Safari doesn't really benefit Apple tho... It doesn't help them sell ipods like itunes does... The windows version doesn't help them sell macs... There's also nothing stopping someone else from taking the open source webkit and creating a new open source interface around it, and distributing it for free to be used on non apple labelled computers. It's just another alternative for windows users who got a horrendously outdated and buggy browser by default.
I know a few DJs, and have often helped them set up for gigs... Having to carry around trunks full of CDs, and having to flick through them manually to find the song you want is a huge pain in the backside. Also having to keep popping them in and out of the players is a pain... You have to carry a large selection, because listeners will request songs to be played, and you have no control over what they might want to hear. The idea of taking a large hard drive containing thousands of songs that can be electronically searched makes a LOT of sense. Also having all the songs available at once lets you queue up a larger set of songs in advance, some DJs want to go and dance with some of the girls that show up!
The answer is to reduce prices, rather than trying to keep them artificially high.
If copyright infringement is used as a source of funds by terrorist groups, and that's a big *IF*, setting higher punishments for the copyright infringement is actually going to help, not hinder them. Higher punishments may discourage some other parties, but terrorist groups, who are already engaging in far more illegal crimes (terrorism) which bring far greater punishments if caught, will simply not care about the comparatively light punishments for copyright infringement. These people are willing to risk lifetime imprisonment, or even death for their crimes... Do you think they're gonna care about the risk of a 5 year prison sentence while raising money for their cause? Ofcourse they won't, they will spend their 5 years in jail, meeting new criminally minded people, and come out 5 years later with new knowledge and contacts in the criminal world, ready to continue fighting for their cause. What the higher punishments will do tho, is discourage smaller copyright infringers who are not doing it for profit, or aren't using the profit to fund other more serious crime. These people are more likely to be scared out of the market, leaving more market share to any terrorists there might be.
However if you reduce the prices to such a level that it's no longer economically viable for the terrorists to sell copies, then they will lose this source of income and be forced to seek another. Copyright infringement is possible because the originals are so overpriced compared to the reproduction cost, and because the copies often remove undesirable anti-consumer measures (unskippable commercials, forced registration/activation, phone-home systems etc). Terrorists won't get rich selling warez copies of linux, just a thought.
Intel would love to buy AMD, and VIA, and be the only source of x86 compatible chips... Intel, like any other company, don't want motivation to progress. They want to continue selling old products for as long as possible at the highest price point they can, not be forced to develop something new and reduce prices in order to compete. Lucky for us consumers Intel don't have that ability, thanks to AMD... The problem is that Microsoft do have that ability, and they abuse it as much as they can. In a competitive marketplace, ODF would be prevalent (supported by a majority of vendors) and OOXML would die a death (supported by only one) and microsoft would have been forced to implement ODF like everyone else.
These architectures are cleaner (less backwards compatibility cruft) and therefore cheaper to produce... x86 only has economies of scale, but the actual per unit cost to a company like IBM is lower for PPC.. Console makers also want customized chips, which throw the economies of scale argument out the window. Also because of the lack of facilities to decode complex x86 instructions into micro-ops, the chip can be smaller and produce less heat... Similarly for things like out of order execution, the chip space to implement this is quite large, but compilers can in theory generate in-order code which is just as fast, assuming they know enough about the internal workings of the CPU.... On a games console, the CPU is always the same, so such assumptions are perfectly valid.
MIPS? MIPS is all but dead, especially at the high end now SGI no longer use them... We won't see the death of x86/x86-64 so long as people are using closed source software. Look at IA64, a promising architecture, but poor backwards compatibility and lack of third party closed source apps killed it. An IA64 machine made a very good linux system if everything you were running on it was open source. The same can be said for other architectures, Alpha was hugely faster than x86, and made a really great linux system, but closed source apps weren't there, windows was ported but it was only NT at a time when most end users ran 9x, very few apps ran natively and quite a lot didn't even run under emulation. Similarly PPC, if you're running entirely open source software a PPC makes a great system, if you need any closed source apps or drivers (think nvidia) then you're screwed.
For-profit companies won't develop for a new architecture until there is a sufficiently large market to make it profitable. End users won't buy systems until the software they want to run is available for it. It's a dependency loop...
