... and happy to boot (catch the double meaning?:)
It's obvious that Linux is not ready for home use. It's not that way how it's going to happen (if it ever happens).
First you get the servers, or a good deal of them.
Then you get the easy workstations, the ones that need just e-mail, internet, and a decent office suite. And are deployed by the hundreds in a single organization so the savings in licenses and support are big.
Then and only then, you get some big organization to decide to stop being an slave and change to support internally only open formats for document transfer, like pdf, html, open office format, etc. That will be the hardest bit, and we are not there yet.
Afterwards, there will be some real competition, and it's difficult to know who will win (when Microsoft really start caring for its users as a response to slipping sales, there will certainly be a fight worth looking at). But at least the landscape will be a bit more interesting.
In the end the present situation cannot last forever. It has a lot of inertia, certainly. But the dominant player is not taking real care of its customers, and for the first time there are some real alternatives. The end is not near, but the end of the beginning is just around the corner.
I live in a world of people with fast internet connections and software skills, and where copying interesting data is in the blood, be it software, music, films. But just a week ago I realized how deep this P2P thing is getting into the "real world". I was doing some install in a manufacturing plant, in the production back office. It was a small office with about ten people working. Then the secretary raised the topic of a new CD of a popular band that was to be released that day. Se asked about how long she had to wait till the CD was shared. Somebody answers that he had downloaded already. The conversation involves more people. The talked about the band, asked if the new CD was any good. All was very natural, no hushing, no self-conciousness. NOBODY even thought about buying the CD. The one that had downloaded it offered for copy, the local net of the company was used to make copies of the thing, while mixing talk of music with production problems. It was all very natural, very cool, like sending copies of a joke e-mail or something like that.
Those where lower-income-bracket people, lower-computer-literacy people, that is, the backbone of the country. And they see nothing even remotely wrong in copying music. I fear the content producers are against too much of a slope now.
s such a model viable in the long term? Of course is viable. You just profit less. And even that perhaps is not true. I've been in China, where you can get absolutely anything in DVD for about 1 dollar each. In fact, it would be difficult for you to try and get a properly licensed film in China. I know I didn't found any. And there was another difference. I had friends there that had more that two thousand DVDs at home, many of which they hadn't had time to see. They simply bought on impulse, because spending 1 dollar is not something you think a lot about. Of course my friends had higher than average (for China) earnings, but in time more and more chinese families will approach that income level.
My bet is that if you had DVDs priced at 1.5$, film copyright infringement would end as we know it, and the amount of dollars spent in DVDs by the average family would grow. I cannot guess if that increase would be enough to compensate for the much-reduced margin on each DVD, but I would bet it would be better bussiness in the long term.
Add to that the release of DVDs on the same day of first screening (sell the things as people exits the cinema), and you have the film distribution model of the future. Big-screen film watching is a fundamentally different experience than DVD watching, and there is but little market cannibalising between the two of them. Film distributors should start to know that.
Anthropomorphization, one of those words nobody can spell, but nobody can live without it. Excerpts from the article: Companies (countries, races, etc.) are not "evil" or "good", and they do not have "intentions."
Rarely, a sizeable revolt happens and the team kicks the cult out.
Companies do not have intentions, but teams can? Anthropom... whatever is a very handy mental resource, one of many to deal with complexity, so let's not demonize it. Certainly can lead you to false thoughts, but more often than not allows you to predict certain events with accurancy. If you consider the complexity of a company, the number of people involved in decision-making, and the fact that you know very little of it, you cannot predict anything.
But in the same way, taking into account the number of brain cells that are involved into taking a decision, you cannot predict anything about what a person will do. Who knows the precise neurotransmitter balance in that brain ? But I can predict that my wife won't like it if I see again that ex-girlfriend, and never fail.
And misteriously I can predict that no really open file format for office files will ever be supported by Microsoft, just by thinking about it as a mean spirited old miser that wants to have the cake and eat it too. Companies are legal entities, and can take decisions. When you see a pattern of decisions, you paint a personality, and hey! it mainly works!
