The problem just is that if you look long enough you will find someone with a pet cause against more or less ANY product/service etc. on the market. At some point it just starts getting really pointless and a waste of time and energy.
Admittedly there are a lot of issues regarding Sony, but if I take a look for what sometimes really esoteric issues people are called sheep here on Slashdot I can only congratulate the non-sheep for the infinite amount of time they seem to have to pursue sometimes really bizarre issues. Not everything you think is a matter of vital importance is of even mild interest for most other people. It's probably good of you to care, but don't be pissed off if you are the only one.
But keep calling us sheep, at least we have it wooly and warm. And I'll cheerfully welcome you in our herd once my pet issue comes up that you give a damn about.;-)
Basically it is a household tariff (still stupid enough). Even if you have a whole wall of TV sets and dozends of computers you just have to pay once. I think they also have changed it in the meantime that the same applies for each site of a company (hooray for lobyyism in that case). However, if you are self-employed you have to pay once for your private stuff, once for business use and once for the radio in your business-used car. Now how stupid is that ?
reiserfs has been the default filesystem on SuSE for years, so it was not a Novell decision. They just kept what had been working for the original SuSE.
That being said, next time I have to sit in a courtroom, i will save my money and not hire a lawyer. i will just post my case on slashdot and let this wealth of knowledge come up with my defense....
The result: "What ? You got 25 years for a parking violation ?"
So we can conclude that Apple's second best effort beats out M$'s best effort?
So MS bought out Sony and is now making Vaios ? OMG ! In case you didn't realize it yet: Intel Macs are nothing than good looking (and fast) PCs with a funny BIOS (which is not a BIOS but Intels EFI standard), and Bootcamp is not more than a boot loader bundled with a custom installer and a set of hardware drivers for XP. So what you are saying doesn't really make sense at all.
This just shows that Apple is making really nice PCs now.
The problem is that the original asker is trying to understand the process when halfway through without apparently having spent too much thought on the basics of what he or she is doing. "I am trying to travel from London to New York. Now sitting here at a crossroads in Hongkong I would like to know if I should have turned left in Dover or right. Do you think I should aquire a map ?"
Why should I buy the patent holder's product for lots of money if I can download some OSS thingy that does the same for free ? So yes, I'm afraid the question is slightly stupid.:-)
Yeah, I'm sure AMD is burning to license Intel's GPU. It's not that they recenty had purchased one of the two leading graphics chips companies. And Via will also be completely starved for integrated chipset IP. That for stupid replies. Some people just are not happy if they cannot whine against Intel. They could open all their IP, start giving out chips for free and donate all their money to the red cross and you still would not be happy.
We bought several Brother HL1450/1470s for my company back in '03 (this models have now long been phased out, but I assume the mechanics of the newer models isn't much different) because of their impressive feature set and comparatively low prices. They were marketed as workgroup printers by Brother, but were only slightly over your maximum price point.
Initially we were quite satisfied, but after a little over a year they started to break down one after another: Creaking noises from the paper feed mechanics, constant paper jams, toner leaking everywhere causing trouble with print quality. One of them died completely on us after 2,5 years. In the meantime we have thrown all of them out and have replaced them by HP Laserjets. Hope they last longer (back in the day they were almost indestructable, but who knows today...). We used them commercially to print invoices and stuff, but nothing a workgroup printer shouldn't be able to handle.
We also have a Brother MFC-9030 fax/scanner/printer which is still going strong after 3,5+ years, but which we hardly use as a printer. So if you have only low printing volume Brother can indeed be attractive for you, but if you want to print higher volumes just stay away.
Really great idea NOT. This would create more or less a monopoly for high-end graphic chips for NVidia. Who else is there ? Intel with their cheap chipset graphics ? Matrox ? A handful of far eastern companies that produce cheap and sucky low-end graphics products noone uses ? Nvidia buying ATI would be the worse thing that could happen for the consumer, even worse than the Intel quasi-monopoly of the dark years before the Athlon. As the history of Intel-vs.-AMD cleary shows competition not only is good for the consumer but in the end also for the companies which are required to innovate and improve their products and to keep themselves strong and vital.
