anything they want as long as they have a bigger legal war chest than their competitors.
Gentoo would be more interesting to me if there was a distro of it that shipped with the Gnome desktop installed by default, installed as binary, and then recompiled all the vanilla binary bits from source when the machine was in screen-saver mode. Then I could be up and running right away and getting work done and the system could do its compile-from-source optimizations overnight or while I was at work.
Here's a question for the "young earth" creationists: the math (triangulation and distance = speed * time) used in this case shows that the universe is at least a billion years old. What is your proof that it isn't? Did God create the stars with "already traveling light" to fill in what would otherwise be a 999,994,000 gap in time and distance?
And to the astronomers (since I'm not one): how many times in astronomical history has a star suddenly appeared in the sky, suggesting that its light just arrived here for the first time? I figure it has probably happened but it's not my field of study so I don't know.
Considering how big of a job it is to make Windows secure, when the hell did the NSA find the time to tap the phone calls of Americans and "terrorists?" Something about this story sounds fishy....
Unless I am reading the Technet site wrong, the subscription gives you access to the latest software for evaluation purposes. It's not like the MSDN subscription where you get to have a production install.
Not exactly. IBM has only announced this chip and from what I have seen it's not even a PPC chip anyway. Apple is CURRENTLY shipping dual core Xeon systems and will more than likely announce quad-core systems next week, similar to systems already shipping from PC makers like Dell. By the time the Power6 makes the jump from vaporware to reality we might see an 8-core Intel chip shipping in the high end Macs.
Oh thank you for taking the bait -- I was hoping someone would walk into this!
Let's start with Cinelerra. In short, it's crapware but getting better. This is superb news if you're a programmer on the project, but totally unacceptable if you're the average user who just wants to download video from your camcorder and edit into a DVD or web clip to send to grandma. Check out a recent review of Cinelerra here. My favorite part of the review is: "The only crashes I encountered while writing this article were during the rendering phase, which I found frustrating; no doubt, if I had all of the required codecs installed, this would be smoother sailing, but it should be the application's job to detect that rather than mine." Indeed! The minute Joe Windows-Refugee has to go out to sourceforge or elsewhere to find the right codecs to keep the program from crashing is the minute he says "screw it" and heads back to Windows. And thank you for taking the Windows MovieMaker bait; you're right in saying that it isn't all that great but you can pull video from your camcorder, edit it, and send it to grandma. Minimal features, but it gets the job done, which is more than Cinelerra can say for now.
Next: K3b. Okay, sure... I'll grant that it works better than Ubuntu's default burning scheme. However, you have to go out and get it on the net. It doesn't come bundled with your Lite-On DVD-RW drive, and I'll bet you $50 that an Ubuntu newbie will see the "made for KDE" part and say "Well that won't work... Ubuntu uses Gnome." You and I both know that's you can use a KDE app on Gnome, but do you think Ubuntu newcomers know that? At this point, we're still assuming that they even know K3b exists and they should use it, and that's assuming quite a bit, my friend!
And lastly: Amarok. One question: does it come with Ubuntu -- or any distribution -- by default? Can you buy music with it? Can you sync your iPod or Zune with it? These are the things average users want. If it cannot deliver, guess which app just got added to the "ignore" list?
The whole point of my previous post was that if the average new-comer from Windows finds that everything doesn't "just work" then they aren't going to stay. Ubuntu is getting close, but it's just not there yet. I hope it gets a lot better and soon... we need the competition in the marketplace.
Since when does a parody of a more serious post earn a mod score of 5? The original 5-point list (six if you count the video comments) addresses common issues that are going to be on the short list of complaints of anyone who is looking to switch from Windows to Linux for more than a few hours. And make no mistake: the benchmark by which Linux will be measured a success or failure as a desktop O/S will be how would-be refugees from Windows take to the experience.
Addressing only at this point the home users, if prospective Linux adopters can't do trivial things like burn CD's without jumping through hoops, then you have problems. What about some basic "life" applications? The Songbird project is a nice idea, but it's not ready yet and certainly nowhere near the level of iTunes and it almost certainly won't support Windows or Apple DRM, so any purchased tracks will either be lost or will have to be burned to CD and re-ripped into your music library. Video editing: there is nothing that remotely approaches Windows Movie Maker, much less iMovie.
