InfoWorld's Tom Sullivan has a blog post up that questions some of the findings in the study. Among other things, he notes that Solaris support was found to cost less than that of either Windows or Linux, and that the same study found Windows to be cheaper when studied over a three-year period. Most importantly, though, he points out that only 20 companies were surveyed to come up with this study, and with those kind of odds you can pretty much make the numbers say anything you want.
Exactly. Which is what makes it the prevailing scientific theory.
Scientific theories can be used to make predictions about the natural world. Creationists like to believe that just because nobody has ever found the fossil remains of a monkey that walks upright and carries a pocket watch, evolution must be "unproven." The truth is that the vast preponderance of observations of living species support the theory of evolution.
Might we someday find an organism that cannot possibly be the result of any of the processes of evolution that have been observed to this day, indeed one that so thoroughly refutes the conclusions drawn from those observations that the entire theory of evolution is dashed to pieces? Sure, it's possible. When you find that organism, I advise you to run, not walk, to your nearest biologist. But bring a lunch.
Stolen definition of faith: "Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing."
I was going more with definition number two, since that's the one most religious people are talking about. Your definition applies more when you say, for example, "I have faith in your ability to complete the task at hand." When you say, "my faith will bring blessings unto my house," or, "through faith I know that dinosaurs were made extinct by Sir Lancelot," you're talking about something else.
I am curious to know more about the basis of the geological methods of fossil dating, if you (or someone else) can provide a layperson's summary.
A Google search turned up this, which seems to offer a pretty good write-up. The gist of it is that there are more ways of radiologically dating geologic material than just the Carbon-14 method.
I Agree with Zdziarski in that both science and religion need a bit of faith from their believers.
I do not. Science does not require faith. If, at any point in the "chain of belief" of a particular scientific theory, you encounter a step of logic that is not demonstrably provable by experimentation, you are quite correct to suspect the veracity of that theory. Science can be put to experimental test; religion cannot. Therefore religion requires faith, whereas the most science requires of you is trust -- you often have to trust that the scientists who figured out a certain point of science and the other scientists who recreated the experiments and pronounced the conclusions valid know more about their field than you do. If there was no way to test that scientists really have the knowledge they claim to have but you still felt you needed to believe in their conclusions, then that would be faith.
One of the weaker points of religions, is that they base all their facts in one initial fact: God exists, and so, from that all the other knowledge is generated.
Similarly, all science proceeds from the belief that the universe exists. If it does not, then no hypothesis can ever be tested accurately. Quantum physicists might already be willing to tell you that time, as humans perceive it, probably doesn't exist. What's next? So in that sense does science require faith? Now we're getting into philosophy.
It seems to me that the people who support the idea of the Creative Commons license are the people who believe very strongly in this idea of "the commons." As far as I can tell, this seems to be an idealistic doctrine which says that the sum total of human creative endeavor is the birthright of every human being, and that everybody should ideally have access to every creative work (either now, or at some point in the future). This ideology naturally makes anyone who wants to profit off his/her own creative works tend to bristle. I don't think Creative Commons is really a bad thing in any particular way, though; like Orlowski, I'm just not sure if there's really any need for it.
In practice, the Creative Commons license seems to mainly appeal to people who want to spread their own creative works in some kind of "viral" way. The license is a public statement: Go ahead and take this, use it, don't worry about it, I won't sue you. (And there may be a couple of additional clauses, such as "I won't sue you unless you try to profit from it.")
But how do you define "profit"? If nobody would benefit in any way from the use of your work, then why would they want to use it in the first place? To my mind, benefit and profit are synonymous here. Maybe they don't sell your song. But maybe they post it on a Web site that accepts advertising. Are they profiting from your song then? It seems to me that if you want to set up all these profit/don't profit clauses, you need to write a little bit more fine print than your average Creative Commons license gives you.
Second, copyright law already gives the author of a work absolute and complete control of how it is used. I'll give you an example of how this works. I am the author and copyright holder of a comic strip called The Adventures of Action Item. Since I first drew it in 1999, this comic strip has had a fairly storied existence. It's been e-mailed around the known universe, printed up in magazines, used as a print sample, and it's constantly available on the Web page above. Every now and again someone writes me to ask if they can use it in one way or another, and my response varies.