So long as closed source software is prevalent, we will forever be stuck with x86/x86-64 and extensions thereof.
For people who have never used anything else, yes it's much easier... KDE/Gnome and OSX are also much easier for a new user to pick up than windows...
However, people already have prior experience of doing things differently, and thus are resistant to change regardless of wether that change is for the better or not.
If they had an active desire to develop a good open format, they would have joined the ODF committee when they were originally invited. They didn't, they chose to ignore it in the hope that ODF would just disappear... When it failed to disappear and started gaining traction, they realised they had no control over it, and rather than join the process and work with other parties, they sought to derail ODF and created their own competing format from scratch.
You played defender of the crown on CGA? Damn, get a copy of UAE and try the Amiga version, Amiga versions of games from that era are virtually all superior to their dos based counterparts.
Most consoles have USB ports... Most keyboards and mice these days are USB, and are dirt cheap... What's to stop console games implementing an option for keyboard/mouse control in some games? There are already alternative controllers for most consoles (steering wheels etc)... I would certainly go for keyboard/mouse options in some games. That's what made the Amiga good too, they connected to your TV like a console, booted games automatically like a console, used joysticks/joypads for games, and had a keyboard and mouse (optional on cdtv/cd32 but still available) for games which benefit from them.
Well, ODF "supports" OLE being embedded in it, but i believe you can only use it on windows systems.. If you load such a document on a mac or linux system it won't work correctly.
Mac office supports MOOXML, which is based on the original OOXML spec, not the newer version, and is still not fully compliant even with that version.
As for iWork, why don't you try passing documents back and forth between the 3 supposed OOXML supporting apps, start using some of the more exotic formatting features and see what happens...
I seem to remember there were no votes against it, and 1 abstention... The actual number of countries voting was much smaller too, as microsoft hadn't stuffed the system with easily bought countries by that point.
Unfortunately, MS are big enough that if they refuse to comply with the published standard, other vendors will simply be forced to reverse engineer and implement the deviations anyway. Otherwise the poorly informed majority of people will simply assume it is the third party implementation at fault, not MS.
But the point is, Microsoft don't care if people implement OOXML... Infact, they would prefer that noone else does, as that leaves users with no choice but to use their products.
They also have significant enough existing market share that their refusal to implement ODF hurts the standard significantly. They refused to implement it purely out of malice, as it would have been significantly easier for them to implement ODF (possibly extending it in the process) than to create OOXML from scratch. They also refused to particulate in the process by which ODF was created, again purely for selfish anti-consumer reasons.
Were they truly interested in developing an open standard, they would have worked with ODF, or at the very least attempted to, when they were first invited.
Actually, i believe they should suspend the process until the allegations of corruption can be thoroughly investigated. Any countries found to have broken the rules should have their vote changed to abstain and possibly have their status within the organization demoted. If there's sufficient evidence of corruption to call the result in to question (ie if all the countries forced to abstain were changed to yes or no it would change the result) then the process should be restarted, or dropped from the fast track.
The entire process should be opened up, each voting country should be required to document in detail why they voted yes or no (explanation shouldn't be necessary for abstentions), and in the case of a second vote should be required to address all of the comments submitted at the first vote, and explain why/how they have been addressed or aren't relevant to that country.
Those who vote on the issue should also be able to demonstrate a competent understanding of the proposal in question, and have done a sufficient level of research into the proposed standard and the issues surrounding it. It is entirely unreasonable for people with little or no understanding in particular fields to have any say in their standardization, for instance many people on slashdot will be qualified to discuss a standard for a computer document format, but considerably fewer will be qualified to help define a standard for fixings used to connect water pipes together etc.
If the air is cold enough, then there won't be any humidity, and dust is relatively easy to filter out. The colder air outside will render the external condenser of the aircon system more efficient, remember all aircon does is move the heat around. And you could use some level of heat exchange too, pump the warm air through a series of heatsink-clad pipes located outside and it will cool down fairly quickly.
Or could it be that, due to the original anonymous group against scientology being well, anonymous, they are easy to impersonate... Thus, the second anonymous group attacking epileptics is actually compose of members of the church of scientology seeking to discredit the original anonymous group?
Germany were fairly close to working it out for themselves too... The USSR may have recovered some of the german research after the war, and america certainly took some of their scientists.
