More fundamentally, there's bad blood between Adobe & Apple dating back to the late 80s:
Adobe is constantly looking over its shoulder at Microsoft and what Microsoft might do. All this is because of a blindside announcement by Microsoft at the Seybold Desktop Publishing Conference in San Francisco on September 20, 1989 when it announced TrueType fonts and made Apple (a traditional Adobe partner) it's strategic partner to promote the new font standard.
Adobe co-founder John Warnock was at the podium next and was in tears over this unforeseen betrayal since Adobe, until then, owned this part of the business. From that point on Adobe, like the character in the movie, has been running from pursuers, imagined or otherwise. Adobe isn't looking to buy or get bought by somebody who makes OSs. They are looking to build their software into a web platform that leaves the OS irrelevant. Sound familiar anyone? The real suitor is the other 800-lb. gorilla in the room. (Hint: rhymes with "Moogle.")
we all know that games generally speaking are the most intensive software ever run on a PC Not even close. Games, after all, run in realtime. There are many, many applications out there that have no problem pegging top-of-the-line hardware for hours on end: DV editing, raytracing, scientific computing. In fact, the whole reason I'm posting this is because I'm waiting for my PC to solve a big math problem:-)
It never ceases to amaze me how the pernicious nature of a government bailout is completely lost on the average American. Businesses have revenue and they have expenses. Revenue minus expenses equals profit. If profit is negative, then your business model is flawed. No amount of corporate handouts can change this basic, simple fact. It doesn't matter if United is $10 or $10 billion in debt--either they are making money or they aren't. If their basic model is sound, then they should have no problem lining up private financing to bridge the gap. If they aren't, and they have to rely on the government for help, then this should raise a red flag, because the entire private banking industry took a look and said no. Who do you trust more to make sound, rational economic decisions--a bunch of self-interested, economically motivated lenders, or, omfg, the United States Congress? I almost can't even type that without laughing aloud.
Yikes, ouch. But the subject of which console font to use has been the subject of muchdiscussion, with no real winner. I personally am glad to see someone with deep pockets throwing their hat into the arena. Consola looks really nice on my screen. Now, if only I could get my editor to do anti-aliasing. (Emacs-Xft, any frikkin year now.)
You were employee #2 at Amazon and you still have to work?:
I was intimately involved with many aspects of getting this new company started. I left, despite significant stock and other inducements to remain, because I am a technical person and had little interest in playing a role in the growth of the company. I was intimately involved with many aspects of getting this now-extremely successful company started. Wow. I know some hardcore nerds, but you, sir, top them all.
It's funny, I distinctly remember reading that post. I had no idea that it had become some sort of object lesson; I never knew that 10 years on people would be talking about "the ESR interview." But whenever I hear about the glitz, glamor and hubris that pervaded the tech industry in the late 1990s, it calls to mind is always the first two sentences of this interview.
I understand the drive to be green, but I think I'm going to wait a few years before jumping on this bandwagon! In a few thousands years, when anthropologists are piecing together the clues to the decline of our civilization, I really hope they come across quotes like this.
iPods, MySpace, Facebook, texting, gChat, Wiis, Game Boys, PlayStations, and, God, especially YouTube all have something in common: using them doesn't make you smarter. Let's face it, the solution is to put down the toys and pick up the books. There's just no way around it. Other countries (China, India) seem to understand this, which is why the admit list for most graduate programs now reads like a Badminton World Cup roster. I look at the study habits of the average American middle schooler and shudder. The future is not bright.
The reason they aren't sold in the US is because it would be competing with a billion other distractions that are available to kids here. And it would lose, and then would be called a failure. The point of this machine is to offer children something challenging and constructive to do with their time in places where there is literally no other form of intellectual stimulation. No books, no music, no newspapers, not even TV. Assuming they're not sewing soccer balls for Adidas, most kids in the third world do a lot of staring into space and goofing off with friends. This laptop is a way to harness all that youthful energy towards an enriching end. Not so much of a problem if you live in the first world, but a real waste of potential elsewhere.
I agree with you, but just playing devil's advocate: isn't downloading it off BitTorrent equivalent to paying $0? If anything, you're saving them the cost of bandwidth.
Do you think the factory workers, or even the management at Lenovo have anything to do with China's military decisions? Yes. China's military goals are dictated by the same thing as those of the US: money. Nearly every geopolitical or military event occurring in the world today can be traced directly back to economic motives. In the case of Myanmar, it's energy. Happy dictators in Burma means more natural gas for China means more electricity for Lenovo.
The US has a behavioral problem as well, do you think that world consumers should punish the people of the US economically because of it? Yes. And, before you ask, I am an American born and raised.
