CDs didn't directly replace floppies... Floppies were replaced by a number of technologies depending on requirements... CDs and DVDs replaced floppies for software and media distribution, but floppies were also used for random saving of data which optical media is not suited to, which usb sticks have largely replaced.
I have flash on my nexus one, and the only thing that caught me was a noticeable delay as it loaded sites which contain flash based ad banners... Now we need adblock for android!
If MS have their way, the only open source being written will be dependent on proprietary windows functionality, making it very difficult to port it to any other platform.
Microsoft hate interoperability and have spent years trying to make it as difficult as possible to use anything else in any environment where you will encounter windows users... They will only ever tolerate any form of interoperability when it goes one way, so outlook will support standards like imap/pop3/smtp but it never works very well and the end goal is to push you into using exchange, which won't work properly with any other clients.
Making a profit by providing a valuable service or product is one thing... Actively harming your customers and those around them by getting them locked in to your proprietary and often inferior platform is quite another.
Also, proprietary software having to compete with open source is simply part of the market, if someone else can produce a cheaper and superior product than you, then your business model is failing and you will have to resort to underhanded tactics to prop it up.
At the end of the day, thats what proprietary software is... It might start off with an initial lead over open source but in any non niche market that attracts significant enough developer attention an open source alternative will soon start catching up. At which point not only does it become very expensive to stay ahead, but once open source reaches the "good enough" level it will be chosen purely based on price.
Look at proprietary unix, sco and bsdi died pretty quickly when linux caught up and ran on the same hardware, other proprietary unixes fared a little better due to having their own dedicated hardware but are still either dead or being pushed into very small niches. Windows keeps itself alive due to inertia and lock-in, how well do you think they would be doing if it was ms-dos vs freedos instead?
Their contributions to the linux kernel were only open sourced under pressure, are poorly maintained and only exist to promote their own hypervisor system...
Their other contributions have pretty much all been windows specific, so continuing the trend of trying to lock people in.
That is exactly what MS does, although in a more devious manner...
The xbox already functions much like the iphone, you need to sign up (and pay) to be a developer, you must use their sdk which runs only on their os and any code you release must first be approved and signed by ms and they take a cut of any sales you make.
They do the same thing in other areas too, not by directly dictating, but through market inertia and various forms of lock-in... This is arguably worse because when people start sending proprietary formatted files around the lock-in extends to people who would prefer not to be customers of ms. Apple on the other hand, can be totally ignored should you wish. You may have an iphone and i may not, but i will still be able to access the emails, photos, video, sms and voice calls generated by your iphone either on another type of phone or a computer.
That's not to excuse apple's behaviour, just pointing out that apple are a minor offender compared to ms here.
If you don't tip, but come back regularly in some places they will become angry with you and spit in your food (or worse)... Plus your regular custom helps the business owner, not the individual server...
It's also possible to have great food and lousy service, or great service and lousy food... It's quite difficult to tip the chef in most places. I wouldn't necessarily discount a place based on one instance of poor service, if you go again someone else might serve you better.
I fully agree with you about fake smiles being creepy, i don't want to be served by someone who is forcing themselves to appear cheerful... I understand that they are at work and don't feel particularly cheerful, i just want a polite and efficient service.
I don't like having to fight to get the server's attention... I don't want to wait ages to get the bill... If i'm eating alone, i don't want to wait longer than necessary for the food. If i'm eating lunch, chances are there is a time limit (lunch break) and i need to leave fairly quickly, i can't wait 20 minutes for a starter, another 30 for the main and then another 20 for the bill to arrive and another 15 before they take the payment... I don't need patronising looks from the server because i order too much... Although moving us to a bigger table might be useful, i like to sample lots of different foods. I don't want the waiter to come back 2 minutes after bringing the food to ask if everything is ok... it's rude to talk with your mouth full which it invariably will be 2 minutes after receiving food, and if i wasn't satisfied i would have said something myself already.
Also, i found service in germany pretty good, the staff were usually very efficient and helpful, usually didn't exhibit fake cheeriness (they are at work after all), and appreciated when you made an effort to speak german (even tho they would quickly detect your accent and reply in english).
