They don't make any money selling hardware, they make money selling complete systems, the Apple way to computing.
Nobody really cares what hardware is inside the box as long as everything works and there is not uncompatibilities or special configurations like with x86 hardware.
The part that makes the hardware sales is their software and way of making computers usable and stylish.
You know, i think he's reffering to unhappiness at work, that happens when you feel unsatisfied no matter what you do, and that you can't keep the pace no matter how much effort you put.
That is, you think you will be happy when you finnaly accomplish X, and when you get smart enough so the road is not so harsh.
It happens that most of the time, those feeling don't go away. And one day you wonder? Why am i so unhappy, I have almost everything yet the void is arround?
I don't know, but I just can't use, for example, any Java gnutella client. They are all slow, ugly and unintegrated. And I have tried many of them, including Lime, Phex and others.
On the other hand, gtk-gnutella or Bearshare where just great. Sure, there is a lot of Java developement, but do people in general like client Java apps? My opinion is they ALL suck, unless java is invisible to the user (OpenOffice for example). And in these case, the app just run terribly slow.
I use phpWiki and you can put a link LikeThis or a link [Like this]. You could even put a link [with arbitraty text but poinint to a keyword|AnotherLink].
1) Produce something that can help other make money and you use the GPL (or closed source). 2) Produce something that can't make money for anyone (games, and most home user programs) and you can't make money except using a closed source system.
So under 2) you end up with really low quality apps and products while under 1) you have great or even better-than-Closed-Source solutions (in some cases).
It all can be summed up with: if you can't sell X directly or indirectly, you are left with no X at all. At least, this is was has been hapening up to now.
Supply and demand explain PRICES (and wages for the fact). The don't measure VALUE. What is more valuable, 100 tons of rice or a big diamond? As you can see, they are not equal though their prices may be the same.
Abstract: VALUE = subjective PRICE = supply and demand
Demand in turn depends on how money is distributed among society. If africa had more money, rice prices would rise. If the world was about 30 bill gates and 20 Soros and 5B poor, diamonds could be worth all the food in the world).
And values do exist. It is not for nothing that you get a life sentence for murder. Also, apparently humans can't be sold for a price (slavery). But if you don't earn enough money to buy food and shelter, you die. So you could say the right to live is arround U$S 300 a month. That is about $30.000 a human. That's our (base) price, though apparently, we are priceless. But of course, VALUE != PRICE, so you can't kill someone and pay $30.000 (nor ANY ammount) to get away from prison.
Then it's not wrong that mostly everything run under Windows and not undex *nix...
After all, why should ANY company deal with *nix if they can get 95% market share by targeting Windows? This may happen with Red Hat or whoever in the future. It's not necesarilly Red Hat doing something wrong, it's kind of inevitable, even if they release the sources of everything.
Comercial software targets (supports) Red Hat, and if you don't like it, you have to either have to spent more resources to have the product working (and selfsupport yourself in the future) or use an unsupported Red Hat version (in which case, you are giving Red Hat more power, and thus more and more application will target redh Hat.
At some point, Red Hat may be THE distribution. They could grow to a scape where no other distro can keep the pace. That is, they can offer services and a lot of value added no other distro will be able to offer. That's good, but I could be bad in the long term.
So it's not their fault, it's how public goods work. And they will always have more incentives to do the right thing than if they owned all the code they distribute.
You are basically extrapoliting todays situation. They don't need to hide the sources to take advantage of the market share thing. For example, we use an antivirus that is ONLY supported on Red Hat (we installed it on our Slak server, but it was a pain due to the inslation program, etc.)
Ximian Gnome requires you to have certain distros as well. With slakware you are out of lack. Now, extrapolete in whose directions and you'll see the point.
It's the chicken and egg thing. At some point companies may not care about slackware, gentoo or whatever as long as it works under Red Hat and some other widely used distro. They will not be supporting all distros, just as _most_ companies do not support more than one OS.