"China" is not some collection of a billion evil people shooting at monks - it's a country full of good people working to feed themselves and take care of their families. I certainly agree with that. And for the most part, Americans are too. But in both cases their leadership is rife with corruption and greed, and harbors a rather flagrant disregard for human rights and the suffering of others. The reason they are able to get away with this is because a growing number of people in both countries are wealthy and complacent. Certainly the masses you speak of bear no direct responsibility for the actions of their country. But we are all indirectly culpable through our inaction. Hitting the only place people seem to care about--the bank account--seems to be the only way to wake anyone up.
Sentences that include jail time send a clear message that violating intellectual property rights is a serious crime with significant consequences and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Sure it will! To the 20% of pirates who speak English, anyways.
You've gotta be kidding me. Somebody needs to venture outside the Bay Area a little. Ever go to the Central Valley in August? It's 100. A/C runs nonstop, nobody goes outside between about 10 and 4, feels like Houston. There's a reason we have power crises and rolling blackouts during heatwaves. Ontario is an hour's drive from Redondo Beach and it's the same if not worse. There are basically two Californias, geographically, politically, economically, and climatically: those of us fortunate enough to live on the coast, and everybody else.
And AC is plenty in the cards, since it's highly correlated with insolation, which itself directly governs how much solar power you can make. Works nice like that.
If someone makes money by illegally appropriating something you hold the copyright on, aren't you entitled to relief? That's certainly the case when it comes to movies and music. If what you are saying is really true, then it sounds like the authors of DVDx and CDex would be entitled to a largish share of a pool of probably millions of dollars in revenues. When that kind of money is involved, it's usually not very hard to find some lawyer willing to go on a pro rata fishing expedition. One or two successful judgements would put a stop to this silliness, IMO.
But most people don't want to live in the middle of the desert, which just happens to be is where areas of maximum insolation are. A 100x100 mile patch of solar panels plopped in the middle of the Mojave desert could power the entire United States. I agree that there is always a tradeoff, but the tradeoffs associated with this approach would appear to be much lower than meeting demand over the coming century with coal or nuclear.
I'm a unix guy all the way, and they told me I could not have access to the plane's media 'mainframe' or I would have had a look to see what was wrong. I am shocked--shocked--that in this day and age a bunch of non-technical people would be hesitant about letting you jack in to the "mainframe" of a fly-by-wire aircraft at 30,000 feet.
Sun Microsystems is going to make a killing over the next couple years. Say what you will about "red-shift" and all their other hokey marketese, they definitely got ahead of the curve when it comes to the idea that power, cooling and infrastructure costs and going to become limiting factors on business growth in the coming decades.
I agree with you. In my experience (litigation consulting; the people you will be calling in a year when you want spreadsheets made) a case this open-and-shut would have settled looong ago. The risk of losing at trial makes every other outcome absolutely pale by comparison, such that most cases are settled before it's even clear who wins on merit. The fact that this case has not settled tells me that this is, and has always been, a hail Mary on SCO's part: the lawsuit is the company, and the company is the lawsuit.
Wishing I could have got ahold of some SCOX shorts.:-)
I don't believe that's correct. King Karl has always stated that this would be his last job in politics, and the letter he e-mailed around over the weekend doesn't mention a thing about 2008. I think he'll become far more preoccupied over the coming years with not going down as a laughing stock in the history books. I also think he will fail.
Slashdot Mirror
More fundamentally, there's bad blood between Adobe & Apple dating back to the late 80s: Adobe is constantly looking over its shoulder at Microsoft and what Microsoft might do. All this is because of a blindside announcement by Microsoft at the Seybold Desktop Publishing Conference in San Francisco on September 20, 1989 when it announced TrueType fonts and made Apple (a traditional Adobe partner) it's strategic partner to promote the new font standard.
Adobe co-founder John Warnock was at the podium next and was in tears over this unforeseen betrayal since Adobe, until then, owned this part of the business. From that point on Adobe, like the character in the movie, has been running from pursuers, imagined or otherwise. Adobe isn't looking to buy or get bought by somebody who makes OSs. They are looking to build their software into a web platform that leaves the OS irrelevant. Sound familiar anyone? The real suitor is the other 800-lb. gorilla in the room. (Hint: rhymes with "Moogle.")
It never ceases to amaze me how the pernicious nature of a government bailout is completely lost on the average American. Businesses have revenue and they have expenses. Revenue minus expenses equals profit. If profit is negative, then your business model is flawed. No amount of corporate handouts can change this basic, simple fact. It doesn't matter if United is $10 or $10 billion in debt--either they are making money or they aren't. If their basic model is sound, then they should have no problem lining up private financing to bridge the gap. If they aren't, and they have to rely on the government for help, then this should raise a red flag, because the entire private banking industry took a look and said no. Who do you trust more to make sound, rational economic decisions--a bunch of self-interested, economically motivated lenders, or, omfg, the United States Congress? I almost can't even type that without laughing aloud.
