But in order to make this 'marketing trick' viable, the software provider must ensure that it is not possible to replace their software with an alternative.
But that can never happen. So a certain piece of software only runs on a certain trusted computing platform. In "Sun's world" (hey, it's his quote) that's no problem -- you want to switch to a different software vendor, you just go ahead, and you'll probably get a different set of hardware to go along with it.
Nah, what I'm seeing in this thread is a lot of discussion about the grand implications of this idea on the software industry as a whole, when really you have to remember that this is only Sun we're talking about. Just because Jonathan Schwartz thinks something doesn't mean the rest of the industry is going to go along with it. Nevertheless, Schwartz is going to continue to put out the market message that makes the most sense for Sun.
Apple has long had a sort of internal argument over what kind of company it is. Is it a software company or is it a hardware company? Sun has had a similar thing going over the years, but unlike Apple, what we're seeing now is that one side has actually won over the other. Sun wants to be a software company now, and that's that.
And if you look at it, of course that's the right strategy for Sun. It's seeing the market share of its hardware business constantly eroded by the Intel platform, and it's consistently had to decrease the margins on its hardware to compete.
On the other hand, it's got this software technology, Java, that it wants to be the foundation of software development in the future. It's working its butt off to get Java away from being trapped on servers and into consumer devices, cell phones, handhelds, etc. It still very much wants Java to be everywhere. It's even planning a consumer branding effort behind Java as a platform.
So obviously Sun's message is going to be software. Because in Sun's ideal world, not only will it be selling its own software products directly, but by extension, everybody else's software will be a Sun product, because of Sun's control of Java.
Let me get this straight... a guy walks up to you and says "Gimme your fucking money." You say "fuck off"... and that escalates the situation? Riiight. So what do you recommend, saying, "No thanks chum, I can see you're on hard times but I have some use for the money meself, actually, so I think I'll just hang onto it if it's all the same to you..."
You are not going to find anything at the store other than what WalMart or BestBuy thinks will be a hit with teenagers.
I was going to post taking issue with what you call "the store" -- (what, you actually go to Best Buy to shop for music???) -- and mention, by way of counter-example, Aquarius Records in San Francisco. Imagine my surprise to find somebody else had already done it!
Seriously, Aquarius is a fine example of what a record store should be. They carry independent and even downright obscure stuff almost exclusively, and the staff knows whereof it speaks. There's something from every genre -- rock, pop, rap, electronica, metal, you name it. New discs hit the shelves with extensive descriptions written by the staff taped to the front of the cases, and more than once I've been inspired to buy something I'd never heard of based on their recommendation. Check the Web site for examples.
What's more, contrary to the impression the earlier poster may have given, Aquarius is no longer run by hippies! One of the owners, in fact, runs tUMULt, a record label full of various eclectic weirdness.
Aquarius apparently does mail order, so I encourage you all to check 'em out and support 'em.
Yes, yes, but Geoffrey Downes and Trevor Horn of the Buggles co-wrote the song with Bruce Woolley -- their writing credits are on the Camera Club album, too -- so you're kinda picking nits here.
Look at the various "geek issues"... it's all about doing whatever they want with no responsibility or cost. Downloading music for free. Downloading software for free.
What a whiner! Screw this guy. I say we plunder the world of its software until they come and get us!! If anybody reading this post right now is truly K-31337, check out my kr4d warez site right now. We've got appz, gamez, OS, everything j00 need. And just because this guy pissed me off, everything will be PHR33 for a limited time! Yeah that's right, I've disabled all the ratios. Leech all you want... for now! But if you expect the site to continue, you need to contribute!
P.S. We're currently looking for couriers, so if you've got mad bandwidth then apply within!
I'm sorry, but that's just not right. People need oxygen to breathe -- not carbon monoxide. The way carbon monoxide poisoning works is that CO forms carboxyhemoglobin in the blood, which inhibits absorbtion of oxygen. You might as well expose a bunch of people to inhalation of low doses of water and expect them to evolve gills. It just doesn't work that way. Or, it might -- the problem is that, as you say, you'd need a couple million years' worth of evolution, and in this experiment all the test subjects would be dead in hours.
This is why I used the carbon monoxide analogy -- RoundUp works in a similar way on plants, inhibiting their ability to form the enzyme EPSP synthase, which they need to grow. Since it's possible to grow a "RoundUp Ready" plant that will resist the effects of the chemical, you might theorize that such a trait could evolve naturally. My point, however, is that it hasn't happened yet, and RoundUp is so toxic to plants that it's extremely unlikely to happen. The trait that makes plants resistant to RoundUp was not arrived at through the normal evolutionary process. Scientist derived the "RoundUp Ready Gene" from material found in a cauliflower mosaic virus, a petunia, and a bacterium. For that type of modification to occur as a fluke in nature, though not impossible, is pretty darn unlikely.