Ubuntu is a nice O/S, but it's not quite there yet.
There are the persistent rumors that the YellowBox technology from NextSTEP is still alive and well on the Apple Campus, and is just waiting for The Steve to give the "And one more thing..." signal for it to come back into the light. But whom does that help, exactly?
Is this the software that was programmed by ES&S for their machine or is this the code that was inserted onto the machines by the hired hackers of the evil, election stealing politicians, as demonstrated on HBO? I've got to know these things...
Does this mean that we might see native-code compilers for java bytecode? I would really like the option of running an app as either interpreted bytecode or as native binary code. Also, does this mean that we'll see faster adoption of non-JVM technologies like OpenGL for Java?
Am I the only person salivating at the possibility of writing code that will compile down to full binary on any platform and make use of hardware for graphics acceleration now, and possibly other things (GPU computational engines, anyone?) later?
Speaking of the Novell deal, what are the odds that we'll see a distro called "Redmond Linux" as an option for PCs, the poor man's Windows with Wine, Mono, and some other stuff meant to make one say "Geez -- I wish I just simply had Windows!"
In theory, WiMax could be used to send backups to a remote storage facility "miles away" -- providing that there is a WiMax network that is actually in operation. But outside of select areas in select cities (like in Canada), where is this WiMax network of which the author speaks?
What are the odds that Microsoft has language in the contract of the deal which allows them to break/undo/shift blame if Novell can't stay clear of GPL legal issues? Anyone who thinks Microsoft is really interested in helping out Linux is forgetting that MS is a company that has been found guilty -- as a point of law -- of using their monopoly position to hurt other companies. Do you think Balmer had a change of heart or something, or that The Microsoft Memo was real and not make believe? Microsoft cannot be trusted -- end of story.
This should have been a really easy case in which prove a lack of harm to the marketplace: simply copy the GPL software released by IBM, Red Hat, and Novell onto a DVD, write your own label on the disk with a Sharpie (Sam's Software Stack, perhaps?) and then sell it to someone right there in the court room and ask the judge and the defendants if there is anything in the GPL license or the law which makes that act illegal. Case closed.
Seding out copies on physical media becomes a monumental risk if you're dealing with information that is confidential, especially if that data is covered by Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA. Remote sessions either by VPN, Apple Remote Desktop (the author said it's a Mac server, right? MS Remote Desktop if not) would side-step the distrobution problem, plus the DBA's can lock down access via ACL so users only get at the data they need/are allowed.
I see Apple isn't on the list. Does anyone know if Apple does non-profit discounts, or are you S.O.L. if you want to user iWork or Final Cut or Aperture at your non-profit?
The "black" part of the art: the inability of managers to adequately know everything they need to know about the projects for which they are responsible.
You're assuming everyone votes on the day of the election. Some states offer "early voting" up to a couple weeks before the voting date, and all of them offer absentee ballots.
Personally, I think voting shouldn't be a single day but should last for eleven days; for example: from the first Friday in November until the end of the Monday eleven days hence, with "the count so far" results being published at noon on days 4 (Monday), 7 (Thursday), and 10 (Sunday), with final (as much as possible, anyway) number announced at noon the day following the close of the polls (Tuesday, day 12). This would provide a whole lot more incentive for folks who haven't voted yet to get off their lazy buts when the preliminary numbers are published and their candidate/issue is behind. I bet we'll get 80+ percent turnout on most elections this way.
Isn't Verizon installing fiber to the premises these days? And what about hybrid-fiber-coax, especially when accessing remote terminals in your neighborhood that have fiber connections back to the service provider (which is what my cable company does)?
And if you don't think the elections in this country are rigged, then don't take my word for it... watch the documentary evidence of it on Google Video.
If Google can find password files and the source code to Diebold's voting machines, they can surely find the pre-determined results to yesterday's vote.
What -- you thought the election was fair and square and only determined when the ballots were counted last night?