Actually, at many busy taxi ranks (airports, train stations etc) it is not uncommon to be given a numbered ticket and you can sit down and wait for the taxi to arrive with the corresponding number.
Not only are screens now much wider than they are tall, but a lot of websites are designed to be in a fixed width strip down the middle of the screen so they look pretty stupid on a widescreen display with huge blank areas either side.
I have a machine running FreeBSD 8.1 which has been up a couple of months with a zfs filesystem, is there anything in particular which could make it crash? I have successfully completed a number of compiles on it at least...
Also try dishpointer.com, you use google maps to locate your property and it shows your lat/long and the elevation required for the sat, it also works out how high obstacles can be at a given distance.
Well they can't, it would need to be royalty free and transferrable...
Commercial software vendors know that price matters, and that they cannot compete with open source on price or target specific companies for takeovers... They simply cannot compete with or even really understand the open source model.
So they use patents like this which effectively forces open source to follow the model they understand, selling the software for a price, even if that price is only to cover overheads (eg patent licenses and admin overhead)...
Most home users only need an IMAP (or pop3) client to talk to their ISP, there are many people out there using outlook for a task it's extremely poorly suited to.
Sharepoint is often used as a CMS too...
If you want an IMAP client or a CMS (as MANY people do), the MS tools are overpriced and considerably inferior to the alternatives.
Despite constantly losing patent lawsuits, microsoft are still pro software patents... As much as MS lose out from patent lawsuits, linux is worse off... While MS can afford to license patents like those on h.264, linux as a whole cannot, and individual distributions would need to sacrifice many of the cost benefits of linux in order to fund the patent licenses.
It depends where that bandwidth is going among other things...
In the UK at least (not sure about belgium), traffic over the telco's adsl platform is very expensive and that just gets it to the isp, it then has to traverse the internet...
On the other hand, internet transit is quite cheap, he.net for instance appear to offer $1/mbps (quick google search - http://he.net/ip_transit.html?gclid=CJi3mPy3yqMCFQGY2AodCWImuQ), 1mbps continuous over a month is good for about 300GB in each direction... A large isp is also likely to get much better deals if they bulk purchase. There is also peering which can be much cheaper if not free... Not to mention traffic which never leaves the isp (eg torrents might have peers nearby), and the biggest the isp the greater chance traffic wont leave.
The binary driver they produce which you cannot fix if it breaks, and neither can your distro maintainers... you are at the absolute mercy of nvidia for bugfixes... The binary driver that only supports x86/amd64 (so no putting your card in a small arm based media player for instance) The binary driver that only works with certain versions of X (ie you can't upgrade until nvidia let you) The binary driver that only works with certain kernel versions (ie you can't upgrade until nvidia let you) The binary driver that will sooner or later drop support for your card, leaving you tied to an old X and kernel version.
I'd rather not have a binary driver... You are far too dependent on a single entity, who would rather sell you a new card even if the old one is still perfectly adequate for your needs.
Only in the case of drivers for hardware, it benefits the hardware maker for those drivers to be as widely available as possible... They can pay to have drivers developed whereby the developers get paid for their time worked, and the result is useful drivers that encourage sales of the hardware.
Hardware is certainly not imaginary, it is perfectly reasonable to sell that, and actual effort has to go into each and every unit sold.
While that's true, a properly configured embedded OS is far less likely to encourage poor behaviour... Windows boxes almost always have a web browser and various other things installed, encouraging users to actually use them.
An embedded box won't have anything like that, it probably won't even have a GUI and if it does its likely to be a specific one for whatever the device is meant to do and not give you any other functionality.
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CDs didn't directly replace floppies...
Floppies were replaced by a number of technologies depending on requirements...
CDs and DVDs replaced floppies for software and media distribution, but floppies were also used for random saving of data which optical media is not suited to, which usb sticks have largely replaced.
I have flash on my nexus one, and the only thing that caught me was a noticeable delay as it loaded sites which contain flash based ad banners... Now we need adblock for android!