And Red Hat may well make the cost of supporting other distros higher (if they ever want). There are thouthand ways to do it. I am not saying they will try that, but they could (but not yet).
I know, but they could become in a position to dictate new rules, if they increase market share. That is, they could be placed in a situation where they could abuse the concept a bit.
If you really trust them, I see no problem. If you are suspicious or conservative, no single distro should have too much market share.
It's anot about Red Hat bad, Reh Hat good. It's about how you think someone in a dominant position and a shareholders interest above all would behave.
The last alternative is to completely disregard the situation and believe no distribution (they are more than a distribution actually in reality!) will be able to abuse, no matter what market share they achieve.
All in all, I'd even preffer a "Red Hat bad" situation than what we have now. Because that way we'd have TWO bad guys (you know who the other is), and that would mean HUGE competition at least for a while.
Dont patents have to be original? The IDEA is clearly NOT original, so i think they should only be able to patent a specific implementation. Then again, I don't care, i have droped the towel, if they want to fuck the world and charge us for breathing H2O while chewing fruit scented bum and looking at the sky, go ahead.
The world is becoming a shitty place to live on thanks to these "rights" trolls:( (pd: this means i feel we are losing in the world economic pie division. The cake is beign awarded to whoever except the people that really push the economy. Al possible innovation paths are being cornered and you can't do anything without a huge number of lawers telling whcih cardinal point you can walk without infringing.
(I know its not a highly positive post, but that's exactly the idea. I feel tired and sad about all these stupid patents...really)
Not only it is not difficult under Windows 98 (registry mess), but may be nearly 100% impractical (Win2000 and XP) and even worst, it is may be _illegal_ (under XP).
If what you say is true, then the Genesis is RIGHT. The guys that wrote it must have just been able to see earth forming with their own eyes!!! (Genesis is about 3000 BC)...
I believe in evolution, but not in hazardous evolution. It just doesn't make sense. The aceptance of the evolution theory can attest that you need some good hypotesis to make people believe in the most incredible improbabilities (like the elefants lifting the earth "plane" or evolution itself).
Uh, and that's exactly the point. Here we are talking about installing a simple OS with no special apps. After all all timed instalations relate to installing the OS and not extra applications.
So 10 minutes for Linux is much more than "enough"...
As for whether "every" group that hates the US has already broken into Army computers, I wouldn't speculate on that. I would say, though, that these folks sure helped anyone who hasn't done so already pick an easy target. How patriotic, eh?
Exactly how? Are they sending Al Qaeda (generic term for terrorism these days) information on how to get in, are they sending them some information they gathered?
I can only see these break-in that go into the newspapers as way to make sure the right people know they ARE vulnerable, and that you don't need much resources or reserach (no nukes, just an internet link) to do it.
It's a BIG WARN letter. You may not like it, but it's a gift from god these breaking come from these nerds and not from actual terrorists. You will disagree for sure, i just want to express that I do not understand your point of view.
The thing is these people help secure your networks and and do not carry out any real destructive actions. After you put them in jail:
1) Less of this "benign tumors" develop (SecureTech, etc) 2) More of the "malign tumors" develop (Al Qaeda) 3) Security is improved a bit but not revisited thereafter, making the mil computer even more vulnerable.
If some guys tryed to divert a plane and flyby some densely populated scycrapers, then sept 11 would have never happened. Of course, nobody will try that because if the actually survive (ie: they dont get killed while trying) they will be killed after succeding (even though they would have preventing a tragedy).
So as nobody has an incentive to try, because the penalty is so high, nobody does try. But then a real terrorist takes advantage because they don't care about FBI raids. They get in, an gather the information or many launch an Nuke (or something nasty) and that's it.
I'd rather see these guys sentenced to work as free advisors to the mil for 10000 hours than be prosecuted. Actually, It'd be a good policy to offer rewards for hacing ANY mil computer (provided you do report inmediately and in proper way [ie: tell the mil, NOT the press]).
