Is it only me, or does anyone else find it "interesting" that Apple Corps waits until the iPod is a global phenom, then "discovers" that "By Jove, those bloody Yanks have gone and set up a music company!"
"Brilliant!" as my favorite beer shillers say.
Sophistry, indeed. Perhaps Apple Computers should purchase Apple Corps and set them out on their collective ear-worm arses.
It's really simple: as long as Google follows the letter and spirit of the law, then they can manage their company as they see fit under the direction of their board of directors.
Should investors prefer another philosophy they can replace the management team.
If they cannot do that, then they can sell their stock and not be involved with Google any longer.
It's really pretty simple. Analysts have no power within a company other than to make suggestions to management and to offer guidance to investors. They cannot compell Google to do anything whatsoever, so they may as well deflate their chests and get over themselves.
I admin and/or host several blogs, and the two biggest time sucks are not the content creation or markup, as WordPress 2.0 has made that as easy as it gets. Instead, the two challenges are 1) the security of the software and/or it's underlying scripting language - e.g., Geeklog or PHP, and also, to an extent, comment spam. Both have gotten better, but if you miss a beat on the security issue, on a high volume blog you can have problems pronto.
As it is now, WP is as hard to use as Microsoft Word. Following behind, albeit not too far is MoveableType, then trailing is Geeklog. I haven't tried many of the other packages simply because my customers have not asked for an installation and as for my own blogs, they work and therefore they only get updated, not replaced.
There's a story I have seen in various internet forums that Wikipedia was largely funded by profits from porn sites at least in the beginning. Is that true?
Microsoft, ever the marketing company and ever the master of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt uses this sting operation to tout once again that open source software MUST be less secure because the source code is out there.
"...expressed fears that making its source code public could allow hackers to find security holes in Microsoft products..."
But theirs is not, because the source code is super-uber-duper Top SECRET.
And that is FUD as usual.
Oddly, the most notable open source OS, Linux, is more secure, partially because of its design (not letting every tom, dick and harry process have access to and control of the kernel) and also in large part due to the fact that people CAN inspect the source code and create fixes for security holes that inevitably emerge.
Security through obscurity has never worked, and one would think Microsoft would be smart enough to realize that by now. They undoubtedly do realize that, but don't want you or I to, otherwise we will not be willing to pony up license fees for their OS when free alternatives are there for the (legal) downloading.
But never let something good like MS catching pirates pass without turning it into an opportunity to FUD some more.
Let me ask you a question in reply, albeit one a little more seriously: using HD sports coverage as an example, what you suggest won't happen. In sports, they still use the same over-zoomed in your face camera shots, to the point of massive pixellation and a near-complete breakdown of the HD format. You do not get many wide-angle panoramics, except in the interstices of programming. They call that the "you are there" style of production.
Now then, porn: it's business is to make you think you "are there." That, and sets are not vistas, like many might think, but usually are just a little wider than the camera angle. The edges have lights, microphone men, directors, monkeys, herds of zebra, you name it. In other words, expect an HD version of the production technique you see now. People pay good money for their blank DVD's so they can make illegal copies of the LD "in your face" style, and they are going to want the same good product when they raise the resolution.
And then you'll be able to see the razor stubble and dingleberries.
"Wow, I never knew Jenna Jameson has all those in-grown hairs from shaving her coochie!"
"Dang, that dude has a dingleberry hanging!"
"Did you see that! What a scar under her armpit from the implant surgery!"
And so forth and so on.
I think HD will make porn look worse, not better...low-def analog tv has a way of hiding the wrinkles, so to speak.
What's really interesting, however is that porno DVDs will have DRM embedded. Currently, they are not encoded, and how many DVD burners has that sold? More than a few, I think.
>What do Apple computers do that Microsoft computers don't >that will appeal to the general computing populace?
Get plagued by malware.
Pure and simple -- OS/X is a more secure operating system that just works, and people are growing very weary of computers that are constantly barraged by flaws, holes, vulnerabilities and backdoors.
Imagine if Toyota forced you to patch your Camry every other week, and once in a while when you did, stuff like the windshield wipers and the tachomoeter no longer worked correctly -- until the fix for the patch they made you get was released. Would you buy a Camry?
No, you would not. You would find a more relible car that just ran. Even if it cost a little more.
