I got his point the first time. AFAIK this distro is produced on a shoestring and I'm sure they have little time and less money to worry too much about this sort of thing. From what I've seen of the distro they chose to spend their very limited resources polishing the actual product, which is very shiny indeed, among other nice things.
That being said, I happen to agree re: the website's front page, but there are other ways of communicating. A plug on Slashdot is probably better than a nice website anyway.
Ok, so your criticism is that the website isn't shiny enough? God, I'd hate to be your waiter. If you haven't tried the distro itself, it's hard to give your attitude any credibility.
That being said, I spent part of yesterday playing around with the gnome version and came away extremely impressed. The 2007 version was very good, and these guys spent a lot of time ironing out bugs and making it simple to set up and use. Everything worked for me right out of the box, the package system is excellent and if you want to fiddle with settings there's an easy to navigate menu system. This is a great distro both for ease of use and for letting you look under the hood without first becoming a command line god.
Try it and you may end up wondering why people get so worked up about Ubuntu.
This being Russia and all, I wouldn't believe a word of it. The Soviet Union collapsed and the KGB took over. If the RBN had a hand it was probably at the request of the government. Welcome to the new cold war.
You're right. IE is not irrelevant so long as MS lives and breathes. One thing I will dispute is your assumption that Firefox will continue it's alleged decline. I've tried IE8 & didn't like it; we already know where MS is going with it. I'd rate the folks at Mozilla a whole lot more likely to respond effectively to criticism.
Also, if IE is better at complex things, IMO it has more to do with web developers catering to IE and it's rich history of quirks (especially given it's artificially created and supported market position) and less to do with IE being a good quality, standards compliant browser.
MS tried locking everyone into their browsing and search ecosystem by bundling IE, which sucked so bad everyone jumped ship as soon as Firefox showed itself to be worlds better. MS tried and failed to block this by abusing it's market position to make non-standard web page coding a de-facto standard, so the only browser that worked was the bundled IE. Give the consumer incentive not to change, right?
Remember "It's not done until Lotus won't run"? Same idea. It only took a few anti-trust actions to make them think seriously about standards compliance, but if you recall the whole recent document format debacle in which they apparently bought off enough ISO members for adoption, you'll know what I'm talking about: MS's tactics have not changed over the years. Fortunately for the rest of us, when forced to actually compete in a relatively open market, MS basically sucks at writing software.
The rest of the internet didn't play along, so now Google owns search, IE is irrelevant and it will soon be possible to do most desktop tasks in the cloud. Since all you need for cloud computing is a browser, the OS it runs on is irrelevant, too.
Firefox may not be what it once was, but it's still better than IE and right now that's all that matters.
...and that would be a first for Microsoft. +1 funny for you. That was a joke, wasn't it?
as was pointed out in a recent article, they're in the business of selling licenses, not software. They found out they need to license something that actually *works* in order for people to buy it.
My theory is that Firefox will ultimately kill windows, if not Microsoft itself. Once the mass consumer market finally realize they don't really need anything but a browser and that OS's don't matter, I don't see where Microsoft will really matter. I thought netbooks would finally break this open, and they still might, but long term the migration to the cloud has Google and not Microsoft written all over it.
One competent marketing/sales guy can put business through the roof. Hate on marketing if you like but they're responsible for putting the SHINE on that little button you just clicked.
I get what you mean, but having the government tell people what they're allowed to drive is a bit much. I'd rather see tax incentives to go green - use a carrot instead of a stick. Do you really want a nanny state that knows best whats good for you?
The Catholic Church currently has a pretty open minded view of science. It's interesting to see them hosting a conference like this because on the surface it flies in the face of religious belief. Too often it's cast as an either/or scenario when there's no real reason for science and faith to conflict - if you look at it the right way. I've heard of scientists taking the view that science is merely a way to explore God's creation. The method still works regardless of how you ground it.
All too often people cite science to trump religion which seems just as intolerant as hard-core creationism. How long after they found out that Santa Claus wasn't really just a guy in a red suit did they realize that God wasn't just a bearded dude in a robe?