Evolution happens by mutation. Often, these mutations are environmentally caused. Sometimes by some weird random genetic crossing. It doesn't matter. The point is that out of a field of (insert weed here), it's more than likely that at least one will survive. It might not be happy, but it'll survive.
That is reeeeeeeeeaaally unlikely, which is what makes Roundup such an effective herbicide. I mean, the stuff is really good at killing plants. The "resistant" plants were created through genetic engineering, and so far none of the weeds that plague farmers' fields have managed to mutate in such a way that Roundup is not effective on them.
The equivalent analogy to what you're proposing is this (and from my understanding of how Roundup works, it's a really good parallel): Put one hundred human beings in a room where 80% of the atmosphere is carbon monoxide, and have them sit there for an hour. By the time the hour is up, most of them will be dead. But some of them may survive. You have those survivors mate, and whatever trait allowed them to escape carbon monoxide poisoning will be passed on to their offspring. Voila! You have just bred people who can breathe carbon monoxide.
I haven't followed the case extensively, but as I understand it he was planting seeds that were saved from the previous year's harvest. Something farmers have been doing for, oh, say, 8000 years.
Contrary, perhaps, to popular belief, many farmers do not use seed from previous years' crops to plant this year. They buy seed from companies like Monsanto (even if they don't buy the GM version), because the seed is generally of higher quality than the seed they could harvest from their fields, meaning they'll get better yields (and hence, make more money). They might use their own seed only if they're particularly hard-hit financially one year.
In the case of GM crops, the genes are patented and you must have a license from Monsanto to grow plants with them. Technically, I believe that Monsanto's license -- its EULA, if you will -- specifies that you are not supposed to re-plant seed. But even if you do, you owe the same licensing fees as if you'd bought the seed "direct from the factory." So it really doesn't behoove you to use seed you've harvested yourself, if the quality is going to be lower for the same price.
In my own experience of friends and people I know, speed is pretty much the Devil when it comes to drugs, but mostly for people who had mental problems to begin with. I've known at least one person who had a history of mental illness in his family, and so should probably have known better than to start fucking around with crystal meth, but he did, and subsequently flipped right off the deep end and never came back. The speed wasn't the cause of his mental problems, but if there was a crack in his brain before, the drugs chiselled it wide open.
The movie "Spider," directed by David ("Videodrome," "Scanners," "Naked Lunch") Cronenberg is, by most accounts, a much more accurate -- admittedly harrowing, but sadly realistic -- portrayal of schizophrenia.
Lucas feels that the Star Wars saga will be his legacy and he doesn't want anyone messing with it. Spielberg practially begged Lucas for a chance to direct a Star Wars film and Lucas said no.
He must be talking about Episodes I-III then (and the original) -- because he didn't direct the others.
ESB best sequel ever made? Bleh. Even as a kid, I was left vaguely weirded out by how different it was from the original. The characters didn't act the same, the costumes and overall look of it was different, the scope of the action was much, much smaller (come on, in the first one they saved the galaxy!). As adults we can appreciate it for its atmosphere, but it hardly lives up to the original. Worst of all, it's got no plot! Plot == beginning, middle, end. ESB starts with characters from the first move in a completely unfamiliar setting with no explanation, and ends on a cliff-hanger. Some stuff happens in between.
...I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
While this not free software in the sense of "free beer" it was free software in the sense of "free speech" since all the source code was available for only slightly more than the manufacturing cost.
How does selling me low-priced goods give me the right of free speech?
All I/O operations are handled by the "BSD Subsystem"
If that's true, then why do you see so many Readme notices explaining that to install certain software, you need to be running Mac OS X 10.x with the BSD subsystem installed? In fact, I never understood that qualification -- I thought it was installed by default?
(I guess the easy answer is that you need to install BSD... to run all your zombie processes, har har har!)
Jango Fett just struck me as some vaguely trailer-trash single dad who wanted to make a few bucks to raise his kid. Saying he was supposed to be "evil" smacks of George Lucas's bizarre moral philosophy, e.g. Anakin is "evil" because he's afraid, or because things piss him off -- or because he misses his mother, for Pete's sake. None of this stuff is "evil" to me, it's just human nature: some good, some bad.
Wow, you make your own coffee at home? How do you harvest the beans, let alone roast them properly? And what's more, why don't you just walk down to Starbuck's and buy a bag of the stuff to bring home? You can even have them pre-grind it for you.