I'm sure you may be thinking of how to shoot down the analogy, but in fact, Toyota won market share in the car industry a long time again precisiely because their cars were more reliable than their American comptition. In droves, they traded in their Chevrolets, the Fords and whatver to get a new Toyota, which was priced at a premium.
It's not unthinkable the same thing could happen in the persoanl computing marketplace.
For the average person, a Mac will run all of the software that they need -- and do it reliably.
THAT'S trused computing.
Re:What about conventional fission reactors?
on
Return to the Moon
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· Score: 2, Insightful
>Basing policy on technology that doesn't exist seems rather silly at this point.
Ironic for you to say such, considering it was posted in a thread on going to the moon. The technology to send a man to the moon and return him safely to the Earth existed only on paper when Kennedy committed the country to the goal of going there before 1/1/70.
Great...Now I Don't Need a 7.1 Surround System
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Scanjet Music
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· Score: 1
I love stuff like this -- you can make music with a scanner...awesome. Other than usage as a gee-whiz or a joke, is there any practicality to it other than the excercise of making it happen?
Then again, that's the true spirit of "hacking" -- and I am old enough to remember when a hacker was someone who took hardware like this and made it do something that it was not "intended" to do and quite often, novel applications and entire product lines were born as a result.
Still, I doubt that this will be attached to my HD home theatre and be an active participant in the audio portion of whatever movie I'm watching.
But its still cool.
Patents In and Of Themselves Are Not Evil
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The Patent Epidemic
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The problem with patents is not that they are being granted at all, as some intellectual anarchists would have you believe, it is that they are being granted for entirely obvious "inventions" that are not really inventions at all. I will not bother to list them, one only has to look into the portfolio of a Jeff Bezos to see that these things are not being reviewed for prior art, orginality or utility, but are instead being rubber-stamped by reviewers more intent on clearing their desk than doing their jobs. Even when they try to do their jobs, rarely does it seem that they know what they are looking at, and rarely do they reject anything for being an entirely obvious application.
Until such time that patents are made more valuable by requiring an invention to be truly unique, the problem of patents being used predatorily to stifle competition will continue. This will take a sea change in Congress, and will be fought tooth and nail by the large corporations with large patent portfolios. They'll naturally claim that each and every patent is indeed a wonderful thing and that each and every patent that they hold should be upheld.
The only thing I can see coming of this is another windfall for lawyers who'll end up battling this out in the courts, one way or the other. It may sound pessimistic, but the truth is that the people and fairness will lose out in the long run.
Artisanal brewers have been using coffee in beer for the longest time...not that the patent office will ever notice that, given their sordid track record of late.
Some simple brewing facts for you: yeast metabolizes sugars, and gives off alcohol and CO2 as their by product. Coffee, in and of itself, has no sugars that are fermentable. Therefore, Nestle will have to add sugar. That's where they run into prior art: at that point, coffee is another adjunct to the brew. Since this has been done more or less since coffee was introduced to the Western hemisphere, their patent had better be extremely specific in order to withstand scrutiny. They certainly will not be able to patent the whole idea of "coffee beer" or for that matter, "coffee liquor" or anything else. The folks that make Kaluha must be laughing over their, ahem, coffee this morning.
As for the "fruity" flavors they are talking about, that is abother by-product of brewing. Most of the time, yeasts, especially ale yeasts, produce esters as by-products in addition to CO2 and alcohols. For a good example of this, go and buy a Weihenstephan beer (which is only the oldest continuously operating brewery in the world, since 725 AD,) whose flagship beer is a wheat beer that has pronounced clove and "fruity" esters because of the yeast that they use. They are specifically iso-amyl acetate, the same ester found in bananas. So, Nestle proposes to "patent" very natually ocurring brewing by-products? Note that Weihenstpehan is only one example. Head north to Belgium (the veritable Disneyland of beers) and you will find brews with every ester under the sun and more. So where can Nestles propose to patent something that has been done for centuries, and has the hallmark of a brewery that has been in operation for overthirteen centuries?
I run a fairly busy blog for a college sports team Red and White From State and it has been up for a year. I've written most of the entries, in fact 380 of them in the 366 days that we've been up. We average over 1,000 unique hits a day, with no advertising, no search engine placement, in fact, it's just there and has gotten around by word of mouth.