When they wanted to print it in a couple of different magazines, I said OK, since it was going to be used as editorial content. But not for free; I negotiated a fee each time. You're selling magazines, I want a cut.
When people e-mail blast it to all their friends, I do nothing. Not just because it would be a little difficult to do anything about that, but because I honestly don't care. Go right ahead. (Hey look at that, I just got viral distribution and I never used a Creative Commons license.)
When people want to host it on their own Web sites, on the other hand, I usually decline. Just link to mine, please. Occasionally someone will post it without asking, and occasionally I will find out who they are and ask them to remove it.
When Xerox wrote to ask me if they could use it as a print sample for one of their printers, I decided that was an acceptable advertising-related purpose, because they weren't trying to co-opt the content or "message" of the strip. The (admittedly garish) colors in the artwork were what was being shown off. Plus they printed it up on cool-looking newsprint stock. I said OK -- and negotiated a fee.
When companies write to ask me if they can use it in some kind of company publication, however, I usually decline. I don't want the strip associated with their company. It's probably meant to make fun of their company.
Then again, sometimes people write me and ask if they can print up fifty copies and hand them out as an icebreaker or other materials for a class they're teaching, and I'll probably say that's fine.
The point of all this? Every case is different. But that's just the thing -- existing copyright law gives me that right. I can really do whatever I want with my own works, and I can grant that other people can use them for whatever
I am interested in Rockbox, but until it implements the features I want (and if you notice, recording is one of them) it's no good to me. Believe it or not, I use the recording feature for work.
The problem was Rio just didn't offer any compelling "stand-out" features and the pricing was on-par with Apple's Ipod selection
I think you've nailed it right there. We old geezers in the audience can remember the advent of another personal audio device, the Walkman. "Walkman" was a Sony brand name. For a while, most of the portable tape players sold were Sonys. But let's face it -- they were just tape players. Pretty soon people started using the word "Walkman" as a generic term to mean any kind of portable cassette player. A lot of other manufacturers were already producing cassette mechanisms and sticking them into a smaller form factor wasn't really rocket science.
What's more, there just wasn't all that many ways a manufacturer could distinguish itself. It was hard to compete on long battery life when every device was expected to use AAs and you had those pesky DC motors to run. Sony got another run at it with "Mega Bass" but even that feature wasn't innovative enough for Sony to corner the market. Their "Sports" models were popular for a while, with the shiny yellow impact-proof plastics. Truthfully Sony probably remained a leader, if not the leader, throughout the whole Walkman phenomenon. But at the end of the day, if you were going to go out and buy a portable tape player today you probably wouldn't care if it was made by Sony or not, and you'd still probably call it a Walkman.
But so now you have the MP3 player market and things aren't so simple. There are more formats to consider, more gizmos you can add on to take advantage of those little CPUs and big hard drives. I personally own an iRiver player, but I have to admit that Apple's iPod UI is way superior. Apple is pretty much kicking ass in this market, and it's doing it because it came up with a solid, innovative product to begin with and there hasn't been a single other feature anyone's come up with yet that can't be had from a stock iPod or a few add-on accessories.
It's possible that other manufacturers could put together product lines that have most of the features and appeal of the iPod and force the prices in the market ever downward. At that point, maybe the term "iPod" would effectively become generic, as well. But right now Apple has a helluva lead and I haven't seen anything that I'd expect to give the iPod a serious run for its money.
(Oh, the reasons I went with the iRiver were OGG support and the ability to record to either WAV or MP3, including optical line-in. But iRiver has disappointed me with some of its choices, particularly in the things it promised to deliver with firmware updates but never did, choosing instead to keep cooking up new product lines to try to catch up with Apple.)
Haha! The sad irony of this little tale: I burned out and quit once we delivered the first milestone.;-)
Actually, you'd be appalled. This was a company where the CEO was fond of telling everyone that what made the company great was all the "creative energy." By which he meant the mind-boggling talents of certain, specific employees, namely the ones who went to art school and could mock up amazing UIs in Photoshop and brainstorm clever marketing gimmicks. "Programmers are a dime a dozen," he would say. "I could walk out into the street and hire ten programmers right now. But I wouldn't be able to get this amazing level of creative energy."