I suppose the writer of the FA has no interest in sports, because, after all, the football team you are following now is certainly NOT the same that you were following ten years ago, so your fidelity should go with the individual players. Except if you Anthropomorphi... well, if you think of the team as an individual, and forget about the composing units.
Why did "Go Daddy" change from Linux to Windows Server?
Because Microsoft gave them a lot of money.
If that's true you'd have to ask about Microsoft motives. If they think that altering the Netcraft survey will help them selling its software to clueless CIOs, perhaps then the OSS community can try to play the same game, and then Bruce Perens had a good idea. On the other side, as there is little money involved in selling Apache, perhaps Microsoft's goals and those of the OSS community aren't the same, and we should try to "market" to CIOs that can look further than a glossy brochure. I'm not saying that that's the case, simply than more there is a need for more debate in that topic, till you decide that boosting Netcraft surveys is good. (Yes, that's what the OSS community needs, more endless debates:o)
Symptoms are information. Why did "Go Daddy" change from Linux to Windows Server? Can something be done about it? Those are IMHO the questions.
If the Netcraft survey is clouded by artificial parking, then the survey loses utility (assuming it has any in the first place, as the domain parking numbers make seeing usage statistics difficult). You can correct with Photoshop your bank account receipt, and that won't make you any richer.
It's somewhat like the Windows monopoly. Everybody has Windows, and everybody has a mobile phone. Those phones will keep adding functionality, co-opting ideas and testing user response till the PDA is a thing of the past, or rather, a function of your phone. Some will never use it, but it'll be there just the same.
By the way, same thing goes for the MP3 player, although that may take a bit longer.
Please, please, let him do it. I hope he does and the litigation kill Linux... IN COUNTRIES WHERE THERE ARE SOFTWARE PATENTS. Then when people start to notice that those countries have a competitive disadvantage (at least in some areas), with respect to others that can use Linux and other OSS perhaps the whole idea of software patents will go down the drain.
you're suggesting is that if MS produces the best OS ever it will be bad for the consumer
Yes, in the long term, a very good OS now (by the market monopoly) will stifle innovation tomorrow. Of course it's impossible to capture all the possible nuances of a situation in just a few lines. A really, really good OS, with an Office suite with open data formats and good modularity, might create a better framework for development than a free-for-all situation. The devil is as always in the details. But as a rule of thumb I still think that it's good that Microsoft is blocked by Dilbertian waste of resources.
My point is that we are in a situation of monopoly that will always by its own nature restrict the choice of users to the monopoly universe. The only way of breaking that stranglehold is through the cracks in the monopoly. If those cracks are plastered there is no way out. Of course the quality of software is more important than politics, but I believe than the quality of anything in a monopoly culture will never be so good as the quality of that same thing in a culture of free competition. So is a matter of short-ter versus long-term quality, IMHO.
Who da'Punk is in fact the real enemy. He wants to end the bloat at Microsoft and convert it into a lean and mean machine of productivity. Imagine what options open source would have if people in Microsoft where devoted to create great software for the users, instead of pursuing their own petty concerns in the corporate ladder. If Who da'Punk and others like him had their way, Microsoft would be user-centric, but keeping the users always within the Microsoft universe. He's planning a world of happy slaves of Microsoft. Now we are all slaves, but at least not happy. In the unsatisfaction of slaves the seeds of change lay. If everybody was contented, the chances of breaking the Microsoft monopoly would be nil (on the other side, we'd be happier and have great software, but still slaves).
So help him not. Cheer Balmer instead. He's our real ally in this fight.
From the post: the hack has not been released to the public
From Jane Austen's "Emma": 'It's to be a secret, I conclude,' said he. These matters are always a secret, till it is found out that everybody knows them. Only let me be told when I may speak out.'"
Basically, the consumer experience is that if you are law-abiding and buy your music, then you have all kind of limitations and problems, in exchange for your money. If you make an unlicensed copy then you have a very nice free file with no strings attached. I reminds me of the old dentist joke that said that there was a dentist that had in his waiting room a sign stating that pain-free treatment was 30 dollars, but painful treatment was a hefty 600 dollars. When the patient asked if there was an error, the dentist said no, those were the right prices. Patients of course opted for the painless and cheap. So that's the choice the consumers are facing now.