You have to be aware that the inside of the human abdomen is a very crowded and puzzling place. Lots of nooks and crannies small items can slip into, also the whole thing is constantly on the move due to the contractions of the digestive organs, beathing and certainly due to the doctors operating and mocing things around. Add a certain amount of blood and bloody water (you flush surfaces both to keep them from drying out (bad for the tissue) and to keep a clear field of vision. Add several hours of operating time for large operations and there is a clear risk to lose things inside the patient. A professional operating team will take several security measures to keep this from happening (see my other post in this thread), but there still is a considerable riskm even without haste and neglect (yes, I am a MD by training).
Which is exacly how it is (or should be) done, and yes, I am a MD by training. The OR nurse assisting the docs during the operation opens a certain amount of surgical instrument etc. kits with a clearly defined number of items in it. It is one of her responsibilities to keep track of the number of instruments she gives to the doctors as well as the number she is getting back and ones that get "lost" outside the patient (dropped to the floor, given to a third party outside the operating team, e.g. to pass tissue samples or excised organs, tumor parts etc.). The same applies for gauze pads, surgical cloth etc. Gauze particles and cloth also have either metallic tags or markings that show up on X-rays on them to be able to locate them either after the fact or, in difficult cases where you know something is missing but can't find it, before clothing the patient using a portable c-beam x-ray machine.
Nevertheless both the nurses and the docs are only human and work often inhuman working hours under extreme pressure, so in spite of all those measure it still can happen that surgical items remain inside the patient.
Small nitpick: They did indeed create a Modula-2 compiler - I think even called Turbo Modula-2 - at the end of the 80s for CP/M. I purchased it back then for my C-128 (those where the days *looks at current laptop* - not). However, CP/M then already had begun its way into obsolecence, and Borland's German division needed almost 6 months to deliver the damn thing. When I finally got it it was more or less unusable, as the IDE froze or something like that when you tried to compile something. In that respect it's better to think they never had released this abomination.
I think that besides the overload with woodworks another big design problem was that the king insisted on the ship carrying three rows of cannons. Two apparently was the standard back then, but the king wanted the most impressive, most bad-ass ship in the entire Baltic Sea, so it had to be three. "What do you mean "Nobody did this before" ? So you do now !" "Well, uhmm... ok Sire !". So they added the third row of cannons, and that apparently as an afterthought and not as part of the original design. Sea-worthyness tests (they let a number of soldiers run from one side of the ship to the other in a coordinated fashion to test the stability of the ship) already showed the ship to be fatally instable and top-heavy, but the king urged for the ship to get finished and noone wanted to tell him that it was not the least seaworthy. Well, he soon got to know anyway.
But at least it got Stockholm a pretty impressing museum.
Yes, and they even had back then the culture "Don't blow the whistle to management that the project is doomed".
I also visited the museum (quite impressive indeed) and there they told that they used to test ships for their stability by having a number of soldiers run from one side of the deck to the other in a coordinated fashion to see if the ship would start to sway. And sway it did, that strong that they had to stop the test to keep it from capsizing. But who wanted to tell the king that his wondership, the one he meant to dominate the Baltic Sea, was not even seaworthy for a pond ?
So everyone kept silent, the ship went under having hardly cleared the harbour, and the best: Afterwards noone could be hold responsible: The master shipbuilder having designed the ship had died before the launch, his successor only inherited the design at a very late stage and couldn't make any substantial changes, and the King, well... you don't hold the King accountable !:-)
I'm afraid I have to disagree with my fellow bear, at least in that respect that you are mixing together two only partially related issues: The one of names and the one of marketing.
You are completely right that commercial products have the big advantage of having often very expensive marketing campaigns on their side. Especially if they are used to sell potential customers re-branding or products with often stupid names. If you hear, read and see often enough that burpalooganda is the new and trendy chocolate bar the young urban professional just HAS to try, someday you just will give that stupid thing a try if only to see what all that bruhaha is about.
