Well, I've seen a number of explanations, that amount to MS "donating" a software package, and then their accountants enter the listed retail price as their donation. This obviously has a certain amount of bogosity about it, especially as their main software packages (Windows and Office) are hardly ever sold at the official retail price. But the laws of accounting for such intangible products are beyond the ken of mere mortals.
It has been pointed out that there is a significant cost to selling products like Windows and Office: The marketing campaign to maintain their market lead is expensive. MS supposedly has spent on the order of a billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) in marketing costs for their major releases such as W95, W98, NT, etc. Marketing is also an intangible, but they'd never have sold anything without it, so it's in some sense a "real" cost.
OTOH, marketing isn't a per-item production cost. For software, that cost is close to zero, now that we have the internet.
In any case, with most commercial products, there are laws in most countries about what can be considered a discount or sale price. Usually, a company is required to show that it has actually sold a product at a claimed price to a significant number of customers, otherwise a discount or sale price lower than that can be considered fraud. But as far as I know, this isn't true for software. At least, I've never read of a company being prosecuted for fraud when they claim a given retail price for software that has never been actually sold for that price. Of course, it could have happened without me reading about it.
It is widely understood that vendors like Dell and HP that sell packaged MS Windows boxes never pay anywhere near the supposed retail price for Windows or any of the apps packaged with it. For independently-produced software, they often don't need to pay at all, because the suppliers really want their apps to be included in the default Windows distros.
There's also the old definition: An honest politician is one who, when bought, stays bought.
But "the market" tends to work in politics, too, at least with democratic governments. If a company bribes a politician and that politician doesn't pay off as expected, in the next election, the company donates less to that politician, or maybe gives its donation to a competing politician. That teaches a valuable market lesson, that it's bad to burn repeat customers. Cheating a customer or client is only profitable the first time. If you want repeat business, you have to deliver what people paid for.
Unless, of course, you're the only game in town. Then you can abuse your customers or clients as you wish, and they'll keep coming back, because they have to do business with you.
Linux is not and will never be a viable alternative until the average user can lift up a rock and get 20 high school kids willing and able to fix their computer.
You've just stated why Microsoft is so obsessed with making sure that schools run nothing but MS software. They're willing to do anything, including donating free computers with free software, on the condition that the schools don't use non-MS software. They understand that most people think like you do, and if linux is allowed in a school system, those kids will end up knowing how to fix a linux computer.
10 or 15 years ago, it was a lot more common to see Apple computers in schools, because they were better suited for schools' needs, and contrary to claims, didn't cost any more. You don't see nearly as many Macs in US schools now, mostly because Apple can't as easily afford to sell below cost. The teachers in schools who would prefer Macs are blocked by orders from management that only Microsoft computers are allowed. And this is often because the contract that came with the "gift" says that if a non-MS system is discovered in the school, the school loses its discount and has to pay the full retail price for all their computers.
Back in the 1970s, IBM was finally ordered by the Justice Department and the courts to stop the practice of selling below cost to schools. Of course, by then it was far too late, and the mainframe part of the computer industry had been reduced to just one name: IBM. That court order didn't apply to Microsoft, however, because it wasn't actually owned by IBM. Now, after a couple decades of Microsoft selling below cost to schools (or outright "donating" computers and software), they have managed to make it difficult for you to hire a high-school kid who knows linux.
And people make the argument quoted above to justify it all.
Recall that Justice pulled the experienced lawyers off the Microsoft case after Bush took office, and one could expect another Republican president to similarly ignore what MS does.
Not necessarily just a Republican. If you check the campaign contribution news stories, one of the interesting changes in 2000 was that it was the first election in which Microsoft was a major contributor. Previously, they hadn't really gotten involved in campaign funding. Suddenly they were one of the top contributors to both Republican and Democratic candidates. Like most corporations, they did contribute more to the Republicans, but they gave significant amounts of money to many Democrats. They repeated this largess in 2004, and are doing the same now. So a Democratic president (and lots of Democratic members of Congress) will be in their pocket after the next election.
Microsoft's management has figured out how the game is played in Washington, and they're now a major player.
But as more PCs come with Linux preinstalled people will hear of it.
Not necessarily. For example, Walmart recently announced their $200 computer which runs linux. Here on/., most people probably noticed that "linux". But most Walmart customers probably didn't. They went to buy a "computer". They've never heard of computer brands, because in most retail outlets, there is only one brand. So the brand is noise. They never bought a "Microsoft" computer and they didn't buy a "Linux" computer at Walmart; they just bought a "computer". Probably not 1 in 100 could tell you what OS their computer is running. They know that it does email and the web and do other things like save stuff to files. But they don't notice the OS's name.
We could illustrate this with the popular automotive analogy: What brand/model engine is in your car? Betcha you don't know. Engines do have brand and model names, and they're often different from the car's, but probably not 1 person out of 1000 could answer this question. They know the brand name and model of their car, but not of its engine.
Similarly, Dell and Walmart (and Newegg and...) are now selling computers that contain MS Windows or linux. Most people are as interested in this internal detail as they are in the brand name of their car's engine. They've never known, they never will know, and if you know, you're one of those geeks that opens up the box and knows things about its innards. You're not a normal person at all. Teenage boys know such things; engineers and mechanics know such things; the rest of us don't know or care.
Actually, Microsoft's choice of OS names will add to this confusion. People rarely really hear capitalization in speech. So if you tell that one computer runs Windows, they'll see on the screen that, sure enough, there are windows there. Then you show them a linux machine, and its screen has windows, too. So they both "run windows". You can see the windows, and when you click on one and type something, the window runs - it changes in response to what you click on or type. I'd challenge you to explain the difference in words that non-geeks will understand.