Oh yes, he would say this. To everyone. At company-wide meetings. He honestly thought he was being inspirational. Once the CTO called him on it in private after he gave one of these speeches. "Don't you think you were being a little, um, insensitive?" But the guy would not back down. He repeated, to the CTO's face, his belief that technical people were basically worthless drones and that he couldn't see why the CTO didn't understand that. That CTO quit the same day and the CEO never understood why, as far as I could tell.
My new boss knew less than me technically, but he knew and freely admitted that he knew less, as his job was to be a manager, not a technician. All my successes were mine, and all he took credit for was doing a wonderful job in hiring the right people - which is how it should be, IMHO.
Exactly. I was once hired to lead a team of developers, and it took me exactly one tour of the cubes downstairs to figure out that I would have a helluva learning curve to catch up to what these guys were working on. At first, I was perplexed. Finally, I asked one of them: "Why aren't you doing my job? You know as much about the guts of this project as anyone does."
His response? No freakin' way. Quite simply, this guy was a little bit introverted, didn't like speaking in front of people, didn't really have the social skills to distinguish himself in business meetings. Plus, what he really wanted to do was code, and if he was doing all the stuff I had to do, he'd never have a chance to do it.
DING! Well there you go, I thought. From then on I saw my primary responsiblities as being three: 1.) Advise the coders on what decisions made the most sense based on the overall agenda of the project and its team members and come to an understanding of how we planned to move forward; 2.) Go to meetings and speak to that position, gather requirements from the other team members and communicate them back to my staff; and 3.) Keep the guys out of those same meetings as much as humanly possible.
Don't forget the kids who walk in and out of the theater and look for one another by lighting their way with their glowing blue cell phones. (I'm also in San Francisco.)
The thing is, your movie tastes, what time of day you see the movie, and how soon after it was released all figure into this. The last movie I had totally ruined was "The Grudge" (not that I missed much there), which I saw at about 2:00pm on a Sunday afternoon. We complained, the manager refunded our money, and explained that she was really sorry -- that movie was just a problem, she said, and a lot of people had been complaining every time they screened it.
But now, when I suggested that if she knew kids were consistently ruining that one particular movie, maybe she should do something about it, she just kind of shrugged. As it turns out, the reason we were speaking to her in the first place is because during the show a friend of mine had put his hand on a kid's shoulder and told him to keep quiet. Sure enough, the kid cried rape, and we had a very annoyed parent waiting for us when we left the theater. This same friend was at the time working as a substitute teacher in an Oakland public school, and he said kids would routinely shoulder into him as they walked into class, mainly because they knew there wasn't a single thing he could do to discipline them. Do so much as look at a teenager crooked, and somewhere a parent is counting the money they think they'll make from the lawsuit. You think a movie theater is really going to hire people to police the place when all they're doing is opening themselves up for liability?
There's at least one solution, though. If you're sick of little kids ruining the movie, try going down to the Embarcadero Theater and seeing an independent film or the latest French import. They're making a lot of pretty good movies these days that don't have any space battles in them... and I guarantee you no 13-year-olds will ruin the screening for you. Grown-up movies, grown-up audience -- it's the theater business's best-kept secret!
Yes, but that's where anti-circumvention laws come in. It's pretty hard to prevent someone from killing another person, too, if they really want to do that -- but you can certainly send them to jail for it.
DRM is much larger then just some lame p2p copyright infringement idea.
DRM will effect the very way we retain our knowledge as a society. The "keyholders" will dictate what information is acceptable and what is not.
Yeah, but isn't that good? You seem to have a kind of inferiority complex that says whomever those "keyholders" might be, they most certainly won't be you. But why wouldn't you be one? Right now, intellectual property rights are the focus of DRM. But doesn't everybody have some kind of information that we want to share with everybody (but not the whole world)?
Time and time again, I hear about some company sharing my personal information with another company against my will. Right now, my credit card company seems to be free to do whatever it wants with my info so long as it sends me a notice of its new policy disguised as a piece of junk mail. If I were able to DRM-enable my own personal information, on the other hand, I could prevent them from doing that in an active, technology-driven way. They couldn't arbitrarily decide that their policy allows them to use my info in a way that I haven't approved, because the pre-defined, explicit digital policies would prevent it.
Everybody's so caught up with rabid, dogmatic hatred of DRM that talking about alternatives, even open source ones, is the geek social equivalent of attending a NAMBLA meeting. Whether you accept the concept of pervasive DRM for all kinds of data or not, if we accept that DRM is an eventuality, isn't it better for DRM technology development to proceed through a community-based action than to let a few corporations control it?