Open source projects don't have this, at least most of the time. But that, at least IMO is the key point. Not the name of a product. What is in a product's name today ? A lot, if you believe the marketeers, more or less nothing, if you believe potential customers. This gets even worse in non-English speaking countries. I read about several studies done by respected research institutes that clearly showed that more than half of German customers do not even understand slogans, even if they are for very intensively propaged products with often extremely prominent names coming from national mega-brands. It has become more and more fashionable in Germany to use English slogans or even English names for outlets; the respective companies spend literally millions and millions in marketing, but people are neither able to tell you what the slogan is nor what it means nor what the product's correct name is, BUT THEY KNOW THE BLOODY PRODUCT and buy it because it seems desirable. THAT is marketing, and that is what open source does not have.
But the names themselves are only smoke and mirrors. Gimp, Linux, whatever, wouldn't be more popular if they were named Super Draw XL 2007 and Power Operating System/1 as long as they are not marketed properly. Maybe 20 years back people would have laughted at many Open Source product names, today everything has a funny/stupid/totally non-descript and synthetical name.
If it is just in the names, neither Apple nor Microsoft ever would have become household names, coming from their very humble roots as small startups with products that only mattered to a small group of enthusiasts, most of them with odd names.
Marketing is the key. Have a great marketing campaign (and a product people think they need, see tamagochi, both stupid name and stupid product but big commercial success) and noone bothers about the stupid names you came up with, at least not in any financially meaningful way. Have the greatest product of all times with a nice and meaningful name, and without marketing it will founder. (and no, I am neither a marketer nor I am related, married or otherwise affiliated with one).
Nono, not THAT stupid name ! I looked it up in the meantime as it kept bothering me: Epcos (used to be Unternehmensbereich Bauelemente (electronic components division, not semiconductors, those became Infineon) ! (another blatantly stupid artificial name, maybe the board flew to Disneyland before coming up with the name).
Regarding Siemens appliances: "Do you want something nice or can it be from Siemens ?";-)
Oh come on. In almost EVERY article about something open source someone complains about the naming thing. Good and well, there are some pretty dumb, ugly oder unpronouncable names, but OTOH there are also loads of pretty crappy commercial names, too:
- My life insurance is at Janitos (will they clean my house if I die ? Ok, I am in Germany, but still it sounds more like some room cleaning service like a large insurer.)
- Oh look, that guy is driving a Toyota Aventis and I just bought that new great drug from Avensis, or was it the other way round ?
- The great Borland/Inprise disaster.
- Qimonda, oh yes ! The Hunchback of Notre Dame's wife ! No ? Oh, it's the recent Infineon spinoff, which uses to be Siemens (on of THE German brand names), like those other guys that also used to be Siemens and whose stupid new artificial name I forgot, even if my dad worked for them for 30 years before they became [stupid artificial name]. Something with e, I think.
[To be continued ad nauseam]
So stupid naming is no privilege of Open Source projects, and still those other guys earn shitloads of money.
Sure the alleged 747 is too small, because it is not a 747 but a 757. I mean - you guys make up elaborate conspiracy theories and do not even bother to check the type of the bloody aircraft. Come on, you can do better than that !
By the same logic you shouldn't recommend software without spyware either, because some might be bundled in a later version. Oh, and be very careful about this so-called Open Source Software. There have been instances where criminally inclined authors decided to close later versions.
The camera thing really works. Last year some German TV show tested this on a German racing track to find out if it was just an Urban Myth or not (this is vital for us, as for Germans driving like hell in general and as fast as your car can go on the Autobahn is as much of a God given right as your guns for you Americans). It really works. You just have to go really really fast. IIRC it worked from 250 km/h onwards (no warranty) or something like that. This is really not too irrelevant if you have a larger/faster car typical for Germany: E.g. our measly company BMW 120d (the smallest line currently available but not a sports car) tops out at 235 km/h (tested by me certainly on the Autobahn). Even at that speed you still can get in trouble from guys in larger BMWs, Porsches or Benzes that want you out of their way. And at night if there is almost no traffic.... welllll...... *big smile*
Slashdot Mirror
Well, to that I can fully agree ! :-)
The problem just is that if you look long enough you will find someone with a pet cause against more or less ANY product/service etc. on the market. At some point it just starts getting really pointless and a waste of time and energy.
