I feel differently, i will quite often buy again from sellers who have given me good service before and i`l be more patient with a buyer who has bought from me before... Also if you had random usernames, what if someone signs up a boatload of bogus accounts, buys valueless phantom items from a malicious account and gives positive feedback.. You`d be buying from a malicious user with reasonable feedback, and couldn`t verify the buyers.
People will still make music to be famous (and fame will amount much higher if copies of the songs are available for free) and musicians can still generate revenue from live shows, you can`t pirate a live show and a live performance is a physical job that will always have a price associated with it, unlike mass reproduction of digital media. Allowing media to be copied for free while charging for live performances will be a much fairer system..
Poor kids will be able to have just as large a music collection as the rich kids.. Artists will have to actually WORK to earn money, instead of sitting on their ass while songs they sung 20 years ago are reproduced endlessly. Artists work will have more exposure to the public, and better music will attract more fans who will attend more live shows. Poor quality manufactured bands will be less prevelant, as music will be less of a "get rich quick" industry and the poor music will discourage people from attending live shows.. Also there will be far less hype surrounding these manufactured acts.
The bundling of suse is very different: Suse don't gain anything from bundling lots of third party software, it`s merely done for convenience. Suse bundle multiple apps performing the same function, to give users choice, there is nothing to stop someone coming along and offering them additional software.. For instance if they were bundling a browser, they wouldn`t refuse a request from netscape to bundle netscape`s browser aswell. Apps bundled with suse can be REMOVED..
Suse`s bundling is more like what dell does than microsoft. Everything they ship is removeable (tho you may need to do a clean install in the case of dell), and you can go to another vendor if you don`t like it.
Maybe if people would follow standards, we would have the freedom to choose what app to run and our lives would be much easier. Unfortunately, microsoft and other companies like to create their own proprietary formats and protocols, forcing you to use their software, which results in people trying to minimise the amount of software they're forced to use.
Well then wait for OSX on x86, most adobe products are available for mac too... And i wonder how long before something like wine, but allowing OSX apps to run under linux will become available.
Hopefully once apple transition to x86 and there`s a good selection of x86/OSX apps available, someone will implement the OSX APIs on top of linux.. So that we can run OSX programs in much the same way wine works, tho it should be easier to implement apple`s api.
Also a lot of websites are designed so poorly that they don`t expand to fit the available width.. so they just occupy a thin column down the middle of the screen on a widescreen display anyway.
Printed material will often take a few days to arrive, whereas a digital copy could be accessed instantly.. As for converting to other formats, this becomes easier by the government using open formats, if they use closed formats then they can only convert to other formats supported by a single app vendor whereas open formats will rapidly have lots of conversion tools available to many formats.
So don`t use acrobat, use another PDF reader.. there are plenty out there.. "preview" that comes with OSX works well for me. Or, just remove the acrobat browser plugin, then it will load it with the actual acrobat program instead of trying to embed it into your browser, so it wont lock up your browser.
And how is this done? Also, why should I (as a webserver admin) need to modify my server config to cater to buggy browser behaviour? Surely this is a browser bug that needs fixing rather than a hassle for every webserver admin in the world.
Yeah, IE also rechecks cached pages every time instead of caching them until the site says they should expire.. That causes a lot more hits.. Mozilla and Opera don`t do that.. But i`m not sure if mozilla reloads a page from the server if you press back or not.
In a truly free market the prices will always get driven as low as possible.. For software this will be free or close-to.. The only cost of producing software is a one-off development cost, and this can be offset by reusing code that has already been developed. The price of software has been kept artificially high, while hardware has gone down in price massively.. However software has much furthur to fall. There will always be things that will have to cost money, because there is an ongoing cost to provide them, hardware may drop to razor thin margins due to competition, but it will never be free due to the raw materials and manufacturing process. Support also will never be free because someone has to physically provide it. This is why sun is starting to give their software away for free, while still making money on support services and hardware.. This is also why microsoft is trying to diversify into services (msn etc) since their existing business model is doomed to failure in the long term.
Selling something (in this case software) at such a hugely inflated price relative to production cost (the initial development costs of most popular software has been recouped many times over already) is tantamount to fraud, and the sooner companies are no longer able to get away with this the better.
It`s quite flakey to build, and takes a long time.. Gentoo seems to have issues with java-config (java-config is a python script, OOo includes its own copy of python which is missing the java-config modules) it doesnt work if you`ve upgraded python to 2.4 etc.. Also on AMD64 you need to use the linux32 command to fake your uname as 32bit.. I ended up building a 32bit chroot on my AMD box using versions of python/gcc/etc i knew worked, and building it there.
