Consider how many people have a computer on their desk.
Consider how many people have a computer (or two, or maybe three...) at home. It isn't hard at all to imagine a typical family with a desktop or laptop computer, and maybe a second one for the kid(s)... but they only have the one at work.
Consider how many of those computers are running Windows.
and...? Market share is likely to be even across the board: Macs eating almost 10% at home, and Linux/Mac eating almost 10% at work (or so).
Consider how many of those people don't have a computer at home.
Dunno about that... there are probably just as many jobs (if not more if you count manufacturing) that don't require an individually assigned desktop/laptop computer, but the average worker in that position has one (or more) at home. This would be especially true at the lower-skilled levels of labor.
That is true, no doubt. But it still isnt very cut and dry. What happens 4+ years from now when everyone and their cat knows Office 2007 (not an unlikely scenario) and every new employee needs to be retrained on OO.org? Then it becomes more expensive.
Maybe 10+ years from now... but even four years hence? The vast majority of the workforce today will still know how to handle OOo rather seamlessly. So unless you're talking about wet-behind-ears bottom-half-of-the-class college grads who don't know any different, Office 2k7 isn't going to represent any real paradigm shift in how documents are made and disseminated.
You also assume that world+dog would be using Office 2k7 - meanwhile, in 2008, half of world+dog are mostly using things like Office 2000 and Office XP.
If you think the DRM for Blu-Ray is problematic, just wait until you are forced to purchase a new PC with the latest version of Windows Vista or whatever virus distribution tool Microsoft creates next, every two years just to watch high-def movies.
I suspect that if the movie industry follows the music industry, DRM will likely be dead in 10 years. This is of course assuming that someone with a conscience pulls an iPod-like revolution in video - like the iPod did with music. You start off with a widly popular product that has just enough DRM in it to satisfy the pigopolists at the MPAA (but not enough to really hamper anyone, legal or not), then once you have dominant market share, you demand the DRM requirements to stop.
Apple was able to demand (and get) DRM removals going because they hold 91% of the digital music market, while the physical music markets (e.g. CD sales) still continue to die off. The music cartel knows where their collective bread will get buttered as time goes on, so it comes to pass that their choices in the matter are small, and shrinking. (It also doesn't hurt that EMI decided to give their fellow RIAA members the high hard one by taking the 'moral' stance of pushing end to DRM as well).
Maybe I'm just too optimistic, but I can see the day when video production houses, one by one, will be forced to start losing their DRM requirements just to remain relevant in the market... just like the music cartels are being forced to do now.
Why, exactly? One would think that competition in ideas and standards would be just as healthy as a competition in the products themselves. Network Effects prevent fair competition in the market. see also Microsoft Office.
That's the rub though, isn't it? Blu-Ray as a spec was just about sealed and ready to go, then Microsoft cobbled together a consortium at the last minute, and pushed HD-DVD because they didn't get their lock-in goodies included into the Blu-Ray spec.
Now do realize that the customer in this format war was not you or I, or any other end-user of the products. Far from it, in fact. The real customer in this little format war were the movie studios. Put in that perspective, the movie studios chose what they believe to be the best deal, and the system I described worked exactly as expected. Studios chose what best suited their needs. We as the typical home viewers had little-to-no input into the deal because we weren't the target clients.
I think Microsoft/Toshiba got confused about who their real clients were as well. In their haste to rig the system in their favor, they thought that all they had to do was please the home viewer, and they'd be set... Sony knew differently after their Betamax experience, and went after the studios. The only part where we as viewers were involved included Sony's Blu-Ray-as-part-of-PS3, the marketing blitzes that purported to show widespread viewer support, and a lot of stuff behind-the-scenes we'll probably never know about. Of course, there was also the zealotry machines that each side fired up, by generating buzz about their respective products and letting those newly-minted fanboys (or at least ideologues) do the rest... and yes, both sides had them. In short, those who were passionate about either format were being used as tools, IMHO (both formats have DRM, both formats hold --roughly-- the same amount of info per-disk, etc). On a technical level, Blu-Ray holds a slight edge, but otherwise the average home user isn't going to know or care about one over the other, save for whatever money they've invested in the equipment.
If Microsoft put a HD-DVD player into the Xbox 360 as standard, and the HD-DVD consortium generated a shedload more marketing noise, things may have been different. But, MSFT already had Toshiba to do the dirty work for them, and the Xboxes are unprofitable enough as it is without adding the further cost of a full-on HD-DVD player to each unit.
