Yes, it would be entirely unreasonable... What if i decided to register something like Paris2020.com, perhaps i planned to run an eye clinic in Paris or something... They can't suddenly decide a few years from now that Paris is going to bid for the olympics in 2020 and that gives them the right to hijack the domain, even worse is the fact they will drop the domain either when the bid is rejected, or when the games are concluded anyway.
It's also not uncommon to use a numeric year as a name for something, usually referring to the year it was first sold or such... Sim City 2000 Windows 2003 Gateway 2000 etc etc...
The point is that many potential customers won't pay, and resort to piracy instead. Those that do pay also usually feel the price is too high, but aren't militant enough to do anything about it. And then there's all the kids who simply can't afford to buy games at the current price points.
When i was younger and had an Amiga i looked at the average price of games ($25-35), looked at how much money i got a week to spend ($4 and sometimes larger amounts for birthday etc), and figured that it would take me 7-8 weeks to get the money together to buy a game, assuming i didn't spend it on anything else, thats a long time especially to a child. I also figured that when i got a lump sum for my birthday, i could either buy 3-4 games that may or may not get boring quickly, or i could buy a hardware upgrade, and copy games from other kids at school.
Remember, some kids are poor and cant afford games, but they still go to school with kids who can... Piracy can put these kids on a more level playing field. Otherwise they simply wouldn't have any games, or would end up with a few very old games and a piece of vintage hardware to run them on, which all their peers at school ridicule.
And who will train them how to do that and support them when things break? Costly commercial support, or some helpful "geeky" locals? If you stifle those geeky locals they won't bother, they will learn how to fix cars or something instead.
There is nothing to stop microsoft implementing their own PDF reader, the format specs are open and easily implemented. That's what Apple have done. They could also license adobe reader for bundling... Or they could bundle the same open source apps that come with linux distributions.
The issue is, microsoft can only be bothered to include support for their own formats, except in cases where they had no other choice (a browser that didnt support jpeg or gif images would be laughable for instance)... Earlier versions didn't even do that, 3.11 could only play wave audio and display the bmp format of images, even tho neither of these formats were commonly used under dos or on other platforms available at the time. Supporting the common formats used by dos apps would have been the right thing to do.
It's only sensible to at the very least include viewers for the most common formats of each type, if not including full blown apps to edit and create such files.
Instead they don't, largely because they want to stifle standard formats and push their own... It's only in a few small and largely irrelevant cases that they've been forced to concede defeat.
For someone who has no familiarity with computers, the dumbed down linux installs that come with netbooks these days are a lot easier than windows. You get a simple menu system, and a full suite of applications ready to be used, and a simple tool giving you a list of additional applications you can install with a single click. No confusing "start menu" to navigate, no hassle to download and install apps manually etc..
Windows is only perceived as being easier because people are already familiar with it.
New (ie newer than the os your trying to install) hardware generally won't work regardless of what OS you want to put on it... New hardware will typically have drivers for the current versions of windows, but you have to install them manually, which depending on the nature of the hardware can be rather difficult. Some very new hardware can lack linux drivers at all. On the other hand, new linux distributions come out far more frequently than windows so if your hardware has been on sale more than a couple of months chances are it will be supported out of the box by current linux distros.
I agree with your previous points, but not this one: netbooks have a fan (so are more fragile), consume as much power as regular laptops (which they are with a smaller screen), their screen cannot be read easily in daylight on a sunny day, they don't have mesh networking, etc: there are many reasons why the OLPC XO-1 is better suited for the third world schools than netbooks (even running Linux).
Isn't mesh networking simply a software function? or does it require explicit hardware support? The fan and screen are relatively easy things that could be changed... Most netbooks are considerably more powerful than the OLPC, and would happily run fanless if clocked down to similar performance levels.
Not really, hence their push for Windows-XP for netbooks. Chinese users have always pirated Windows, why wouldn't they pirate Windows XP for their netbooks. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft make a Vista-light or keep making an XP version for those netbooks to ensure that Linux's usage stay marginal.
Because in order to further reduce cost, some of these manufacturers forego the more expensive x86 compatible processors that can run windows, in favor of cheaper and lower power chinese produced ARM or MIPS based cores, which cannot run windows, but will run linux perfectly well while being cheaper and more power efficient. ARM processors pretty much dominate the cellphone market, are manufactured by the millions, and are cheap and low power while being more than powerful enough to run linux.