Gene splicing a frog gene into a potato cannot be compared to the old ways of selective cross-breeding.
Yes, the old "Frankenfoods" argument. And yet, the vast majority of GM crops were produced not by careful, Photoshop-style cutting and pasting of genes but by either A.) irradiation, or B.) chemicals designed to speed up the process of cellular division and mutation. In other words, scientists pretty much accelerate the ordinary processes of nature, and any beneficial mutations come up are flukes -- but ones that could probably have occurred anyway.
Does anyone not know the history of the videogame industry on Slashdot? Try 1976. That was the year Warner Communications (think Warner Bros. Pictures) purchased Atari, Inc. By the early 1982, Atari accounted for 3/4's of Warner's profits. So in your analysis, you are 22 years off on the video game industry's importance to Hollywood.
That's right -- and by 1983 they were in the toilet, racking up $500M in losses and burying unsold cartridges in landfills. Interesting how those cartridges were movie tie-ins. Hmmmmm....
At what point are people -- rational people-- going to get together and form a coalition to bring about a bloodless coup, lift the Democrats and Republicans from office, wipe clean the slate of stupid laws and ridiculous political/legal traditions, form a new American government starting from the foundation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and finally make it so that bullshit like this is the exception rather than the norm?
Oh, please. Like this has anything to do with the government. As if this case is going to go anywhere at all if they do decide to sue. There isn't even any intellectual property involved!
You can judge a government by its ability to deflect stupid bullshit like this. Let's wait until they get awarded ten billion dollars before we start slagging the U.S. government, mkay?
And BTW, it's not as if it's the government that makes people do things like this, either. A whole lot of people out there are greedy, shiftless bastards who will screw their best friend for a buck. If you don't think your friends are exactly the same way, wait until you win the lottery. If these people do decide to press a lawsuit and Google decides to settle it, that's just "cost of doing business" -- based not on the fact that the laws are unfair, but that Google knows enough to expect people to behave like babies.
Commercial distros, last time I checked, are still a hell of alot cheaper than Windows. Employees of Commercial Linux Distros still need to be paid.
Well, part of Microsoft's Windows Server strategy roadshow these days is the idea that:
"Linux" is not a product companies buy; it's a technology that other vendors use to build solutions (e.g. Red Hat).
When companies talk about using open source, they're really using a commercially-packaged solution offered by one of these vendors. Very few, if any, Fortune 500 companies deploy Linux or other open source software through the "completely free" (as in beer) route.
So when you talk about Linux vs. Windows, you now have a real baseline to compare total costs and "value" obtained from each.
Microsoft's argument (and this is straight from the mouth of Bob Muglia, MS's VP in charge of Windows Server) is that when you break it down in this way, you start to find that the Linux/OSS solution really doesn't cost significantly less than a Windows solution.
Right? Wrong? It's hard for me to say, personally. Companies like Red Hat definitely seem to be cooking up high-price-tag subscription schemes that are comparable to what you could get any other OS for.
Similarly, Sun's argument these days is that it will sell you Linux (licensed from SuSE or Red Hat, or bundled with the Java Desktop) but if you ask them, Solaris is the better deal. They claim that Solaris is the result of years of more sophisticated engineering, with more enterprise-class features, and can be had for significantly lower TCO than Linux. Seriously. They say Solaris is cheaper, in the long run, and that's not a 20-years type long run, either.
Sure, it could all be FUD, but the D in that acronym is definitely present already. Red Hat hasn't yet figured out what the market will support in terms of Linux support licensing. I bet they could charge less than Microsoft does, but so far lower cost doesn't really seem to be the strongest link in its value proposition.
Right on the money. Totally classic drug scenario. Same thing happened to a friend of mine -- let an old friend, whom he knew was fucked up on drugs, stay at his place for a while. When my friend finally decided to tell the guy he had to go, the next day he found a bunch of his stuff missing, and the hard drive in his computer swapped out with another hard drive. I guess the junkie figured he could sell it with all the "valuable software" that was installed on it. Funny thing, he left a ton of CDs and DVDs lying around the place. Who can explain it? Brain-addled, plain and simple.
The robots would take on the painstaking, time consuming, and sometimes dangerous, task of collecting water samples which is currently being done by carbon based lifeforms.