What? The joke's punchline? Well, the dentist simply started treating with no kind of pain killers, of course the patient felt a lot of pain and started crying aloud. Then the dentist said "No cries, no cries or I'll charge you the full "Painful" fee".
Basically it's a balancing act. The US lawmakers want to decide if more money is to be had from the telcos or from the content providers. The balance in the long term is for the content providers. Specially if they are international content providers.
Has anyone stopped to think what would happen if that idea suddenly became law, and it was adopted all over the world? Well, the German telcos, for example, would tax Google to allow a moderately good access. And then the French, and the Chinese, the Zambian, you name it. Everybody would partake into Google profits, and then Yahoo, and Amazon, Ebay, etc. The US would be taxed from foreign telcos. Of course that would be a two-way street, but the balance I think would be bad for the US, as it has so many content providers.
I don't think US lawmakers would find the idea of US companies' profits being siphoned away to China, for example (think about how much the chinese could charge, if rates are by user) at all funny. So I don't think this is going to become law, ever.
I would like to know if the testing environments included many animals in the buildings. In many places in this world, people keeps poultry and other livestock inside their homes. As they are so sensitive, will these devices be fooled by rats inside the building? Or even flies? This thing could give so many false positives in real use as to be almost useless.
Seeing it from the point of view of a guerrilla fighter, now you would have an easy way of luring troops into your traps by simply putting a dog in the building. When the troops come, the booby trap explodes. Or better than a dog, use a man, seeing how low the own human life is regarded by some of the latests fighters-against-freedom groups.
It's perhaps just me but I'm a bit tired of this way of presenting technology as the key that will solve the problems of the military in guerrilla environments. Organization, training and motivation are in my humble point of view, much more important. But you cannot show them off so easily in a presentation, I suppose.
Some USB flash company has a new offer of 128 Mb USB flash storage at the incredible price of $30. Expensive ? Not when you consider that it has BUNDLED, completely FREEEEEEEE, the newest album of the BARENAKED LADIES!!!!.
Much depends on the way you tell things, you know.
So we metric system users...
on
King Kong Lived?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
...or restricted to midi files. Plagiarism is the thing called. Romeo and Juliet is not an original work, its argument is closely based on awell-known (then) Italian medieval story, using even the same names. However, we can agreee that the good old Bard polished it a bit, adding value, not just translated from the italian. Every work must be so judged to determine if the added value is big enough. Midi files are no exception. The fact that the mixing is done with programs makes almost no difference. After all, a human operator is needed to use it, select the incoming files and judge and adjust the result. You are not considered less of an artist if you use a CNC lathe for you sculpting; the same reasoning should apply. Nothing new to see here, sorry, walk along.
When the next disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web - is thought up, the lawyers...
will be as clueless as they were before. Will think that the new technology is some geek playground with no real world use. And then it'll be too late.
Well, in eight years from now, it could seem that now was the time to close Apple and give the money back to the shareholders. Who's to know that? Apple is depending too much in the iPod for its success. When the iPod frenzy abates it'll have to find some other hit to keep on sailing. That's not so easy. That said, it'll probably always have a niche in the computer field, and perhaps it can reinvent itself as a consumer-electronics company, but that's far from sure.
There is one clear difference between Dell and Apple. Dell is a lean machine of a company, offering the same as everybody else just easier, cheaper and with more options. Its margins are always going to be small, but it'll probably always make money. Apple is a boutique company that will always have fatter margins because it'll offer exclusive products. But it depends too much on fickle consumers that can change brands as easily in electronics as in shirts. Dell is like Wal-Mart, and Apple is like a successful delicatessen chain.
How will they make it stick for a producer (of MPEG encoders) in India or China, for example. Or are they ready to allow the indian film producers into their club for "approving devices"? Or outright forbid imports of that kind of devices from any other country?
I wonder if they have a deeper plan or if they are just clueless.
Slashdot Mirror
Such commitment on open source-development could be seen as a good step
But we can always spin it to look like pure evil.