I would have said the same thing about Sin City two years ago, and I would have been dead wrong.
I'm glad to hear that you've gained wisdom as you've gotten older.
In all seriousness, the first Sin City comic was entertaining as a one-off, but since then it's all been the same silly pre-adolescent formula. I found the movie boring and a little embarrassing to watch, given how much it pandered to the cravings of 14-year-old boys to the omission of pretty much all else.
San Francisco is a city with its fair share of problems. There is lots of economic disparity here. As other people have mentioned, you will not walk a block downtown without getting panhandled. The neighborhood I live in is fairly residential and yet there are still a couple of homeless people that park themselves in front of the local restaurants every evening.
What's more, contrary to popular perception about the Bay Area's liberality, a lot of the larger-scale economic disparity divides along racial lines. Neighborhoods like Bayview and Hunter's Point are predominantly black and in many ways they are almost completely neglected. Those areas were once Naval shipyards and that has been the excuse to lump them under Federal jurisdiction, not that of the City of San Francisco, which means they get passed up for a lot of urban development programs. Not to mention that the shipyards' legacy is a ton of environmental poisons -- Bayview has the highest instance of breast cancer in the Bay Area, if not California.
The only way you are going to start to help the economic underclass of San Francisco get ahead is to get them out of areas like this and into productive roles in society, and the way to do that is to provide them with opportunities. Free Internet access can help to do that. For example, it could make distance learning possible for single mothers and the disabled. It can give the elderly another lifeline to the outside world. It can provide communications facilities for not-for-profit organizations that conduct economic development programs. Hell, even letting kids surf the Web for free is one more thing that will keep them from running down Mission Street in packs, brawling and trading gunshots with each other.
Is there such a thing as a free lunch? No. Should the residents of San Francisco support programs that sound like they could benefit the residents of San Francisco, whether or not they think the mayor is a publicity whore? Sure. Why not?
So you believe in an operational philosophoy that says, "Microsoft Windows costs $99. Linux costs nothing. You will save $99 if you go with Linux"?
Honestly, I don't know anyone who makes IT purchasing decisions and thinks TCO is some carved-in-stone, factual number the way you seem to be implying. But talking about TCO is a way of bringing to the discussion the idea that everything has hidden costs and recurring costs, and you can't plan a budget without thinking these through.
Yes, it's virtually impossible to predict exactly what an IT asset will have cost you five years down the road. It's also impossible to predict exactly how many gallons of gas you will have to buy to travel a given number of miles, but they post guesses about that on stickers in new car windows all the time.
About a year ago, my company's IT department rolled out LCD screens to every employee and I was ecstatic. Not so much because I had been clamoring for a new screen (I hadn't even thought about it), but because it was an upgrade that actually made some kind of logical sense.
Think about it. What I do all day is mostly send e-mails and work in Microsoft Office. A traditional 'upgrade' would be to drop a new, faster computer with a big hard drive on my desk. But not only does that take a lot of work on behalf of IT, not only is it incredibly disruptive to my workday, but it doesn't really benefit me at all. I can probably store my entire work folder and all its accumulated contents since I began working here on a single USB keychain drive. My CPU needs were met and exceeded some generations of hardware ago.
On the other hand, a new LCD screen that's crisp, clear, and easy to read -- as opposed to some legacy, piece of junk CRT that's been getting blurrier and dimmer for years -- is something tangible that I look at and notice day in and day out. You might think it doesn't result in an increase in productivity, but I disagree completely. In fact, if someone had given me the choice between the monitor and a new CPU, I would have taken the monitor in a second.
I realized Kozmo was terminally doomed as soon as they started offering their DVD service. I mean, it's one thing to offer a service that competes with your corner convenience store, but does a dot-com startup really want to make enemies out of the likes of Blockbuster Video, Hollywood Video, Wal-Mart, and Netflix all at once?
See the difference? GP is just saying a lot of bad words and swearing things about windows...
No, I don't see. Where is the swearing? Where are the bad words? "Scrotum" is a legitimate medical term, my friend, despite the fact that it means exactly what you think it means. The only one I see swearing, ironically, is you, in your next paragraph.