There are parallels... Microsoft tried to "innovate" with vista, but people are sticking with XP... When your new product is seen as inferior (bigger, slower, less compatible, less reliable) than the old one then the "innovation" has failed... Same with new coke, people preferred the taste of the original. Microsoft were getting away with bigger larger slower products, because the older ones (think 98, 95, 3.1 etc) were so laughably unreliable that people accepted the inferior performance as simply being the price of improved stability... XP on the other hand is reasonably stable, arguably moreso than vista.
It's a way of getting money to other companies, who will return the favor by buying exclusively microsoft products etc... It's also quite profitable to get tax breaks to the retail value by donating software that costs nothing to produce to charity, especially since most of the recipients of charity could not afford to buy it at retail price anyway. They have also been known to donate hardware, usually hardware that is no longer useful within the company (too slow to run the latest bloatware), and its much cheaper than paying a company to dispose of it.
You can look at redhat for a better example... Corporate customers will always want support, they can buy that from redhat... Home users may want support, they can buy that from redhat... More experienced users can support themselves, they can download fedora or centos for free...
And with linux being collaboratively developed, the development costs are spread across a large number of companies operating in the same way, as well as the customer having more choice about where to get their software and support from, and support providers all having equal access to code so that they can provide a good level of support.
Think of linux like a standard, normally many competing companies come together to develop and improve a standard (no jokes about iso/ooxml), and then providing their own services around the standard.
Not only that, but software is often developed as a loss leader to add value to or promote other areas of a business... Think companies making hardware drivers, and support vendors like redhat.
Well, it used to be free as in available for no cost, and not covered in the cost of another product (from the users perspective)... As they made versions for MacOS, Solaris and HPUX aswell... These versions got canned very quickly too, once netscape had been killed off.
Fuse is also pretty cool and quite recent... Rsync... A lot of internet protocols were first implemented in open source code first, you're HTTP example is just one of many. There's also plenty of innovation to be had in producing a better version of something (as opposed to a possibly half assed replica)...
Slashdot Mirror
Safari doesn't really benefit Apple tho...
It doesn't help them sell ipods like itunes does...
The windows version doesn't help them sell macs...
There's also nothing stopping someone else from taking the open source webkit and creating a new open source interface around it, and distributing it for free to be used on non apple labelled computers.
It's just another alternative for windows users who got a horrendously outdated and buggy browser by default.
I know a few DJs, and have often helped them set up for gigs...
Having to carry around trunks full of CDs, and having to flick through them manually to find the song you want is a huge pain in the backside. Also having to keep popping them in and out of the players is a pain... You have to carry a large selection, because listeners will request songs to be played, and you have no control over what they might want to hear.
The idea of taking a large hard drive containing thousands of songs that can be electronically searched makes a LOT of sense. Also having all the songs available at once lets you queue up a larger set of songs in advance, some DJs want to go and dance with some of the girls that show up!
The answer is to reduce prices, rather than trying to keep them artificially high.
If copyright infringement is used as a source of funds by terrorist groups, and that's a big *IF*, setting higher punishments for the copyright infringement is actually going to help, not hinder them. Higher punishments may discourage some other parties, but terrorist groups, who are already engaging in far more illegal crimes (terrorism) which bring far greater punishments if caught, will simply not care about the comparatively light punishments for copyright infringement.
These people are willing to risk lifetime imprisonment, or even death for their crimes... Do you think they're gonna care about the risk of a 5 year prison sentence while raising money for their cause? Ofcourse they won't, they will spend their 5 years in jail, meeting new criminally minded people, and come out 5 years later with new knowledge and contacts in the criminal world, ready to continue fighting for their cause.
What the higher punishments will do tho, is discourage smaller copyright infringers who are not doing it for profit, or aren't using the profit to fund other more serious crime. These people are more likely to be scared out of the market, leaving more market share to any terrorists there might be.
However if you reduce the prices to such a level that it's no longer economically viable for the terrorists to sell copies, then they will lose this source of income and be forced to seek another. Copyright infringement is possible because the originals are so overpriced compared to the reproduction cost, and because the copies often remove undesirable anti-consumer measures (unskippable commercials, forced registration/activation, phone-home systems etc). Terrorists won't get rich selling warez copies of linux, just a thought.