Maybe, have you noticed that the price of netbooks since the first EEE 701 have only gone up? Hardware makers don't like too cheap hardware because they're afraid of loosing sells of higher priced laptops..
Yes, hardware makers like HP, Dell, Asus etc who have existing product lines of laptops to protect... But what about chinese companies who don't already produce laptops, and thus have no existing market to protect?
A home grown proprietary market would have a lot of trouble succeeding against free software and large proprietary players from other countries...
By being small, your costs would be higher and your market smaller... A large player like microsoft on the other hand has already recouped their development costs a thousand times over and can afford to give their software away for free if necessary, at least until the local competition has been eliminated. It would also take you considerable time and money to develop your proprietary software to a marketable state during which time you will not be generating any revenue, whereas your competitors will already have products on sale.
By concentrating on open source you can get to market almost immediately with virtually no up front costs, you cannot be undercut on the cost of the software because you too can afford to give it away free, and you can provide better support services because you are local and your labour costs are the same or lower than your competitors.
It is virtually impossible to compete with the large established players in a market they already control, even if the software is both superior and free. In a new market where your customers aren't already locked in to a competitors it's considerably easier, but the large player still has a massive advantage, and you won't be able to afford to develop, test, market and support software on your own while still undercutting the large competitors. Selling support services for open source is about the only strategy that stands a chance.
And what use are the machines without any additional apps, not to mention fixing those that break, and showing people how to use them because not all kids are inquisitive enough to work things out for themselves.
And what happens when the supplied version of windows ceases to be supported, and no new third party apps are being developed? They will have to upgrade, but will they be able to? Will there be a new version that supports the hardware?
As you pointed out, there will be a small percentage of people who want to learn, and giving them the capability to learn as much as possible about the system they use will benefit them greatly. Many of these people will need some encouragement to do so, windows doesn't encourage people to learn much.
But it's not just the benefit for the few who want to learn, it's the benefits conveyed on to others. If you have a handful of people in each community who become highly technical then they can help others in their community, help them to learn how to make better use of the machines they've been given, or these people can write software to benefit their communities. And if these individuals become good enough, they will potentially be able to offer consulting services to other areas - ie people who can afford to pay for them, building up a profitable business from a poor start.
Otherwise, those people with potential will either be stifled by the windows way of discouraging in depth learning, or will only learn to a limited degree... They will likely end up just pirating software, because they can't afford to buy it... They will be stuck with an obsolete version of windows that will increasingly not run newer apps, and before too long their current hardware will become useless. Their only choice will be to buy newer hardware which they may not be able to afford, and probably put a pirated copy of windows and a set of apps on it.
No, it's not as interoperable by a long shot... It has it's own APIs which are nothing like any other OS. Porting software to or from windows is far more difficult than porting it between linux/bsd/solaris/osx/etc...
Out of the box windows comes with very little capability for viewing any non microsoft file formats, they will only support a non microsoft format once it has become too ubiquitous to ignore, eg jpeg/mp3/ascii etc older versions only supported wav audio and bmp images... There's no default support for other common formats like PDF which everything else supports out of the box. There's no support for any non microsoft filesystems except iso9660, again because the had no choice...
It is always microsoft products that are non interoperable... If anyone else released products with such poor interoperability they would fail miserably, it's only because of their size that they can bully and coerce the customers.
A small number will desire to see the OS code.. A larger number will be curious if presented with the opportunity to see the code, but will not even consider the possibility on their own simply due to a lack of awareness. Most of these kids won't realise how computers can be programmed if you don't show them and give them the choice.
The difference is... The C64, VIC20, PET etc all dropped you into a BASIC interpreter and encouraged you to learn how do do more than just play prewritten games. Windows actively discourages you from doing this, even trying to view a list of system files is greeted with a "this is dangerous, dont do this" warning.
Commodore were very good in that respect, even the later Amiga systems came with simply instructions to copy the workbench disks, and then declared you can do anything you like to the copy and encouraged you to do so, worst case you simply go back to the start and make a new copy of the originals.
Only if they are made aware of the possibilities. Windows actively discourages learning about the underlying system, and is designed to convince users that doing so is dangerous and should be avoided...
