There are people out there who will know the open source software inside out too, and to a much greater level given availability of the sourcecode, whereas only the original vendor will ever have that level of knowledge about a closed source package.
What you do highlight, is that its important not to get your business dependent on something that can be taken away from you... However you're approaching it from the wrong angle... Any proprietary software is dependent on its vendor, who may stop updating it, may discontinue the product, may decide they dont like you or are part of a larger company which competes against you, may go bankrupt or any number of other risks. With an open source package, you have 2 very important advantages:
1, the source is available, so absolute worst case you can hire someone to work on it for you, as opposed to being stuck at a dead end. 2, the data will be stored in a format for which documentation is available, wether the format is properly documented or the only documentation is the source itself obviously matters, but either situation is better than a proprietary system where no documentation is available to you at all and you are forced to reverse engineer the binaries.
Always have an exit strategy, plan for what you will do if the worst happens to any one of your suppliers. In the restaurant trade that will be everything from "buy our rice from any one of the other 50 suppliers" to "migrate all our accounting data to a whole new package"...
The framerate of PAL is down to the power supply in europe being 50hz, while the power supply in the us is 60hz, which means you can sync the display to the input power source rather than having your own timing circuitry.
Well, under that assumption the bacteria would have starved to death long before the 30 minutes was up... As someone else pointed out, they would last barely 5 minutes, so i assumed the total available food was enough to sustain the population growth for 30 minutes... Also that's typically how bacteria operate, they multiply very quickly if there is a surplus of food until all the food is gone.
Possibly not even for navigation, if the car can recognise junctions, knows where it started, knows how far its travelled and in what direction it can easily calculate this data alongside a map to work out where it is, and where it needs to go.
I stop in the overtaking lane of the highway all the time, during peak hours around here there are queues of stationary traffic in all lanes of the highway.
It's all about what the car is worth to the driver... I find that people driving really old beat up cars can often be just as bad. When you're driving a car which has a trivial value relative to your available funds, you are far less concerned about damaging it.
No shame perhaps... But the inconvenience, the expense, the potential injury depending how hard you were hit...
You could be injured by the impact, perhaps seriously, this might cause you to spend time in pain and/or hospital when you'd otherwise be working or doing something more enjoyable...
Your car is most likely to be damaged, which could result in a costly repair or having to find a replacement, and in the interim not all insurers will provide a rental car so you might find yourself without transport.
And while it is almost certainly not your fault if your were stationary, that doesn't mean the other party won't try to claim that it was and keep both you and your insurer busy arguing about it... Plus there might be others involved if the impacted shunted your car forwards into another vehicle.
Having walked around a call center, if you keep your eyes closed its quite easy to imagine that your in a room full of cute girls... But open your eyes, and you realise that many of them are anything but cute, and just somehow have a really nice telephone voice.
I do similar, but with a wildcard subdomain so user@something.mydomain.com, the reasons for this are:
1, spammers will try to brute force common email account names once they get a domain to target 2, i can override the wildcard by creating specific mx records for a given hostname, and thus lose the spam without my mailserver having to process it at all, usually i redirect it to the mx records of the server that sold me out.
Of course they don't want to rely on microsoft, that was a stupid position to get themselves into in the first place. NEVER rely on a single source for anything of any importance!
MS isn't going to hurt the industry as a whole, only the OEMs since it wont reduce sales, just shift them. There's not a lot the OEMs can do about it, they need MS and MS don't need them. MS can treat the OEMs however they like and they will still keep lapping up whatever scraps they are fed because they have no choice now.
3.2% is a small niche... Linux has always been a small niche in the desktop space too...
I remember when firefox first started taking off, someone quoted to me once that you have to capture 10% of the market before anyone will take you seriously.
At no percentage increase in sales does it become a real deal, it's all about hard numbers and percentages of the overall market, and ms are failing badly on both counts compared to both android and ios.
And dropping a platform to offer an incompatible one with no easy migration path does not encourage me to buy their new replacement platform... What assurances do i have that their current platform won't be discontinued at some point in the near future, rendering any investment i might make in hardware and apps effectively wasted?
one of them aging, unpopular, and effectively discontinued
I believe you need the original pak files if you want to play the original quake maps... If you just want to play the shareware quake map, or third party maps then sure you don't need the cd, but then it's not really the same game.