Not jerky at all, running on a 2.8ghz macbook pro with safari 5.0.1 (with lots of other stuff open too)...
You could also do games in Java, which is more open and cross platform than flash is.
If configuring such a machine, wether from apple, dell or elsewhere i would always buy easily upgradable things like ram and drives separately...
Apple laptops don't come covered in stickers (i guess steve jobs hates them too, or thinks they would ruin the aesthetics)...
What other laptop manufacturers don't include all these stickers?
If MS have their way, the only open source being written will be dependent on proprietary windows functionality, making it very difficult to port it to any other platform.
Microsoft hate interoperability and have spent years trying to make it as difficult as possible to use anything else in any environment where you will encounter windows users... They will only ever tolerate any form of interoperability when it goes one way, so outlook will support standards like imap/pop3/smtp but it never works very well and the end goal is to push you into using exchange, which won't work properly with any other clients.
Making a profit by providing a valuable service or product is one thing...
Actively harming your customers and those around them by getting them locked in to your proprietary and often inferior platform is quite another.
Also, proprietary software having to compete with open source is simply part of the market, if someone else can produce a cheaper and superior product than you, then your business model is failing and you will have to resort to underhanded tactics to prop it up.
At the end of the day, thats what proprietary software is... It might start off with an initial lead over open source but in any non niche market that attracts significant enough developer attention an open source alternative will soon start catching up.
At which point not only does it become very expensive to stay ahead, but once open source reaches the "good enough" level it will be chosen purely based on price.
Look at proprietary unix, sco and bsdi died pretty quickly when linux caught up and ran on the same hardware, other proprietary unixes fared a little better due to having their own dedicated hardware but are still either dead or being pushed into very small niches.
Windows keeps itself alive due to inertia and lock-in, how well do you think they would be doing if it was ms-dos vs freedos instead?
Their contributions to the linux kernel were only open sourced under pressure, are poorly maintained and only exist to promote their own hypervisor system...
Their other contributions have pretty much all been windows specific, so continuing the trend of trying to lock people in.
I see quite a lot of prominent android phones being advertised on TV... And they quite often display the android logo and talk about the app market.
That is exactly what MS does, although in a more devious manner...
The xbox already functions much like the iphone, you need to sign up (and pay) to be a developer, you must use their sdk which runs only on their os and any code you release must first be approved and signed by ms and they take a cut of any sales you make.
They do the same thing in other areas too, not by directly dictating, but through market inertia and various forms of lock-in... This is arguably worse because when people start sending proprietary formatted files around the lock-in extends to people who would prefer not to be customers of ms.
Apple on the other hand, can be totally ignored should you wish. You may have an iphone and i may not, but i will still be able to access the emails, photos, video, sms and voice calls generated by your iphone either on another type of phone or a computer.
That's not to excuse apple's behaviour, just pointing out that apple are a minor offender compared to ms here.
If you don't tip, but come back regularly in some places they will become angry with you and spit in your food (or worse)...
Plus your regular custom helps the business owner, not the individual server...
It's also possible to have great food and lousy service, or great service and lousy food... It's quite difficult to tip the chef in most places. I wouldn't necessarily discount a place based on one instance of poor service, if you go again someone else might serve you better.
I fully agree with you about fake smiles being creepy, i don't want to be served by someone who is forcing themselves to appear cheerful... I understand that they are at work and don't feel particularly cheerful, i just want a polite and efficient service.
I don't like having to fight to get the server's attention...
I don't want to wait ages to get the bill...
If i'm eating alone, i don't want to wait longer than necessary for the food.
If i'm eating lunch, chances are there is a time limit (lunch break) and i need to leave fairly quickly, i can't wait 20 minutes for a starter, another 30 for the main and then another 20 for the bill to arrive and another 15 before they take the payment...
I don't need patronising looks from the server because i order too much... Although moving us to a bigger table might be useful, i like to sample lots of different foods.
I don't want the waiter to come back 2 minutes after bringing the food to ask if everything is ok... it's rude to talk with your mouth full which it invariably will be 2 minutes after receiving food, and if i wasn't satisfied i would have said something myself already.