~~
As per MSFT Office, the files are a standard in the business sense (though PDF is almost as prevalent nowadays), but not in any real technical sense. It's just another ordinary proprietary not-so-well-documented binary file set. The whole thing we saw during the '90s was less of a format war than it was a war of applications.
We're only beginning to see a rise towards a real document standard now - which is why MSFT is trying its level best to fight off ODF and replace it with their particular munge-up called OOXML (which IMHO is nothing more than a barely concealed software patent trap). Once the dust settles there, MS Office is liable to be the loser in either case, unless MSFT suddenly starts dropping the suite price to $50 USD a pop.
That totally misses the point. We're talking *standards*, not *manufacturers*. Having multiple manufacturers who are competing for the exact same market is fantastic. But it doesn't help capitalism to have multiple standards; if anything, it fragments the market and makes competition more difficult.
Why, exactly? One would think that competition in ideas and standards would be just as healthy as a competition in the products themselves.
Hell, if it wasn't for competition in standards, we'd all still be using Direct Current in our homes instead of AC, and our computers would still have RAMBUS(*puke*) in them instead of DDR memory.
Everyone acts like standards wars are new or something. Go hunt down the really old-school standards wars, like Westinghouse vs. Edison (AC vs. DC) sometime... it's been healthy for us as a whole, and I don't see why we should throttle such competitions anytime soon.
I know it was a typo, but for a minute I kept thinking of some guy dropping his work on a thesis defense to rush out and buy some Disney Princesses sequel on DVD.
Much thanks for the (albeit unintended) morning mental giggle.:)
Being able to check if your vote was tabulated correctly is worth introducing another way for bosses to abuse power
Are you kidding? Any boss dumb enough to try it would land you firmly in jackpot territory - and I'm sure your boss' boss would happily fire the SOB after having to pay out a metric shitload of money in litigation awards and lawyer fees.
...and we haven't even touched on the bad PR (think "Enron" level here) that this would generate for the company once word got out. All it would take for proof is to discreetly turn on your cell/smart phone camera and/or voice recorder whenever the boss shows up to ask.
From TFA (the popSci URL that does explain it):
Here's how it works: One MEA stack is coupled to a high- temperature heat source (such as solar heat concentrated by mirrors), and the other to a low-temperature heat sink (ambient air). The low-temperature stack acts as the compressor stage while the high-temperature stack functions as the power stage. Once the cycle is started by the electrical jolt, the resulting pressure differential produces voltage across each of the MEA stacks. The higher voltage at the high-temperature stack forces the low-temperature stack to pump hydrogen from low pressure to high pressure, maintaining the pressure differential. Meanwhile hydrogen passing through the high-temperature stack generates power.
IOW, you still need a constant heat source. TFA mentions that they're working on a 200 degree C version, and managed to get their prototype going w/ 60% efficiency if the temp is at 600 degrees C... TFA also mentions that current solar furnaces can jack out around 800 degree C heat when you have a shitload of parabolic mirrors pointing at your boiler.
Overall, you're still taking in heat (read: energy) from an external source, so there's (from the looks of it) no cheating going on here.
Nitpick: Cartesian can also refer to 3-dimensional (x,y,z) coordinates, not just two (we'll, err, leave the really nasty/neat uses for the stuff --like Normal Vector and Quaternion Rotation calcs-- out of it for now).:)
But yeah, I can otherwise grok what you're getting at, and it's a pretty neat test.
It's not much different from the litany of automakers proclaiming long and loud about how they're suddenly committed to the Environment, yet behind the scenes will whine and complain (and lobby their asses off) when the the US gov't says it's going to bump gas mileage standards by some embarrassingly small increment at some future point in time.
It's all about the facade until you sign the receipt and call the product yours. Then you get to find that vast gulf between the sweet whispers of marketing promise, and the eardrum-splitting howls of post-purchase reality.
Microsoft just managed to adapt that particular sense of acumen to an otherwise somewhat objective world (technology, that is). Since the computer industry is not really too awful bound by that truth-in-advertising laws that, say, real estate and food would be (at least in the US), the folks at MSFT really don't have to care. Really - what're you gonna do, install Linux in protest? (at least that's the current attitude that I've seen some of the MSFT sales flacks carry).
Wasn't there some sort of Internationally-recognized moratorium about landing on Europa, for fear of potential bacteriological contamination?
Forget the Arthur. C. Clarke meme... I'm speaking as in a for-real 'we ain't going there yet' agreement that space-faring nations had agreed to, at least until they can come up with some sort of exploration set-up that can search for life there without risk (or at least an acceptably minimized risk) of contaminating the underlying ocean with Earth-borne bacteria.
