1. Have the government install it [by it I mean fibre or pipe to door] and companies are taxed, e.g. 1% or something to support it
2. Have one company install pipe, own it, do whatever it wants
3. Realize that the CUSTOMERS are paying for the pipe and ultimately they should have a say on how they use it [e.g. comcast could stop screwing vonage users for instance]
I mean they put a coax from the box to my house once, like five years ago. Why would [or should] I pay a monthly fee for what amounts to 20 minutes of time and five dollars worth of cable?
As for the miles and miles of cable that joins up the infrastructure I'd like to think that decades of paying stupidly high charges would have covered that.
The problem is they say "the cable is worth 389 million" so every year they tell the customer they have to recoup that when the cable has long since been bought and paid for.
Now on the other hand if we just had the government maintain it and fairly lease it out to bidders [that being the gotcha] we wouldn't have these problems. As for the "let capitalism run its course" folk look where we are at now.
Why can I send 20 gigs of data ten thousand miles for 30$/month when I can't make a phone call [which is scratchy and all] overseas for anything less than 3 dollars a minute [on my cell].... hmmm 800kbit modem vs. 9.6kbit cell... hmm... which costs more...
Telcos and the like can shove their heads up their collective asses.
Whatever, it's their country and if they want to oppress themselves all the power to them. More so this is a draft n'est pas? How many american bills when drafted seemed daffy?
It's entirely possible that this is
[ ] Incorrect news [ ] Making the wrong conclusions [X] Jumping to conclusions [X] Flamebait [X] Copying another post, sorry I had to
Personally I look forward to getting back to Canada and out of the USA so I can get the icky feeling off myself.
Because Canada
[ ] Is so much better [ ] Has less immigrants [X] Doesn't have Bush [X] Can tolerate more than one point of view [ ] A nation which enjoys equal protection under the law [ ] Has quality politicians [ ] Has Effective journalism [X] Has poutine
Most people don't use Office by choice. I know if they're anything like me they get dragged into it.
My first text was in LaTeX and now is likely to be ported to Word for publication. My second text is in Word by default. Just the way the publisher wants. If I had a choice about it, both would be in LaTeX because that's what it was meant for. Presentable material.
The fad to use Word for manuscripts probably started because an editor or two had a hardon for MSFT then next thing you know all manuscripts are in Word. And now, years later they're in Word just because that's how they were done last year, etc, etc, etc.
There are very few technical reasons why anyone uses Office over OpenOffice. I'd safely say the majority of OSS and Students would prefer it over Office and probably do actually use it instead.
I was never saying that OSS tools are the majority market share holders. I was saying that it's not too uncommon to see them used. My PHBs use Firefox. That was unheard of years ago. What else do they sneak in that I don't know about? Here at work we use Office mostly because our... quality IT... folk are MSFT cronies. That said we still sneak firefox, cygwin, etc onto our boxes to actually get real work done.
I just think the majority of naysayers are just underestimating the presence of OSS in the real world.
Yeah sure most people don't use cygwin, they don't use msvc either.
Of the people who are software developers on windows quite a few know of cygwin, quite a few pirate copies of MSVC and the rest usually have MSVC access through their work [e.g. the company bought it].
I don't really know of a lot of people who go out and buy MSVC, a full legit copy, just to do hobby or OSS software development. It just doesn't happen.
As for WMP, I'd think Nullsoft has something to say about that. Winamp and iTunes alone are probably more popular than WMP. Don't confuse "WMP got invoked" with "I chose to run WMP".
As for the general scene, I think people like you just give it a bad rap because that's what you're used to. All of my developer friends work both windows and Linux, are aware of the OSS alternatives, etc. I've yet to really meet a developer who is completely unaware of the other side of the fence. They may not use it professionally but they at least know about it.
And really, these people who just keep saying "nobody uses OSS" are just towing the party line. If nobody used OSS why would their be international conferences dedicated to it? Why would companies spend billions a year on supporting it? Why sites like kernel.org need super fat pipes? etc...