Also, i found service in germany pretty good, the staff were usually very efficient and helpful, usually didn't exhibit fake cheeriness (they are at work after all), and appreciated when you made an effort to speak german (even tho they would quickly detect your accent and reply in english).
Actually, at many busy taxi ranks (airports, train stations etc) it is not uncommon to be given a numbered ticket and you can sit down and wait for the taxi to arrive with the corresponding number.
The people who carry out the attacks are pretty stupid, the people giving the orders and making the plans are not.
Not only are screens now much wider than they are tall, but a lot of websites are designed to be in a fixed width strip down the middle of the screen so they look pretty stupid on a widescreen display with huge blank areas either side.
I have a machine running FreeBSD 8.1 which has been up a couple of months with a zfs filesystem, is there anything in particular which could make it crash? I have successfully completed a number of compiles on it at least...
Also try dishpointer.com, you use google maps to locate your property and it shows your lat/long and the elevation required for the sat, it also works out how high obstacles can be at a given distance.
In which case they terminate your contract, and replace you with a cheap monkey...
Well they can't, it would need to be royalty free and transferrable...
Commercial software vendors know that price matters, and that they cannot compete with open source on price or target specific companies for takeovers... They simply cannot compete with or even really understand the open source model.
So they use patents like this which effectively forces open source to follow the model they understand, selling the software for a price, even if that price is only to cover overheads (eg patent licenses and admin overhead)...
I remember the box for "Rise of the Robots" where there was a very prominent label stating "Actual in game graphics"...
Most home users only need an IMAP (or pop3) client to talk to their ISP, there are many people out there using outlook for a task it's extremely poorly suited to.
Sharepoint is often used as a CMS too...
If you want an IMAP client or a CMS (as MANY people do), the MS tools are overpriced and considerably inferior to the alternatives.
Despite constantly losing patent lawsuits, microsoft are still pro software patents... As much as MS lose out from patent lawsuits, linux is worse off... While MS can afford to license patents like those on h.264, linux as a whole cannot, and individual distributions would need to sacrifice many of the cost benefits of linux in order to fund the patent licenses.
It depends where that bandwidth is going among other things...
In the UK at least (not sure about belgium), traffic over the telco's adsl platform is very expensive and that just gets it to the isp, it then has to traverse the internet...
On the other hand, internet transit is quite cheap, he.net for instance appear to offer $1/mbps (quick google search - http://he.net/ip_transit.html?gclid=CJi3mPy3yqMCFQGY2AodCWImuQ), 1mbps continuous over a month is good for about 300GB in each direction... A large isp is also likely to get much better deals if they bulk purchase.
There is also peering which can be much cheaper if not free...
Not to mention traffic which never leaves the isp (eg torrents might have peers nearby), and the biggest the isp the greater chance traffic wont leave.
The binary driver they produce which you cannot fix if it breaks, and neither can your distro maintainers... you are at the absolute mercy of nvidia for bugfixes...
The binary driver that only supports x86/amd64 (so no putting your card in a small arm based media player for instance)
The binary driver that only works with certain versions of X (ie you can't upgrade until nvidia let you)
The binary driver that only works with certain kernel versions (ie you can't upgrade until nvidia let you)
The binary driver that will sooner or later drop support for your card, leaving you tied to an old X and kernel version.
I'd rather not have a binary driver... You are far too dependent on a single entity, who would rather sell you a new card even if the old one is still perfectly adequate for your needs.
Only in the case of drivers for hardware, it benefits the hardware maker for those drivers to be as widely available as possible... They can pay to have drivers developed whereby the developers get paid for their time worked, and the result is useful drivers that encourage sales of the hardware.
Hardware is certainly not imaginary, it is perfectly reasonable to sell that, and actual effort has to go into each and every unit sold.
While that's true, a properly configured embedded OS is far less likely to encourage poor behaviour...
Windows boxes almost always have a web browser and various other things installed, encouraging users to actually use them.
An embedded box won't have anything like that, it probably won't even have a GUI and if it does its likely to be a specific one for whatever the device is meant to do and not give you any other functionality.