Also the openoffice build process is very different to most apps, it has a configure script in a subdir, a seperate bootstrap script and finally it`s own make program that doesn`t seem to work with multithreading.
Nah, msoffice isn`t so cross platform, doesnt have regular expression searches and doesn`t let you write macros in 4 different languages (3 of which are usefull languages, not forcing you to learn it's own proprietary macro language which is useless for anything else)
The windows version works fine.. The mac version is OK, but not as good as one using the native gui would be, still it's good that it's so easy to port software to mac nowadays.. Now that it`s running through X11 people can concentrate on making a native interface for it. It would have been much harder and slower to port it to windows, and that only got done quicker because of greater demand.
Because PDF has a lot in common with postscript.. PDF is basically postscript with more dynamic content (dynamic table of contents, hyperlinks etc) whereas postscript is purely concerned with appearance since it`s for printing.. So by doing a print to pdf (or print to postscript and ps2pdf) you can achieve a basic PDF without any of the more complex features... Often such PDF`s will be of very poor quality, and using rasterised text instead of properly rendered fonts for instance.. On the other hand OpenDocument is very much unsuited to being used in this way, you`d end up with pretty much everything (including text) being converted into images.
Well maybe it`s time to reassess the situation, these new opteron based machines sun has been putting out are not only cheaper than comparable dell boxes, but considerably faster, smaller and more power efficient.. Plus sun are a well known and established vendor.
Yes, they could do with a link on the front page saying download now, which then tries to detect the OS and language your using, but still provides links to other platforms/languages. Just like what firefox does...
Rendering OpenDocument in a browser should be a simple matter of supplying the appropriate XSLT.. As for page layout formats, that would be PDF... word files are open to a degree of interpretation by the app too, different versions of word render the same file differently and the same version but with different printer/font configurations will often look different too.
Only they're not quite double the performance, because they share the memory bus. Any memory intensive application will hit contention between the 2 cores... AMD have a faster memory interface to begin with, and in a multiprocessor system each processor has it`s own connection to memory... Although the 2 cores on a single AMD processor share their connection to memory, they dont share with other chips in the same machine and their connection to memory is still faster than intel`s. Also AMD have an internal connection between the 2 cores on a single chip whereas intel`s chips need to go via the processor bus.
Dell claim that AMD couldn`t supply enough CPUs, so they sell none atall? The least they could do is supply some of their customers instead of none at all. They could also price the systems higher to keep demand lower until supply increased... On the other hand, the fact that dell claims AMD couldn`t meet supply suggests that dell knows the AMD systems would sell like hotcakes.
As for being locked in to dell, how come? Hardware isn`t such a lockin scheme as software is, you can easily drop in a sun or hp server in place of a dell.. And, the superior performance and lower power consumption of AMD processors is a valid business case for dropping dell and switching to another vendor.
The problem you mention with debian breaking sendmail, is already solved with gentoo... Portage usually keeps a couple of previous versions in the tree, and it`s possible to "mask" packages you don`t want, so if the new one breaks you can mask it and reinstall the previous one... Or a little smarter, update a test machine, find it breaks, and then mask the broken package on your real machine before you perform an update.
And on an embedded system the developers of the system would be putting the packages together themselves, and not relying on someone else`s packages.. That way they can remove any parts they deem unnecessary, not just files but sections of code etc if necessary.. And compiling them in such a way as to reduce filesize (-Os for instance on gcc) And also as you said, on an embedded system the compilers wouldn`t even be present, so end users wouldn`t be trying to compile anything in any case.
Ofcourse small or text-only browsers will have limited features, but the difference is... If you follow standards, your site will be accessible (text content will be readable, site will be navigatable) in text based browsers, but graphical content and appearance will be lost (but you knew that already when you chose to use a text based browser) However there are many sites which rely on things like flash, or don`t provide alt tags for links (which means screen readers for the blind cant read out the link text either) which don`t work atall in lynx.. There are many reasons to use minimalist or text-based browsers, mobile phones are one example, i often use a gsm dialup connection (v.slow) to research information while i`m away from a faster connection (think travelling, trains, airports etc) and i browse with lynx because loading images on websites really kills the 9600bps connection.. And since what i`m looking for is usually textual information there`s no reason for me to need a graphical browser, i HATE poorly written sites that force me to use a graphical browser and waste my time, not to mention the fact that the mobile operator charges per megabyte of transfer and i want to minimise that.
The hardware was open, the software (including the bios) was closed.. Compaq and others cloned the bios, and they would have cloned dos too had microsoft not just conveniently sold it to them.