There's a little problem here, because most companies that just ignore patents do have a huge number of them to counterattack the suer (probably a big competitor). And while they are firing back, the tend to put a massive amount of lawers to make sure they do win both trials.
So they just reach an agreement. And thus, they tend to not really care much about patents: the are well armed for counterattack and have huge resources to buy defense.
If you don't have any money and any patents and produce a highly visible product that infringes thouthans of patents, it gets worst.
As Linus said, there's nothing you can do about it. Just hope IBM will pay for your lawers and help with their own patents for conterattack or buy Linux a license to use it (if everything fails), but that's more a hope than a real fact. We'll have to see what happens.
Things get worst because these products are all open source, so it's trivial to prove if a patent is beign abused. If you have a closed source product, how would a patent owner know if the closed product is using their reverse mapping patents?
I am pretty sure gnumeric, abiword and many open source packages suffer the patents infringement problem. It hasn't been a problem until now, but does doesn't mean the problem is not there (like a virus, it may be sleeping, but can awake at any time...usually when the most harm can be done)...
You don't need a fresh install, you can copy from a ready to go system through the net, and have severla images depending on the most comon cases (mail server, web server, etc).
That would take about 10 minutes: - boot a CD distro w/network support: 30 seconds - format HD: 30 seconds (and spare time then) - start ftp transfer (20 seconds) - reboot (and recompile kernel if needed: 3 minutes, and afterwards spare time during compile) - lilo: 1 second - do some actual config (IPs, etc): depends, but should take less than under Windows (and no reboots?) - total time: under 10 minutes for sure
Can you beat that?
After that, make an image of the final instalation. Ever need a backup? Just copy the partitions images. Can you beat that?
Great, so IBM can't sell it, it can't be used for embedded systems, Red Hat has to take those parts out if they want to sell it, etc.
Let's not worry...because who needs to comply with the law. Law can't harm us. To defend the GPL, ah law is good. To comply with it in other areas, ah law is bad.
Seems a bit naive or childish to me. What would be nice would be to play by the rules and have something like an Open Patents system, where royalties would go to finance OSS or maybe no royalties at all: just to make sure people nobody can abuse their patents (ie: if somebody MUST use some Open Patent, they have to allow any Open Patent member to use their patents, or something in that line of though).
Claiming the problem is not there when it actually IS there is not good. It may be a strategy for something else, but not a strategy in itself.
Well, protocols that survived where the Open ones. Now some copamnies want to promote the non-open ones. I mean Disney, RIIA and some other friends. The non-tech companies do not care much (they don't sense "danger").
Only developer that are not married with MS actually outcry the need for open standard, and some services sectors like Banks and the such (ie: products where MS could easily turn into some kind of unavoidable ManInTheMiddle)
Or do you want the application to GUESS what you have in mind when you paste something? They provide a sane default and you have the freedom to override it. You just need to know you can Paste Special.
Even more, it's a blessing Notepad and Word behave differently, according to each capabilities and needs. If you are using notepad you probably don't care about the formating and if you are using Word or excel, you do care.
I think your point is right in that MS very much limits the users in many way, but the example was just a terrible one. A better example would be the "Find..." command, that really lacks power, the way extensions work (ie: they don't really guess what a file is for, as in file [binary]), etc.
We still do get it, do we? The point is america NEEDS a monopolist because ONLY a MONOPOLIST can be an effective cyber-cop of media content.
If you have diversity and competition, you can't control data. And that's what media/content resellers are asking the goverment to do.
On the one hand you have the citizens not knowing MS is getting ready to be the cyber-cop for a huge profit. On the other hand you have entire industries crying for a solution that involves allowing a Monopoly to solve all their problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple makes money by selling hardware
They don't make any money selling hardware, they make money selling complete systems, the Apple way to computing.
Nobody really cares what hardware is inside the box as long as everything works and there is not uncompatibilities or special configurations like with x86 hardware.
The part that makes the hardware sales is their software and way of making computers usable and stylish.