The purpose is to encourage learning, not to create a dependency on proprietary software.
One will result in increased costs of entry into the market for these countries, as all their potential workers will only know proprietary software and insist on it, making it more expensive to get going and flowing money out of the country.
The other will result in a local industry where software is produced and supported locally, with money remaining in the local economy and jobs being created.
Yes, I agree it's entirely unethical to put the content on the disc and then charge you extra to actually use it, it's underhand and involves hidden costs to rip you off further for the same product rather than selling you an expansion pack that was developed later.
On the other hand, i have no issue with paying to play an online game, i actually prefer this since the company actually has to continue working in order to guarantee their revenue stream. You're buying a service that it costs them time and money to provide, not an intangible piece of software that it costs them nothing to copy. However if the game requires online play, you should get the actual software for free - after all, it's just a client, the server is where the gameplay is.
Everyone has a different level of profiteering that they will tollerate, relative to what you actually get for your money...
Do you think people will complain about a new innovative game that's priced at say $30? How about a version of solitaire that just comes with a new set of card graphics for $70?
Games now are far more expensive than they used to be, and in many cases the gameplay isn't as good and a lot of games are encumbered with drm schemes that hinder the paying customers (and don't mention pirates, pirate copies don't have drm so it has no effect on them), it's just covered up with better graphics, bought and paid for reviews and marketing hype.
That's always been the case... A few years ago you'd get a "sequel" which was actually just the same game with a bunch of new levels and a couple of bugfixes..
Yes, they need something GPL-like to prevent big corps from taking their research, making a slight tweak and patenting the result...
The difference is that knowledge is not a limited resource, it is only artificially limited by these large corps and the laws they have bought and paid for.
There is also Proxmox VE, which has the web interface and uses an embedded VNC Java applet for controlling the machines... It seems quite good, but is still in beta.
The requirement for a windows management program put me off too, i would much rather have something web based for the management of the host (adding/removing virtuals, power up/down, changing virtual hardware etc) and something standards compliant for interacting with the virtual images (eg vnc for graphical, ssh for text based serial consoles). I use a mac primarily, paying extra for a copy of windows and the hassle not to mention overheads of running it in a vm don't appeal to me, and i want to be able to admin things from my phone if necessary (i was able to ssh to an hp lights out management card and correct a system that was failing to boot via serial console, all from my phone while sitting in a restaurant).
He didn't, he even denied having anything to do with them... However later he proceeded to praise those that carried out the attacks. This doesn't mean he claimed responsibility for them, he merely praises those who did... And why not? The US has been blaming him, and trying to hunt him and his associates down for years... It makes sense he would be supportive of anyone attacking his enemies.
We shouldn't, and more importantly we shouldn't be changing our rules to bend to the will of others...
If you want to go and live in an islamic country, you will be expected to follow the existing rules, you will be expected not to eat pork etc... You don't see people from the west migrating to islamic countries and demanding the right to eat pork, expected to learn the language or anything else that islam forbids...
Why then should people come to western countries and demand exceptions to the law just for them, like their own religious holidays (in addition to existing holiday allowances), the right to wear a turban instead of a motorcycle helmet etc...
Western countries bend over backwards to accommodate immigrants, most other countries do not...
In my opinion, if you choose to move to another country you should know what that entails and what laws and customs are already in place there... And if you are not willing to obey those laws, respect if not follow the customs, and learn the local language then you have no business going there.
If you want to live in a country with customs laws and language like your home country, then why not stay there? If they way they do things is so great, don't leave... And if you want to move somewhere else because you think that country is better, ask yourself WHY that country is better, could it have something to do with the culture? If you change their culture to match the country you came from, then you will end up right back where you started.
If he had such weapons at his disposal, surely he would have used them when his country was being invaded... He had nothing to lose, he was always going to get defeated and ultimately executed facing such a large and well equipped enemy.
Absolutely, a computer is a tool that should do exactly what the user tells it to...
* It should not second guess the user * It should not disobey the user's instructions, * It should not bother the user with unimportant information, * It should not demand the users attention (focus grabbing) but rather wait until the user chooses to read whatever information it has to display.
Slashdot Mirror
And rightly so... .org TLD anyway.