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I feel differently, i will quite often buy again from sellers who have given me good service before and i`l be more patient with a buyer who has bought from me before...
Also if you had random usernames, what if someone signs up a boatload of bogus accounts, buys valueless phantom items from a malicious account and gives positive feedback.. You`d be buying from a malicious user with reasonable feedback, and couldn`t verify the buyers.
People will still make music to be famous (and fame will amount much higher if copies of the songs are available for free) and musicians can still generate revenue from live shows, you can`t pirate a live show and a live performance is a physical job that will always have a price associated with it, unlike mass reproduction of digital media.
Allowing media to be copied for free while charging for live performances will be a much fairer system..
Poor kids will be able to have just as large a music collection as the rich kids..
Artists will have to actually WORK to earn money, instead of sitting on their ass while songs they sung 20 years ago are reproduced endlessly.
Artists work will have more exposure to the public, and better music will attract more fans who will attend more live shows.
Poor quality manufactured bands will be less prevelant, as music will be less of a "get rich quick" industry and the poor music will discourage people from attending live shows.. Also there will be far less hype surrounding these manufactured acts.
The bundling of suse is very different:
Suse don't gain anything from bundling lots of third party software, it`s merely done for convenience.
Suse bundle multiple apps performing the same function, to give users choice, there is nothing to stop someone coming along and offering them additional software.. For instance if they were bundling a browser, they wouldn`t refuse a request from netscape to bundle netscape`s browser aswell.
Apps bundled with suse can be REMOVED..
Suse`s bundling is more like what dell does than microsoft. Everything they ship is removeable (tho you may need to do a clean install in the case of dell), and you can go to another vendor if you don`t like it.
Maybe if people would follow standards, we would have the freedom to choose what app to run and our lives would be much easier.
Unfortunately, microsoft and other companies like to create their own proprietary formats and protocols, forcing you to use their software, which results in people trying to minimise the amount of software they're forced to use.
Well then wait for OSX on x86, most adobe products are available for mac too...
And i wonder how long before something like wine, but allowing OSX apps to run under linux will become available.
Hopefully once apple transition to x86 and there`s a good selection of x86/OSX apps available, someone will implement the OSX APIs on top of linux.. So that we can run OSX programs in much the same way wine works, tho it should be easier to implement apple`s api.
Also a lot of websites are designed so poorly that they don`t expand to fit the available width.. so they just occupy a thin column down the middle of the screen on a widescreen display anyway.
Printed material will often take a few days to arrive, whereas a digital copy could be accessed instantly..
As for converting to other formats, this becomes easier by the government using open formats, if they use closed formats then they can only convert to other formats supported by a single app vendor whereas open formats will rapidly have lots of conversion tools available to many formats.
So don`t use acrobat, use another PDF reader.. there are plenty out there.. "preview" that comes with OSX works well for me.
Or, just remove the acrobat browser plugin, then it will load it with the actual acrobat program instead of trying to embed it into your browser, so it wont lock up your browser.
And how is this done?
Also, why should I (as a webserver admin) need to modify my server config to cater to buggy browser behaviour? Surely this is a browser bug that needs fixing rather than a hassle for every webserver admin in the world.
Yeah, IE also rechecks cached pages every time instead of caching them until the site says they should expire.. That causes a lot more hits.. Mozilla and Opera don`t do that.. But i`m not sure if mozilla reloads a page from the server if you press back or not.
In a truly free market the prices will always get driven as low as possible.. For software this will be free or close-to..
The only cost of producing software is a one-off development cost, and this can be offset by reusing code that has already been developed.
The price of software has been kept artificially high, while hardware has gone down in price massively.. However software has much furthur to fall.
There will always be things that will have to cost money, because there is an ongoing cost to provide them, hardware may drop to razor thin margins due to competition, but it will never be free due to the raw materials and manufacturing process. Support also will never be free because someone has to physically provide it.
This is why sun is starting to give their software away for free, while still making money on support services and hardware.. This is also why microsoft is trying to diversify into services (msn etc) since their existing business model is doomed to failure in the long term.
Selling something (in this case software) at such a hugely inflated price relative to production cost (the initial development costs of most popular software has been recouped many times over already) is tantamount to fraud, and the sooner companies are no longer able to get away with this the better.
It`s quite flakey to build, and takes a long time..
Gentoo seems to have issues with java-config (java-config is a python script, OOo includes its own copy of python which is missing the java-config modules) it doesnt work if you`ve upgraded python to 2.4 etc..
Also on AMD64 you need to use the linux32 command to fake your uname as 32bit..
I ended up building a 32bit chroot on my AMD box using versions of python/gcc/etc i knew worked, and building it there.