;-)
Admittedly there are a lot of issues regarding Sony, but if I take a look for what sometimes really esoteric issues people are called sheep here on Slashdot I can only congratulate the non-sheep for the infinite amount of time they seem to have to pursue sometimes really bizarre issues. Not everything you think is a matter of vital importance is of even mild interest for most other people. It's probably good of you to care, but don't be pissed off if you are the only one.
But keep calling us sheep, at least we have it wooly and warm. And I'll cheerfully welcome you in our herd once my pet issue comes up that you give a damn about.
Basically it is a household tariff (still stupid enough). Even if you have a whole wall of TV sets and dozends of computers you just have to pay once. I think they also have changed it in the meantime that the same applies for each site of a company (hooray for lobyyism in that case). However, if you are self-employed you have to pay once for your private stuff, once for business use and once for the radio in your business-used car. Now how stupid is that ?
reiserfs has been the default filesystem on SuSE for years, so it was not a Novell decision. They just kept what had been working for the original SuSE.
That being said, next time I have to sit in a courtroom, i will save my money and not hire a lawyer. i will just post my case on slashdot and let this wealth of knowledge come up with my defense....
The result: "What ? You got 25 years for a parking violation ?"
Yeah, but image the length of the queue !
So we can conclude that Apple's second best effort beats out M$'s best effort?
So MS bought out Sony and is now making Vaios ? OMG ! In case you didn't realize it yet: Intel Macs are nothing than good looking (and fast) PCs with a funny BIOS (which is not a BIOS but Intels EFI standard), and Bootcamp is not more than a boot loader bundled with a custom installer and a set of hardware drivers for XP. So what you are saying doesn't really make sense at all.
This just shows that Apple is making really nice PCs now.
The problem is that the original asker is trying to understand the process when halfway through without apparently having spent too much thought on the basics of what he or she is doing. "I am trying to travel from London to New York. Now sitting here at a crossroads in Hongkong I would like to know if I should have turned left in Dover or right. Do you think I should aquire a map ?"
So trouble seems likely, I'm afraid.
Why should I buy the patent holder's product for lots of money if I can download some OSS thingy that does the same for free ? So yes, I'm afraid the question is slightly stupid. :-)
Yeah, I'm sure AMD is burning to license Intel's GPU. It's not that they recenty had purchased one of the two leading graphics chips companies. And Via will also be completely starved for integrated chipset IP. That for stupid replies. Some people just are not happy if they cannot whine against Intel. They could open all their IP, start giving out chips for free and donate all their money to the red cross and you still would not be happy.
Nothing ironic here.
We bought several Brother HL1450/1470s for my company back in '03 (this models have now long been phased out, but I assume the mechanics of the newer models isn't much different) because of their impressive feature set and comparatively low prices. They were marketed as workgroup printers by Brother, but were only slightly over your maximum price point.
Initially we were quite satisfied, but after a little over a year they started to break down one after another: Creaking noises from the paper feed mechanics, constant paper jams, toner leaking everywhere causing trouble with print quality. One of them died completely on us after 2,5 years. In the meantime we have thrown all of them out and have replaced them by HP Laserjets. Hope they last longer (back in the day they were almost indestructable, but who knows today...). We used them commercially to print invoices and stuff, but nothing a workgroup printer shouldn't be able to handle.
We also have a Brother MFC-9030 fax/scanner/printer which is still going strong after 3,5+ years, but which we hardly use as a printer. So if you have only low printing volume Brother can indeed be attractive for you, but if you want to print higher volumes just stay away.
Really great idea NOT. This would create more or less a monopoly for high-end graphic chips for NVidia. Who else is there ? Intel with their cheap chipset graphics ? Matrox ? A handful of far eastern companies that produce cheap and sucky low-end graphics products noone uses ? Nvidia buying ATI would be the worse thing that could happen for the consumer, even worse than the Intel quasi-monopoly of the dark years before the Athlon. As the history of Intel-vs.-AMD cleary shows competition not only is good for the consumer but in the end also for the companies which are required to innovate and improve their products and to keep themselves strong and vital.