At the same time, I'm disappointed that they haven't tried to avocate the proper use of permissions as in "See? If you use the NT permissions to segergate your files then it wouldn't be a problem in the first place."
What's the use of assigning proper permissions if every user has Admin privileges anyway? But maybe that's part of what you're talking about...
It's pretty hard to market any kind of Unix operating system these days without having an open source strategy at the same time. Sun does it. IBM does it. It may seem a little gross and certainly a little hypocritical, but it's not exactly a surprise that SCO would try it, too.
Slashdot Mirror
InfoWorld's Tom Sullivan has a blog post up that questions some of the findings in the study. Among other things, he notes that Solaris support was found to cost less than that of either Windows or Linux, and that the same study found Windows to be cheaper when studied over a three-year period. Most importantly, though, he points out that only 20 companies were surveyed to come up with this study, and with those kind of odds you can pretty much make the numbers say anything you want.
Scientific theories can be used to make predictions about the natural world. Creationists like to believe that just because nobody has ever found the fossil remains of a monkey that walks upright and carries a pocket watch, evolution must be "unproven." The truth is that the vast preponderance of observations of living species support the theory of evolution.
Might we someday find an organism that cannot possibly be the result of any of the processes of evolution that have been observed to this day, indeed one that so thoroughly refutes the conclusions drawn from those observations that the entire theory of evolution is dashed to pieces? Sure, it's possible. When you find that organism, I advise you to run, not walk, to your nearest biologist. But bring a lunch.
Just don't try using it to drill through rocket casings of ancient, extra-terrestrial origin. You'll regret it.
In practice, the Creative Commons license seems to mainly appeal to people who want to spread their own creative works in some kind of "viral" way. The license is a public statement: Go ahead and take this, use it, don't worry about it, I won't sue you. (And there may be a couple of additional clauses, such as "I won't sue you unless you try to profit from it.")
But how do you define "profit"? If nobody would benefit in any way from the use of your work, then why would they want to use it in the first place? To my mind, benefit and profit are synonymous here. Maybe they don't sell your song. But maybe they post it on a Web site that accepts advertising. Are they profiting from your song then? It seems to me that if you want to set up all these profit/don't profit clauses, you need to write a little bit more fine print than your average Creative Commons license gives you.
Second, copyright law already gives the author of a work absolute and complete control of how it is used. I'll give you an example of how this works. I am the author and copyright holder of a comic strip called The Adventures of Action Item. Since I first drew it in 1999, this comic strip has had a fairly storied existence. It's been e-mailed around the known universe, printed up in magazines, used as a print sample, and it's constantly available on the Web page above. Every now and again someone writes me to ask if they can use it in one way or another, and my response varies.
The point of all this? Every case is different. But that's just the thing -- existing copyright law gives me that right. I can really do whatever I want with my own works, and I can grant that other people can use them for whatever
I am interested in Rockbox, but until it implements the features I want (and if you notice, recording is one of them) it's no good to me. Believe it or not, I use the recording feature for work.
What's more, there just wasn't all that many ways a manufacturer could distinguish itself. It was hard to compete on long battery life when every device was expected to use AAs and you had those pesky DC motors to run. Sony got another run at it with "Mega Bass" but even that feature wasn't innovative enough for Sony to corner the market. Their "Sports" models were popular for a while, with the shiny yellow impact-proof plastics. Truthfully Sony probably remained a leader, if not the leader, throughout the whole Walkman phenomenon. But at the end of the day, if you were going to go out and buy a portable tape player today you probably wouldn't care if it was made by Sony or not, and you'd still probably call it a Walkman.
But so now you have the MP3 player market and things aren't so simple. There are more formats to consider, more gizmos you can add on to take advantage of those little CPUs and big hard drives. I personally own an iRiver player, but I have to admit that Apple's iPod UI is way superior. Apple is pretty much kicking ass in this market, and it's doing it because it came up with a solid, innovative product to begin with and there hasn't been a single other feature anyone's come up with yet that can't be had from a stock iPod or a few add-on accessories.
It's possible that other manufacturers could put together product lines that have most of the features and appeal of the iPod and force the prices in the market ever downward. At that point, maybe the term "iPod" would effectively become generic, as well. But right now Apple has a helluva lead and I haven't seen anything that I'd expect to give the iPod a serious run for its money.