It's entirely possible that Microsoft's downfall will be because of this. If they can't maintain their monopoly control of small-computer vendors, and those vendors are permitted to sell machines running linux, Microsoft could lose, and none of their customers would even know. Microsoft's management understands this, which is why they're so upset with the prospects of small computers being delivered that don't contain their software when delivered.
Yes, but only one group of people called Americans. The others are called, as you have proven to be aware, "Canadians", "Mexicans", "Peruvians", etc...
I enjoy pedantic douchebaggery as much as the next geek, but this one is right down there with grammar-naziing
And, of course, it really is a form of grammar naziiing. After all, the basic answer to the question is that we usually refer to people by their nationality, not their continent, and there's only one nation with "America" in its name. OTOH, "African" is understood as referring to the continent, since there's more than one nation with "Africa" in its name. It seems pretty clear that most people do understand this, since everyone except a few real dummies casually accept "American" to mean a citizen of the US.
That term "US" is a bit more fun. It's true that there's only one nation with "United States" in its name. But when you consider translations, there are a number of other countries whose official name includes the phrase "United States" in their own language. (Trivia question: Can you name them? And why is this question trickier than it appears at first?;-)
There are also curiosities in the use of continent names. Thus, there are several countries with "Africa" in their names, but "African" doesn't generally refer to the citizens of all those countries. Rather, it refers to people born in/on the continent of Africa. And it's generally understood to be a rather vague term, without implications of patriotism or even common attitudes toward anything in particular. It's usually used only in contexts that deal with the residents of that continent as a whole, usually in economic or health discussions.
It's also common to hear "North American", but it usually only refers to Canadians and Americans. You might think, looking at a map, that Mexicans would be included, but they are usually included in the term "Central Americans". This is for historical and cultural reasons, since there's no geographic reason for such a phrase. (The North American craton does include most of Mexico, after all.;-)
Then there's the fun of terms like "European" and "Asian". Is a Turk European or Asian? OK, what about a Kurd or an Armenian? How about a Russian who grew up in Murmansk? And note that "African" usually doesn't include the people living on Africa's north coast, who are "Middle Eastern", though some people will exert the effort to say "sub-Saharan African" instead of the usual plain "African".
I suppose the only ones who have it easy are the Australians. They know what country and continent they live in/on. Well, except that, technically, New Guinea is part of that continent.
Ron Paul's stance on Privacy and Personal Liberty.
"The biggest threat to your privacy is the government. We must drastically limit the ability of government to collect and store data regarding citizens' personal matters."
Well, he's wrong there. The biggest threat by far is from private corporations, at least here in the US.
The government at least has some laws in place, including parts of the Constitution, that restrict its right to invade our dwellings, read our correspondence, etc. There are few if any laws so restricting any private organization. Collecting data about us and selling it is, for the most part, entirely legal, and what few laws exist are almost totally unenforced.
A more effective approach would be to note that all organizations, government and non-government, are potential abusers of our privacy and liberty. Candidates should be queried out about our rights in general. And they should be asked what if any controls they'd suggest for abuses by powerful organizations like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Walmart, Bank of America, amazon.com, google, and so on.
(Hey, does slashdot make any money from information about our posts?;-)
I don't know that this company is actually abusing patent law. It seems like they have an actual invention (a type of keyboard + software that makes it easier to type in "weird" characters).
The descriptions of their keyboard, including this larger image, aren't too convincing. What they seem to have "invented" is the idea of adding a fifth "Ng" shift key to the conventional four (Shift, Ctrl, logo, Alt). They gave it somewhat unusual placement, stealing space from the usual Shift keys (and making them smaller).
But keyboards with five shift keys are hardly novel. I'm typing this on a 4-year-old Mac Powerbook, which has five shift keys (shift, fn, ctrl, alt/option, logo/cmd) at the lower left corner. The Mac puts all but the shift keys in the lower row, stealing space from the space bar
So what did they actually "invent"? Putting extra shift keys next to the usual "shift" keys? Inventing a new "Ng" label to paint on the key? Using a new keycode for the new keys?
Keyboards have been made with more than five shift keys, too.
The obvious conjecture is that this is yet another attempt to either extort money from the OLPC project, or to bankrupt it through litigation. Or maybe to just block its use in Nigeria, similar to the Microsoft bribe attempt discussed here last week.
[T]here is evidence of early contact with Polynesia (pre-Columbus), thanks to (of all things) chicken DNA.
Yes, but that's not the first evidence of such contact. Many decades ago, botanists pointed out that the sweet potato [Ipomoea batatas] plants that were growing all over Polynesia and southeast Asia actually evolved in South America. It seemed unlikely that the plant could have migrated out into the Pacific on its own; transport by humans was the most reasonable conclusion. Also, the archaeological evidence for the plant seems older in the central Pacific than in areas farther west.
Of course, it's always good to have multiple independent kinds of evidence for such claims. This is especially true in the tropics, where biological remains often aren't preserved too well. Further DNA studies of domestic animals and plants will probably add more support to this idea over the next several decades.
YMMV, but it appears that Microsoft has a no cost licencing program for non profit organisations and charities. All that is required is for the organisation to ask.
Yeah, I heard that from one person. Others don't seem to have gotten such a helpful response. It seems to depend on which person at Microsoft you point to. Or maybe whether they think you're really a charitable organization. Or maybe whether the BSA finds you before you hear about this program.