While the "market share" of Linux and other OSS alternatives may be lower I don't think it's trivial. First off, OSS is harder to model since most people don't buy it. So saying "MSFT gets 80% of the sales" is meaningless because of the horde of people like me who use OSes like Gentoo.
Anyways, Vista will suck, it will suck fierce and I'll be laughing from my comfortable stable Gentoo setup with money in my pocket to do more important things.
1. Some game website will first frown on it, then get a beta copy and hype all the neato features.
2. Other testers will then buy $800 graphic cards to test it out on their vapor cooled 5Ghz Pentium4 box, then say, meh, only gets slightly better FPS than Jazz Jackrabbit or something equally stupid
3. The game will be released, it will sit on 5 CDs instead of one DVD to keep "costs down" and pirated versions will appear with all the speech replaced with mexican festival music
4. People will realize the game is as deep as the pamphelet their latest credit card came in and will toy with the game until 17 minutes after initial release someone posts a complete walkthrough with every secret bonus and glitch found.
5. The online site will be inundated with delinquant 13 yr old sharp shooters who won't give us hard working adults a chance to just play the game and have fun.
6. Some dude in Korea will die after playing the game for 79 hours straight.
7. A full week after the release of the game a dozen patches will come out to fix various holes in the game [re: pirates] and each one will take a full 200MB to replace 39KB of code in the binary.
8. A full week and one day after release the game will become yesteryear news and people will be clamouring about the latest "let's kill the mutant aliens in obviously dangerous situations game"... oh fuck call it Far Cry 2.
9. The folk at 3DR will be vindicated then bought out by MSFT and outsourced to India to make the "books" look good.
I think you'll find most legit MSVC/Office users are in the workplace and not at home. The full edition of Office is 900 dollars in Canada provided you're not lying and don't buy the student edition.
Some of us... have to work legitimately. We can't just skimp out and use an OEM CD and a student copy to do professional work on a box.
I'd think you'll find that firefox is getting millions of downloads because the average joe is using it.
As for development tools... entire industries are based on the GNU toolchains. That's true just as much for Windows as it is anything else.
It's people like you that make the "nobody uses OSS" truth happen. When in reality millions are using OSS just fine. No matter how much you scream "nobody uses OSS" into the wind it won't come true.
Stop being a MSFT puppet and stop spreading their FUD.
And when you realize the shinyness of your desktop doesn't reflect it's usefulness go jump on the Gentoo bandwagon and be part of a winning team for a change.
As much as I hate MSFT for being a monopoly and industry stiffler I hate Apple for being prima donnas.
My Dell laptop is just fine. It's sturdy, works in both winxp and linux, has good battery life, is fast, etc, and costs much less than the standard issue G4 laptop at the time (even though my Dell has a 3yr warranty, larger battery and HD than the standard G4).
If Apple could realize that their outsourced third-world construction factories are no better than the third-world construction factories Dell uses... they could charge appropriate prices.
Though since they ditched freescale and went Intel I don't see the motivation. If I wanted another Intel laptop I'd go to dell.ca. PPC had some merit mostly because it was a different architecture which if followed through more heavily could give x86 a run for the MIPS/Watt ratio.
Windows isn't worth the 300 or whatever bucks a fully legit non-oem copy costs. It doesn't come with any useful tools and the extra doo-dahs like WMP and IE most people avoid like the plague.
If they could just get through their thick fucking skulls that people just want the OS + Driver support and they'll take care of the userland tools themselves they'd have a product worth actuallying buying.
But of course if their past is any indication of their future Vista will take 5GB of disk space and still require 300 additional 3rd party tools to be installed to be useful.
Now if you could get Office+MSVC+WinXP for say $300 or something that may be worth it. Cuz at least then you'd have professional [well sorta] tools to work with.
As it stands the average XP user downloads cygwin, ming, lcc-win32 or others for development, OpenOffice for a suite, firefox/mozilla for browsing, etc...
Oh well, I'm happy with my Gentoo boxes anyways. Takes less disk space, is more useable and I get the double-plus good feeling from using OSS.
Your post fails to take note that alot of people seemingly do the same with much less. OpenOffice is the same size as Word2003 on its own.