Yes windows phone 7 is growing, while windows mobile is dropping fast (faster than wp7 is rising by all accounts), giving microsoft a net loss.
Also it's easy to have high percentage point increases when your market share is trivially low, in absolute market share or shipment numbers they are still laughably far behind ios and android.
I had a 500% increase in phone sales this year... Last year i sold 1 used handset to a friend, this year i sold 5 old handsets that i found in a drawer on ebay and at a junk sale.
Linux users are used to getting software for free, but then so are pirates... The difference is that the pirates couldn't care less about copyrights and license terms, while many linux users do respect them and wouldn't download any software that wasn't intentionally offered to them for free.
Now things like the core os, browsers, etc are absolutely essential tools that noone should be without... They should be free, so that they are as accessible as possible to everyone. Games on the other hand, are a purely optional form of entertainment... They are not necessities, they are luxuries and so many people have no issues paying for games, and can easily do without if necessary.
Because then noone would bother to make any native linux apps... Look what happened to OS/2.
Incidentally if you target wine when you develop your applications, they will run just fine on windows too whereas the other way round doesn't always work.
Plenty of windows users use intel graphics too, you can't blame the os if the underlying hardware is low-end...
As for ATI/nVidia, their drivers on linux are every bit as quick as the windows versions if not faster..
Supporting windows is also a nightmare, how many games come with a readme saying "dont use version xxx of ati drivers, dont use yyy of nvidia, known problems etc"... I've seen lots of games which have glitches with certain driver versions.
But here's the thing, on windows Valve have absolutely no control over the drivers or the underlying system.. On Linux, they have already started working with Intel, and likely will do the same with AMD, to ensure that the open graphics stack and their games run well together. So while they have no control over the hardware, they can at least influence the entire software stack. And hardware is not so diverse today as it used to be, 2 types of processor, 3 types of video...
Intel have never had any success in mobile... Nokia are falling fast... And MS are somewhere between, never had much success and also seem to be falling, albeit from a much lower height than Nokia.
Why would 3 failures of the mobile market want to get together?
The Linux versions of quake/doom/quake3 etc basically required you to buy the windows version, download and install the linux binaries and then manually copy the data files to the right place... So any sales would have counted as windows versions, even if you never intended to play them on windows.
Explaining how to fix a problem can be difficult on the phone, but on a chat feature where I can't see your screen
And how exactly can you see a screen over the phone?
Of course what's more efficient depends on the exact nature of the problem, but for many technical problems i would rather use a textual medium to explain them (typically irc, forums or email for me) for one simple reason: cut+paste If the computer returns an error, i can paste it, which is easier and less error prone to reading it out. And if i need to run some commands, i can paste those commands back in the same way (this is also another reason why geeks use the cli - its easier to explain in a support context, even over the phone where reading cli output is far less error prone than trying to describe a graphic verbally)...
Macs generally don't have highend videocards, and most macs sold are laptops in any case... It's not surprising they would reduce the default level of detail in a mac version.
It really depends on the nature of the company and of the job... But a full blown desktop is really not the best choice in most situations.
Most companies would be content for users to have a dumb terminal, its easily replaceable, contains no data if stolen, makes hotdesking and centralised control much easier. For employees who need a portable device anyway, a dockable tablet or phone would be great in the majority of cases. The risk of data theft already exists, but if you have a dockable portable device then you remove the need for multiple devices but can provide a bigger screen and comfortable keyboard when in the office.
For use on the go, a laptop is often quite inconvenient, you can't really hold it in one hand and operate it with the other while you commute on the train for instance. A tablet on the other hand can be quite usable in this scenario, and let you catch up on some work or read something in a situation where you would otherwise just be unproductive.
Those who need huge amounts of memory and processing power are a small niche, even smaller are those who need that in a portable (or luggable) form factor.
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There are people out there who will know the open source software inside out too, and to a much greater level given availability of the sourcecode, whereas only the original vendor will ever have that level of knowledge about a closed source package.