... and happy to boot (catch the double meaning? :)
It's obvious that Linux is not ready for home use. It's not that way how it's going to happen (if it ever happens).
First you get the servers, or a good deal of them.
Then you get the easy workstations, the ones that need just e-mail, internet, and a decent office suite. And are deployed by the hundreds in a single organization so the savings in licenses and support are big.
Then and only then, you get some big organization to decide to stop being an slave and change to support internally only open formats for document transfer, like pdf, html, open office format, etc. That will be the hardest bit, and we are not there yet.
Afterwards, there will be some real competition, and it's difficult to know who will win (when Microsoft really start caring for its users as a response to slipping sales, there will certainly be a fight worth looking at). But at least the landscape will be a bit more interesting.
In the end the present situation cannot last forever. It has a lot of inertia, certainly. But the dominant player is not taking real care of its customers, and for the first time there are some real alternatives. The end is not near, but the end of the beginning is just around the corner.
Faced with opposition from conservative groups and some pornography Web sites
I guess that if those two can be united against a measure, it's probably a really iditotic measure.
I live in a world of people with fast internet connections and software skills, and where copying interesting data is in the blood, be it software, music, films. But just a week ago I realized how deep this P2P thing is getting into the "real world". I was doing some install in a manufacturing plant, in the production back office. It was a small office with about ten people working. Then the secretary raised the topic of a new CD of a popular band that was to be released that day. Se asked about how long she had to wait till the CD was shared. Somebody answers that he had downloaded already. The conversation involves more people. The talked about the band, asked if the new CD was any good. All was very natural, no hushing, no self-conciousness. NOBODY even thought about buying the CD. The one that had downloaded it offered for copy, the local net of the company was used to make copies of the thing, while mixing talk of music with production problems. It was all very natural, very cool, like sending copies of a joke e-mail or something like that.
Those where lower-income-bracket people, lower-computer-literacy people, that is, the backbone of the country. And they see nothing even remotely wrong in copying music. I fear the content producers are against too much of a slope now.
s such a model viable in the long term?
Of course is viable. You just profit less. And even that perhaps is not true. I've been in China, where you can get absolutely anything in DVD for about 1 dollar each. In fact, it would be difficult for you to try and get a properly licensed film in China. I know I didn't found any. And there was another difference. I had friends there that had more that two thousand DVDs at home, many of which they hadn't had time to see. They simply bought on impulse, because spending 1 dollar is not something you think a lot about. Of course my friends had higher than average (for China) earnings, but in time more and more chinese families will approach that income level.
My bet is that if you had DVDs priced at 1.5$, film copyright infringement would end as we know it, and the amount of dollars spent in DVDs by the average family would grow. I cannot guess if that increase would be enough to compensate for the much-reduced margin on each DVD, but I would bet it would be better bussiness in the long term.
Add to that the release of DVDs on the same day of first screening (sell the things as people exits the cinema), and you have the film distribution model of the future. Big-screen film watching is a fundamentally different experience than DVD watching, and there is but little market cannibalising between the two of them. Film distributors should start to know that.
You cannot grow foreverfaster than your market.
Anthropomorphization, one of those words nobody can spell, but nobody can live without it.
Excerpts from the article:
Companies (countries, races, etc.) are not "evil" or "good", and they do not have "intentions."
Rarely, a sizeable revolt happens and the team kicks the cult out.
Companies do not have intentions, but teams can?
Anthropom... whatever is a very handy mental resource, one of many to deal with complexity, so let's not demonize it. Certainly can lead you to false thoughts, but more often than not allows you to predict certain events with accurancy. If you consider the complexity of a company, the number of people involved in decision-making, and the fact that you know very little of it, you cannot predict anything.
But in the same way, taking into account the number of brain cells that are involved into taking a decision, you cannot predict anything about what a person will do. Who knows the precise neurotransmitter balance in that brain ? But I can predict that my wife won't like it if I see again that ex-girlfriend, and never fail.
And misteriously I can predict that no really open file format for office files will ever be supported by Microsoft, just by thinking about it as a mean spirited old miser that wants to have the cake and eat it too. Companies are legal entities, and can take decisions. When you see a pattern of decisions, you paint a personality, and hey! it mainly works!
