The phone company (Myanmar Post & Telecom - http://www.mpt.net.mm/ normally, tho its down right now) is owned and tightly controlled by the government. They can cut off international phonecalls just as quickly as they did Internet. Aside from that, the cost of international phonecalls effectively cuts off all but the richest people over there, and those rich people tend to be part of the regime and have no interest in bringing it down.
Well, Burma is the British name for the country... And what it was officially called while occupied by the British. It's also easier to pronounce, and will probably stick around regardless.. Think Germany vs Deutschland
Actually, Burma is what the British called it when they invaded... The locals always called it Myanmar, and regardless of government would probably still have renamed it back after becoming independent from Britain.
Only very lazy people would... Most people would clean up their own shit, and those who didnt would end up being cast out. I used to live in a house with no sewer system, everything went into a cesspool in the back garden, a good distance away from the house. Every few months a truck came along to remove the solid waste that remained in there, as liquid had mostly evaporated or drained away.
That's crap... They've been saying that along, but never really giving any serious examples. Also, when the ODF format was being created, Microsoft were invited to join the committee and would have been able to address any missing features at that stage, they refused repeatedly.
You still need to get the sunlight through to the algae... so for the lower layers you'd need a complex system of mirrors to direct sunlight down there.
But put what kind of pressure? All they've talked about so far is sanctions, but what good will that do? Sanctions won't hurt the Burmese government, they will still sell their natural gas and buy weapons on the black market. It won't be the government that suffers, it will be the ordinary people on the street who are already suffering. The Burmese government is not above forcing people to work for free, or allowing people to starve
Macs have never really been more expensive, they just never offered anything on the ultra low end... Lowend office PCs used to come without soundcards, macs never did... Macs used to ship with SCSI drives as standard, higher end SCSI based PCs always cost around the same as macs.
True the OSX GUI is quite heavy, but it's far from essential and it's far lighter than vista's interface... And modern macs are not locked to OSX, you can run windows or linux on them easily enough (i know several people who do this), and i cant think of any reason why any other x86 os such as freebsd wouldnt run on them.
Gentoo is very strong in certain niches... Among security testers (penetration testing etc) Gentoo is about the most prominent distribution, and in other areas where there's lots of highly technical people. It's because Gentoo offers you a decent level of convenience, while not sacrificing flexibility (linux from scratch is more flexible in some ways, but far less convenient). You also gain some security advantages from having apps compiled slightly differently to anyone else. No binary based distribution will ever offer the same flexibility, because to compile and distribute every package in every possible configuration would be ridiculous.
I agree, what is it with commercial vendors and having to write a horrible kludgy "installer"... What's wrong with just providing packages for the standard package manager?
What will make linux succeed is what made windows/dos succeed in the first place, and what you talked about...
Companies used windows/dos on x86 machines because it was cheaper than buying "proper" computers from the likes of IBM (ie mainframes). Once the inertia of proprietary lockin has been overcome, they will do the same with linux. Home users will follow suit because they want to have the same as they do at work, just like they did before (The home market used to be ruled by the likes of Commodore).
Their update software sucks, i found it very unstable when i last tried it... You also never used to need it, you used to be able to download all the updates manually and just unzip them into the device (it shows up as a standard usb storage device).
I find the following quote from the article quite misleading:
"Imagine I'm an IT manager contemplating standardising on a mobile platform. I want something rich enough to deliver applications, that's available from multiple manufacturers, offering a decent range of handsets with corporate features. Linux just falls down on all of those."
The point of "that's available from multiple manufacturers", while a very valid point, surely linux is the only one that really is available from multiple manufacturers. With symbian or windows mobile, you may be able to get the hardware from multiple vendors, but your stuck with a single vendor for the software. With linux, as the article states, there are at least 2 groups pushing mobile linux, and multiple hardware manufacturers also rolling their own.
The freedom of being able to buy your hardware from multiple vendors doesn't is far less of an advantage if you only have one vendor to buy the software from, whereas the freedom to obtain both hardware and software from multiple vendors is a huge benefit to the purchaser.
However new versions don't cost money... There really is no reason to divert developer time away from writing the new version, to fix up the old one, excepting security problems of course.
This is utterly ridiculous, the only person they should be suing is the photographer. It was him who took the photo, and him who chose to distribute it under the creative commons licence. If he did this without the knowledge or permission of the subject, then they might have a case.
On the other hand, their daughter now has her 15 minutes of fame, and might even be able to model for other work.
Airlines aren't always in direct competition with each other... Very few airlines offer a totally global service, often they will have deals with other airlines to carry their passengers onwards to other destinations, for instance a european airline might only offer direct flights to a few major cities in the US, and then have deals with a local american airline to carry their passengers onwards... For this to work smoothly, they need to be using the same or a compatible booking system, so it would make sense for one to be collaboratively developed by several airlines. There is also a company called SITA (www.sita.aero) that handles airport networks, and interconnects between airlines, i would imagine they have a centralized bookings system for just the purposes i mentioned above.