A study funded by a gun manufacturer has determined that guns very rarely harm anyone. Experiments have verified their theoretical calculations that, when a gun is fired off in a random direction, only a tiny percentage of the bullets hits anyone.
(I tried to think of an automotive metaphor, but couldn't come up with a good one.)
Anything that's going to be seriously radioactive for 30,000 years is going to be an alpha emitter. Whose highly dangerous particles need massive shielding between you and the source, like that provided by, say, a piece of paper.
Yeah, but haven't you heard - paper is obsolete. It's all been replaced by computer displays (and "electronic paper"). If the alpha particles start whamming into those, before long you have lots of dead pixels. And we can't have that, now can we?
If we have to re-establish paper plants (which are highly polluting), it'll be a huge expense. And think of the trees!
That OEM copy of Office that came with your Dell? Well, you can't put that on another system if you get rid of that old Dell. That's not exactly common knowledge, nor is it out in the open; it's buried in the EULA.
This is a problem that's fairly widely known among charitable organizations. People often offer to donate computers to them, thinking that it's a valuable donation. But if it's a Microsoft system, such a donation only covers the hardware. You can't legally donate the software. If the charitable organization doesn't purchase their own copy of the software, wipe the disk, and reinstall their legal copy, they are in volation and can be victimized by the BSA or the software companies. And they'd better save all the receipts, because otherwise any software found on their disks will be assumed illegal.
I know of a number of organizations that have a policy of wiping contributed disks and installing linux (usually Red Hat, but Ubuntu is getting popular). But many don't, and are using the software that came with the hardware. If you're involved with a charitable organization, you might check into this, and try to explain to them the dangers of using software from Microsoft or other such corporations. The best approach might be to ask them if they can show you their receipts for every proprietary program on their disks. If not, they're risking being hauled into court and fined a lot of money.
Has anyone here been involved with a charitable organization that has dealt with this? It might be interesting to hear your story.
Out of curiosity, I fetched the obvious URL, "http://www.ernieball.com/", and here are the HTTP headers: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:40:58 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.54 OpenSSL/0.9.7e DAV/2 PHP/5.1.6 mod_python/3.1.4 Python/2.4 SVN/1.2.3 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6 Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html
So yes, they're using some sort of unix system (maybe linux) for a web server. They also have mod_python installed, and also use PHP. (Not that we care.;-)
In fact, the phrase makes perfect sense, but only if you know that one of the older meanings of "prove" is "to test".
Yeah; I'm familiar with that explanation. But rather than explain, what I like to do is just say "Exceptions disprove the rule." It's fun to watch people get confused and flustered, because they know that they were trying to use the old saying to support something that's false, and I've seen through them. Most people don't know that archaic meaning of "prove", only the modern meaning, so they were in fact arguing for an absurdity when they claimed that an exception proved a rule.
Of course, I wouldn't try that comeback with someone that I knew was familiar with older versions of the English language. You can usually spot them, y'know.
As everyone knows (;-), Yale and Harvard are also primary competitors in their law schools, and Yale turns out about as many lawyers as Harvard. In fact, there have been some interesting studies done comparing the two schools, which have radically different teaching cultures in their law schools. The conclusion seems to be that both work quite well, and their graduates have roughly the same success rate after graduation.
So what's going on between the RIAA/MPAA and Yale? Does Yale's reputation as being the "nice" law school (if that's not an oxymoron) result in them being attacked more or less? Anyone have data?
So, the XO laptop is clearly technicly superior for the intended market. But, marketing and other stuff can still make it fail.
One of the bizarre things about discussions like this is that most people seem to just assume that there has to be one best computer. It's easy to understand why a company like IBM or Microsoft might want to impose its product on the entire "market", regardless of how appropriate it is. But it's strange to see people in general arguing in favor of one particular computer.
To use the usual worn-out metaphor, we don't see people treating all vehicles as interchangeable. If you suggested that a particular brand of car (or boat or airplane) was the best, and everyone else should just buy that one. If you tried to argue that an auto, even a really good one, should be bought instead of an airplane or helicopter or oil tanker or cruise ship; that would be dismissed by everyone as just silly.
The same should work for computers. You could argue that Microsoft makes a fairly good desktop single-user computer. But suggesting that the same system would be appropriate for all situations where you want a computer, well, that should get the same dismissal as the suggestion that autos, airplanes and boats are interchangeable.
It seems fairly obvious that any of the current crop of small commercial computers is a very poor match for what the OLPC project is trying to do. I get the feeling that Mac users understand that their favorite system wouldn't do this job at all; they've gotten this across by their clear absence from this discussion. The linux fanboys like the fact that the XO is based on linux, but the UI is totally different, and we haven't heard anyone pushing Gnome or KDE, because they all understand that that would be silly. But it's interesting to read people suggesting that a Windows box would be appropriate. Are they all astroturfers? Maybe, but I'd guess not. It's likely that a lot of them do think that giving a Vista box to a 5-year-old in Kenya or Cambodia who doesn't understand a word of English would be the Right Thing To DO.
Actually, I think the most interesting thing about the XO is its innovative UI. Next is its "mesh" approach to networking, which we've discussed for decades but never really done much about. And with first-world people jumping on the "Give One, Get One" offer, these may actually have an impact on computers aimed at adults.
It'll be interesting to watch. If OLPC manages to survive Microsoft's attacks.
Negroponte doesn't have to personally manage consumer sales or production. Spin off a new company to handle the consumer side and plough the profits back into the charitable side.