You know, i think he's reffering to unhappiness at work, that happens when you feel unsatisfied no matter what you do, and that you can't keep the pace no matter how much effort you put.
That is, you think you will be happy when you finnaly accomplish X, and when you get smart enough so the road is not so harsh.
It happens that most of the time, those feeling don't go away. And one day you wonder? Why am i so unhappy, I have almost everything yet the void is arround?
It just depends on the person.
I don't know, but I just can't use, for example, any Java gnutella client. They are all slow, ugly and unintegrated. And I have tried many of them, including Lime, Phex and others.
On the other hand, gtk-gnutella or Bearshare where just great. Sure, there is a lot of Java developement, but do people in general like client Java apps? My opinion is they ALL suck, unless java is invisible to the user (OpenOffice for example). And in these case, the app just run terribly slow.
You don't need to be a guru to notice this.
I use phpWiki and you can put a link LikeThis or a link [Like this]. You could even put a link [with arbitraty text but poinint to a keyword|AnotherLink].
...
It really is easy
1) Produce something that can help other make money and you use the GPL (or closed source).
2) Produce something that can't make money for anyone (games, and most home user programs) and you can't make money except using a closed source system.
So under 2) you end up with really low quality apps and products while under 1) you have great or even better-than-Closed-Source solutions (in some cases).
It all can be summed up with: if you can't sell X directly or indirectly, you are left with no X at all. At least, this is was has been hapening up to now.
Supply and demand explain PRICES (and wages for the fact). The don't measure VALUE. What is more valuable, 100 tons of rice or a big diamond? As you can see, they are not equal though their prices may be the same.
Abstract:
VALUE = subjective
PRICE = supply and demand
Demand in turn depends on how money is distributed among society. If africa had more money, rice prices would rise. If the world was about 30 bill gates and 20 Soros and 5B poor, diamonds could be worth all the food in the world).
And values do exist. It is not for nothing that you get a life sentence for murder. Also, apparently humans can't be sold for a price (slavery). But if you don't earn enough money to buy food and shelter, you die. So you could say the right to live is arround U$S 300 a month. That is about $30.000 a human. That's our (base) price, though apparently, we are priceless. But of course, VALUE != PRICE, so you can't kill someone and pay $30.000 (nor ANY ammount) to get away from prison.
Then it's not wrong that mostly everything run under Windows and not undex *nix ...
After all, why should ANY company deal with *nix if they can get 95% market share by targeting Windows? This may happen with Red Hat or whoever in the future. It's not necesarilly Red Hat doing something wrong, it's kind of inevitable, even if they release the sources of everything.
Comercial software targets (supports) Red Hat, and if you don't like it, you have to either have to spent more resources to have the product working (and selfsupport yourself in the future) or use an unsupported Red Hat version (in which case, you are giving Red Hat more power, and thus more and more application will target redh Hat.
At some point, Red Hat may be THE distribution. They could grow to a scape where no other distro can keep the pace. That is, they can offer services and a lot of value added no other distro will be able to offer. That's good, but I could be bad in the long term.
So it's not their fault, it's how public goods work. And they will always have more incentives to do the right thing than if they owned all the code they distribute.
You are basically extrapoliting todays situation. They don't need to hide the sources to take advantage of the market share thing. For example, we use an antivirus that is ONLY supported on Red Hat (we installed it on our Slak server, but it was a pain due to the inslation program, etc.)
Ximian Gnome requires you to have certain distros as well. With slakware you are out of lack. Now, extrapolete in whose directions and you'll see the point.
It's the chicken and egg thing. At some point companies may not care about slackware, gentoo or whatever as long as it works under Red Hat and some other widely used distro. They will not be supporting all distros, just as _most_ companies do not support more than one OS.
And Red Hat may well make the cost of supporting other distros higher (if they ever want). There are thouthand ways to do it. I am not saying they will try that, but they could (but not yet).
I know, but they could become in a position to dictate new rules, if they increase market share. That is, they could be placed in a situation where they could abuse the concept a bit.