Simple economics on that one. When gas was pushing $5 a gallon the Volt looked like genius.
People make all sorts of wacky decisions when it comes to choosing a vehicle. Ego, safety paranoia, interior or cargo space needs (real or imagined). The other day I saw a large suv sliding all over in the snow - either it didn't have 4 wheel drive or the driver didn't know how to turn it on. Rational choice? Anyone remember the commercial where a woman gets a Hummer so she can intimidate other drivers? Someone had market research about that point. As long as gas is cheap, fuel economy will not be the major selling point to all but a relatively few environmentally minded people.
Hear, hear! I'm a big fan of tax credits for this thing-give people an incentive rather than a punishment. Why use a stick when a carrot works just as well?
A legislative ban on incandescents is just plain stupid for the reasons you mentioned. If you follow the electrons incandescent bulbs aren't a problem. Hell, what is the problem in the first place? Greenhouse gas production and pollution, which comes from many sources including electricity production. Look at overall energy use to see the heart of the problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_use_in_the_United_States has charts clearly showing that the largest energy use is industrial and transportation, energy which in turn is generated by burning fossil fuels directly as with internal combustion engines or indirectly by electricity generation.
Greed is a motivator. Greedy people will work hard to acquire money. Capitalism & free enterprise allow a society to harness greedy people for positive ends like the creation of jobs to produce valuable goods and services. This is a good thing. Unfortunately, greedy people are not necessarily *smart*. And even the smart greedy people are not necessarily *correct* when they do things a particular way.
The story sums it up nicely - this formula oversimplifies a complex market creating a classic bursting bubble. There's an economist named Taleb http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ lecturing about how the market will basically always be more complex than you think.
The best part about his message is in not trusting your data too much. I think of this every time people start talking confidently about geoengineering. We don't know as much as we think we do.
Either you really don't get it or you're trolling and unfortunately you don't seem to be trolling. Where do you get the money to pay them? By taxing people who's work produces some actual value. Much better to do nothing.
So, the point was to alter the perceived value of downloading, to increase the cost of otherwise free music in order to make pay services seem like a better value? Makes perfect sense to me - the high profile lawsuits, caving in court whenever a precedent could be set. It all fits. I think they were unsure of how much success they would have in court and anticipated they would do better. The trouble is it's all going to be irrelevant.
The other shoe that's dropping is the focus on international efforts to create the ACTA http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/07/071230 international copyright treaty. If they can get this thing passed, local laws will be irrelevant. My belief is that in most countries the process of becoming a signatory to a treaty is much simpler than getting a law passed on a national level, which simplifies the task for media industry shills with suitcases full of cash.
You're missing the point! Everything you say is true, but how many of these phones are out there? Hardly any! And the vast majority are being sold to DEVELOPERS. Why piss them all off to lock out a few bad eggs? How do you know they wouldn't buy paid apps? Why not? If you spend $400 to get one to develop are you going to have another one for general use? Of course not.
The interesting thing here is the total lack of trust Google is showing for their developer community. By definition, these folks are more tech savvy than average - if they really want to pirate they'll eventually find a way no matter what Google does. They raised the entry barrier by charging $400 for the phone - but exactly how many of this already small pool of people are going to be pirating? It seems to me that Google just pissed off their entire (and comparatively small vs Apple) developer community to close an awfully small hole. There was a recent article stating that these guys aren't making any money off apps anyway - how much abuse before they simply walk away from the platform?
It would be nice, but he has no political base in government. The powers that be will appoint someone whose interests coincide with their own, since power likes privacy. Too much sunshine is bad for backroom deals.
How do you test for negative long term effects before implementing any geoengineering method? You can't. I sincerely hope that no geoengineering scheme is ever even seriously contemplated, much less implemented. The entire concept of Geoengineering is scientific hubris in the extreme.
Slashdot Mirror
Pure, unadulterated karma. Don't let it get you down.