I think a lot of people would pay good money for a hardware/software bundle which is built together as a cohesive whole... This removes driver problems, since the hardware configuration is known up front. Apple already do this, they sell bundles of standard x86 hardware running mostly open source code. There's also all the high end vendors who do the same, people like Sun and IBM etc.
And don't forget appliances, most people don't want to build their own video recorder, manufacturers can save a lot of money and attract certain types of customers by using open source, and still sell huge numbers of units to the mass market.
Well, your best support is a competitive market... A proprietary product can only be properly supported by the company that produced it, any third party support will be restricted by lack of access to code (not just to read, but to modify) and internal documentation. And since only one company can support it, there is no competition for providing support for that product, giving them no incentive to improve the support quality or lower the price.
With open source, third parties can easily open up to offer support to the same level as anyone else, if all the support companies for a product offer an expensive and poor service, that leaves an opportunity for someone else to operate in that area.
The west already can't compete on price with the chinese... So perhaps they should stop trying, stop producing buggy software to emulate operations that hardware should be doing, and produce proper hardware to do it, which they can sell as premium quality goods, instead of competing with the low end cheap stuff coming from china. Most of the software based devices i've ever used have been incredibly buggy, less compatible and/or slower than their hardware based counterparts. Some of them improved in reliability once third parties had reverse engineered them and produced better drivers.
As an example, the original alcatel speedtouch usb dsl modems... The official drivers were horrendous and suffered from heaps of problem, the windows drivers were very late to support xp, and at least the early versions didnt work at all on multiprocessor machines, and the drivers would often lock up (i witnessed this on windows 2000) more often when the machine was under load but quite randomly otherwise, requiring you to reboot the machine. The official linux drivers were just as bad, incredibly unstable tho they did work with multiple cpus and didnt become noticeably more unreliable under load. They also had all kinds of problems with various USB chipsets, they worked reasonably well with 2 VIA chipsets i had, but an old Intel chipset (pentium pro FX chipset i believe, one of the first to support usb) could barely stay up for more than 5 minutes.
Later some third party drivers came out for linux, which improved the situation massively, but the devices themselves were never all that great. Replacing the usb device with a hardware based dsl router that connected via ethernet removed all the problems, and everything worked well after that (all my ethernet cards are decent quality ones, not ones where most of the processing is done by the cpu).
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I doubt it, operating a non government controlled communications device is illegal and the punishment quite severe.
The phone company (Myanmar Post & Telecom - http://www.mpt.net.mm/ normally, tho its down right now) is owned and tightly controlled by the government.
They can cut off international phonecalls just as quickly as they did Internet.
Aside from that, the cost of international phonecalls effectively cuts off all but the richest people over there, and those rich people tend to be part of the regime and have no interest in bringing it down.
Well, Burma is the British name for the country... And what it was officially called while occupied by the British.
It's also easier to pronounce, and will probably stick around regardless.. Think Germany vs Deutschland
Actually, Burma is what the British called it when they invaded...
The locals always called it Myanmar, and regardless of government would probably still have renamed it back after becoming independent from Britain.
Only very lazy people would...
Most people would clean up their own shit, and those who didnt would end up being cast out.
I used to live in a house with no sewer system, everything went into a cesspool in the back garden, a good distance away from the house. Every few months a truck came along to remove the solid waste that remained in there, as liquid had mostly evaporated or drained away.
That's crap... They've been saying that along, but never really giving any serious examples.
Also, when the ODF format was being created, Microsoft were invited to join the committee and would have been able to address any missing features at that stage, they refused repeatedly.
You still need to get the sunlight through to the algae... so for the lower layers you'd need a complex system of mirrors to direct sunlight down there.
But put what kind of pressure? All they've talked about so far is sanctions, but what good will that do?
Sanctions won't hurt the Burmese government, they will still sell their natural gas and buy weapons on the black market. It won't be the government that suffers, it will be the ordinary people on the street who are already suffering.
The Burmese government is not above forcing people to work for free, or allowing people to starve
Macs have never really been more expensive, they just never offered anything on the ultra low end...
Lowend office PCs used to come without soundcards, macs never did...
Macs used to ship with SCSI drives as standard, higher end SCSI based PCs always cost around the same as macs.
True the OSX GUI is quite heavy, but it's far from essential and it's far lighter than vista's interface...
And modern macs are not locked to OSX, you can run windows or linux on them easily enough (i know several people who do this), and i cant think of any reason why any other x86 os such as freebsd wouldnt run on them.
You could always use vsftpd, it supports FTPS (ftp over ssl) and lets you chroot the users into their homedirs...
Gentoo is very strong in certain niches...
Among security testers (penetration testing etc) Gentoo is about the most prominent distribution, and in other areas where there's lots of highly technical people.
It's because Gentoo offers you a decent level of convenience, while not sacrificing flexibility (linux from scratch is more flexible in some ways, but far less convenient).
You also gain some security advantages from having apps compiled slightly differently to anyone else.
No binary based distribution will ever offer the same flexibility, because to compile and distribute every package in every possible configuration would be ridiculous.