You have to be aware that the inside of the human abdomen is a very crowded and puzzling place. Lots of nooks and crannies small items can slip into, also the whole thing is constantly on the move due to the contractions of the digestive organs, beathing and certainly due to the doctors operating and mocing things around. Add a certain amount of blood and bloody water (you flush surfaces both to keep them from drying out (bad for the tissue) and to keep a clear field of vision. Add several hours of operating time for large operations and there is a clear risk to lose things inside the patient. A professional operating team will take several security measures to keep this from happening (see my other post in this thread), but there still is a considerable riskm even without haste and neglect (yes, I am a MD by training).
Which is exacly how it is (or should be) done, and yes, I am a MD by training. The OR nurse assisting the docs during the operation opens a certain amount of surgical instrument etc. kits with a clearly defined number of items in it. It is one of her responsibilities to keep track of the number of instruments she gives to the doctors as well as the number she is getting back and ones that get "lost" outside the patient (dropped to the floor, given to a third party outside the operating team, e.g. to pass tissue samples or excised organs, tumor parts etc.). The same applies for gauze pads, surgical cloth etc. Gauze particles and cloth also have either metallic tags or markings that show up on X-rays on them to be able to locate them either after the fact or, in difficult cases where you know something is missing but can't find it, before clothing the patient using a portable c-beam x-ray machine.
Nevertheless both the nurses and the docs are only human and work often inhuman working hours under extreme pressure, so in spite of all those measure it still can happen that surgical items remain inside the patient.
Borland didn't create a Modula-2 compiler
Small nitpick: They did indeed create a Modula-2 compiler - I think even called Turbo Modula-2 - at the end of the 80s for CP/M. I purchased it back then for my C-128 (those where the days *looks at current laptop* - not). However, CP/M then already had begun its way into obsolecence, and Borland's German division needed almost 6 months to deliver the damn thing. When I finally got it it was more or less unusable, as the IDE froze or something like that when you tried to compile something. In that respect it's better to think they never had released this abomination.
I think that besides the overload with woodworks another big design problem was that the king insisted on the ship carrying three rows of cannons. Two apparently was the standard back then, but the king wanted the most impressive, most bad-ass ship in the entire Baltic Sea, so it had to be three. "What do you mean "Nobody did this before" ? So you do now !" "Well, uhmm... ok Sire !". So they added the third row of cannons, and that apparently as an afterthought and not as part of the original design. Sea-worthyness tests (they let a number of soldiers run from one side of the ship to the other in a coordinated fashion to test the stability of the ship) already showed the ship to be fatally instable and top-heavy, but the king urged for the ship to get finished and noone wanted to tell him that it was not the least seaworthy. Well, he soon got to know anyway.
But at least it got Stockholm a pretty impressing museum.
Yes, and they even had back then the culture "Don't blow the whistle to management that the project is doomed".
:-)
I also visited the museum (quite impressive indeed) and there they told that they used to test ships for their stability by having a number of soldiers run from one side of the deck to the other in a coordinated fashion to see if the ship would start to sway. And sway it did, that strong that they had to stop the test to keep it from capsizing. But who wanted to tell the king that his wondership, the one he meant to dominate the Baltic Sea, was not even seaworthy for a pond ?
So everyone kept silent, the ship went under having hardly cleared the harbour, and the best: Afterwards noone could be hold responsible: The master shipbuilder having designed the ship had died before the launch, his successor only inherited the design at a very late stage and couldn't make any substantial changes, and the King, well... you don't hold the King accountable !
I'm afraid I have to disagree with my fellow bear, at least in that respect that you are mixing together two only partially related issues: The one of names and the one of marketing.
You are completely right that commercial products have the big advantage of having often very expensive marketing campaigns on their side. Especially if they are used to sell potential customers re-branding or products with often stupid names. If you hear, read and see often enough that burpalooganda is the new and trendy chocolate bar the young urban professional just HAS to try, someday you just will give that stupid thing a try if only to see what all that bruhaha is about.