A full WinXP install is roughly 3/4th the size of a full Gentoo desktop workstation [with build/edit/programming tools + WM + xmms + mplayer + openoffice + tetex +...] and yet lacks a proper shell, media player, development tools, office suite, TeX suite, etc.
MSFT "bloat" is on a whole other level of bloat that most OSS doesn't even approach. The only exception that rings a bell is KDE where they are acting very much like MSFT in terms of doing everything in house, etc, etc, etc. [Gnome fan]
Fact of the matter is getting sub 2MB kernels is not too hard. Getting larger than 3MB kernels is hard. So Linux on it's own is fairly tight. Now if you put KDE [or even to a certain extent Gnome] on a laptop meant to run a slow processor with little ram... you're stupid. IceWM for instance would run just fine and take a fraction of the resources.
Stop thinking in terms of x86 though... an ARM or PPC processor costs a fraction of a modern X86 and for the applications these will run is just as competitive [if not more because they often take less power].
Similarly for memory, there is no reason this has to be CL2 PC3200 memory. I'll bet there is quite a bit of spoilage memory that gets marked down [or written off] because it's not up to speed. Call it CL2.5 PC2100 and be use that, etc, etc.
There are a lot of things around already that could lend themselves to a cheap PC.
Take a look at something like the GP32 or NDS. They have more than enough juice to run Linux and they run off small batteries for a dozen hours. Granted the screens are not quite the right size [or number of] and there is no keyboard but for the most part those "toys" show that a relatively cheap computing platform is possible.
If you could spec out a 250Mhz ARM9 with 128MB of PC-100 memory, a 20G 4300RPM drive, 640x480 VGA display, 802.11b wifi and QWERTY/Dvorak keyboard you'd pretty much have a laptop. Moving to the ARM and PC-100 from x86 and DDR alone probably saves enough money. In the grand scheme of things the 20G drive could be replaced with a 4GiB flash and still be useful as a relatively full desktop Gentoo install takes only 2GiB of disk leaving a full 2GiB for user documents and what not. That would very likely cut costs in secondary fashions as the battery would not have to be as big to accomodate the motors. The form factor could be smaller, etc.
As another poster said though I doubt these would cost 100$ today but in the future it's possible but more so they could be written off, e.g. if they cost 300$ some generous entity could pay 200$ and the recipient could pay the last 100$ and voila, 100$ laptop that is small, low power [usage] and functional for it's environment.
The trick is really to apply better use of our current technology.
Yeah but the things they sell they don't bundle with their OS for free.
You need an OS, if the OS packs other things [at a direct loss recouped through license hikes] is just more monopoly wrangling. They bought out the company that original wrote VPC and now want to give it out for free? With their new OS you say? At a loss?...
That really isn't the problem. The problem is two fold after that. first it attracts a lot of users, then they raise the price and have no reason to really add value.
I don't recall Win3.11 costing 299$... I don't recall Office costing 1000$ back then either...
Now that they own the scene they can charge whatever they want. They're taking advantage of how large they are to absorb huge losses to then take out the competition. That's not GOOD for the consumers and is WHY we have monopoly laws.
Everyone seems to think anti-monopoly zealots are just sore losers, but when MSFT wins yet another market by losing more money than the combined market earns together...you lose the ability to select products and have options.
Now you could say "just don't buy windows" except then try and go out and buy a laptop or PC without windows. If your job is not highly technical chances are not only do you need Office but you won't know how to install Linux or BSD [let alone use it]. If 10 years ago people had the choice between Windows and Linux or BSD you'd see more people today running something else.
Difference is VMware is in the VM business. It's like Coke giving out free samples of Coke [e.g. when they come out with new flavours].
MSFT is in the OS business and bundling VPC [which they probably will] with their OS is exploiting the monopoly they hold on the OS world to basically make VMWare redundant.
If MSFT wanted to really remain a real business they'd sell VPC as an add-on package and then the users find competition.
Though to be honest I use QEMU on my 4-core Linux workstation to emulate WinXP so I can write my book [using Word]... so VPC would be useless for me.