My wife asks me why I do it. I tell her that it's therapeutic, that it's interesting to me, and that I enjoy it -- most of the time. She thinks I am crazy. Maybe so. But at least I am having a good time doing it.
for IBM, (an OSS expendature that intense) would be throwing money down a well.
See: the fees they pay their lawyers in the SCO lawsuit.
See: IBM opening their patent suite to FOSS
See: IBM's own work in the kernel, etc.
Anyone who thinks IBM is not serious about open source needs to look closer.
Your implication is that Red Hat alone has the programmers who can keep the development of gcc et. al running.
Let me give you a little hint at who can do it as well: Leave Red Hat's headquarters, turn left on Avent Ferry Road, go to I-440. Continue on to the I-40 intersection and go west until you reach Davis Drive. Turn right at the top of the exit to the end of Davis Drive.
You've just arrived at IBM in Research Triangle Park.
What Matthew Szulik is actually clamoring for is more sales for Red Hat, especially when he takes a swipe at SuSe, which is one of Red Hat's strongest competitors. Subtle Szulik isn't.
The truth is that the number of distros is good for the industry. Sure, it sets back Red Hat's bottom line, but a lot of people use Linux because it is free as in beer. The Debian distros in particular come very close to rivalling the "products" that Red Hat, et. al, distribute, and as far as support, "Google is your friend."
Szulik and company actually hurt their own sales when they decided to focus solely on the enterprise market and leave the smaller potatoes out to fend with Fedora. SuSe still offers a nice packages distro for those that want one, and they took a lot of the folks who had used Red Hat's products previous to their being abandoned. Others went with Debian, and some Fedora. None of these choices generate profits for Red Hat.
Sorry the little guys weren't big enough for you to worry about, Matt, but there are other choices in the Linux world to use. That may be bad for you, but it is good for us. And Matt, let's tell it like it is: you need us more than we need you. That's how FOSS works, so get used to it.
I often print in Super A3, and it costs about $5-8 a print. That's expensive, but 13"x19" is a pretty large photo. Getting a print that size out of a photo processor would be far more.
Then again, I also print 13"x46" panoramics quite often. Those are incredibly expensive to have a processor do, and I can do those in the digital darkroom far cheaper.
Finally, someone posted here that Laser RGB is better. Oddly enough, I have been to a number of working professional photographers, for example Clyde Butcher and he uses ink based printing. Galen Rowell did, as do a number of other prominent professionals. That should speak for itself.
I guess the bottom line is how serious you are about photography. For a snapshot, yeah, Wal-Mart's pices are cheaper. For someone who aspires to fine art, money is not much of an object in the first place, and the convenience and flexibility of doing it yourself means more than a few cents per print anyday anyway.
Records companies are often called greedy, and that's probably true. However, they do have a responsibility to the sharehoders to get everything that they can get in order to return maximum profits. Basically, that boils down to what they will charge whatever the market will bear.
If you sold your car, you'd probably choose to sell it to whoever would pay you the most money. Same with your house.
But at the end of the day, consumers have a choice. Music is a product that you really do not need, and it is a luxury. The way to get the music companies to charge less is to buy less, and let the marketplace force them to charge a price that consumers find more reasonable. That's also part of the equation of 'what the marketplace will bear.'
I said that Microsoft is always having to come up with protection schemes, add-ons, etc. to secure their OS. Why not seal the kernel and execution environment? That argument is as germaine tonight as it was in 1996.
Love them or hate them, a Microsoft OS is at best a Rube Goldberg device of an operating system. I think that is one of the reasons why MS OS's slow to a crawl after a period of time, or at least seem to.
Look at the average Windows system that has not had a rebuild in a year or more. More than likely, the system tray at the right stretches halfway across the screen when it is expanded. There's virus protection, a personal firewall, spam protection, etc. etc. etc.
Now we have another protection racket (err, application) from Microsoft to protect us from what is ultimately Microsoft's fault: an operating system that at it's core was designed in such a way that security was an afterthought.
So, we have words of Microsoft's plans to have more protected kernel. Of course, because it is Microsoft, that means you will need to use Microsoft's apps, or their approved vendors, Microsoft approved hardware, etc. etc. Trusted computing? Sure -- Microsoft can trust you to fill their profit stream after you install their secure OS.