The olympics is supposed to be a non commercial sporting venture, and thus belongs on the
Yes, it would be entirely unreasonable...
What if i decided to register something like Paris2020.com, perhaps i planned to run an eye clinic in Paris or something... They can't suddenly decide a few years from now that Paris is going to bid for the olympics in 2020 and that gives them the right to hijack the domain, even worse is the fact they will drop the domain either when the bid is rejected, or when the games are concluded anyway.
It's also not uncommon to use a numeric year as a name for something, usually referring to the year it was first sold or such...
Sim City 2000
Windows 2003
Gateway 2000
etc etc...
The point is that many potential customers won't pay, and resort to piracy instead.
Those that do pay also usually feel the price is too high, but aren't militant enough to do anything about it.
And then there's all the kids who simply can't afford to buy games at the current price points.
When i was younger and had an Amiga i looked at the average price of games ($25-35), looked at how much money i got a week to spend ($4 and sometimes larger amounts for birthday etc), and figured that it would take me 7-8 weeks to get the money together to buy a game, assuming i didn't spend it on anything else, thats a long time especially to a child.
I also figured that when i got a lump sum for my birthday, i could either buy 3-4 games that may or may not get boring quickly, or i could buy a hardware upgrade, and copy games from other kids at school.
Remember, some kids are poor and cant afford games, but they still go to school with kids who can... Piracy can put these kids on a more level playing field. Otherwise they simply wouldn't have any games, or would end up with a few very old games and a piece of vintage hardware to run them on, which all their peers at school ridicule.
And who will train them how to do that and support them when things break?
Costly commercial support, or some helpful "geeky" locals?
If you stifle those geeky locals they won't bother, they will learn how to fix cars or something instead.
There is nothing to stop microsoft implementing their own PDF reader, the format specs are open and easily implemented. That's what Apple have done.
They could also license adobe reader for bundling...
Or they could bundle the same open source apps that come with linux distributions.
The issue is, microsoft can only be bothered to include support for their own formats, except in cases where they had no other choice (a browser that didnt support jpeg or gif images would be laughable for instance)... Earlier versions didn't even do that, 3.11 could only play wave audio and display the bmp format of images, even tho neither of these formats were commonly used under dos or on other platforms available at the time. Supporting the common formats used by dos apps would have been the right thing to do.
It's only sensible to at the very least include viewers for the most common formats of each type, if not including full blown apps to edit and create such files.
Instead they don't, largely because they want to stifle standard formats and push their own... It's only in a few small and largely irrelevant cases that they've been forced to concede defeat.
But it's not...
For someone who has no familiarity with computers, the dumbed down linux installs that come with netbooks these days are a lot easier than windows. You get a simple menu system, and a full suite of applications ready to be used, and a simple tool giving you a list of additional applications you can install with a single click. No confusing "start menu" to navigate, no hassle to download and install apps manually etc..
Windows is only perceived as being easier because people are already familiar with it.
New (ie newer than the os your trying to install) hardware generally won't work regardless of what OS you want to put on it...
New hardware will typically have drivers for the current versions of windows, but you have to install them manually, which depending on the nature of the hardware can be rather difficult.
Some very new hardware can lack linux drivers at all.
On the other hand, new linux distributions come out far more frequently than windows so if your hardware has been on sale more than a couple of months chances are it will be supported out of the box by current linux distros.
I agree with your previous points, but not this one: netbooks have a fan (so are more fragile), consume as much power as regular laptops (which they are with a smaller screen), their screen cannot be read easily in daylight on a sunny day, they don't have mesh networking, etc: there are many reasons why the OLPC XO-1 is better suited for the third world schools than netbooks (even running Linux).
Isn't mesh networking simply a software function? or does it require explicit hardware support?
The fan and screen are relatively easy things that could be changed... Most netbooks are considerably more powerful than the OLPC, and would happily run fanless if clocked down to similar performance levels.
Not really, hence their push for Windows-XP for netbooks. Chinese users have always pirated Windows, why wouldn't they pirate Windows XP for their netbooks. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft make a Vista-light or keep making an XP version for those netbooks to ensure that Linux's usage stay marginal.