And BTW, QEMU with the kqemu kernel module is actually fairly fast. Aside from slow [but functional] I/O support the cpu emulation is fast. For instance, once firefox or Word has loaded they run smooth as if they were on a native box.
I dunno, but only people who are over the age of 50 would even be old enough to remember the Beatles and specifically the name "Apple" being associated with them.
If you ask any random 16-24 yr old person on the street the name of the Beatles label you'll probably get a low percentage of correct answers.
I don't see how Apple Computers is in anyway confusing people away from the Apple label. When I think itunes I don't think of the Beatles. I think of frustration at using a crappy piece of software [in light of things like GNUpod] and horrible DRM.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are customers paying for the extra costs of DRM?
How many times do these people have to be told, DRM can't work, at least not the way they want.
(shudder) to quote Bruce Schneier, you can't make water unwet, you can't make bits uncopyable.
STOP STOP STOP.
The only crypto should be authentication, as in, I the user want to be protected from fraud.
That and I don't really see the worth. Not a lot of TV is worth seeing once let alone twice.
Tom
1. Have the government install it [by it I mean fibre or pipe to door] and companies are taxed, e.g. 1% or something to support it
... hmmm 800kbit modem vs. 9.6kbit cell ... hmm ... which costs more...
2. Have one company install pipe, own it, do whatever it wants
3. Realize that the CUSTOMERS are paying for the pipe and ultimately they should have a say on how they use it [e.g. comcast could stop screwing vonage users for instance]
I mean they put a coax from the box to my house once, like five years ago. Why would [or should] I pay a monthly fee for what amounts to 20 minutes of time and five dollars worth of cable?
As for the miles and miles of cable that joins up the infrastructure I'd like to think that decades of paying stupidly high charges would have covered that.
The problem is they say "the cable is worth 389 million" so every year they tell the customer they have to recoup that when the cable has long since been bought and paid for.
Now on the other hand if we just had the government maintain it and fairly lease it out to bidders [that being the gotcha] we wouldn't have these problems. As for the "let capitalism run its course" folk look where we are at now.
Why can I send 20 gigs of data ten thousand miles for 30$/month when I can't make a phone call [which is scratchy and all] overseas for anything less than 3 dollars a minute [on my cell].
Telcos and the like can shove their heads up their collective asses.
Tom
A school district banning a book is not the same thing. You can still read it at home if you want.
:-)
By your logic my school board banned The Art of Computer Programming since none of my classes would allow me to read it. That's nonsense.
Besides schools never teach anything of value past the third grade anyways.
Tom
You should google for beaver tails then.... mmm the official snack of winterlude...
Tom
Really? Since when? I'm fairly certain the charter of rights may have something to say about that.
Tom
Whatever, it's their country and if they want to oppress themselves all the power to them. More so this is a draft n'est pas? How many american bills when drafted seemed daffy?
It's entirely possible that this is
[ ] Incorrect news
[ ] Making the wrong conclusions
[X] Jumping to conclusions
[X] Flamebait
[X] Copying another post, sorry I had to
Personally I look forward to getting back to Canada and out of the USA so I can get the icky feeling off myself.
Because Canada
[ ] Is so much better
[ ] Has less immigrants
[X] Doesn't have Bush
[X] Can tolerate more than one point of view
[ ] A nation which enjoys equal protection under the law
[ ] Has quality politicians
[ ] Has Effective journalism
[X] Has poutine
Tom
How would SSE2 speed up rendering HTML?
If you think about it your webbrowser is for the most part a on-the-fly compiler, parsing HTML, XHTML, JS, etc and compiling it into onscreen "stuff".
Your question is like asking when GCC will support SSE2 natively to speed itself up.
There may be a few graphic algorithms that can benefit from SSE2 but for the most part nothing else.
Tom
Most people don't use Office by choice. I know if they're anything like me they get dragged into it.
... quality IT ... folk are MSFT cronies. That said we still sneak firefox, cygwin, etc onto our boxes to actually get real work done.