I agree, what is it with commercial vendors and having to write a horrible kludgy "installer"...
What's wrong with just providing packages for the standard package manager?
What will make linux succeed is what made windows/dos succeed in the first place, and what you talked about...
Companies used windows/dos on x86 machines because it was cheaper than buying "proper" computers from the likes of IBM (ie mainframes). Once the inertia of proprietary lockin has been overcome, they will do the same with linux.
Home users will follow suit because they want to have the same as they do at work, just like they did before (The home market used to be ruled by the likes of Commodore).
Hmm, pretty sure i can upgrade all the software on my nokia N800, it too runs linux by default but you can rebuild it and install your own apps too.
Their update software sucks, i found it very unstable when i last tried it...
You also never used to need it, you used to be able to download all the updates manually and just unzip them into the device (it shows up as a standard usb storage device).
I find the following quote from the article quite misleading:
"Imagine I'm an IT manager contemplating standardising on a mobile platform. I want something rich enough to deliver applications, that's available from multiple manufacturers, offering a decent range of handsets with corporate features. Linux just falls down on all of those."
The point of "that's available from multiple manufacturers", while a very valid point, surely linux is the only one that really is available from multiple manufacturers.
With symbian or windows mobile, you may be able to get the hardware from multiple vendors, but your stuck with a single vendor for the software. With linux, as the article states, there are at least 2 groups pushing mobile linux, and multiple hardware manufacturers also rolling their own.
The freedom of being able to buy your hardware from multiple vendors doesn't is far less of an advantage if you only have one vendor to buy the software from, whereas the freedom to obtain both hardware and software from multiple vendors is a huge benefit to the purchaser.
However new versions don't cost money...
There really is no reason to divert developer time away from writing the new version, to fix up the old one, excepting security problems of course.
This is utterly ridiculous, the only person they should be suing is the photographer.
It was him who took the photo, and him who chose to distribute it under the creative commons licence. If he did this without the knowledge or permission of the subject, then they might have a case.
On the other hand, their daughter now has her 15 minutes of fame, and might even be able to model for other work.
Airlines aren't always in direct competition with each other...
Very few airlines offer a totally global service, often they will have deals with other airlines to carry their passengers onwards to other destinations, for instance a european airline might only offer direct flights to a few major cities in the US, and then have deals with a local american airline to carry their passengers onwards...
For this to work smoothly, they need to be using the same or a compatible booking system, so it would make sense for one to be collaboratively developed by several airlines.
There is also a company called SITA (www.sita.aero) that handles airport networks, and interconnects between airlines, i would imagine they have a centralized bookings system for just the purposes i mentioned above.
I think a lot of people would pay good money for a hardware/software bundle which is built together as a cohesive whole...
This removes driver problems, since the hardware configuration is known up front. Apple already do this, they sell bundles of standard x86 hardware running mostly open source code. There's also all the high end vendors who do the same, people like Sun and IBM etc.
And don't forget appliances, most people don't want to build their own video recorder, manufacturers can save a lot of money and attract certain types of customers by using open source, and still sell huge numbers of units to the mass market.
Free code to be taken by a commercial entity, changed just enough to render it incompatible, and then sold back to you for a ridiculous price.
Well, your best support is a competitive market...
A proprietary product can only be properly supported by the company that produced it, any third party support will be restricted by lack of access to code (not just to read, but to modify) and internal documentation.
And since only one company can support it, there is no competition for providing support for that product, giving them no incentive to improve the support quality or lower the price.
With open source, third parties can easily open up to offer support to the same level as anyone else, if all the support companies for a product offer an expensive and poor service, that leaves an opportunity for someone else to operate in that area.
The west already can't compete on price with the chinese...
So perhaps they should stop trying, stop producing buggy software to emulate operations that hardware should be doing, and produce proper hardware to do it, which they can sell as premium quality goods, instead of competing with the low end cheap stuff coming from china.
Most of the software based devices i've ever used have been incredibly buggy, less compatible and/or slower than their hardware based counterparts. Some of them improved in reliability once third parties had reverse engineered them and produced better drivers.
As an example, the original alcatel speedtouch usb dsl modems... The official drivers were horrendous and suffered from heaps of problem, the windows drivers were very late to support xp, and at least the early versions didnt work at all on multiprocessor machines, and the drivers would often lock up (i witnessed this on windows 2000) more often when the machine was under load but quite randomly otherwise, requiring you to reboot the machine. The official linux drivers were just as bad, incredibly unstable tho they did work with multiple cpus and didnt become noticeably more unreliable under load.
They also had all kinds of problems with various USB chipsets, they worked reasonably well with 2 VIA chipsets i had, but an old Intel chipset (pentium pro FX chipset i believe, one of the first to support usb) could barely stay up for more than 5 minutes.
Later some third party drivers came out for linux, which improved the situation massively, but the devices themselves were never all that great.
Replacing the usb device with a hardware based dsl router that connected via ethernet removed all the problems, and everything worked well after that (all my ethernet cards are decent quality ones, not ones where most of the processing is done by the cpu).
Where's the list?