If you really trust them, I see no problem. If you are suspicious or conservative, no single distro should have too much market share.
It's anot about Red Hat bad, Reh Hat good. It's about how you think someone in a dominant position and a shareholders interest above all would behave.
The last alternative is to completely disregard the situation and believe no distribution (they are more than a distribution actually in reality!) will be able to abuse, no matter what market share they achieve.
All in all, I'd even preffer a "Red Hat bad" situation than what we have now. Because that way we'd have TWO bad guys (you know who the other is), and that would mean HUGE competition at least for a while.
Dont patents have to be original? The IDEA is clearly NOT original, so i think they should only be able to patent a specific implementation. Then again, I don't care, i have droped the towel, if they want to fuck the world and charge us for breathing H2O while chewing fruit scented bum and looking at the sky, go ahead.
:( (pd: this means i feel we are losing in the world economic pie division. The cake is beign awarded to whoever except the people that really push the economy. Al possible innovation paths are being cornered and you can't do anything without a huge number of lawers telling whcih cardinal point you can walk without infringing.
The world is becoming a shitty place to live on thanks to these "rights" trolls
(I know its not a highly positive post, but that's exactly the idea. I feel tired and sad about all these stupid patents...really)
Have you withnessed an XP copy-instead-of-reinstall?
Correction: not only it IS difficult ...
Not only it is not difficult under Windows 98 (registry mess), but may be nearly 100% impractical (Win2000 and XP) and even worst, it is may be _illegal_ (under XP).
:) then reply...
Get your facts right please
If you never ever configured one then it will take longer. But it can take less. With Windows, it can't (you can't just copy it).
... 5000 years (rougly the age of the earth).
...
If what you say is true, then the Genesis is RIGHT. The guys that wrote it must have just been able to see earth forming with their own eyes!!! (Genesis is about 3000 BC)
I believe in evolution, but not in hazardous evolution. It just doesn't make sense. The aceptance of the evolution theory can attest that you need some good hypotesis to make people believe in the most incredible improbabilities (like the elefants lifting the earth "plane" or evolution itself).
Uh, and that's exactly the point. Here we are talking about installing a simple OS with no special apps. After all all timed instalations relate to installing the OS and not extra applications.
So 10 minutes for Linux is much more than "enough"...
Didnt RMS ask for this? After all, he gave them the GPL, and now they don't like cooperation? Since when??
As for whether "every" group that hates the US has already broken into Army computers, I wouldn't speculate on that. I would say, though, that these folks sure helped anyone who hasn't done so already pick an easy target. How patriotic, eh?
Exactly how? Are they sending Al Qaeda (generic term for terrorism these days) information on how to get in, are they sending them some information they gathered?
I can only see these break-in that go into the newspapers as way to make sure the right people know they ARE vulnerable, and that you don't need much resources or reserach (no nukes, just an internet link) to do it.
It's a BIG WARN letter. You may not like it, but it's a gift from god these breaking come from these nerds and not from actual terrorists. You will disagree for sure, i just want to express that I do not understand your point of view.
The thing is these people help secure your networks and and do not carry out any real destructive actions. After you put them in jail:
1) Less of this "benign tumors" develop (SecureTech, etc)
2) More of the "malign tumors" develop (Al Qaeda)
3) Security is improved a bit but not revisited thereafter, making the mil computer even more vulnerable.
If some guys tryed to divert a plane and flyby some densely populated scycrapers, then sept 11 would have never happened. Of course, nobody will try that because if the actually survive (ie: they dont get killed while trying) they will be killed after succeding (even though they would have preventing a tragedy).
So as nobody has an incentive to try, because the penalty is so high, nobody does try. But then a real terrorist takes advantage because they don't care about FBI raids. They get in, an gather the information or many launch an Nuke (or something nasty) and that's it.
I'd rather see these guys sentenced to work as free advisors to the mil for 10000 hours than be prosecuted. Actually, It'd be a good policy to offer rewards for hacing ANY mil computer (provided you do report inmediately and in proper way [ie: tell the mil, NOT the press]).