Because in order to further reduce cost, some of these manufacturers forego the more expensive x86 compatible processors that can run windows, in favor of cheaper and lower power chinese produced ARM or MIPS based cores, which cannot run windows, but will run linux perfectly well while being cheaper and more power efficient. ARM processors pretty much dominate the cellphone market, are manufactured by the millions, and are cheap and low power while being more than powerful enough to run linux.
Maybe, have you noticed that the price of netbooks since the first EEE 701 have only gone up?
Hardware makers don't like too cheap hardware because they're afraid of loosing sells of higher priced laptops..
Yes, hardware makers like HP, Dell, Asus etc who have existing product lines of laptops to protect...
But what about chinese companies who don't already produce laptops, and thus have no existing market to protect?
A home grown proprietary market would have a lot of trouble succeeding against free software and large proprietary players from other countries...
By being small, your costs would be higher and your market smaller... A large player like microsoft on the other hand has already recouped their development costs a thousand times over and can afford to give their software away for free if necessary, at least until the local competition has been eliminated.
It would also take you considerable time and money to develop your proprietary software to a marketable state during which time you will not be generating any revenue, whereas your competitors will already have products on sale.
By concentrating on open source you can get to market almost immediately with virtually no up front costs, you cannot be undercut on the cost of the software because you too can afford to give it away free, and you can provide better support services because you are local and your labour costs are the same or lower than your competitors.
It is virtually impossible to compete with the large established players in a market they already control, even if the software is both superior and free.
In a new market where your customers aren't already locked in to a competitors it's considerably easier, but the large player still has a massive advantage, and you won't be able to afford to develop, test, market and support software on your own while still undercutting the large competitors. Selling support services for open source is about the only strategy that stands a chance.
And what use are the machines without any additional apps, not to mention fixing those that break, and showing people how to use them because not all kids are inquisitive enough to work things out for themselves.
And what happens when the supplied version of windows ceases to be supported, and no new third party apps are being developed? They will have to upgrade, but will they be able to? Will there be a new version that supports the hardware?
As you pointed out, there will be a small percentage of people who want to learn, and giving them the capability to learn as much as possible about the system they use will benefit them greatly. Many of these people will need some encouragement to do so, windows doesn't encourage people to learn much.
But it's not just the benefit for the few who want to learn, it's the benefits conveyed on to others. If you have a handful of people in each community who become highly technical then they can help others in their community, help them to learn how to make better use of the machines they've been given, or these people can write software to benefit their communities. And if these individuals become good enough, they will potentially be able to offer consulting services to other areas - ie people who can afford to pay for them, building up a profitable business from a poor start.
Otherwise, those people with potential will either be stifled by the windows way of discouraging in depth learning, or will only learn to a limited degree... They will likely end up just pirating software, because they can't afford to buy it... They will be stuck with an obsolete version of windows that will increasingly not run newer apps, and before too long their current hardware will become useless. Their only choice will be to buy newer hardware which they may not be able to afford, and probably put a pirated copy of windows and a set of apps on it.
No, it's not as interoperable by a long shot...
It has it's own APIs which are nothing like any other OS.
Porting software to or from windows is far more difficult than porting it between linux/bsd/solaris/osx/etc...
Out of the box windows comes with very little capability for viewing any non microsoft file formats, they will only support a non microsoft format once it has become too ubiquitous to ignore, eg jpeg/mp3/ascii etc older versions only supported wav audio and bmp images... There's no default support for other common formats like PDF which everything else supports out of the box. There's no support for any non microsoft filesystems except iso9660, again because the had no choice...
It is always microsoft products that are non interoperable... If anyone else released products with such poor interoperability they would fail miserably, it's only because of their size that they can bully and coerce the customers.
A small number will desire to see the OS code..
A larger number will be curious if presented with the opportunity to see the code, but will not even consider the possibility on their own simply due to a lack of awareness.
Most of these kids won't realise how computers can be programmed if you don't show them and give them the choice.
The difference is...
The C64, VIC20, PET etc all dropped you into a BASIC interpreter and encouraged you to learn how do do more than just play prewritten games.
Windows actively discourages you from doing this, even trying to view a list of system files is greeted with a "this is dangerous, dont do this" warning.
Commodore were very good in that respect, even the later Amiga systems came with simply instructions to copy the workbench disks, and then declared you can do anything you like to the copy and encouraged you to do so, worst case you simply go back to the start and make a new copy of the originals.