Instead, why doesn't Microsoft use the principles of Occam's Razor and not let applications have direct access to the kernel? Why not have an equivilant of chroot that works well? Why, at the core, give so many holes for applications, good or bad, to wreak havoc on your computer?
Gee, sounds like a mind-numbingly simple idea. I guess it has many names, but they all end in "nix." (BSD excepted, but you get the point.)
Good point, however, you could make an anology to your take and the outsourcing of jobs to economies where humans are in abundance...and the net effect here has been 1) layoffs and 2) increased time demands to match productivity on those who kept their jobs. Many of those demands come in the form of technological gee-gaws that have their own time-sucking demands, whether we want them or not.
Robots may not care so much about working more hours, but you can certainly expect the workers to care about being displaced by them....as well as the ones who have to work harder to stay in the same place to compete.
Bottom line is that many of us were "given" bright new technologies to help us do our jobs. Now, we spend a great deal of our time servicing those technologies. Many of us get hundreds of e-mails a day. Lots of voice mails. Cell phones that were foisted on us to keep us in touch. It may be easier, yes, but is it better? I will wager less than 1/5th of the e-mails I get (non-spam, work-related) are important. But I still have to read them. Voice mails? More or less the same. What was important two hours ago may not be so important now. But I still have to service the voice mail by spending time listening to them in order to cull the wheat from the chaff. As for cell phones, they are handy, yes. But sometimes, when you cannot be reached, people arrive at solutions or problems go away without you having to talk on the phone. But, if you are in range, you will service that technology too.
Yes, those things have value. But with every value there is an associated cost, and one of those costs in terms of technology is time.
That's my point about new technologies -- they come out as wondrous time-saving inventions that are SURE! to make your life better, but all too often people do not recognize the cost associated with any technological device that is not always seen at first. That is, until they have listened to their 69th useless voice mail or gotten their fourth call of the night asking a question better asked the next day in the office.
One only has to go back through ancient issues of Popular Science or Life Magazines to read through promised Utopia through technology. Flying cars, personal atomic power plants, smart homes, etc., were the rule of the day back then, and they all had fleetingly brilliant promise to bring a new "wealth" of leisure.
It didn't happen.
Fast forward to the 1970's at the advent of the personal computer revolution and read magazines like "Byte" or similiar. The coming of age of the PC was to free us from mundane tasks, make work easier, give us more leisure time because things were simpler.
That did not happen either, even if Byte and others were correct in saying that the computer revolution was here to stay.
There is a truism in regards to technology: when something is made easier to do, more of it is expected to be done.
Or, if you prefer, back to the PC analogy: PC's have made things like spreadsheets, memos, etc., far easier for the average office worker, but instead of being rewarded with more leisure time, more spreadsheets and memos etc. are expected instead. In other words, instead of making life easier, more work has been created and now we are more or less enslaved to the technology that it is done on.
History is rife with examples of this: cellphones, for example. Now you cannot get away and work goes with you everywhere, all too often 24/7. Enslaved to the never-ending communication, instead of better, we got more.
George Santayna said those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. True. And history here will repeat itself. Technology will make things easier, and when they are easier it will be expected that more of it will be done.
And, as anyone who has sat on a beach with only a cool drink and the waves to contemplate, more work, no matter how "easy" is not Utopia.
By your example, Xerox would have never made it out of the garage.
A pen can be used for copyright vioations, as can a camera. How much ink is invested in illegal copying every year is anyone's guess. Cameras, the same thing.
Yes, I know that those are ridiculous examples. However, under the Grokster standard, either of the latter could be considered instruments for wanton copyright violation (despite the ridiculousness of it) and be banned...if they were new technologies.
Most any tool, be it software or hardware, is capable of being used illegally. That people do so is not so much a reflection of most tools but instead a reflection on those people.
Oh, How The Litigators Are Gonna Love THIS
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Bridging Torrent and RSS
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Automation of Bittorrent was inevitable. More or less, torrents become the functional equivilant of the automated podcast gathering programs.
Things is, most podcasts are original content. Much of the 'torrents, and let's be honest, are not, and they are not exactly sanctioned (meaning they're pirated works.)
Gee, do you think that the MPAA legal goons will be among the early adopters? Think that they will have the RIAA folks for company?
Bet the farm on it.