My first text was in LaTeX and now is likely to be ported to Word for publication. My second text is in Word by default. Just the way the publisher wants. If I had a choice about it, both would be in LaTeX because that's what it was meant for. Presentable material.
The fad to use Word for manuscripts probably started because an editor or two had a hardon for MSFT then next thing you know all manuscripts are in Word. And now, years later they're in Word just because that's how they were done last year, etc, etc, etc.
There are very few technical reasons why anyone uses Office over OpenOffice. I'd safely say the majority of OSS and Students would prefer it over Office and probably do actually use it instead.
I was never saying that OSS tools are the majority market share holders. I was saying that it's not too uncommon to see them used. My PHBs use Firefox. That was unheard of years ago. What else do they sneak in that I don't know about? Here at work we use Office mostly because our
I just think the majority of naysayers are just underestimating the presence of OSS in the real world.
Tom
Yeah sure most people don't use cygwin, they don't use msvc either.
Of the people who are software developers on windows quite a few know of cygwin, quite a few pirate copies of MSVC and the rest usually have MSVC access through their work [e.g. the company bought it].
I don't really know of a lot of people who go out and buy MSVC, a full legit copy, just to do hobby or OSS software development. It just doesn't happen.
As for WMP, I'd think Nullsoft has something to say about that. Winamp and iTunes alone are probably more popular than WMP. Don't confuse "WMP got invoked" with "I chose to run WMP".
As for the general scene, I think people like you just give it a bad rap because that's what you're used to. All of my developer friends work both windows and Linux, are aware of the OSS alternatives, etc. I've yet to really meet a developer who is completely unaware of the other side of the fence. They may not use it professionally but they at least know about it.
And really, these people who just keep saying "nobody uses OSS" are just towing the party line. If nobody used OSS why would their be international conferences dedicated to it? Why would companies spend billions a year on supporting it? Why sites like kernel.org need super fat pipes? etc...
While the "market share" of Linux and other OSS alternatives may be lower I don't think it's trivial. First off, OSS is harder to model since most people don't buy it. So saying "MSFT gets 80% of the sales" is meaningless because of the horde of people like me who use OSes like Gentoo.
Anyways, Vista will suck, it will suck fierce and I'll be laughing from my comfortable stable Gentoo setup with money in my pocket to do more important things.
Tom
1. Some game website will first frown on it, then get a beta copy and hype all the neato features.
... oh fuck call it Far Cry 2.
2. Other testers will then buy $800 graphic cards to test it out on their vapor cooled 5Ghz Pentium4 box, then say, meh, only gets slightly better FPS than Jazz Jackrabbit or something equally stupid
3. The game will be released, it will sit on 5 CDs instead of one DVD to keep "costs down" and pirated versions will appear with all the speech replaced with mexican festival music
4. People will realize the game is as deep as the pamphelet their latest credit card came in and will toy with the game until 17 minutes after initial release someone posts a complete walkthrough with every secret bonus and glitch found.
5. The online site will be inundated with delinquant 13 yr old sharp shooters who won't give us hard working adults a chance to just play the game and have fun.
6. Some dude in Korea will die after playing the game for 79 hours straight.
7. A full week after the release of the game a dozen patches will come out to fix various holes in the game [re: pirates] and each one will take a full 200MB to replace 39KB of code in the binary.
8. A full week and one day after release the game will become yesteryear news and people will be clamouring about the latest "let's kill the mutant aliens in obviously dangerous situations game"
9. The folk at 3DR will be vindicated then bought out by MSFT and outsourced to India to make the "books" look good.
Tom
I think you'll find most legit MSVC/Office users are in the workplace and not at home. The full edition of Office is 900 dollars in Canada provided you're not lying and don't buy the student edition.
Some of us... have to work legitimately. We can't just skimp out and use an OEM CD and a student copy to do professional work on a box.
I'd think you'll find that firefox is getting millions of downloads because the average joe is using it.
As for development tools... entire industries are based on the GNU toolchains. That's true just as much for Windows as it is anything else.
It's people like you that make the "nobody uses OSS" truth happen. When in reality millions are using OSS just fine. No matter how much you scream "nobody uses OSS" into the wind it won't come true.