Also the openoffice build process is very different to most apps, it has a configure script in a subdir, a seperate bootstrap script and finally it`s own make program that doesn`t seem to work with multithreading.
Nah, msoffice isn`t so cross platform, doesnt have regular expression searches and doesn`t let you write macros in 4 different languages (3 of which are usefull languages, not forcing you to learn it's own proprietary macro language which is useless for anything else)
The windows version works fine..
The mac version is OK, but not as good as one using the native gui would be, still it's good that it's so easy to port software to mac nowadays.. Now that it`s running through X11 people can concentrate on making a native interface for it.
It would have been much harder and slower to port it to windows, and that only got done quicker because of greater demand.
Because PDF has a lot in common with postscript.. PDF is basically postscript with more dynamic content (dynamic table of contents, hyperlinks etc) whereas postscript is purely concerned with appearance since it`s for printing.. So by doing a print to pdf (or print to postscript and ps2pdf) you can achieve a basic PDF without any of the more complex features... Often such PDF`s will be of very poor quality, and using rasterised text instead of properly rendered fonts for instance..
On the other hand OpenDocument is very much unsuited to being used in this way, you`d end up with pretty much everything (including text) being converted into images.
Well maybe it`s time to reassess the situation, these new opteron based machines sun has been putting out are not only cheaper than comparable dell boxes, but considerably faster, smaller and more power efficient..
Plus sun are a well known and established vendor.
Yes, they could do with a link on the front page saying download now, which then tries to detect the OS and language your using, but still provides links to other platforms/languages. Just like what firefox does...
Rendering OpenDocument in a browser should be a simple matter of supplying the appropriate XSLT..
As for page layout formats, that would be PDF...
word files are open to a degree of interpretation by the app too, different versions of word render the same file differently and the same version but with different printer/font configurations will often look different too.
Only they're not quite double the performance, because they share the memory bus. Any memory intensive application will hit contention between the 2 cores...
AMD have a faster memory interface to begin with, and in a multiprocessor system each processor has it`s own connection to memory...
Although the 2 cores on a single AMD processor share their connection to memory, they dont share with other chips in the same machine and their connection to memory is still faster than intel`s. Also AMD have an internal connection between the 2 cores on a single chip whereas intel`s chips need to go via the processor bus.
Dell claim that AMD couldn`t supply enough CPUs, so they sell none atall?
The least they could do is supply some of their customers instead of none at all. They could also price the systems higher to keep demand lower until supply increased...
On the other hand, the fact that dell claims AMD couldn`t meet supply suggests that dell knows the AMD systems would sell like hotcakes.
As for being locked in to dell, how come? Hardware isn`t such a lockin scheme as software is, you can easily drop in a sun or hp server in place of a dell..
And, the superior performance and lower power consumption of AMD processors is a valid business case for dropping dell and switching to another vendor.
The problem you mention with debian breaking sendmail, is already solved with gentoo...
Portage usually keeps a couple of previous versions in the tree, and it`s possible to "mask" packages you don`t want, so if the new one breaks you can mask it and reinstall the previous one...
Or a little smarter, update a test machine, find it breaks, and then mask the broken package on your real machine before you perform an update.
And on an embedded system the developers of the system would be putting the packages together themselves, and not relying on someone else`s packages.. That way they can remove any parts they deem unnecessary, not just files but sections of code etc if necessary.. And compiling them in such a way as to reduce filesize (-Os for instance on gcc)
And also as you said, on an embedded system the compilers wouldn`t even be present, so end users wouldn`t be trying to compile anything in any case.
Ofcourse small or text-only browsers will have limited features, but the difference is...
If you follow standards, your site will be accessible (text content will be readable, site will be navigatable) in text based browsers, but graphical content and appearance will be lost (but you knew that already when you chose to use a text based browser)
However there are many sites which rely on things like flash, or don`t provide alt tags for links (which means screen readers for the blind cant read out the link text either) which don`t work atall in lynx.. There are many reasons to use minimalist or text-based browsers, mobile phones are one example, i often use a gsm dialup connection (v.slow) to research information while i`m away from a faster connection (think travelling, trains, airports etc) and i browse with lynx because loading images on websites really kills the 9600bps connection.. And since what i`m looking for is usually textual information there`s no reason for me to need a graphical browser, i HATE poorly written sites that force me to use a graphical browser and waste my time, not to mention the fact that the mobile operator charges per megabyte of transfer and i want to minimise that.
The hardware was open, the software (including the bios) was closed..
Compaq and others cloned the bios, and they would have cloned dos too had microsoft not just conveniently sold it to them.