I think we should all hail this as an amazing achievement. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the cost to train your average water-quality inspector runs in excess of $40,000. When you consider that your average water inspector might taste no more than 4-5 samples before falling over dead from intestinal parasites, terrorism-related poisoning or environmental toxins, that's a heavy price tag. Don't get me wrong -- there's still no better way to test the quality of local water than to feed it to a human being and see what happens. But this is one job that I, for one, have no qualms turning over to robotic replacements. I'm just afraid that this plan is on a collision course with the local water-quality-tester unions, who I'm sure will have something to say about these mechanical "temp workers."
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Nah, what I'm seeing in this thread is a lot of discussion about the grand implications of this idea on the software industry as a whole, when really you have to remember that this is only Sun we're talking about. Just because Jonathan Schwartz thinks something doesn't mean the rest of the industry is going to go along with it. Nevertheless, Schwartz is going to continue to put out the market message that makes the most sense for Sun.
Apple has long had a sort of internal argument over what kind of company it is. Is it a software company or is it a hardware company? Sun has had a similar thing going over the years, but unlike Apple, what we're seeing now is that one side has actually won over the other. Sun wants to be a software company now, and that's that.
And if you look at it, of course that's the right strategy for Sun. It's seeing the market share of its hardware business constantly eroded by the Intel platform, and it's consistently had to decrease the margins on its hardware to compete.
On the other hand, it's got this software technology, Java, that it wants to be the foundation of software development in the future. It's working its butt off to get Java away from being trapped on servers and into consumer devices, cell phones, handhelds, etc. It still very much wants Java to be everywhere. It's even planning a consumer branding effort behind Java as a platform.
So obviously Sun's message is going to be software. Because in Sun's ideal world, not only will it be selling its own software products directly, but by extension, everybody else's software will be a Sun product, because of Sun's control of Java.
Let me get this straight ... a guy walks up to you and says "Gimme your fucking money." You say "fuck off" ... and that escalates the situation? Riiight. So what do you recommend, saying, "No thanks chum, I can see you're on hard times but I have some use for the money meself, actually, so I think I'll just hang onto it if it's all the same to you..."
Seriously, Aquarius is a fine example of what a record store should be. They carry independent and even downright obscure stuff almost exclusively, and the staff knows whereof it speaks. There's something from every genre -- rock, pop, rap, electronica, metal, you name it. New discs hit the shelves with extensive descriptions written by the staff taped to the front of the cases, and more than once I've been inspired to buy something I'd never heard of based on their recommendation. Check the Web site for examples.
What's more, contrary to the impression the earlier poster may have given, Aquarius is no longer run by hippies! One of the owners, in fact, runs tUMULt, a record label full of various eclectic weirdness.
Aquarius apparently does mail order, so I encourage you all to check 'em out and support 'em.
Yes, yes, but Geoffrey Downes and Trevor Horn of the Buggles co-wrote the song with Bruce Woolley -- their writing credits are on the Camera Club album, too -- so you're kinda picking nits here.
P.S. We're currently looking for couriers, so if you've got mad bandwidth then apply within!
Not in 2006, it won't.
I'm sorry, but that's just not right. People need oxygen to breathe -- not carbon monoxide. The way carbon monoxide poisoning works is that CO forms carboxyhemoglobin in the blood, which inhibits absorbtion of oxygen. You might as well expose a bunch of people to inhalation of low doses of water and expect them to evolve gills. It just doesn't work that way. Or, it might -- the problem is that, as you say, you'd need a couple million years' worth of evolution, and in this experiment all the test subjects would be dead in hours.
This is why I used the carbon monoxide analogy -- RoundUp works in a similar way on plants, inhibiting their ability to form the enzyme EPSP synthase, which they need to grow. Since it's possible to grow a "RoundUp Ready" plant that will resist the effects of the chemical, you might theorize that such a trait could evolve naturally. My point, however, is that it hasn't happened yet, and RoundUp is so toxic to plants that it's extremely unlikely to happen. The trait that makes plants resistant to RoundUp was not arrived at through the normal evolutionary process. Scientist derived the "RoundUp Ready Gene" from material found in a cauliflower mosaic virus, a petunia, and a bacterium. For that type of modification to occur as a fluke in nature, though not impossible, is pretty darn unlikely.
The equivalent analogy to what you're proposing is this (and from my understanding of how Roundup works, it's a really good parallel): Put one hundred human beings in a room where 80% of the atmosphere is carbon monoxide, and have them sit there for an hour. By the time the hour is up, most of them will be dead. But some of them may survive. You have those survivors mate, and whatever trait allowed them to escape carbon monoxide poisoning will be passed on to their offspring. Voila! You have just bred people who can breathe carbon monoxide.
How likely does it sound to you?