I could've sworn that there was something in place to that effect... sort of the same reason why the Russians held off from their efforts to drill all the way down to Lake Vostok in Antarctica.
Actually, it was fear of being left behind by everyone else (no matter who it was) that spurred OSX. Let's face it, MacOS 9.x sucked by comparison (yeah, yeah, cue the furry-toothed Mac users among us shouting for blood, etc)... But seriously - I've used both OS9 and OSX, and OSX, at least from a geek standpoint (admin, coding, name it), kicks the unholy crap out of OS9.
I'm just glad Apple managed to pull it off and jerk a lot of Mac developers out of their sleep and into this century.
Was it Windows? Not really... Was it Linux? Again, not really. Was it overall competition, as OS9 was hobbled by a creaky 'square-peg-jammed-in-an-increasingly-rounding-hole' architecture and a miles-deep layer of overall cruft? I'd like to double-down on the latter, please.
I use both Mac (for gfx and CG work) at home, and Linux at work.
I don't get the fanaticism against either from the other. The Dual G5 and my Linux desktop @ home connect and transfer files no sweat via NFS. They both play nice with each other.
IMHO, the article is kinda wrong on one eating the other anyway... Linux doubled from what IMHO is a very iffy-sized percentage in the first place (what metrics are they using, anyway?) The only loser I can see out of the deal using their metrics is Windows... which somehow doesn't bother me all that much.:)
'No fast-food cooks are allowed to volunteer for the soup kitchen, so either you quit your day job or get out.'
That's basically what OLPC is saying to Intel.
McDonalds isn't "competition" to the soup kitchen any more than the Asus Eee is competition to the XO Laptop. And yet Negroponte demands that Intel drop making chipsets for anything that may "compete" with the XO? Even if you just restricted it to the Classmate, Negroponte has repeatedly said that he would not, for instance, sell XO laptops to poorer school districts in the First World (where the more expensive-but-still-cheap Classmate would be damned useful), so where's the competition in that case?
IMHO, the whole thing is an asinine demand to make of any contributing company, and reeks of egotism on Negroponte's part.
It's not exactly the same thing in this case with CO2.
In the case of CO2, you're taking an element (carbon) out of one ecosystem (the lithosphere) and putting it into another (the atmosphere).
In the case of salt, if you take it from the sea, you put it back in the sea (after diluting it sufficiently as you re-introduce it, of course). If you dug it up out of the ground, you put it back in the ground. This way you can minimize any damage potential by keeping things to as close as zero-sum as possible.
I agree about saline diffusion, but that would have to be accounted and engineered for in the first place (basically by diluting the salt sufficiently before discharge, or by depositing it in a shaft dug on land but close to shore, where the ocean's water table can leach it back out gradually).
Slashdot Mirror
Consider how many people have a computer (or two, or maybe three...) at home. It isn't hard at all to imagine a typical family with a desktop or laptop computer, and maybe a second one for the kid(s)... but they only have the one at work.
Consider how many of those computers are running Windows.and...? Market share is likely to be even across the board: Macs eating almost 10% at home, and Linux/Mac eating almost 10% at work (or so).
Consider how many of those people don't have a computer at home.Dunno about that... there are probably just as many jobs (if not more if you count manufacturing) that don't require an individually assigned desktop/laptop computer, but the average worker in that position has one (or more) at home. This would be especially true at the lower-skilled levels of labor.
(what is this "mating" thing you speak of? It sounds as messy and inelegant as Visual Basic. Yuck).
(come to think of it, this may explain why there are so few shell users left...)
(you know, those places where the bulk of MSFT's cutomer base can be found?)
(...and if you're using WU at work? Then either you've got a tiny company, or your CIO needs to be fired).
Maybe 10+ years from now... but even four years hence? The vast majority of the workforce today will still know how to handle OOo rather seamlessly. So unless you're talking about wet-behind-ears bottom-half-of-the-class college grads who don't know any different, Office 2k7 isn't going to represent any real paradigm shift in how documents are made and disseminated.
You also assume that world+dog would be using Office 2k7 - meanwhile, in 2008, half of world+dog are mostly using things like Office 2000 and Office XP.
I suspect that if the movie industry follows the music industry, DRM will likely be dead in 10 years. This is of course assuming that someone with a conscience pulls an iPod-like revolution in video - like the iPod did with music. You start off with a widly popular product that has just enough DRM in it to satisfy the pigopolists at the MPAA (but not enough to really hamper anyone, legal or not), then once you have dominant market share, you demand the DRM requirements to stop.