Whatcha wanna bet this happens in a year or two? I'd predict that, once the XO gets into the hands of people in a bunch of different countries, they'll get lots of feedback, and make a lot of changes. With its radical redesign of the GUI and the networking, it could turn into a very practical gadget for a lot of people. And if they keep up the charity aspect, lots of first-world people will be willing to pay a premium for that warm, fuzzy feeling of helping poor kids.
But I'd agree, spinning off the hardware into a separate organization may start to look very practical to the OLPC gang.
If Microsoft doesn't manage to kill it off, of course.
I'm in mixed minds because although a taser is a torture device, I still think it's better to be able to use a Taser rather than shoot someone dead,...
Yes, it's probably better to torture someone that to kill them.
But what does it say about you, that you would make such an argument?
(And what does it say about me, that I'd agree with you?;-)
Secondly, it could reveal information written by others which may or may not be about you - and totally outside your control.
Well, my name happens to be not especially rare (but rarer than "Bill Gates";-). There are a number of other computer people with my name. I've seen bibliographies that list things written by several of us, with no clues that they might be different people. So your name alone isn't necessarily all that informative.
If your name is shared with someone that you'd rather not be associated with, you might have a problem these days. Then there's my wife's problem: Googling her turns up zillions of references to a 19th-century poet, with things about her mixed in very sparsely.
Sometimes URLs or a good online nickname can help separate you from all those others.
I interview a *lot* of people and I have never seen a CV (resume) that lists any nicknames, alter-egos, aliases or anything that would point to the candidate having any kind of online presence.
I've seen the other side of this. Since I've worked mostly on network programming since 1980 or so, I've always had my resume online, and I've included things like my email address and a few web sites.
But when dealing with headhunters, I've been constantly bemused by their approach: They invariably strip out all such identifying information, and reduce it to a list of keywords. This tells the reader what I've worked with, but blocks any attempt to communicate with me directly or look at anything that I've done.
I understand why they do this; they don't want me or their clients doing an end run and cutting them out of the chain. But the result is, as you say, the interviewers don't see anything that could lead to direct communication. I find this a problem, because it seems to me that a network programmer should demonstrate a network presence to prospective employers. I'm not sure what I can do to change it, though.
I have got a few jobs through my online resume. I've also got a huge number of messages from people whose software found the resume and automatically sent me a description of a job that was utterly unrelated to my background.;-)
No real vendor support. Who is going to buy these things when they have to fix every single problem themselves?
I'll bet that in most villages (or poor urban neighborhoods), there'll be 2 or 3 kids with these that'll immediately want to take them apart and learn how they work. They'll also dig into the software, and start writing their own. The rest of the kids will call them the local equivalent of geeks and nerds, but they'll learn. And they'll be the local support crew.
An important ideal in the OLPC project has been to make the kids as independent as possible of the external power structures that have kept them down. Making them dependent on outsiders for support would only continue this bad history. Making it easy for the kids to take the gadgets apart and study them means that they'll be independent of outside support.
Of course, the companies that make their profit from support contracts can be expected to find this a threat. It is a threat to their future profit. Some of those kids are going to be the local suppliers in the future. And they won't be beholden to a foreign computer supplier, because their supplier has worked to make them independent.
It is a bit curious that this approach is being pushed by an American "entrepreneur". Who'd'a thunk?;-)
I am just disappointed that OLPC themselves didnt see the potential in selling a consumer version of their device.
Negroponte has repeatedly said that he's not interested in selling computers; he's trying to provide education. He sees the XO as a way to get information to places that it can't reach now.
If he were to become a computer vendor, all his time would be taken up by that job, and he'd have no time to be an educator.
Note that Negroponte isn't in an MIT department with "Computer" in its name. He's in the Media Lab. He's interested in information transfer. Hardware is someone else's job, and he only got marginally involved because nobody else was willing to work on the sort of hardware that could do the job he wanted done.
Hey, let a few MS salespeople know you're thinking of ordering an XO, and they'll probably make you an offer.
It'd probably work better if you work in a school system. Tell MS that you're talking to your school committee about the XO, and see how fast MS's people come in with a very good-looking offer. Of course, if you take it, you might be surprised at all the extra charges for the things you didn't think of, but which turn out to be needed to make their systems actually usable.
Some years back, when I was in college, I saw an entertaining example of this. A bunch of systems were ordered at a very low price. When they were delivered, it was discovered that 1) They didn't come with power adapters, 2) The required power adapters were rather expensive, and 3) The contract said that only the required power adapters could be used (and using any others would void the warranty). The final price turned out to be slightly higher than retail. Those of us who had advised against the purchase found it all tremendously amusing.
(Names not included to protect the poor suckers who fell for it. Some of them were friends of mine.;-)
What is being offered by Microsoft and Intel is an inferior, but more expensive product.
And your problem is? If it's more expensive and inferior then it'll be unsuccessful.
Not true at all. The poster child for the situation is Netscape, but Microsoft has "done a Netscape" on lots of other startups.
Fact is, a high-quality product by a small, underfunded company can be and often is squashed by a poor-quality product with a large advertising budget. That has been Microsoft's approach from the very start, when they had the huge IBM budget behind the first model "IBM PC". The tech world smugly predicted that such a shoddy, overpriced computer couldn't possibly succeed against the many better things that were already for sale. But it did succeed, and most of those CP/M companies are long gone, because people recognized the IBM brand, and IBM could spend more on the ad campaign than the entire operating budgets of all its competitors combined.
That's exactly what MS will try here, and chances are very good that they'll end up bankrupting the OLPC project before it gets off the ground. MS has already shown that it's willing to use bribery and back-room politics to derail OLPC orders. They've probably learned to not be quite so blatant, and cover their tracks a bit better, and they may well succeed with such tactics in many cases.