In the case of GM crops, the genes are patented and you must have a license from Monsanto to grow plants with them. Technically, I believe that Monsanto's license -- its EULA, if you will -- specifies that you are not supposed to re-plant seed. But even if you do, you owe the same licensing fees as if you'd bought the seed "direct from the factory." So it really doesn't behoove you to use seed you've harvested yourself, if the quality is going to be lower for the same price.
In my own experience of friends and people I know, speed is pretty much the Devil when it comes to drugs, but mostly for people who had mental problems to begin with. I've known at least one person who had a history of mental illness in his family, and so should probably have known better than to start fucking around with crystal meth, but he did, and subsequently flipped right off the deep end and never came back. The speed wasn't the cause of his mental problems, but if there was a crack in his brain before, the drugs chiselled it wide open.
The movie "Spider," directed by David ("Videodrome," "Scanners," "Naked Lunch") Cronenberg is, by most accounts, a much more accurate -- admittedly harrowing, but sadly realistic -- portrayal of schizophrenia.
ESB best sequel ever made? Bleh. Even as a kid, I was left vaguely weirded out by how different it was from the original. The characters didn't act the same, the costumes and overall look of it was different, the scope of the action was much, much smaller (come on, in the first one they saved the galaxy!). As adults we can appreciate it for its atmosphere, but it hardly lives up to the original. Worst of all, it's got no plot! Plot == beginning, middle, end. ESB starts with characters from the first move in a completely unfamiliar setting with no explanation, and ends on a cliff-hanger. Some stuff happens in between.
(I guess the easy answer is that you need to install BSD ... to run all your zombie processes, har har har!)
Jango Fett just struck me as some vaguely trailer-trash single dad who wanted to make a few bucks to raise his kid. Saying he was supposed to be "evil" smacks of George Lucas's bizarre moral philosophy, e.g. Anakin is "evil" because he's afraid, or because things piss him off -- or because he misses his mother, for Pete's sake. None of this stuff is "evil" to me, it's just human nature: some good, some bad.
Wow, you make your own coffee at home? How do you harvest the beans, let alone roast them properly? And what's more, why don't you just walk down to Starbuck's and buy a bag of the stuff to bring home? You can even have them pre-grind it for you.
You can judge a government by its ability to deflect stupid bullshit like this. Let's wait until they get awarded ten billion dollars before we start slagging the U.S. government, mkay?
And BTW, it's not as if it's the government that makes people do things like this, either. A whole lot of people out there are greedy, shiftless bastards who will screw their best friend for a buck. If you don't think your friends are exactly the same way, wait until you win the lottery. If these people do decide to press a lawsuit and Google decides to settle it, that's just "cost of doing business" -- based not on the fact that the laws are unfair, but that Google knows enough to expect people to behave like babies.
- "Linux" is not a product companies buy; it's a technology that other vendors use to build solutions (e.g. Red Hat).
- When companies talk about using open source, they're really using a commercially-packaged solution offered by one of these vendors. Very few, if any, Fortune 500 companies deploy Linux or other open source software through the "completely free" (as in beer) route.
- So when you talk about Linux vs. Windows, you now have a real baseline to compare total costs and "value" obtained from each.
Microsoft's argument (and this is straight from the mouth of Bob Muglia, MS's VP in charge of Windows Server) is that when you break it down in this way, you start to find that the Linux/OSS solution really doesn't cost significantly less than a Windows solution.Right? Wrong? It's hard for me to say, personally. Companies like Red Hat definitely seem to be cooking up high-price-tag subscription schemes that are comparable to what you could get any other OS for.
Similarly, Sun's argument these days is that it will sell you Linux (licensed from SuSE or Red Hat, or bundled with the Java Desktop) but if you ask them, Solaris is the better deal. They claim that Solaris is the result of years of more sophisticated engineering, with more enterprise-class features, and can be had for significantly lower TCO than Linux. Seriously. They say Solaris is cheaper, in the long run, and that's not a 20-years type long run, either.
Sure, it could all be FUD, but the D in that acronym is definitely present already. Red Hat hasn't yet figured out what the market will support in terms of Linux support licensing. I bet they could charge less than Microsoft does, but so far lower cost doesn't really seem to be the strongest link in its value proposition.
Right on the money. Totally classic drug scenario. Same thing happened to a friend of mine -- let an old friend, whom he knew was fucked up on drugs, stay at his place for a while. When my friend finally decided to tell the guy he had to go, the next day he found a bunch of his stuff missing, and the hard drive in his computer swapped out with another hard drive. I guess the junkie figured he could sell it with all the "valuable software" that was installed on it. Funny thing, he left a ton of CDs and DVDs lying around the place. Who can explain it? Brain-addled, plain and simple.