Apple was able to demand (and get) DRM removals going because they hold 91% of the digital music market, while the physical music markets (e.g. CD sales) still continue to die off. The music cartel knows where their collective bread will get buttered as time goes on, so it comes to pass that their choices in the matter are small, and shrinking. (It also doesn't hurt that EMI decided to give their fellow RIAA members the high hard one by taking the 'moral' stance of pushing end to DRM as well).
Maybe I'm just too optimistic, but I can see the day when video production houses, one by one, will be forced to start losing their DRM requirements just to remain relevant in the market... just like the music cartels are being forced to do now.
Network Effects prevent fair competition in the market. see also Microsoft Office.
That's the rub though, isn't it? Blu-Ray as a spec was just about sealed and ready to go, then Microsoft cobbled together a consortium at the last minute, and pushed HD-DVD because they didn't get their lock-in goodies included into the Blu-Ray spec.
Now do realize that the customer in this format war was not you or I, or any other end-user of the products. Far from it, in fact. The real customer in this little format war were the movie studios. Put in that perspective, the movie studios chose what they believe to be the best deal, and the system I described worked exactly as expected. Studios chose what best suited their needs. We as the typical home viewers had little-to-no input into the deal because we weren't the target clients.
I think Microsoft/Toshiba got confused about who their real clients were as well. In their haste to rig the system in their favor, they thought that all they had to do was please the home viewer, and they'd be set... Sony knew differently after their Betamax experience, and went after the studios. The only part where we as viewers were involved included Sony's Blu-Ray-as-part-of-PS3, the marketing blitzes that purported to show widespread viewer support, and a lot of stuff behind-the-scenes we'll probably never know about. Of course, there was also the zealotry machines that each side fired up, by generating buzz about their respective products and letting those newly-minted fanboys (or at least ideologues) do the rest... and yes, both sides had them. In short, those who were passionate about either format were being used as tools, IMHO (both formats have DRM, both formats hold --roughly-- the same amount of info per-disk, etc). On a technical level, Blu-Ray holds a slight edge, but otherwise the average home user isn't going to know or care about one over the other, save for whatever money they've invested in the equipment.
If Microsoft put a HD-DVD player into the Xbox 360 as standard, and the HD-DVD consortium generated a shedload more marketing noise, things may have been different. But, MSFT already had Toshiba to do the dirty work for them, and the Xboxes are unprofitable enough as it is without adding the further cost of a full-on HD-DVD player to each unit.
~~
As per MSFT Office, the files are a standard in the business sense (though PDF is almost as prevalent nowadays), but not in any real technical sense. It's just another ordinary proprietary not-so-well-documented binary file set. The whole thing we saw during the '90s was less of a format war than it was a war of applications.
We're only beginning to see a rise towards a real document standard now - which is why MSFT is trying its level best to fight off ODF and replace it with their particular munge-up called OOXML (which IMHO is nothing more than a barely concealed software patent trap). Once the dust settles there, MS Office is liable to be the loser in either case, unless MSFT suddenly starts dropping the suite price to $50 USD a pop.
That totally misses the point. We're talking *standards*, not *manufacturers*. Having multiple manufacturers who are competing for the exact same market is fantastic. But it doesn't help capitalism to have multiple standards; if anything, it fragments the market and makes competition more difficult.
Why, exactly? One would think that competition in ideas and standards would be just as healthy as a competition in the products themselves.
Hell, if it wasn't for competition in standards, we'd all still be using Direct Current in our homes instead of AC, and our computers would still have RAMBUS(*puke*) in them instead of DDR memory.
Everyone acts like standards wars are new or something. Go hunt down the really old-school standards wars, like Westinghouse vs. Edison (AC vs. DC) sometime... it's been healthy for us as a whole, and I don't see why we should throttle such competitions anytime soon.
Much thanks for the (albeit unintended) morning mental giggle. :)
Cripes - Lighten up, Festus. Nobody's gonna ban your precious hemp seeds.
You're like one of those people who go positively apeshit and screams "heretic!" when some guy shows up at a LUG meeting with a Mac.
(the mental image... holy crap what a bad evil mental image.... it's like the Janet Reno brain-sear of 1998 all friggin' over again!)
(I know, I know... but I couldn't pass up the chance to say that).
Are you kidding? Any boss dumb enough to try it would land you firmly in jackpot territory - and I'm sure your boss' boss would happily fire the SOB after having to pay out a metric shitload of money in litigation awards and lawyer fees.