Stop being a MSFT puppet and stop spreading their FUD.
Tom
And when you realize the shinyness of your desktop doesn't reflect it's usefulness go jump on the Gentoo bandwagon and be part of a winning team for a change.
... they could charge appropriate prices.
As much as I hate MSFT for being a monopoly and industry stiffler I hate Apple for being prima donnas.
My Dell laptop is just fine. It's sturdy, works in both winxp and linux, has good battery life, is fast, etc, and costs much less than the standard issue G4 laptop at the time (even though my Dell has a 3yr warranty, larger battery and HD than the standard G4).
If Apple could realize that their outsourced third-world construction factories are no better than the third-world construction factories Dell uses
Though since they ditched freescale and went Intel I don't see the motivation. If I wanted another Intel laptop I'd go to dell.ca. PPC had some merit mostly because it was a different architecture which if followed through more heavily could give x86 a run for the MIPS/Watt ratio.
Alas...
Tom
Can I get an amen brother?
Windows isn't worth the 300 or whatever bucks a fully legit non-oem copy costs. It doesn't come with any useful tools and the extra doo-dahs like WMP and IE most people avoid like the plague.
If they could just get through their thick fucking skulls that people just want the OS + Driver support and they'll take care of the userland tools themselves they'd have a product worth actuallying buying.
But of course if their past is any indication of their future Vista will take 5GB of disk space and still require 300 additional 3rd party tools to be installed to be useful.
Now if you could get Office+MSVC+WinXP for say $300 or something that may be worth it. Cuz at least then you'd have professional [well sorta] tools to work with.
As it stands the average XP user downloads cygwin, ming, lcc-win32 or others for development, OpenOffice for a suite, firefox/mozilla for browsing, etc...
Oh well, I'm happy with my Gentoo boxes anyways. Takes less disk space, is more useable and I get the double-plus good feeling from using OSS.
Tom
Your post fails to take note that alot of people seemingly do the same with much less. OpenOffice is the same size as Word2003 on its own.
...] and yet lacks a proper shell, media player, development tools, office suite, TeX suite, etc.
... you're stupid. IceWM for instance would run just fine and take a fraction of the resources.
A full WinXP install is roughly 3/4th the size of a full Gentoo desktop workstation [with build/edit/programming tools + WM + xmms + mplayer + openoffice + tetex +
MSFT "bloat" is on a whole other level of bloat that most OSS doesn't even approach. The only exception that rings a bell is KDE where they are acting very much like MSFT in terms of doing everything in house, etc, etc, etc. [Gnome fan]
Fact of the matter is getting sub 2MB kernels is not too hard. Getting larger than 3MB kernels is hard. So Linux on it's own is fairly tight. Now if you put KDE [or even to a certain extent Gnome] on a laptop meant to run a slow processor with little ram
Tom
Stop thinking in terms of x86 though... an ARM or PPC processor costs a fraction of a modern X86 and for the applications these will run is just as competitive [if not more because they often take less power].
Similarly for memory, there is no reason this has to be CL2 PC3200 memory. I'll bet there is quite a bit of spoilage memory that gets marked down [or written off] because it's not up to speed. Call it CL2.5 PC2100 and be use that, etc, etc.
There are a lot of things around already that could lend themselves to a cheap PC.
Take a look at something like the GP32 or NDS. They have more than enough juice to run Linux and they run off small batteries for a dozen hours. Granted the screens are not quite the right size [or number of] and there is no keyboard but for the most part those "toys" show that a relatively cheap computing platform is possible.
If you could spec out a 250Mhz ARM9 with 128MB of PC-100 memory, a 20G 4300RPM drive, 640x480 VGA display, 802.11b wifi and QWERTY/Dvorak keyboard you'd pretty much have a laptop. Moving to the ARM and PC-100 from x86 and DDR alone probably saves enough money. In the grand scheme of things the 20G drive could be replaced with a 4GiB flash and still be useful as a relatively full desktop Gentoo install takes only 2GiB of disk leaving a full 2GiB for user documents and what not. That would very likely cut costs in secondary fashions as the battery would not have to be as big to accomodate the motors. The form factor could be smaller, etc.