Open source projects don't have this, at least most of the time. But that, at least IMO is the key point. Not the name of a product. What is in a product's name today ? A lot, if you believe the marketeers, more or less nothing, if you believe potential customers. This gets even worse in non-English speaking countries. I read about several studies done by respected research institutes that clearly showed that more than half of German customers do not even understand slogans, even if they are for very intensively propaged products with often extremely prominent names coming from national mega-brands. It has become more and more fashionable in Germany to use English slogans or even English names for outlets; the respective companies spend literally millions and millions in marketing, but people are neither able to tell you what the slogan is nor what it means nor what the product's correct name is, BUT THEY KNOW THE BLOODY PRODUCT and buy it because it seems desirable. THAT is marketing, and that is what open source does not have.
But the names themselves are only smoke and mirrors. Gimp, Linux, whatever, wouldn't be more popular if they were named Super Draw XL 2007 and Power Operating System/1 as long as they are not marketed properly. Maybe 20 years back people would have laughted at many Open Source product names, today everything has a funny/stupid/totally non-descript and synthetical name.
If it is just in the names, neither Apple nor Microsoft ever would have become household names, coming from their very humble roots as small startups with products that only mattered to a small group of enthusiasts, most of them with odd names.
Marketing is the key. Have a great marketing campaign (and a product people think they need, see tamagochi, both stupid name and stupid product but big commercial success) and noone bothers about the stupid names you came up with, at least not in any financially meaningful way. Have the greatest product of all times with a nice and meaningful name, and without marketing it will founder. (and no, I am neither a marketer nor I am related, married or otherwise affiliated with one).
Nono, not THAT stupid name ! I looked it up in the meantime as it kept bothering me: Epcos (used to be Unternehmensbereich Bauelemente (electronic components division, not semiconductors, those became Infineon) ! (another blatantly stupid artificial name, maybe the board flew to Disneyland before coming up with the name).
;-)
Regarding Siemens appliances: "Do you want something nice or can it be from Siemens ?"
Oh come on. In almost EVERY article about something open source someone complains about the naming thing. Good and well, there are some pretty dumb, ugly oder unpronouncable names, but OTOH there are also loads of pretty crappy commercial names, too:
- My life insurance is at Janitos (will they clean my house if I die ? Ok, I am in Germany, but still it sounds more like some room cleaning service like a large insurer.)
- Oh look, that guy is driving a Toyota Aventis and I just bought that new great drug from Avensis, or was it the other way round ?
- The great Borland/Inprise disaster.
- Qimonda, oh yes ! The Hunchback of Notre Dame's wife ! No ? Oh, it's the recent Infineon spinoff, which uses to be Siemens (on of THE German brand names), like those other guys that also used to be Siemens and whose stupid new artificial name I forgot, even if my dad worked for them for 30 years before they became [stupid artificial name]. Something with e, I think.
[To be continued ad nauseam]
So stupid naming is no privilege of Open Source projects, and still those other guys earn shitloads of money.
Sure the alleged 747 is too small, because it is not a 747 but a 757. I mean - you guys make up elaborate conspiracy theories and do not even bother to check the type of the bloody aircraft. Come on, you can do better than that !
FreeBSD ?
By the same logic you shouldn't recommend software without spyware either, because some might be bundled in a later version. Oh, and be very careful about this so-called Open Source Software. There have been instances where criminally inclined authors decided to close later versions.
The camera thing really works. Last year some German TV show tested this on a German racing track to find out if it was just an Urban Myth or not (this is vital for us, as for Germans driving like hell in general and as fast as your car can go on the Autobahn is as much of a God given right as your guns for you Americans). It really works. You just have to go really really fast. IIRC it worked from 250 km/h onwards (no warranty) or something like that. This is really not too irrelevant if you have a larger/faster car typical for Germany: E.g. our measly company BMW 120d (the smallest line currently available but not a sports car) tops out at 235 km/h (tested by me certainly on the Autobahn). Even at that speed you still can get in trouble from guys in larger BMWs, Porsches or Benzes that want you out of their way. And at night if there is almost no traffic.... welllll...... *big smile*