What you do highlight, is that its important not to get your business dependent on something that can be taken away from you... However you're approaching it from the wrong angle... Any proprietary software is dependent on its vendor, who may stop updating it, may discontinue the product, may decide they dont like you or are part of a larger company which competes against you, may go bankrupt or any number of other risks.
With an open source package, you have 2 very important advantages:
1, the source is available, so absolute worst case you can hire someone to work on it for you, as opposed to being stuck at a dead end.
2, the data will be stored in a format for which documentation is available, wether the format is properly documented or the only documentation is the source itself obviously matters, but either situation is better than a proprietary system where no documentation is available to you at all and you are forced to reverse engineer the binaries.
Always have an exit strategy, plan for what you will do if the worst happens to any one of your suppliers. In the restaurant trade that will be everything from "buy our rice from any one of the other 50 suppliers" to "migrate all our accounting data to a whole new package"...
I used my first gen soundblaster awe32 (with upgraded ram) from around the time it came out, up until i retired my last machine that had isa slots...
The framerate of PAL is down to the power supply in europe being 50hz, while the power supply in the us is 60hz, which means you can sync the display to the input power source rather than having your own timing circuitry.
Well, under that assumption the bacteria would have starved to death long before the 30 minutes was up... As someone else pointed out, they would last barely 5 minutes, so i assumed the total available food was enough to sustain the population growth for 30 minutes... Also that's typically how bacteria operate, they multiply very quickly if there is a surplus of food until all the food is gone.
Possibly not even for navigation, if the car can recognise junctions, knows where it started, knows how far its travelled and in what direction it can easily calculate this data alongside a map to work out where it is, and where it needs to go.
I stop in the overtaking lane of the highway all the time, during peak hours around here there are queues of stationary traffic in all lanes of the highway.
It's all about what the car is worth to the driver... I find that people driving really old beat up cars can often be just as bad. When you're driving a car which has a trivial value relative to your available funds, you are far less concerned about damaging it.
No shame perhaps...
But the inconvenience, the expense, the potential injury depending how hard you were hit...
You could be injured by the impact, perhaps seriously, this might cause you to spend time in pain and/or hospital when you'd otherwise be working or doing something more enjoyable...
Your car is most likely to be damaged, which could result in a costly repair or having to find a replacement, and in the interim not all insurers will provide a rental car so you might find yourself without transport.
And while it is almost certainly not your fault if your were stationary, that doesn't mean the other party won't try to claim that it was and keep both you and your insurer busy arguing about it... Plus there might be others involved if the impacted shunted your car forwards into another vehicle.
Because artificial scarcity can be turned into profit...
29 minutes.
Having walked around a call center, if you keep your eyes closed its quite easy to imagine that your in a room full of cute girls...
But open your eyes, and you realise that many of them are anything but cute, and just somehow have a really nice telephone voice.
I do similar, but with a wildcard subdomain so user@something.mydomain.com, the reasons for this are:
1, spammers will try to brute force common email account names once they get a domain to target
2, i can override the wildcard by creating specific mx records for a given hostname, and thus lose the spam without my mailserver having to process it at all, usually i redirect it to the mx records of the server that sold me out.
Of course they don't want to rely on microsoft, that was a stupid position to get themselves into in the first place. NEVER rely on a single source for anything of any importance!
MS isn't going to hurt the industry as a whole, only the OEMs since it wont reduce sales, just shift them. There's not a lot the OEMs can do about it, they need MS and MS don't need them.
MS can treat the OEMs however they like and they will still keep lapping up whatever scraps they are fed because they have no choice now.
3.2% is a small niche...
Linux has always been a small niche in the desktop space too...
I remember when firefox first started taking off, someone quoted to me once that you have to capture 10% of the market before anyone will take you seriously.
At no percentage increase in sales does it become a real deal, it's all about hard numbers and percentages of the overall market, and ms are failing badly on both counts compared to both android and ios.
And dropping a platform to offer an incompatible one with no easy migration path does not encourage me to buy their new replacement platform... What assurances do i have that their current platform won't be discontinued at some point in the near future, rendering any investment i might make in hardware and apps effectively wasted?
one of them aging, unpopular, and effectively discontinued
I'd argue that both are unpopular...