Intel would love to buy AMD, and VIA, and be the only source of x86 compatible chips...
Intel, like any other company, don't want motivation to progress. They want to continue selling old products for as long as possible at the highest price point they can, not be forced to develop something new and reduce prices in order to compete. Lucky for us consumers Intel don't have that ability, thanks to AMD... The problem is that Microsoft do have that ability, and they abuse it as much as they can. In a competitive marketplace, ODF would be prevalent (supported by a majority of vendors) and OOXML would die a death (supported by only one) and microsoft would have been forced to implement ODF like everyone else.
These architectures are cleaner (less backwards compatibility cruft) and therefore cheaper to produce... x86 only has economies of scale, but the actual per unit cost to a company like IBM is lower for PPC..
Console makers also want customized chips, which throw the economies of scale argument out the window.
Also because of the lack of facilities to decode complex x86 instructions into micro-ops, the chip can be smaller and produce less heat... Similarly for things like out of order execution, the chip space to implement this is quite large, but compilers can in theory generate in-order code which is just as fast, assuming they know enough about the internal workings of the CPU.... On a games console, the CPU is always the same, so such assumptions are perfectly valid.
MIPS? MIPS is all but dead, especially at the high end now SGI no longer use them...
We won't see the death of x86/x86-64 so long as people are using closed source software. Look at IA64, a promising architecture, but poor backwards compatibility and lack of third party closed source apps killed it. An IA64 machine made a very good linux system if everything you were running on it was open source.
The same can be said for other architectures, Alpha was hugely faster than x86, and made a really great linux system, but closed source apps weren't there, windows was ported but it was only NT at a time when most end users ran 9x, very few apps ran natively and quite a lot didn't even run under emulation.
Similarly PPC, if you're running entirely open source software a PPC makes a great system, if you need any closed source apps or drivers (think nvidia) then you're screwed.
For-profit companies won't develop for a new architecture until there is a sufficiently large market to make it profitable. End users won't buy systems until the software they want to run is available for it. It's a dependency loop...
So long as closed source software is prevalent, we will forever be stuck with x86/x86-64 and extensions thereof.
For people who have never used anything else, yes it's much easier...
KDE/Gnome and OSX are also much easier for a new user to pick up than windows...
However, people already have prior experience of doing things differently, and thus are resistant to change regardless of wether that change is for the better or not.
If they had an active desire to develop a good open format, they would have joined the ODF committee when they were originally invited.
They didn't, they chose to ignore it in the hope that ODF would just disappear...
When it failed to disappear and started gaining traction, they realised they had no control over it, and rather than join the process and work with other parties, they sought to derail ODF and created their own competing format from scratch.
You played defender of the crown on CGA?
Damn, get a copy of UAE and try the Amiga version, Amiga versions of games from that era are virtually all superior to their dos based counterparts.
Most consoles have USB ports...
Most keyboards and mice these days are USB, and are dirt cheap...
What's to stop console games implementing an option for keyboard/mouse control in some games? There are already alternative controllers for most consoles (steering wheels etc)... I would certainly go for keyboard/mouse options in some games. That's what made the Amiga good too, they connected to your TV like a console, booted games automatically like a console, used joysticks/joypads for games, and had a keyboard and mouse (optional on cdtv/cd32 but still available) for games which benefit from them.
Well, ODF "supports" OLE being embedded in it, but i believe you can only use it on windows systems.. If you load such a document on a mac or linux system it won't work correctly.
Mac office supports MOOXML, which is based on the original OOXML spec, not the newer version, and is still not fully compliant even with that version.
As for iWork, why don't you try passing documents back and forth between the 3 supposed OOXML supporting apps, start using some of the more exotic formatting features and see what happens...
I seem to remember there were no votes against it, and 1 abstention... The actual number of countries voting was much smaller too, as microsoft hadn't stuffed the system with easily bought countries by that point.
Unfortunately, MS are big enough that if they refuse to comply with the published standard, other vendors will simply be forced to reverse engineer and implement the deviations anyway. Otherwise the poorly informed majority of people will simply assume it is the third party implementation at fault, not MS.
But the point is, Microsoft don't care if people implement OOXML... Infact, they would prefer that noone else does, as that leaves users with no choice but to use their products.