Only if they are made aware of the possibilities. Windows actively discourages learning about the underlying system, and is designed to convince users that doing so is dangerous and should be avoided...
The purpose is to encourage learning, not to create a dependency on proprietary software.
One will result in increased costs of entry into the market for these countries, as all their potential workers will only know proprietary software and insist on it, making it more expensive to get going and flowing money out of the country.
The other will result in a local industry where software is produced and supported locally, with money remaining in the local economy and jobs being created.
Yes, I agree it's entirely unethical to put the content on the disc and then charge you extra to actually use it, it's underhand and involves hidden costs to rip you off further for the same product rather than selling you an expansion pack that was developed later.
On the other hand, i have no issue with paying to play an online game, i actually prefer this since the company actually has to continue working in order to guarantee their revenue stream. You're buying a service that it costs them time and money to provide, not an intangible piece of software that it costs them nothing to copy. However if the game requires online play, you should get the actual software for free - after all, it's just a client, the server is where the gameplay is.
Everyone has a different level of profiteering that they will tollerate, relative to what you actually get for your money...
Do you think people will complain about a new innovative game that's priced at say $30?
How about a version of solitaire that just comes with a new set of card graphics for $70?
Games now are far more expensive than they used to be, and in many cases the gameplay isn't as good and a lot of games are encumbered with drm schemes that hinder the paying customers (and don't mention pirates, pirate copies don't have drm so it has no effect on them), it's just covered up with better graphics, bought and paid for reviews and marketing hype.
That's always been the case... A few years ago you'd get a "sequel" which was actually just the same game with a bunch of new levels and a couple of bugfixes..
Yes, they need something GPL-like to prevent big corps from taking their research, making a slight tweak and patenting the result...
The difference is that knowledge is not a limited resource, it is only artificially limited by these large corps and the laws they have bought and paid for.
There is also Proxmox VE, which has the web interface and uses an embedded VNC Java applet for controlling the machines... It seems quite good, but is still in beta.
The requirement for a windows management program put me off too, i would much rather have something web based for the management of the host (adding/removing virtuals, power up/down, changing virtual hardware etc) and something standards compliant for interacting with the virtual images (eg vnc for graphical, ssh for text based serial consoles).
I use a mac primarily, paying extra for a copy of windows and the hassle not to mention overheads of running it in a vm don't appeal to me, and i want to be able to admin things from my phone if necessary (i was able to ssh to an hp lights out management card and correct a system that was failing to boot via serial console, all from my phone while sitting in a restaurant).
He didn't, he even denied having anything to do with them...
However later he proceeded to praise those that carried out the attacks. This doesn't mean he claimed responsibility for them, he merely praises those who did... And why not? The US has been blaming him, and trying to hunt him and his associates down for years... It makes sense he would be supportive of anyone attacking his enemies.
We shouldn't, and more importantly we shouldn't be changing our rules to bend to the will of others...
If you want to go and live in an islamic country, you will be expected to follow the existing rules, you will be expected not to eat pork etc... You don't see people from the west migrating to islamic countries and demanding the right to eat pork, expected to learn the language or anything else that islam forbids...
Why then should people come to western countries and demand exceptions to the law just for them, like their own religious holidays (in addition to existing holiday allowances), the right to wear a turban instead of a motorcycle helmet etc...
Western countries bend over backwards to accommodate immigrants, most other countries do not...
In my opinion, if you choose to move to another country you should know what that entails and what laws and customs are already in place there... And if you are not willing to obey those laws, respect if not follow the customs, and learn the local language then you have no business going there.
If you want to live in a country with customs laws and language like your home country, then why not stay there? If they way they do things is so great, don't leave... And if you want to move somewhere else because you think that country is better, ask yourself WHY that country is better, could it have something to do with the culture? If you change their culture to match the country you came from, then you will end up right back where you started.
If he had such weapons at his disposal, surely he would have used them when his country was being invaded...
He had nothing to lose, he was always going to get defeated and ultimately executed facing such a large and well equipped enemy.
Absolutely, a computer is a tool that should do exactly what the user tells it to...
* It should not second guess the user
* It should not disobey the user's instructions,
* It should not bother the user with unimportant information,
* It should not demand the users attention (focus grabbing) but rather wait until the user chooses to read whatever information it has to display.