Come to think of it, one must wonder when or if the adult industry will resort to infringement lawsuits to protect their unique content...sure there has been a scant amount of it, but eventually, someone is going to pay big for those Jenna Jameson clips. (LOL.)
The total space available on any hard drive is approximately 75% of the total amount of data you would like to store on it.
Corollaries:
a) The failure rate for hard drives is 100%
b) Backup media is always less than 40% of what is needed
c) Hard drives always fail at the most inconvenient time
d) All drives all full in 4 months.
e) Microsoft products always make the most inefficient usage of any hard drive and have programs that automagically fragment the drive in the background.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it only me, or does anyone else find it "interesting" that Apple Corps waits until the iPod is a global phenom, then "discovers" that "By Jove, those bloody Yanks have gone and set up a music company!"
"Brilliant!" as my favorite beer shillers say.
Sophistry, indeed. Perhaps Apple Computers should purchase Apple Corps and set them out on their collective ear-worm arses.
It's really simple: as long as Google follows the letter and spirit of the law, then they can manage their company as they see fit under the direction of their board of directors.
Should investors prefer another philosophy they can replace the management team.
If they cannot do that, then they can sell their stock and not be involved with Google any longer.
It's really pretty simple. Analysts have no power within a company other than to make suggestions to management and to offer guidance to investors. They cannot compell Google to do anything whatsoever, so they may as well deflate their chests and get over themselves.
I admin and/or host several blogs, and the two biggest time sucks are not the content creation or markup, as WordPress 2.0 has made that as easy as it gets. Instead, the two challenges are 1) the security of the software and/or it's underlying scripting language - e.g., Geeklog or PHP, and also, to an extent, comment spam. Both have gotten better, but if you miss a beat on the security issue, on a high volume blog you can have problems pronto.
As it is now, WP is as hard to use as Microsoft Word. Following behind, albeit not too far is MoveableType, then trailing is Geeklog. I haven't tried many of the other packages simply because my customers have not asked for an installation and as for my own blogs, they work and therefore they only get updated, not replaced.
There's a story I have seen in various internet forums that Wikipedia was largely funded by profits from porn sites at least in the beginning. Is that true?
Microsoft, ever the marketing company and ever the master of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt uses this sting operation to tout once again that open source software MUST be less secure because the source code is out there.
"...expressed fears that making its source code public could allow hackers to find security holes in Microsoft products..."
But theirs is not, because the source code is super-uber-duper Top SECRET.
And that is FUD as usual.
Oddly, the most notable open source OS, Linux, is more secure, partially because of its design (not letting every tom, dick and harry process have access to and control of the kernel) and also in large part due to the fact that people CAN inspect the source code and create fixes for security holes that inevitably emerge.
Security through obscurity has never worked, and one would think Microsoft would be smart enough to realize that by now. They undoubtedly do realize that, but don't want you or I to, otherwise we will not be willing to pony up license fees for their OS when free alternatives are there for the
(legal) downloading.
But never let something good like MS catching pirates pass without turning it into an opportunity to FUD some more.
Let me ask you a question in reply, albeit one a little more seriously: using HD sports coverage as an example, what you suggest won't happen. In sports, they still use the same over-zoomed in your face camera shots, to the point of massive pixellation and a near-complete breakdown of the HD format. You do not get many wide-angle panoramics, except in the interstices of programming. They call that the "you are there" style of production.
Now then, porn: it's business is to make you think you "are there." That, and sets are not vistas, like many might think, but usually are just a little wider than the camera angle. The edges have lights, microphone men, directors, monkeys, herds of zebra, you name it. In other words, expect an HD version of the production technique you see now. People pay good money for their blank DVD's so they can make illegal copies of the LD "in your face" style, and they are going to want the same good product when they raise the resolution.
And then you'll be able to see the razor stubble and dingleberries.
Think of the benefits that HD porn will offer:
"Wow, I never knew Jenna Jameson has all those in-grown hairs from shaving her coochie!"
"Dang, that dude has a dingleberry hanging!"
"Did you see that! What a scar under her armpit from the implant surgery!"
And so forth and so on.
I think HD will make porn look worse, not better...low-def analog tv has a way of hiding the wrinkles, so to speak.
What's really interesting, however is that porno DVDs will have DRM embedded. Currently, they are not encoded, and how many DVD burners has that sold? More than a few, I think.