There's a little problem here, because most companies that just ignore patents do have a huge number of them to counterattack the suer (probably a big competitor). And while they are firing back, the tend to put a massive amount of lawers to make sure they do win both trials.
So they just reach an agreement. And thus, they tend to not really care much about patents: the are well armed for counterattack and have huge resources to buy defense.
If you don't have any money and any patents and produce a highly visible product that infringes thouthans of patents, it gets worst.
As Linus said, there's nothing you can do about it. Just hope IBM will pay for your lawers and help with their own patents for conterattack or buy Linux a license to use it (if everything fails), but that's more a hope than a real fact. We'll have to see what happens.
Things get worst because these products are all open source, so it's trivial to prove if a patent is beign abused. If you have a closed source product, how would a patent owner know if the closed product is using their reverse mapping patents?
I am pretty sure gnumeric, abiword and many open source packages suffer the patents infringement problem. It hasn't been a problem until now, but does doesn't mean the problem is not there (like a virus, it may be sleeping, but can awake at any time...usually when the most harm can be done)...
You don't need a fresh install, you can copy from a ready to go system through the net, and have severla images depending on the most comon cases (mail server, web server, etc).
That would take about 10 minutes:
- boot a CD distro w/network support: 30 seconds
- format HD: 30 seconds (and spare time then)
- start ftp transfer (20 seconds)
- reboot (and recompile kernel if needed: 3 minutes, and afterwards spare time during compile)
- lilo: 1 second
- do some actual config (IPs, etc): depends, but should take less than under Windows (and no reboots?)
- total time: under 10 minutes for sure
Can you beat that?
After that, make an image of the final instalation. Ever need a backup? Just copy the partitions images. Can you beat that?
I'd bet money that you can't.
>Not a big deal. Don't worry.
Great, so IBM can't sell it, it can't be used for embedded systems, Red Hat has to take those parts out if they want to sell it, etc.
Let's not worry...because who needs to comply with the law. Law can't harm us. To defend the GPL, ah law is good. To comply with it in other areas, ah law is bad.
Seems a bit naive or childish to me. What would be nice would be to play by the rules and have something like an Open Patents system, where royalties would go to finance OSS or maybe no royalties at all: just to make sure people nobody can abuse their patents (ie: if somebody MUST use some Open Patent, they have to allow any Open Patent member to use their patents, or something in that line of though).
Claiming the problem is not there when it actually IS there is not good. It may be a strategy for something else, but not a strategy in itself.
Well, protocols that survived where the Open ones. Now some copamnies want to promote the non-open ones. I mean Disney, RIIA and some other friends. The non-tech companies do not care much (they don't sense "danger").
Only developer that are not married with MS actually outcry the need for open standard, and some services sectors like Banks and the such (ie: products where MS could easily turn into some kind of unavoidable ManInTheMiddle)
What?
Edit -> Paste Special -> Unformated Text
Or do you want the application to GUESS what you have in mind when you paste something? They provide a sane default and you have the freedom to override it. You just need to know you can Paste Special.
Even more, it's a blessing Notepad and Word behave differently, according to each capabilities and needs. If you are using notepad you probably don't care about the formating and if you are using Word or excel, you do care.
I think your point is right in that MS very much limits the users in many way, but the example was just a terrible one. A better example would be the "Find..." command, that really lacks power, the way extensions work (ie: they don't really guess what a file is for, as in file [binary]), etc.
We still do get it, do we? The point is america NEEDS a monopolist because ONLY a MONOPOLIST can be an effective cyber-cop of media content.
If you have diversity and competition, you can't control data. And that's what media/content resellers are asking the goverment to do.
On the one hand you have the citizens not knowing MS is getting ready to be the cyber-cop for a huge profit. On the other hand you have entire industries crying for a solution that involves allowing a Monopoly to solve all their problems.
(sorry for the caps)