(Oh, the reasons I went with the iRiver were OGG support and the ability to record to either WAV or MP3, including optical line-in. But iRiver has disappointed me with some of its choices, particularly in the things it promised to deliver with firmware updates but never did, choosing instead to keep cooking up new product lines to try to catch up with Apple.)
Haha! The sad irony of this little tale: I burned out and quit once we delivered the first milestone. ;-)
Actually, you'd be appalled. This was a company where the CEO was fond of telling everyone that what made the company great was all the "creative energy." By which he meant the mind-boggling talents of certain, specific employees, namely the ones who went to art school and could mock up amazing UIs in Photoshop and brainstorm clever marketing gimmicks. "Programmers are a dime a dozen," he would say. "I could walk out into the street and hire ten programmers right now. But I wouldn't be able to get this amazing level of creative energy."
Oh yes, he would say this. To everyone. At company-wide meetings. He honestly thought he was being inspirational. Once the CTO called him on it in private after he gave one of these speeches. "Don't you think you were being a little, um, insensitive?" But the guy would not back down. He repeated, to the CTO's face, his belief that technical people were basically worthless drones and that he couldn't see why the CTO didn't understand that. That CTO quit the same day and the CEO never understood why, as far as I could tell.
Pfff, Bruce isn't even telling you the whole story. He had it easy. He was sleeping with the boss.
His response? No freakin' way. Quite simply, this guy was a little bit introverted, didn't like speaking in front of people, didn't really have the social skills to distinguish himself in business meetings. Plus, what he really wanted to do was code, and if he was doing all the stuff I had to do, he'd never have a chance to do it.
DING! Well there you go, I thought. From then on I saw my primary responsiblities as being three: 1.) Advise the coders on what decisions made the most sense based on the overall agenda of the project and its team members and come to an understanding of how we planned to move forward; 2.) Go to meetings and speak to that position, gather requirements from the other team members and communicate them back to my staff; and 3.) Keep the guys out of those same meetings as much as humanly possible.
"All right," I said. "Can do."
Don't forget the kids who walk in and out of the theater and look for one another by lighting their way with their glowing blue cell phones. (I'm also in San Francisco.)
... and I guarantee you no 13-year-olds will ruin the screening for you. Grown-up movies, grown-up audience -- it's the theater business's best-kept secret!
The thing is, your movie tastes, what time of day you see the movie, and how soon after it was released all figure into this. The last movie I had totally ruined was "The Grudge" (not that I missed much there), which I saw at about 2:00pm on a Sunday afternoon. We complained, the manager refunded our money, and explained that she was really sorry -- that movie was just a problem, she said, and a lot of people had been complaining every time they screened it.
But now, when I suggested that if she knew kids were consistently ruining that one particular movie, maybe she should do something about it, she just kind of shrugged. As it turns out, the reason we were speaking to her in the first place is because during the show a friend of mine had put his hand on a kid's shoulder and told him to keep quiet. Sure enough, the kid cried rape, and we had a very annoyed parent waiting for us when we left the theater. This same friend was at the time working as a substitute teacher in an Oakland public school, and he said kids would routinely shoulder into him as they walked into class, mainly because they knew there wasn't a single thing he could do to discipline them. Do so much as look at a teenager crooked, and somewhere a parent is counting the money they think they'll make from the lawsuit. You think a movie theater is really going to hire people to police the place when all they're doing is opening themselves up for liability?
There's at least one solution, though. If you're sick of little kids ruining the movie, try going down to the Embarcadero Theater and seeing an independent film or the latest French import. They're making a lot of pretty good movies these days that don't have any space battles in them
Yes, but that's where anti-circumvention laws come in. It's pretty hard to prevent someone from killing another person, too, if they really want to do that -- but you can certainly send them to jail for it.
Time and time again, I hear about some company sharing my personal information with another company against my will. Right now, my credit card company seems to be free to do whatever it wants with my info so long as it sends me a notice of its new policy disguised as a piece of junk mail. If I were able to DRM-enable my own personal information, on the other hand, I could prevent them from doing that in an active, technology-driven way. They couldn't arbitrarily decide that their policy allows them to use my info in a way that I haven't approved, because the pre-defined, explicit digital policies would prevent it.