>What do Apple computers do that Microsoft computers don't
>that will appeal to the general computing populace?
Get plagued by malware.
Pure and simple -- OS/X is a more secure operating system that just works, and people are growing very weary of computers that are constantly barraged by flaws, holes, vulnerabilities and backdoors.
Imagine if Toyota forced you to patch your Camry every other week, and once in a while when you did, stuff like the windshield wipers and the tachomoeter no longer worked correctly -- until the fix for the patch they made you get was released. Would you buy a Camry?
No, you would not. You would find a more relible car that just ran. Even if it cost a little more.
I'm sure you may be thinking of how to shoot down the analogy, but in fact, Toyota won market share in the car industry a long time again precisiely because their cars were more reliable than their American comptition. In droves, they traded in their Chevrolets, the Fords and whatver to get a new Toyota, which was priced at a premium.
It's not unthinkable the same thing could happen in the persoanl computing marketplace.
For the average person, a Mac will run all of the software that they need -- and do it reliably.
THAT'S trused computing.
>Basing policy on technology that doesn't exist seems rather silly at this point.
Ironic for you to say such, considering it was posted in a thread on going to the moon. The technology to send a man to the moon and return him safely to the Earth existed only on paper when Kennedy committed the country to the goal of going there before 1/1/70.
I love stuff like this -- you can make music with a scanner...awesome. Other than usage as a gee-whiz or a joke, is there any practicality to it other than the excercise of making it happen?
Then again, that's the true spirit of "hacking" -- and I am old enough to remember when a hacker was someone who took hardware like this and made it do something that it was not "intended" to do and quite often, novel applications and entire product lines were born as a result.
Still, I doubt that this will be attached to my HD home theatre and be an active participant in the audio portion of whatever movie I'm watching.
But its still cool.
The problem with patents is not that they are being granted at all, as some intellectual anarchists would have you believe, it is that they are being granted for entirely obvious "inventions" that are not really inventions at all. I will not bother to list them, one only has to look into the portfolio of a Jeff Bezos to see that these things are not being reviewed for prior art, orginality or utility, but are instead being rubber-stamped by reviewers more intent on clearing their desk than doing their jobs. Even when they try to do their jobs, rarely does it seem that they know what they are looking at, and rarely do they reject anything for being an entirely obvious application.
Until such time that patents are made more valuable by requiring an invention to be truly unique, the problem of patents being used predatorily to stifle competition will continue. This will take a sea change in Congress, and will be fought tooth and nail by the large corporations with large patent portfolios. They'll naturally claim that each and every patent is indeed a wonderful thing and that each and every patent that they hold should be upheld.
The only thing I can see coming of this is another windfall for lawyers who'll end up battling this out in the courts, one way or the other. It may sound pessimistic, but the truth is that the people and fairness will lose out in the long run.
Artisanal brewers have been using coffee in beer for the longest time...not that the patent office will ever notice that, given their sordid track record of late.
See: Wolf Tongue Brewery
Espresso Stout
Among others.
Some simple brewing facts for you: yeast metabolizes sugars, and gives off alcohol and CO2 as their by product. Coffee, in and of itself, has no sugars that are fermentable. Therefore, Nestle will have to add sugar. That's where they run into prior art: at that point, coffee is another adjunct to the brew. Since this has been done more or less since coffee was introduced to the Western hemisphere, their patent had better be extremely specific in order to withstand scrutiny. They certainly will not be able to patent the whole idea of "coffee beer" or for that matter, "coffee liquor" or anything else. The folks that make Kaluha must be laughing over their, ahem, coffee this morning.
As for the "fruity" flavors they are talking about, that is abother by-product of brewing. Most of the time, yeasts, especially ale yeasts, produce esters as by-products in addition to CO2 and alcohols. For a good example of this, go and buy a Weihenstephan beer (which is only the oldest continuously operating brewery in the world, since 725 AD,) whose flagship beer is a wheat beer that has pronounced clove and "fruity" esters because of the yeast that they use. They are specifically iso-amyl acetate, the same ester found in bananas. So, Nestle proposes to "patent" very natually ocurring brewing by-products? Note that Weihenstpehan is only one example. Head north to Belgium (the veritable Disneyland of beers) and you will find brews with every ester under the sun and more. So where can Nestles propose to patent something that has been done for centuries, and has the hallmark of a brewery that has been in operation for over thirteen centuries?