They also have significant enough existing market share that their refusal to implement ODF hurts the standard significantly. They refused to implement it purely out of malice, as it would have been significantly easier for them to implement ODF (possibly extending it in the process) than to create OOXML from scratch. They also refused to particulate in the process by which ODF was created, again purely for selfish anti-consumer reasons.
Were they truly interested in developing an open standard, they would have worked with ODF, or at the very least attempted to, when they were first invited.
Actually, i believe they should suspend the process until the allegations of corruption can be thoroughly investigated.
Any countries found to have broken the rules should have their vote changed to abstain and possibly have their status within the organization demoted.
If there's sufficient evidence of corruption to call the result in to question (ie if all the countries forced to abstain were changed to yes or no it would change the result) then the process should be restarted, or dropped from the fast track.
The entire process should be opened up, each voting country should be required to document in detail why they voted yes or no (explanation shouldn't be necessary for abstentions), and in the case of a second vote should be required to address all of the comments submitted at the first vote, and explain why/how they have been addressed or aren't relevant to that country.
Those who vote on the issue should also be able to demonstrate a competent understanding of the proposal in question, and have done a sufficient level of research into the proposed standard and the issues surrounding it. It is entirely unreasonable for people with little or no understanding in particular fields to have any say in their standardization, for instance many people on slashdot will be qualified to discuss a standard for a computer document format, but considerably fewer will be qualified to help define a standard for fixings used to connect water pipes together etc.
If the air is cold enough, then there won't be any humidity, and dust is relatively easy to filter out.
The colder air outside will render the external condenser of the aircon system more efficient, remember all aircon does is move the heat around. And you could use some level of heat exchange too, pump the warm air through a series of heatsink-clad pipes located outside and it will cool down fairly quickly.
Or could it be that, due to the original anonymous group against scientology being well, anonymous, they are easy to impersonate...
Thus, the second anonymous group attacking epileptics is actually compose of members of the church of scientology seeking to discredit the original anonymous group?
Germany were fairly close to working it out for themselves too...
The USSR may have recovered some of the german research after the war, and america certainly took some of their scientists.
There are parallels...
Microsoft tried to "innovate" with vista, but people are sticking with XP...
When your new product is seen as inferior (bigger, slower, less compatible, less reliable) than the old one then the "innovation" has failed... Same with new coke, people preferred the taste of the original.
Microsoft were getting away with bigger larger slower products, because the older ones (think 98, 95, 3.1 etc) were so laughably unreliable that people accepted the inferior performance as simply being the price of improved stability... XP on the other hand is reasonably stable, arguably moreso than vista.
It's a way of getting money to other companies, who will return the favor by buying exclusively microsoft products etc...
It's also quite profitable to get tax breaks to the retail value by donating software that costs nothing to produce to charity, especially since most of the recipients of charity could not afford to buy it at retail price anyway.
They have also been known to donate hardware, usually hardware that is no longer useful within the company (too slow to run the latest bloatware), and its much cheaper than paying a company to dispose of it.
You can look at redhat for a better example...
Corporate customers will always want support, they can buy that from redhat...
Home users may want support, they can buy that from redhat...
More experienced users can support themselves, they can download fedora or centos for free...
And with linux being collaboratively developed, the development costs are spread across a large number of companies operating in the same way, as well as the customer having more choice about where to get their software and support from, and support providers all having equal access to code so that they can provide a good level of support.
Think of linux like a standard, normally many competing companies come together to develop and improve a standard (no jokes about iso/ooxml), and then providing their own services around the standard.
Not only that, but software is often developed as a loss leader to add value to or promote other areas of a business... Think companies making hardware drivers, and support vendors like redhat.
Well, it used to be free as in available for no cost, and not covered in the cost of another product (from the users perspective)... As they made versions for MacOS, Solaris and HPUX aswell... These versions got canned very quickly too, once netscape had been killed off.
Fuse is also pretty cool and quite recent...
Rsync...
A lot of internet protocols were first implemented in open source code first, you're HTTP example is just one of many.
There's also plenty of innovation to be had in producing a better version of something (as opposed to a possibly half assed replica)...
And eyecandy is arguably an evolution of enlightenment, that was looking pretty when interfaces like OS9 were boring and plain.