Everybody's so caught up with rabid, dogmatic hatred of DRM that talking about alternatives, even open source ones, is the geek social equivalent of attending a NAMBLA meeting. Whether you accept the concept of pervasive DRM for all kinds of data or not, if we accept that DRM is an eventuality, isn't it better for DRM technology development to proceed through a community-based action than to let a few corporations control it?
In all seriousness, the first Sin City comic was entertaining as a one-off, but since then it's all been the same silly pre-adolescent formula. I found the movie boring and a little embarrassing to watch, given how much it pandered to the cravings of 14-year-old boys to the omission of pretty much all else.
San Francisco is a city with its fair share of problems. There is lots of economic disparity here. As other people have mentioned, you will not walk a block downtown without getting panhandled. The neighborhood I live in is fairly residential and yet there are still a couple of homeless people that park themselves in front of the local restaurants every evening.
What's more, contrary to popular perception about the Bay Area's liberality, a lot of the larger-scale economic disparity divides along racial lines. Neighborhoods like Bayview and Hunter's Point are predominantly black and in many ways they are almost completely neglected. Those areas were once Naval shipyards and that has been the excuse to lump them under Federal jurisdiction, not that of the City of San Francisco, which means they get passed up for a lot of urban development programs. Not to mention that the shipyards' legacy is a ton of environmental poisons -- Bayview has the highest instance of breast cancer in the Bay Area, if not California.
The only way you are going to start to help the economic underclass of San Francisco get ahead is to get them out of areas like this and into productive roles in society, and the way to do that is to provide them with opportunities. Free Internet access can help to do that. For example, it could make distance learning possible for single mothers and the disabled. It can give the elderly another lifeline to the outside world. It can provide communications facilities for not-for-profit organizations that conduct economic development programs. Hell, even letting kids surf the Web for free is one more thing that will keep them from running down Mission Street in packs, brawling and trading gunshots with each other.
Is there such a thing as a free lunch? No. Should the residents of San Francisco support programs that sound like they could benefit the residents of San Francisco, whether or not they think the mayor is a publicity whore? Sure. Why not?
Until I hear otherwise, I'm going to assume that this is the most elaborate Goatse troll ever.
So you believe in an operational philosophoy that says, "Microsoft Windows costs $99. Linux costs nothing. You will save $99 if you go with Linux"?
Honestly, I don't know anyone who makes IT purchasing decisions and thinks TCO is some carved-in-stone, factual number the way you seem to be implying. But talking about TCO is a way of bringing to the discussion the idea that everything has hidden costs and recurring costs, and you can't plan a budget without thinking these through.
Yes, it's virtually impossible to predict exactly what an IT asset will have cost you five years down the road. It's also impossible to predict exactly how many gallons of gas you will have to buy to travel a given number of miles, but they post guesses about that on stickers in new car windows all the time.
About a year ago, my company's IT department rolled out LCD screens to every employee and I was ecstatic. Not so much because I had been clamoring for a new screen (I hadn't even thought about it), but because it was an upgrade that actually made some kind of logical sense.
Think about it. What I do all day is mostly send e-mails and work in Microsoft Office. A traditional 'upgrade' would be to drop a new, faster computer with a big hard drive on my desk. But not only does that take a lot of work on behalf of IT, not only is it incredibly disruptive to my workday, but it doesn't really benefit me at all. I can probably store my entire work folder and all its accumulated contents since I began working here on a single USB keychain drive. My CPU needs were met and exceeded some generations of hardware ago.
On the other hand, a new LCD screen that's crisp, clear, and easy to read -- as opposed to some legacy, piece of junk CRT that's been getting blurrier and dimmer for years -- is something tangible that I look at and notice day in and day out. You might think it doesn't result in an increase in productivity, but I disagree completely. In fact, if someone had given me the choice between the monitor and a new CPU, I would have taken the monitor in a second.
I realized Kozmo was terminally doomed as soon as they started offering their DVD service. I mean, it's one thing to offer a service that competes with your corner convenience store, but does a dot-com startup really want to make enemies out of the likes of Blockbuster Video, Hollywood Video, Wal-Mart, and Netflix all at once?
Business tools? Let's don't forget that revolutionary new division of Nextel, Boost Mobile.
It's pretty hard to market any kind of Unix operating system these days without having an open source strategy at the same time. Sun does it. IBM does it. It may seem a little gross and certainly a little hypocritical, but it's not exactly a surprise that SCO would try it, too.