I suppose the writer of the FA has no interest in sports, because, after all, the football team you are following now is certainly NOT the same that you were following ten years ago, so your fidelity should go with the individual players. Except if you Anthropomorphi... well, if you think of the team as an individual, and forget about the composing units.
Why did "Go Daddy" change from Linux to Windows Server?
:o)
Because Microsoft gave them a lot of money.
If that's true you'd have to ask about Microsoft motives. If they think that altering the Netcraft survey will help them selling its software to clueless CIOs, perhaps then the OSS community can try to play the same game, and then Bruce Perens had a good idea. On the other side, as there is little money involved in selling Apache, perhaps Microsoft's goals and those of the OSS community aren't the same, and we should try to "market" to CIOs that can look further than a glossy brochure. I'm not saying that that's the case, simply than more there is a need for more debate in that topic, till you decide that boosting Netcraft surveys is good. (Yes, that's what the OSS community needs, more endless debates
Symptoms are information. Why did "Go Daddy" change from Linux to Windows Server? Can something be done about it? Those are IMHO the questions.
If the Netcraft survey is clouded by artificial parking, then the survey loses utility (assuming it has any in the first place, as the domain parking numbers make seeing usage statistics difficult). You can correct with Photoshop your bank account receipt, and that won't make you any richer.
It's somewhat like the Windows monopoly. Everybody has Windows, and everybody has a mobile phone. Those phones will keep adding functionality, co-opting ideas and testing user response till the PDA is a thing of the past, or rather, a function of your phone. Some will never use it, but it'll be there just the same.
By the way, same thing goes for the MP3 player, although that may take a bit longer.
Please, please, let him do it. I hope he does and the litigation kill Linux... IN COUNTRIES WHERE THERE ARE SOFTWARE PATENTS. Then when people start to notice that those countries have a competitive disadvantage (at least in some areas), with respect to others that can use Linux and other OSS perhaps the whole idea of software patents will go down the drain.
you're suggesting is that if MS produces the best OS ever it will be bad for the consumer
Yes, in the long term, a very good OS now (by the market monopoly) will stifle innovation tomorrow. Of course it's impossible to capture all the possible nuances of a situation in just a few lines. A really, really good OS, with an Office suite with open data formats and good modularity, might create a better framework for development than a free-for-all situation. The devil is as always in the details. But as a rule of thumb I still think that it's good that Microsoft is blocked by Dilbertian waste of resources.
My point is that we are in a situation of monopoly that will always by its own nature restrict the choice of users to the monopoly universe. The only way of breaking that stranglehold is through the cracks in the monopoly. If those cracks are plastered there is no way out. Of course the quality of software is more important than politics, but I believe than the quality of anything in a monopoly culture will never be so good as the quality of that same thing in a culture of free competition. So is a matter of short-ter versus long-term quality, IMHO.
Who da'Punk is in fact the real enemy. He wants to end the bloat at Microsoft and convert it into a lean and mean machine of productivity. Imagine what options open source would have if people in Microsoft where devoted to create great software for the users, instead of pursuing their own petty concerns in the corporate ladder. If Who da'Punk and others like him had their way, Microsoft would be user-centric, but keeping the users always within the Microsoft universe. He's planning a world of happy slaves of Microsoft. Now we are all slaves, but at least not happy. In the unsatisfaction of slaves the seeds of change lay. If everybody was contented, the chances of breaking the Microsoft monopoly would be nil (on the other side, we'd be happier and have great software, but still slaves).
So help him not. Cheer Balmer instead. He's our real ally in this fight.
From the post:
the hack has not been released to the public
From Jane Austen's "Emma":
'It's to be a secret, I conclude,' said he. These matters are always a secret, till it is found out that everybody knows them. Only let me be told when I may speak out.'"
Basically, the consumer experience is that if you are law-abiding and buy your music, then you have all kind of limitations and problems, in exchange for your money. If you make an unlicensed copy then you have a very nice free file with no strings attached. I reminds me of the old dentist joke that said that there was a dentist that had in his waiting room a sign stating that pain-free treatment was 30 dollars, but painful treatment was a hefty 600 dollars. When the patient asked if there was an error, the dentist said no, those were the right prices. Patients of course opted for the painless and cheap. So that's the choice the consumers are facing now.