To use the British phrase: bullocks.
My wife asks me why I do it. I tell her that it's therapeutic, that it's interesting to me, and that I enjoy it -- most of the time. She thinks I am crazy. Maybe so. But at least I am having a good time doing it.
for IBM, (an OSS expendature that intense) would be throwing money down a well.
See: the fees they pay their lawyers in the SCO lawsuit.
See: IBM opening their patent suite to FOSS
See: IBM's own work in the kernel, etc.
Anyone who thinks IBM is not serious about open source needs to look closer.
Your implication is that Red Hat alone has the programmers who can keep the development of gcc et. al running.
Let me give you a little hint at who can do it as well: Leave Red Hat's headquarters, turn left on Avent Ferry Road, go to I-440. Continue on to the I-40 intersection and go west until you reach Davis Drive. Turn right at the top of the exit to the end of Davis Drive.
You've just arrived at IBM in Research Triangle Park.
Think that IBM could manage this?
Or, for that matter, Novell?
The truth is that the number of distros is good for the industry. Sure, it sets back Red Hat's bottom line, but a lot of people use Linux because it is free as in beer. The Debian distros in particular come very close to rivalling the "products" that Red Hat, et. al, distribute, and as far as support, "Google is your friend."
Szulik and company actually hurt their own sales when they decided to focus solely on the enterprise market and leave the smaller potatoes out to fend with Fedora. SuSe still offers a nice packages distro for those that want one, and they took a lot of the folks who had used Red Hat's products previous to their being abandoned. Others went with Debian, and some Fedora. None of these choices generate profits for Red Hat.
Sorry the little guys weren't big enough for you to worry about, Matt, but there are other choices in the Linux world to use. That may be bad for you, but it is good for us. And Matt, let's tell it like it is: you need us more than we need you. That's how FOSS works, so get used to it.
I often print in Super A3, and it costs about $5-8 a print. That's expensive, but 13"x19" is a pretty large photo. Getting a print that size out of a photo processor would be far more.
Then again, I also print 13"x46" panoramics quite often. Those are incredibly expensive to have a processor do, and I can do those in the digital darkroom far cheaper.
Finally, someone posted here that Laser RGB is better. Oddly enough, I have been to a number of working professional photographers, for example Clyde Butcher and he uses ink based printing. Galen Rowell did, as do a number of other prominent professionals. That should speak for itself.
I guess the bottom line is how serious you are about photography. For a snapshot, yeah, Wal-Mart's pices are cheaper. For someone who aspires to fine art, money is not much of an object in the first place, and the convenience and flexibility of doing it yourself means more than a few cents per print anyday anyway.
If you sold your car, you'd probably choose to sell it to whoever would pay you the most money. Same with your house.
But at the end of the day, consumers have a choice. Music is a product that you really do not need, and it is a luxury. The way to get the music companies to charge less is to buy less, and let the marketplace force them to charge a price that consumers find more reasonable. That's also part of the equation of 'what the marketplace will bear.'
Try reading the comment next time.
I said that Microsoft is always having to come up with protection schemes, add-ons, etc. to secure their OS. Why not seal the kernel and execution environment? That argument is as germaine tonight as it was in 1996.
Love them or hate them, a Microsoft OS is at best a Rube Goldberg device of an operating system. I think that is one of the reasons why MS OS's slow to a crawl after a period of time, or at least seem to.
Look at the average Windows system that has not had a rebuild in a year or more. More than likely, the system tray at the right stretches halfway across the screen when it is expanded. There's virus protection, a personal firewall, spam protection, etc. etc. etc.
Now we have another protection racket (err, application) from Microsoft to protect us from what is ultimately Microsoft's fault: an operating system that at it's core was designed in such a way that security was an afterthought.
So, we have words of Microsoft's plans to have more protected kernel. Of course, because it is Microsoft, that means you will need to use Microsoft's apps, or their approved vendors, Microsoft approved hardware, etc. etc. Trusted computing? Sure -- Microsoft can trust you to fill their profit stream after you install their secure OS.
Instead, why doesn't Microsoft use the principles of Occam's Razor and not let applications have direct access to the kernel? Why not have an equivilant of chroot that works well? Why, at the core, give so many holes for applications, good or bad, to wreak havoc on your computer?