This campaign could well be yet another textbook case in how monopoly capitalism works. Stay tuned; it'll probably be well covered here, though not in the mainstream media.
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Well, I've seen a number of explanations, that amount to MS "donating" a software package, and then their accountants enter the listed retail price as their donation. This obviously has a certain amount of bogosity about it, especially as their main software packages (Windows and Office) are hardly ever sold at the official retail price. But the laws of accounting for such intangible products are beyond the ken of mere mortals.
It has been pointed out that there is a significant cost to selling products like Windows and Office: The marketing campaign to maintain their market lead is expensive. MS supposedly has spent on the order of a billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) in marketing costs for their major releases such as W95, W98, NT, etc. Marketing is also an intangible, but they'd never have sold anything without it, so it's in some sense a "real" cost.
OTOH, marketing isn't a per-item production cost. For software, that cost is close to zero, now that we have the internet.
In any case, with most commercial products, there are laws in most countries about what can be considered a discount or sale price. Usually, a company is required to show that it has actually sold a product at a claimed price to a significant number of customers, otherwise a discount or sale price lower than that can be considered fraud. But as far as I know, this isn't true for software. At least, I've never read of a company being prosecuted for fraud when they claim a given retail price for software that has never been actually sold for that price. Of course, it could have happened without me reading about it.
It is widely understood that vendors like Dell and HP that sell packaged MS Windows boxes never pay anywhere near the supposed retail price for Windows or any of the apps packaged with it. For independently-produced software, they often don't need to pay at all, because the suppliers really want their apps to be included in the default Windows distros.
There's also the old definition: An honest politician is one who, when bought, stays bought.
But "the market" tends to work in politics, too, at least with democratic governments. If a company bribes a politician and that politician doesn't pay off as expected, in the next election, the company donates less to that politician, or maybe gives its donation to a competing politician. That teaches a valuable market lesson, that it's bad to burn repeat customers. Cheating a customer or client is only profitable the first time. If you want repeat business, you have to deliver what people paid for.
Unless, of course, you're the only game in town. Then you can abuse your customers or clients as you wish, and they'll keep coming back, because they have to do business with you.
Linux is not and will never be a viable alternative until the average user can lift up a rock and get 20 high school kids willing and able to fix their computer.
You've just stated why Microsoft is so obsessed with making sure that schools run nothing but MS software. They're willing to do anything, including donating free computers with free software, on the condition that the schools don't use non-MS software. They understand that most people think like you do, and if linux is allowed in a school system, those kids will end up knowing how to fix a linux computer.
10 or 15 years ago, it was a lot more common to see Apple computers in schools, because they were better suited for schools' needs, and contrary to claims, didn't cost any more. You don't see nearly as many Macs in US schools now, mostly because Apple can't as easily afford to sell below cost. The teachers in schools who would prefer Macs are blocked by orders from management that only Microsoft computers are allowed. And this is often because the contract that came with the "gift" says that if a non-MS system is discovered in the school, the school loses its discount and has to pay the full retail price for all their computers.
Back in the 1970s, IBM was finally ordered by the Justice Department and the courts to stop the practice of selling below cost to schools. Of course, by then it was far too late, and the mainframe part of the computer industry had been reduced to just one name: IBM. That court order didn't apply to Microsoft, however, because it wasn't actually owned by IBM. Now, after a couple decades of Microsoft selling below cost to schools (or outright "donating" computers and software), they have managed to make it difficult for you to hire a high-school kid who knows linux.
And people make the argument quoted above to justify it all.
Recall that Justice pulled the experienced lawyers off the Microsoft case after Bush took office, and one could expect another Republican president to similarly ignore what MS does.
Not necessarily just a Republican. If you check the campaign contribution news stories, one of the interesting changes in 2000 was that it was the first election in which Microsoft was a major contributor. Previously, they hadn't really gotten involved in campaign funding. Suddenly they were one of the top contributors to both Republican and Democratic candidates. Like most corporations, they did contribute more to the Republicans, but they gave significant amounts of money to many Democrats. They repeated this largess in 2004, and are doing the same now. So a Democratic president (and lots of Democratic members of Congress) will be in their pocket after the next election.
Microsoft's management has figured out how the game is played in Washington, and they're now a major player.
But as more PCs come with Linux preinstalled people will hear of it.
/., most people probably noticed that "linux". But most Walmart customers probably didn't. They went to buy a "computer". They've never heard of computer brands, because in most retail outlets, there is only one brand. So the brand is noise. They never bought a "Microsoft" computer and they didn't buy a "Linux" computer at Walmart; they just bought a "computer". Probably not 1 in 100 could tell you what OS their computer is running. They know that it does email and the web and do other things like save stuff to files. But they don't notice the OS's name.
...) are now selling computers that contain MS Windows or linux. Most people are as interested in this internal detail as they are in the brand name of their car's engine. They've never known, they never will know, and if you know, you're one of those geeks that opens up the box and knows things about its innards. You're not a normal person at all. Teenage boys know such things; engineers and mechanics know such things; the rest of us don't know or care.
Not necessarily. For example, Walmart recently announced their $200 computer which runs linux. Here on
We could illustrate this with the popular automotive analogy: What brand/model engine is in your car? Betcha you don't know. Engines do have brand and model names, and they're often different from the car's, but probably not 1 person out of 1000 could answer this question. They know the brand name and model of their car, but not of its engine.