I got his point the first time. AFAIK this distro is produced on a shoestring and I'm sure they have little time and less money to worry too much about this sort of thing. From what I've seen of the distro they chose to spend their very limited resources polishing the actual product, which is very shiny indeed, among other nice things.
That being said, I happen to agree re: the website's front page, but there are other ways of communicating. A plug on Slashdot is probably better than a nice website anyway.
Ok, so your criticism is that the website isn't shiny enough? God, I'd hate to be your waiter. If you haven't tried the distro itself, it's hard to give your attitude any credibility.
That being said, I spent part of yesterday playing around with the gnome version and came away extremely impressed. The 2007 version was very good, and these guys spent a lot of time ironing out bugs and making it simple to set up and use. Everything worked for me right out of the box, the package system is excellent and if you want to fiddle with settings there's an easy to navigate menu system. This is a great distro both for ease of use and for letting you look under the hood without first becoming a command line god.
Try it and you may end up wondering why people get so worked up about Ubuntu.
This being Russia and all, I wouldn't believe a word of it. The Soviet Union collapsed and the KGB took over. If the RBN had a hand it was probably at the request of the government. Welcome to the new cold war.
You're right. IE is not irrelevant so long as MS lives and breathes. One thing I will dispute is your assumption that Firefox will continue it's alleged decline. I've tried IE8 & didn't like it; we already know where MS is going with it. I'd rate the folks at Mozilla a whole lot more likely to respond effectively to criticism.
Also, if IE is better at complex things, IMO it has more to do with web developers catering to IE and it's rich history of quirks (especially given it's artificially created and supported market position) and less to do with IE being a good quality, standards compliant browser.
Sorry, I should have elaborated.
MS tried locking everyone into their browsing and search ecosystem by bundling IE, which sucked so bad everyone jumped ship as soon as Firefox showed itself to be worlds better. MS tried and failed to block this by abusing it's market position to make non-standard web page coding a de-facto standard, so the only browser that worked was the bundled IE. Give the consumer incentive not to change, right?
Remember "It's not done until Lotus won't run"? Same idea. It only took a few anti-trust actions to make them think seriously about standards compliance, but if you recall the whole recent document format debacle in which they apparently bought off enough ISO members for adoption, you'll know what I'm talking about: MS's tactics have not changed over the years. Fortunately for the rest of us, when forced to actually compete in a relatively open market, MS basically sucks at writing software.
The rest of the internet didn't play along, so now Google owns search, IE is irrelevant and it will soon be possible to do most desktop tasks in the cloud. Since all you need for cloud computing is a browser, the OS it runs on is irrelevant, too.
Firefox may not be what it once was, but it's still better than IE and right now that's all that matters.
Reddit called. They want you back.
She's right on both of your points. First because that is how businesses operate, the second because you're posting here.
3001
...and that would be a first for Microsoft. +1 funny for you. That was a joke, wasn't it?
as was pointed out in a recent article, they're in the business of selling licenses, not software. They found out they need to license something that actually *works* in order for people to buy it.
My theory is that Firefox will ultimately kill windows, if not Microsoft itself. Once the mass consumer market finally realize they don't really need anything but a browser and that OS's don't matter, I don't see where Microsoft will really matter. I thought netbooks would finally break this open, and they still might, but long term the migration to the cloud has Google and not Microsoft written all over it.
Speaking of the Russians, if you look at Murmansk on the map you can pick out the carrier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_aircraft_carrier_Admiral_Kuznetsov. It's visible right across from Mishukovo.
Put him on commission.
One competent marketing/sales guy can put business through the roof. Hate on marketing if you like but they're responsible for putting the SHINE on that little button you just clicked.
I get what you mean, but having the government tell people what they're allowed to drive is a bit much. I'd rather see tax incentives to go green - use a carrot instead of a stick. Do you really want a nanny state that knows best whats good for you?