As another poster said though I doubt these would cost 100$ today but in the future it's possible but more so they could be written off, e.g. if they cost 300$ some generous entity could pay 200$ and the recipient could pay the last 100$ and voila, 100$ laptop that is small, low power [usage] and functional for it's environment.
The trick is really to apply better use of our current technology.
Tom
MIPS/Watt ... like they do ALREADY!!!
Mod parent down as "I've never been to arm.com so I'm a big dummy."
Tom
ARM doesn't typically target super fast designs. They go more for low power and then reach for efficiency.
So this core wouldn't be designed for speed.
Also for many embedded platforms the cpu speed is less important compared to power consumption and bus contention.
Tom
Only if you use Fedora. If you're like me and don't then it's like
Who cares:1
It's important:0
Frankly Fedora was just a poor rehash of Redhat which was a pain to work with anyways.
Tom
Yeah but the things they sell they don't bundle with their OS for free.
...
... I don't recall Office costing 1000$ back then either ...
...you lose the ability to select products and have options.
You need an OS, if the OS packs other things [at a direct loss recouped through license hikes] is just more monopoly wrangling. They bought out the company that original wrote VPC and now want to give it out for free? With their new OS you say? At a loss?
That really isn't the problem. The problem is two fold after that. first it attracts a lot of users, then they raise the price and have no reason to really add value.
I don't recall Win3.11 costing 299$
Now that they own the scene they can charge whatever they want. They're taking advantage of how large they are to absorb huge losses to then take out the competition. That's not GOOD for the consumers and is WHY we have monopoly laws.
Everyone seems to think anti-monopoly zealots are just sore losers, but when MSFT wins yet another market by losing more money than the combined market earns together
Now you could say "just don't buy windows" except then try and go out and buy a laptop or PC without windows. If your job is not highly technical chances are not only do you need Office but you won't know how to install Linux or BSD [let alone use it]. If 10 years ago people had the choice between Windows and Linux or BSD you'd see more people today running something else.
Tom
Difference is VMware is in the VM business. It's like Coke giving out free samples of Coke [e.g. when they come out with new flavours].
MSFT is in the OS business and bundling VPC [which they probably will] with their OS is exploiting the monopoly they hold on the OS world to basically make VMWare redundant.
If MSFT wanted to really remain a real business they'd sell VPC as an add-on package and then the users find competition.
Though to be honest I use QEMU on my 4-core Linux workstation to emulate WinXP so I can write my book [using Word]... so VPC would be useless for me.
And BTW, QEMU with the kqemu kernel module is actually fairly fast. Aside from slow [but functional] I/O support the cpu emulation is fast. For instance, once firefox or Word has loaded they run smooth as if they were on a native box.
QEMU is also free and open source.
Tom
they're worried that the laptop spies on you yet they're totally cool with running Windows.
Go figure.
Tom
yeah, what the fuck is bio-piracy anyways? Sounds very cromulent to me.
Tom
Put a POT inline with both channels. ... what you don't shop at electronic stores?
I'm sure there are headphones out there that have this sort of mechanism already installed.
That way you can just turn down the volume. It wouldn't stop distortion but provided the signal is ok and just too loud this would help you.
Tom
I dunno, but only people who are over the age of 50 would even be old enough to remember the Beatles and specifically the name "Apple" being associated with them.
If you ask any random 16-24 yr old person on the street the name of the Beatles label you'll probably get a low percentage of correct answers.
I don't see how Apple Computers is in anyway confusing people away from the Apple label. When I think itunes I don't think of the Beatles. I think of frustration at using a crappy piece of software [in light of things like GNUpod] and horrible DRM.
Tom
I dunno, Gentoo works just fine for me. *BSD works just fine for a lot of others, etc, etc.
"best" is like what a kid would write.
Why not say "rated the highest at $BLAH" or "was the best amongst competitors at doing $BLAH".
At least qualify what it was best at.
Tom