Similarly, Dell and Walmart (and Newegg and
Actually, Microsoft's choice of OS names will add to this confusion. People rarely really hear capitalization in speech. So if you tell that one computer runs Windows, they'll see on the screen that, sure enough, there are windows there. Then you show them a linux machine, and its screen has windows, too. So they both "run windows". You can see the windows, and when you click on one and type something, the window runs - it changes in response to what you click on or type. I'd challenge you to explain the difference in words that non-geeks will understand.
It's entirely possible that Microsoft's downfall will be because of this. If they can't maintain their monopoly control of small-computer vendors, and those vendors are permitted to sell machines running linux, Microsoft could lose, and none of their customers would even know. Microsoft's management understands this, which is why they're so upset with the prospects of small computers being delivered that don't contain their software when delivered.
And, of course, it really is a form of grammar naziiing. After all, the basic answer to the question is that we usually refer to people by their nationality, not their continent, and there's only one nation with "America" in its name. OTOH, "African" is understood as referring to the continent, since there's more than one nation with "Africa" in its name. It seems pretty clear that most people do understand this, since everyone except a few real dummies casually accept "American" to mean a citizen of the US.
That term "US" is a bit more fun. It's true that there's only one nation with "United States" in its name. But when you consider translations, there are a number of other countries whose official name includes the phrase "United States" in their own language. (Trivia question: Can you name them? And why is this question trickier than it appears at first?
There are also curiosities in the use of continent names. Thus, there are several countries with "Africa" in their names, but "African" doesn't generally refer to the citizens of all those countries. Rather, it refers to people born in/on the continent of Africa. And it's generally understood to be a rather vague term, without implications of patriotism or even common attitudes toward anything in particular. It's usually used only in contexts that deal with the residents of that continent as a whole, usually in economic or health discussions.
It's also common to hear "North American", but it usually only refers to Canadians and Americans. You might think, looking at a map, that Mexicans would be included, but they are usually included in the term "Central Americans". This is for historical and cultural reasons, since there's no geographic reason for such a phrase. (The North American craton does include most of Mexico, after all.
Then there's the fun of terms like "European" and "Asian". Is a Turk European or Asian? OK, what about a Kurd or an Armenian? How about a Russian who grew up in Murmansk? And note that "African" usually doesn't include the people living on Africa's north coast, who are "Middle Eastern", though some people will exert the effort to say "sub-Saharan African" instead of the usual plain "African".
I suppose the only ones who have it easy are the Australians. They know what country and continent they live in/on. Well, except that, technically, New Guinea is part of that continent.
Ron Paul's stance on Privacy and Personal Liberty.
;-)
"The biggest threat to your privacy is the government. We must drastically limit the ability of government to collect and store data regarding citizens' personal matters."
Well, he's wrong there. The biggest threat by far is from private corporations, at least here in the US.
The government at least has some laws in place, including parts of the Constitution, that restrict its right to invade our dwellings, read our correspondence, etc. There are few if any laws so restricting any private organization. Collecting data about us and selling it is, for the most part, entirely legal, and what few laws exist are almost totally unenforced.
A more effective approach would be to note that all organizations, government and non-government, are potential abusers of our privacy and liberty. Candidates should be queried out about our rights in general. And they should be asked what if any controls they'd suggest for abuses by powerful organizations like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Walmart, Bank of America, amazon.com, google, and so on.
(Hey, does slashdot make any money from information about our posts?
I don't know that this company is actually abusing patent law. It seems like they have an actual invention (a type of keyboard + software that makes it easier to type in "weird" characters).
The descriptions of their keyboard, including this larger image, aren't too convincing. What they seem to have "invented" is the idea of adding a fifth "Ng" shift key to the conventional four (Shift, Ctrl, logo, Alt). They gave it somewhat unusual placement, stealing space from the usual Shift keys (and making them smaller).
But keyboards with five shift keys are hardly novel. I'm typing this on a 4-year-old Mac Powerbook, which has five shift keys (shift, fn, ctrl, alt/option, logo/cmd) at the lower left corner. The Mac puts all but the shift keys in the lower row, stealing space from the space bar
So what did they actually "invent"? Putting extra shift keys next to the usual "shift" keys? Inventing a new "Ng" label to paint on the key? Using a new keycode for the new keys?
Keyboards have been made with more than five shift keys, too.
The obvious conjecture is that this is yet another attempt to either extort money from the OLPC project, or to bankrupt it through litigation. Or maybe to just block its use in Nigeria, similar to the Microsoft bribe attempt discussed here last week.
[T]here is evidence of early contact with Polynesia (pre-Columbus), thanks to (of all things) chicken DNA.
Yes, but that's not the first evidence of such contact. Many decades ago, botanists pointed out that the sweet potato [Ipomoea batatas] plants that were growing all over Polynesia and southeast Asia actually evolved in South America. It seemed unlikely that the plant could have migrated out into the Pacific on its own; transport by humans was the most reasonable conclusion. Also, the archaeological evidence for the plant seems older in the central Pacific than in areas farther west.
Of course, it's always good to have multiple independent kinds of evidence for such claims. This is especially true in the tropics, where biological remains often aren't preserved too well. Further DNA studies of domestic animals and plants will probably add more support to this idea over the next several decades.
YMMV, but it appears that Microsoft has a no cost licencing program for non profit organisations and charities. All that is required is for the organisation to ask.
Yeah, I heard that from one person. Others don't seem to have gotten such a helpful response. It seems to depend on which person at Microsoft you point to. Or maybe whether they think you're really a charitable organization. Or maybe whether the BSA finds you before you hear about this program.
A study funded by a gun manufacturer has determined that guns very rarely harm anyone. Experiments have verified their theoretical calculations that, when a gun is fired off in a random direction, only a tiny percentage of the bullets hits anyone.