Gee, sounds like a mind-numbingly simple idea. I guess it has many names, but they all end in "nix." (BSD excepted, but you get the point.)
Good point, however, you could make an anology to your take and the outsourcing of jobs to economies where humans are in abundance...and the net effect here has been 1) layoffs and 2) increased time demands to match productivity on those who kept their jobs. Many of those demands come in the form of technological gee-gaws that have their own time-sucking demands, whether we want them or not.
Robots may not care so much about working more hours, but you can certainly expect the workers to care about being displaced by them....as well as the ones who have to work harder to stay in the same place to compete.
Bottom line is that many of us were "given" bright new technologies to help us do our jobs. Now, we spend a great deal of our time servicing those technologies. Many of us get hundreds of e-mails a day. Lots of voice mails. Cell phones that were foisted on us to keep us in touch. It may be easier, yes, but is it better? I will wager less than 1/5th of the e-mails I get (non-spam, work-related) are important. But I still have to read them. Voice mails? More or less the same. What was important two hours ago may not be so important now. But I still have to service the voice mail by spending time listening to them in order to cull the wheat from the chaff. As for cell phones, they are handy, yes. But sometimes, when you cannot be reached, people arrive at solutions or problems go away without you having to talk on the phone. But, if you are in range, you will service that technology too.
Yes, those things have value. But with every value there is an associated cost, and one of those costs in terms of technology is time.
That's my point about new technologies -- they come out as wondrous time-saving inventions that are SURE! to make your life better, but all too often people do not recognize the cost associated with any technological device that is not always seen at first. That is, until they have listened to their 69th useless voice mail or gotten their fourth call of the night asking a question better asked the next day in the office.
It didn't happen.
Fast forward to the 1970's at the advent of the personal computer revolution and read magazines like "Byte" or similiar. The coming of age of the PC was to free us from mundane tasks, make work easier, give us more leisure time because things were simpler.
That did not happen either, even if Byte and others were correct in saying that the computer revolution was here to stay.
There is a truism in regards to technology: when something is made easier to do, more of it is expected to be done.
Or, if you prefer, back to the PC analogy: PC's have made things like spreadsheets, memos, etc., far easier for the average office worker, but instead of being rewarded with more leisure time, more spreadsheets and memos etc. are expected instead. In other words, instead of making life easier, more work has been created and now we are more or less enslaved to the technology that it is done on.
History is rife with examples of this: cellphones, for example. Now you cannot get away and work goes with you everywhere, all too often 24/7. Enslaved to the never-ending communication, instead of better, we got more.
George Santayna said those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. True. And history here will repeat itself. Technology will make things easier, and when they are easier it will be expected that more of it will be done.
And, as anyone who has sat on a beach with only a cool drink and the waves to contemplate, more work, no matter how "easy" is not Utopia.
By your example, Xerox would have never made it out of the garage.
A pen can be used for copyright vioations, as can a camera. How much ink is invested in illegal copying every year is anyone's guess. Cameras, the same thing.
Yes, I know that those are ridiculous examples. However, under the Grokster standard, either of the latter could be considered instruments for wanton copyright violation (despite the ridiculousness of it) and be banned...if they were new technologies.
Most any tool, be it software or hardware, is capable of being used illegally. That people do so is not so much a reflection of most tools but instead a reflection on those people.
Automation of Bittorrent was inevitable. More or less, torrents become the functional equivilant of the automated podcast gathering programs.
Things is, most podcasts are original content. Much of the 'torrents, and let's be honest, are not, and they are not exactly sanctioned (meaning they're pirated works.)
Gee, do you think that the MPAA legal goons will be among the early adopters? Think that they will have the RIAA folks for company?
Bet the farm on it.
Come to think of it, one must wonder when or if the adult industry will resort to infringement lawsuits to protect their unique content...sure there has been a scant amount of it, but eventually, someone is going to pay big for those Jenna Jameson clips. (LOL.)
The total space available on any hard drive is approximately 75% of the total amount of data you would like to store on it.
Corollaries:
a) The failure rate for hard drives is 100%
b) Backup media is always less than 40% of what is needed
c) Hard drives always fail at the most inconvenient time
d) All drives all full in 4 months.
e) Microsoft products always make the most inefficient usage of any hard drive and have programs that automagically fragment the drive in the background.