I believe you need the original pak files if you want to play the original quake maps...
If you just want to play the shareware quake map, or third party maps then sure you don't need the cd, but then it's not really the same game.
Yes windows phone 7 is growing, while windows mobile is dropping fast (faster than wp7 is rising by all accounts), giving microsoft a net loss.
Also it's easy to have high percentage point increases when your market share is trivially low, in absolute market share or shipment numbers they are still laughably far behind ios and android.
I had a 500% increase in phone sales this year... Last year i sold 1 used handset to a friend, this year i sold 5 old handsets that i found in a drawer on ebay and at a junk sale.
Linux users are used to getting software for free, but then so are pirates... The difference is that the pirates couldn't care less about copyrights and license terms, while many linux users do respect them and wouldn't download any software that wasn't intentionally offered to them for free.
Now things like the core os, browsers, etc are absolutely essential tools that noone should be without... They should be free, so that they are as accessible as possible to everyone.
Games on the other hand, are a purely optional form of entertainment... They are not necessities, they are luxuries and so many people have no issues paying for games, and can easily do without if necessary.
Because then noone would bother to make any native linux apps... Look what happened to OS/2.
Incidentally if you target wine when you develop your applications, they will run just fine on windows too whereas the other way round doesn't always work.
Plenty of windows users use intel graphics too, you can't blame the os if the underlying hardware is low-end...
As for ATI/nVidia, their drivers on linux are every bit as quick as the windows versions if not faster..
Supporting windows is also a nightmare, how many games come with a readme saying "dont use version xxx of ati drivers, dont use yyy of nvidia, known problems etc"... I've seen lots of games which have glitches with certain driver versions.
But here's the thing, on windows Valve have absolutely no control over the drivers or the underlying system..
On Linux, they have already started working with Intel, and likely will do the same with AMD, to ensure that the open graphics stack and their games run well together.
So while they have no control over the hardware, they can at least influence the entire software stack. And hardware is not so diverse today as it used to be, 2 types of processor, 3 types of video...
Intel have never had any success in mobile...
Nokia are falling fast...
And MS are somewhere between, never had much success and also seem to be falling, albeit from a much lower height than Nokia.
Why would 3 failures of the mobile market want to get together?
The Linux versions of quake/doom/quake3 etc basically required you to buy the windows version, download and install the linux binaries and then manually copy the data files to the right place...
So any sales would have counted as windows versions, even if you never intended to play them on windows.
Explaining how to fix a problem can be difficult on the phone, but on a chat feature where I can't see your screen
And how exactly can you see a screen over the phone?
Of course what's more efficient depends on the exact nature of the problem, but for many technical problems i would rather use a textual medium to explain them (typically irc, forums or email for me) for one simple reason: cut+paste
If the computer returns an error, i can paste it, which is easier and less error prone to reading it out. And if i need to run some commands, i can paste those commands back in the same way (this is also another reason why geeks use the cli - its easier to explain in a support context, even over the phone where reading cli output is far less error prone than trying to describe a graphic verbally)...
Macs generally don't have highend videocards, and most macs sold are laptops in any case... It's not surprising they would reduce the default level of detail in a mac version.
It really depends on the nature of the company and of the job... But a full blown desktop is really not the best choice in most situations.
Most companies would be content for users to have a dumb terminal, its easily replaceable, contains no data if stolen, makes hotdesking and centralised control much easier.
For employees who need a portable device anyway, a dockable tablet or phone would be great in the majority of cases. The risk of data theft already exists, but if you have a dockable portable device then you remove the need for multiple devices but can provide a bigger screen and comfortable keyboard when in the office.
For use on the go, a laptop is often quite inconvenient, you can't really hold it in one hand and operate it with the other while you commute on the train for instance. A tablet on the other hand can be quite usable in this scenario, and let you catch up on some work or read something in a situation where you would otherwise just be unproductive.
Those who need huge amounts of memory and processing power are a small niche, even smaller are those who need that in a portable (or luggable) form factor.