(I tried to think of an automotive metaphor, but couldn't come up with a good one.)
Anything that's going to be seriously radioactive for 30,000 years is going to be an alpha emitter. Whose highly dangerous particles need massive shielding between you and the source, like that provided by, say, a piece of paper.
Yeah, but haven't you heard - paper is obsolete. It's all been replaced by computer displays (and "electronic paper"). If the alpha particles start whamming into those, before long you have lots of dead pixels. And we can't have that, now can we?
If we have to re-establish paper plants (which are highly polluting), it'll be a huge expense. And think of the trees!
That OEM copy of Office that came with your Dell? Well, you can't put that on another system if you get rid of that old Dell. That's not exactly common knowledge, nor is it out in the open; it's buried in the EULA.
This is a problem that's fairly widely known among charitable organizations. People often offer to donate computers to them, thinking that it's a valuable donation. But if it's a Microsoft system, such a donation only covers the hardware. You can't legally donate the software. If the charitable organization doesn't purchase their own copy of the software, wipe the disk, and reinstall their legal copy, they are in volation and can be victimized by the BSA or the software companies. And they'd better save all the receipts, because otherwise any software found on their disks will be assumed illegal.
I know of a number of organizations that have a policy of wiping contributed disks and installing linux (usually Red Hat, but Ubuntu is getting popular). But many don't, and are using the software that came with the hardware. If you're involved with a charitable organization, you might check into this, and try to explain to them the dangers of using software from Microsoft or other such corporations. The best approach might be to ask them if they can show you their receipts for every proprietary program on their disks. If not, they're risking being hauled into court and fined a lot of money.
Has anyone here been involved with a charitable organization that has dealt with this? It might be interesting to hear your story.
Out of curiosity, I fetched the obvious URL, "http://www.ernieball.com/", and here are the HTTP headers:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:40:58 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.54 OpenSSL/0.9.7e DAV/2 PHP/5.1.6 mod_python/3.1.4 Python/2.4 SVN/1.2.3
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html
So yes, they're using some sort of unix system (maybe linux) for a web server. They also have mod_python installed, and also use PHP. (Not that we care.
In fact, the phrase makes perfect sense, but only if you know that one of the older meanings of "prove" is "to test".
Yeah; I'm familiar with that explanation. But rather than explain, what I like to do is just say "Exceptions disprove the rule." It's fun to watch people get confused and flustered, because they know that they were trying to use the old saying to support something that's false, and I've seen through them. Most people don't know that archaic meaning of "prove", only the modern meaning, so they were in fact arguing for an absurdity when they claimed that an exception proved a rule.
Of course, I wouldn't try that comeback with someone that I knew was familiar with older versions of the English language. You can usually spot them, y'know.
As everyone knows (;-), Yale and Harvard are also primary competitors in their law schools, and Yale turns out about as many lawyers as Harvard. In fact, there have been some interesting studies done comparing the two schools, which have radically different teaching cultures in their law schools. The conclusion seems to be that both work quite well, and their graduates have roughly the same success rate after graduation.
...
So what's going on between the RIAA/MPAA and Yale? Does Yale's reputation as being the "nice" law school (if that's not an oxymoron) result in them being attacked more or less? Anyone have data?
Just curious
So, the XO laptop is clearly technicly superior for the intended market. But, marketing and other stuff can still make it fail.
One of the bizarre things about discussions like this is that most people seem to just assume that there has to be one best computer. It's easy to understand why a company like IBM or Microsoft might want to impose its product on the entire "market", regardless of how appropriate it is. But it's strange to see people in general arguing in favor of one particular computer.
To use the usual worn-out metaphor, we don't see people treating all vehicles as interchangeable. If you suggested that a particular brand of car (or boat or airplane) was the best, and everyone else should just buy that one. If you tried to argue that an auto, even a really good one, should be bought instead of an airplane or helicopter or oil tanker or cruise ship; that would be dismissed by everyone as just silly.
The same should work for computers. You could argue that Microsoft makes a fairly good desktop single-user computer. But suggesting that the same system would be appropriate for all situations where you want a computer, well, that should get the same dismissal as the suggestion that autos, airplanes and boats are interchangeable.
It seems fairly obvious that any of the current crop of small commercial computers is a very poor match for what the OLPC project is trying to do. I get the feeling that Mac users understand that their favorite system wouldn't do this job at all; they've gotten this across by their clear absence from this discussion. The linux fanboys like the fact that the XO is based on linux, but the UI is totally different, and we haven't heard anyone pushing Gnome or KDE, because they all understand that that would be silly. But it's interesting to read people suggesting that a Windows box would be appropriate. Are they all astroturfers? Maybe, but I'd guess not. It's likely that a lot of them do think that giving a Vista box to a 5-year-old in Kenya or Cambodia who doesn't understand a word of English would be the Right Thing To DO.
Actually, I think the most interesting thing about the XO is its innovative UI. Next is its "mesh" approach to networking, which we've discussed for decades but never really done much about. And with first-world people jumping on the "Give One, Get One" offer, these may actually have an impact on computers aimed at adults.
It'll be interesting to watch. If OLPC manages to survive Microsoft's attacks.
Negroponte doesn't have to personally manage consumer sales or production. Spin off a new company to handle the consumer side and plough the profits back into the charitable side.
Whatcha wanna bet this happens in a year or two? I'd predict that, once the XO gets into the hands of people in a bunch of different countries, they'll get lots of feedback, and make a lot of changes. With its radical redesign of the GUI and the networking, it could turn into a very practical gadget for a lot of people. And if they keep up the charity aspect, lots of first-world people will be willing to pay a premium for that warm, fuzzy feeling of helping poor kids.