IOW, you still need a constant heat source. TFA mentions that they're working on a 200 degree C version, and managed to get their prototype going w/ 60% efficiency if the temp is at 600 degrees C... TFA also mentions that current solar furnaces can jack out around 800 degree C heat when you have a shitload of parabolic mirrors pointing at your boiler.
Overall, you're still taking in heat (read: energy) from an external source, so there's (from the looks of it) no cheating going on here.
But yeah, I can otherwise grok what you're getting at, and it's a pretty neat test.
And yet for some odd reason NeoOffice on my Mac can open them just fine with no adverse reaction.
It's not much different from the litany of automakers proclaiming long and loud about how they're suddenly committed to the Environment, yet behind the scenes will whine and complain (and lobby their asses off) when the the US gov't says it's going to bump gas mileage standards by some embarrassingly small increment at some future point in time.
It's all about the facade until you sign the receipt and call the product yours. Then you get to find that vast gulf between the sweet whispers of marketing promise, and the eardrum-splitting howls of post-purchase reality.
Microsoft just managed to adapt that particular sense of acumen to an otherwise somewhat objective world (technology, that is). Since the computer industry is not really too awful bound by that truth-in-advertising laws that, say, real estate and food would be (at least in the US), the folks at MSFT really don't have to care. Really - what're you gonna do, install Linux in protest? (at least that's the current attitude that I've seen some of the MSFT sales flacks carry).
Forget the Arthur. C. Clarke meme... I'm speaking as in a for-real 'we ain't going there yet' agreement that space-faring nations had agreed to, at least until they can come up with some sort of exploration set-up that can search for life there without risk (or at least an acceptably minimized risk) of contaminating the underlying ocean with Earth-borne bacteria.
I could've sworn that there was something in place to that effect... sort of the same reason why the Russians held off from their efforts to drill all the way down to Lake Vostok in Antarctica.
Actually, it was fear of being left behind by everyone else (no matter who it was) that spurred OSX. Let's face it, MacOS 9.x sucked by comparison (yeah, yeah, cue the furry-toothed Mac users among us shouting for blood, etc)... But seriously - I've used both OS9 and OSX, and OSX, at least from a geek standpoint (admin, coding, name it), kicks the unholy crap out of OS9.
I'm just glad Apple managed to pull it off and jerk a lot of Mac developers out of their sleep and into this century.
Was it Windows? Not really... Was it Linux? Again, not really. Was it overall competition, as OS9 was hobbled by a creaky 'square-peg-jammed-in-an-increasingly-rounding-hole' architecture and a miles-deep layer of overall cruft? I'd like to double-down on the latter, please.
I use both Mac (for gfx and CG work) at home, and Linux at work.
I don't get the fanaticism against either from the other. The Dual G5 and my Linux desktop @ home connect and transfer files no sweat via NFS. They both play nice with each other.
IMHO, the article is kinda wrong on one eating the other anyway... Linux doubled from what IMHO is a very iffy-sized percentage in the first place (what metrics are they using, anyway?) The only loser I can see out of the deal using their metrics is Windows... which somehow doesn't bother me all that much. :)
'No fast-food cooks are allowed to volunteer for the soup kitchen, so either you quit your day job or get out.'
That's basically what OLPC is saying to Intel.
McDonalds isn't "competition" to the soup kitchen any more than the Asus Eee is competition to the XO Laptop. And yet Negroponte demands that Intel drop making chipsets for anything that may "compete" with the XO? Even if you just restricted it to the Classmate, Negroponte has repeatedly said that he would not, for instance, sell XO laptops to poorer school districts in the First World (where the more expensive-but-still-cheap Classmate would be damned useful), so where's the competition in that case?
IMHO, the whole thing is an asinine demand to make of any contributing company, and reeks of egotism on Negroponte's part.
In the case of CO2, you're taking an element (carbon) out of one ecosystem (the lithosphere) and putting it into another (the atmosphere).
In the case of salt, if you take it from the sea, you put it back in the sea (after diluting it sufficiently as you re-introduce it, of course). If you dug it up out of the ground, you put it back in the ground. This way you can minimize any damage potential by keeping things to as close as zero-sum as possible.
I agree about saline diffusion, but that would have to be accounted and engineered for in the first place (basically by diluting the salt sufficiently before discharge, or by depositing it in a shaft dug on land but close to shore, where the ocean's water table can leach it back out gradually).
So by that logic: MRI's, CT scans, and Laproscopy cameras make a surgeon worthless?
Err, yeah.