Yikes, ouch. But the subject of which console font to use has been the subject of much discussion, with no real winner. I personally am glad to see someone with deep pockets throwing their hat into the arena. Consola looks really nice on my screen. Now, if only I could get my editor to do anti-aliasing. (Emacs-Xft, any frikkin year now.)
Too many buttons, indeed.
It'll be a cold day in hell before they sell that company to MS.
You forgot the word "consarned."
It's funny, I distinctly remember reading that post. I had no idea that it had become some sort of object lesson; I never knew that 10 years on people would be talking about "the ESR interview." But whenever I hear about the glitz, glamor and hubris that pervaded the tech industry in the late 1990s, it calls to mind is always the first two sentences of this interview.
iPods, MySpace, Facebook, texting, gChat, Wiis, Game Boys, PlayStations, and, God, especially YouTube all have something in common: using them doesn't make you smarter. Let's face it, the solution is to put down the toys and pick up the books. There's just no way around it. Other countries (China, India) seem to understand this, which is why the admit list for most graduate programs now reads like a Badminton World Cup roster. I look at the study habits of the average American middle schooler and shudder. The future is not bright.
Of course, I would expect no more informed a comment from the guy responsible for the single worst piece of software ever created.
The reason they aren't sold in the US is because it would be competing with a billion other distractions that are available to kids here. And it would lose, and then would be called a failure. The point of this machine is to offer children something challenging and constructive to do with their time in places where there is literally no other form of intellectual stimulation. No books, no music, no newspapers, not even TV. Assuming they're not sewing soccer balls for Adidas, most kids in the third world do a lot of staring into space and goofing off with friends. This laptop is a way to harness all that youthful energy towards an enriching end. Not so much of a problem if you live in the first world, but a real waste of potential elsewhere.
I agree with you, but just playing devil's advocate: isn't downloading it off BitTorrent equivalent to paying $0? If anything, you're saving them the cost of bandwidth.
You've gotta be kidding me. Somebody needs to venture outside the Bay Area a little. Ever go to the Central Valley in August? It's 100. A/C runs nonstop, nobody goes outside between about 10 and 4, feels like Houston. There's a reason we have power crises and rolling blackouts during heatwaves. Ontario is an hour's drive from Redondo Beach and it's the same if not worse. There are basically two Californias, geographically, politically, economically, and climatically: those of us fortunate enough to live on the coast, and everybody else.
And AC is plenty in the cards, since it's highly correlated with insolation, which itself directly governs how much solar power you can make. Works nice like that.
The research has been done. I suggest you read up on the Schwarzgerat. :-)
Which is funny, because Microsoft's (PC) hardware has always been top-notch. Compare with software.
If someone makes money by illegally appropriating something you hold the copyright on, aren't you entitled to relief? That's certainly the case when it comes to movies and music. If what you are saying is really true, then it sounds like the authors of DVDx and CDex would be entitled to a largish share of a pool of probably millions of dollars in revenues. When that kind of money is involved, it's usually not very hard to find some lawyer willing to go on a pro rata fishing expedition. One or two successful judgements would put a stop to this silliness, IMO.
But most people don't want to live in the middle of the desert, which just happens to be is where areas of maximum insolation are. A 100x100 mile patch of solar panels plopped in the middle of the Mojave desert could power the entire United States. I agree that there is always a tradeoff, but the tradeoffs associated with this approach would appear to be much lower than meeting demand over the coming century with coal or nuclear.
media 'mainframe' or I would have had a look to see what was wrong. I am shocked--shocked--that in this day and age a bunch of non-technical people would be hesitant about letting you jack in to the "mainframe" of a fly-by-wire aircraft at 30,000 feet.
Igniting your shoes is so 2002.
Linux is soooo Y2K. I run RedHat now.
Sun Microsystems is going to make a killing over the next couple years. Say what you will about "red-shift" and all their other hokey marketese, they definitely got ahead of the curve when it comes to the idea that power, cooling and infrastructure costs and going to become limiting factors on business growth in the coming decades.
So what we really need is an distributed, uncensorable, encrypted network that is really good at distributing small files.
If only such a thing existed.
I agree with you. In my experience (litigation consulting; the people you will be calling in a year when you want spreadsheets made) a case this open-and-shut would have settled looong ago. The risk of losing at trial makes every other outcome absolutely pale by comparison, such that most cases are settled before it's even clear who wins on merit. The fact that this case has not settled tells me that this is, and has always been, a hail Mary on SCO's part: the lawsuit is the company, and the company is the lawsuit.
:-)
Wishing I could have got ahold of some SCOX shorts.
I don't believe that's correct. King Karl has always stated that this would be his last job in politics, and the letter he e-mailed around over the weekend doesn't mention a thing about 2008. I think he'll become far more preoccupied over the coming years with not going down as a laughing stock in the history books. I also think he will fail.