But I'd agree, spinning off the hardware into a separate organization may start to look very practical to the OLPC gang.
If Microsoft doesn't manage to kill it off, of course.
I'm in mixed minds because although a taser is a torture device, I still think it's better to be able to use a Taser rather than shoot someone dead, ...
;-)
Yes, it's probably better to torture someone that to kill them.
But what does it say about you, that you would make such an argument?
(And what does it say about me, that I'd agree with you?
Secondly, it could reveal information written by others which may or may not be about you - and totally outside your control.
;-). There are a number of other computer people with my name. I've seen bibliographies that list things written by several of us, with no clues that they might be different people. So your name alone isn't necessarily all that informative.
Well, my name happens to be not especially rare (but rarer than "Bill Gates"
If your name is shared with someone that you'd rather not be associated with, you might have a problem these days. Then there's my wife's problem: Googling her turns up zillions of references to a 19th-century poet, with things about her mixed in very sparsely.
Sometimes URLs or a good online nickname can help separate you from all those others.
I interview a *lot* of people and I have never seen a CV (resume) that lists any nicknames, alter-egos, aliases or anything that would point to the candidate having any kind of online presence.
;-)
I've seen the other side of this. Since I've worked mostly on network programming since 1980 or so, I've always had my resume online, and I've included things like my email address and a few web sites.
But when dealing with headhunters, I've been constantly bemused by their approach: They invariably strip out all such identifying information, and reduce it to a list of keywords. This tells the reader what I've worked with, but blocks any attempt to communicate with me directly or look at anything that I've done.
I understand why they do this; they don't want me or their clients doing an end run and cutting them out of the chain. But the result is, as you say, the interviewers don't see anything that could lead to direct communication. I find this a problem, because it seems to me that a network programmer should demonstrate a network presence to prospective employers. I'm not sure what I can do to change it, though.
I have got a few jobs through my online resume. I've also got a huge number of messages from people whose software found the resume and automatically sent me a description of a job that was utterly unrelated to my background.
No real vendor support. Who is going to buy these things when they have to fix every single problem themselves?
;-)
I'll bet that in most villages (or poor urban neighborhoods), there'll be 2 or 3 kids with these that'll immediately want to take them apart and learn how they work. They'll also dig into the software, and start writing their own. The rest of the kids will call them the local equivalent of geeks and nerds, but they'll learn. And they'll be the local support crew.
An important ideal in the OLPC project has been to make the kids as independent as possible of the external power structures that have kept them down. Making them dependent on outsiders for support would only continue this bad history. Making it easy for the kids to take the gadgets apart and study them means that they'll be independent of outside support.
Of course, the companies that make their profit from support contracts can be expected to find this a threat. It is a threat to their future profit. Some of those kids are going to be the local suppliers in the future. And they won't be beholden to a foreign computer supplier, because their supplier has worked to make them independent.
It is a bit curious that this approach is being pushed by an American "entrepreneur". Who'd'a thunk?
I am just disappointed that OLPC themselves didnt see the potential in selling a consumer version of their device.
Negroponte has repeatedly said that he's not interested in selling computers; he's trying to provide education. He sees the XO as a way to get information to places that it can't reach now.
If he were to become a computer vendor, all his time would be taken up by that job, and he'd have no time to be an educator.
Note that Negroponte isn't in an MIT department with "Computer" in its name. He's in the Media Lab. He's interested in information transfer. Hardware is someone else's job, and he only got marginally involved because nobody else was willing to work on the sort of hardware that could do the job he wanted done.
I suppose I'd pay $3 for Vista.
;-)
Hey, let a few MS salespeople know you're thinking of ordering an XO, and they'll probably make you an offer.
It'd probably work better if you work in a school system. Tell MS that you're talking to your school committee about the XO, and see how fast MS's people come in with a very good-looking offer. Of course, if you take it, you might be surprised at all the extra charges for the things you didn't think of, but which turn out to be needed to make their systems actually usable.
Some years back, when I was in college, I saw an entertaining example of this. A bunch of systems were ordered at a very low price. When they were delivered, it was discovered that 1) They didn't come with power adapters, 2) The required power adapters were rather expensive, and 3) The contract said that only the required power adapters could be used (and using any others would void the warranty). The final price turned out to be slightly higher than retail. Those of us who had advised against the purchase found it all tremendously amusing.
(Names not included to protect the poor suckers who fell for it. Some of them were friends of mine.
Not true at all. The poster child for the situation is Netscape, but Microsoft has "done a Netscape" on lots of other startups.
Fact is, a high-quality product by a small, underfunded company can be and often is squashed by a poor-quality product with a large advertising budget. That has been Microsoft's approach from the very start, when they had the huge IBM budget behind the first model "IBM PC". The tech world smugly predicted that such a shoddy, overpriced computer couldn't possibly succeed against the many better things that were already for sale. But it did succeed, and most of those CP/M companies are long gone, because people recognized the IBM brand, and IBM could spend more on the ad campaign than the entire operating budgets of all its competitors combined.
That's exactly what MS will try here, and chances are very good that they'll end up bankrupting the OLPC project before it gets off the ground. MS has already shown that it's willing to use bribery and back-room politics to derail OLPC orders. They've probably learned to not be quite so blatant, and cover their tracks a bit better, and they may well succeed with such tactics in many cases.
This campaign could well be yet another textbook case in how monopoly capitalism works. Stay tuned; it'll probably be well covered here, though not in the mainstream media.