What? The joke's punchline? Well, the dentist simply started treating with no kind of pain killers, of course the patient felt a lot of pain and started crying aloud. Then the dentist said "No cries, no cries or I'll charge you the full "Painful" fee".
Basically it's a balancing act. The US lawmakers want to decide if more money is to be had from the telcos or from the content providers. The balance in the long term is for the content providers. Specially if they are international content providers.
Has anyone stopped to think what would happen if that idea suddenly became law, and it was adopted all over the world? Well, the German telcos, for example, would tax Google to allow a moderately good access. And then the French, and the Chinese, the Zambian, you name it. Everybody would partake into Google profits, and then Yahoo, and Amazon, Ebay, etc. The US would be taxed from foreign telcos. Of course that would be a two-way street, but the balance I think would be bad for the US, as it has so many content providers.
I don't think US lawmakers would find the idea of US companies' profits being siphoned away to China, for example (think about how much the chinese could charge, if rates are by user) at all funny. So I don't think this is going to become law, ever.
I would like to know if the testing environments included many animals in the buildings. In many places in this world, people keeps poultry and other livestock inside their homes. As they are so sensitive, will these devices be fooled by rats inside the building? Or even flies? This thing could give so many false positives in real use as to be almost useless.
Seeing it from the point of view of a guerrilla fighter, now you would have an easy way of luring troops into your traps by simply putting a dog in the building. When the troops come, the booby trap explodes. Or better than a dog, use a man, seeing how low the own human life is regarded by some of the latests fighters-against-freedom groups.
It's perhaps just me but I'm a bit tired of this way of presenting technology as the key that will solve the problems of the military in guerrilla environments. Organization, training and motivation are in my humble point of view, much more important. But you cannot show them off so easily in a presentation, I suppose.
Road builders will from now on be sued if any crime is commited with help of a road.
Some USB flash company has a new offer of 128 Mb USB flash storage at the incredible price of $30. Expensive ? Not when you consider that it has BUNDLED, completely FREEEEEEEE, the newest album of the BARENAKED LADIES!!!!.
Much depends on the way you tell things, you know.
... can now speak about the 600 Kg gorilla. Good.
...or restricted to midi files. Plagiarism is the thing called. Romeo and Juliet is not an original work, its argument is closely based on awell-known (then) Italian medieval story, using even the same names. However, we can agreee that the good old Bard polished it a bit, adding value, not just translated from the italian. Every work must be so judged to determine if the added value is big enough. Midi files are no exception. The fact that the mixing is done with programs makes almost no difference. After all, a human operator is needed to use it, select the incoming files and judge and adjust the result. You are not considered less of an artist if you use a CNC lathe for you sculpting; the same reasoning should apply. Nothing new to see here, sorry, walk along.
When the next disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web - is thought up, the lawyers...
will be as clueless as they were before. Will think that the new technology is some geek playground with no real world use. And then it'll be too late.
Well, in eight years from now, it could seem that now was the time to close Apple and give the money back to the shareholders. Who's to know that? Apple is depending too much in the iPod for its success. When the iPod frenzy abates it'll have to find some other hit to keep on sailing. That's not so easy. That said, it'll probably always have a niche in the computer field, and perhaps it can reinvent itself as a consumer-electronics company, but that's far from sure.
There is one clear difference between Dell and Apple. Dell is a lean machine of a company, offering the same as everybody else just easier, cheaper and with more options. Its margins are always going to be small, but it'll probably always make money. Apple is a boutique company that will always have fatter margins because it'll offer exclusive products. But it depends too much on fickle consumers that can change brands as easily in electronics as in shirts. Dell is like Wal-Mart, and Apple is like a successful delicatessen chain.
How will they make it stick for a producer (of MPEG encoders) in India or China, for example. Or are they ready to allow the indian film producers into their club for "approving devices"? Or outright forbid imports of that kind of devices from any other country?
I wonder if they have a deeper plan or if they are just clueless.