The Catholic Church currently has a pretty open minded view of science. It's interesting to see them hosting a conference like this because on the surface it flies in the face of religious belief. Too often it's cast as an either/or scenario when there's no real reason for science and faith to conflict - if you look at it the right way. I've heard of scientists taking the view that science is merely a way to explore God's creation. The method still works regardless of how you ground it.
All too often people cite science to trump religion which seems just as intolerant as hard-core creationism. How long after they found out that Santa Claus wasn't really just a guy in a red suit did they realize that God wasn't just a bearded dude in a robe?
Simple economics on that one. When gas was pushing $5 a gallon the Volt looked like genius.
People make all sorts of wacky decisions when it comes to choosing a vehicle. Ego, safety paranoia, interior or cargo space needs (real or imagined). The other day I saw a large suv sliding all over in the snow - either it didn't have 4 wheel drive or the driver didn't know how to turn it on. Rational choice? Anyone remember the commercial where a woman gets a Hummer so she can intimidate other drivers? Someone had market research about that point. As long as gas is cheap, fuel economy will not be the major selling point to all but a relatively few environmentally minded people.
Hear, hear! I'm a big fan of tax credits for this thing-give people an incentive rather than a punishment. Why use a stick when a carrot works just as well?
A legislative ban on incandescents is just plain stupid for the reasons you mentioned. If you follow the electrons incandescent bulbs aren't a problem. Hell, what is the problem in the first place? Greenhouse gas production and pollution, which comes from many sources including electricity production. Look at overall energy use to see the heart of the problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_use_in_the_United_States has charts clearly showing that the largest energy use is industrial and transportation, energy which in turn is generated by burning fossil fuels directly as with internal combustion engines or indirectly by electricity generation.
The bottom line: CFL's save drop in an ocean.
Greed is a motivator. Greedy people will work hard to acquire money. Capitalism & free enterprise allow a society to harness greedy people for positive ends like the creation of jobs to produce valuable goods and services. This is a good thing. Unfortunately, greedy people are not necessarily *smart*. And even the smart greedy people are not necessarily *correct* when they do things a particular way.
The story sums it up nicely - this formula oversimplifies a complex market creating a classic bursting bubble. There's an economist named Taleb http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ lecturing about how the market will basically always be more complex than you think.
The best part about his message is in not trusting your data too much. I think of this every time people start talking confidently about geoengineering. We don't know as much as we think we do.
Either you really don't get it or you're trolling and unfortunately you don't seem to be trolling. Where do you get the money to pay them? By taxing people who's work produces some actual value. Much better to do nothing.
So, the point was to alter the perceived value of downloading, to increase the cost of otherwise free music in order to make pay services seem like a better value? Makes perfect sense to me - the high profile lawsuits, caving in court whenever a precedent could be set. It all fits. I think they were unsure of how much success they would have in court and anticipated they would do better. The trouble is it's all going to be irrelevant.
The other shoe that's dropping is the focus on international efforts to create the ACTA http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/07/071230 international copyright treaty. If they can get this thing passed, local laws will be irrelevant. My belief is that in most countries the process of becoming a signatory to a treaty is much simpler than getting a law passed on a national level, which simplifies the task for media industry shills with suitcases full of cash.
You're missing the point! Everything you say is true, but how many of these phones are out there? Hardly any! And the vast majority are being sold to DEVELOPERS. Why piss them all off to lock out a few bad eggs? How do you know they wouldn't buy paid apps? Why not? If you spend $400 to get one to develop are you going to have another one for general use? Of course not.
The interesting thing here is the total lack of trust Google is showing for their developer community. By definition, these folks are more tech savvy than average - if they really want to pirate they'll eventually find a way no matter what Google does. They raised the entry barrier by charging $400 for the phone - but exactly how many of this already small pool of people are going to be pirating? It seems to me that Google just pissed off their entire (and comparatively small vs Apple) developer community to close an awfully small hole. There was a recent article stating that these guys aren't making any money off apps anyway - how much abuse before they simply walk away from the platform?
So less bytes / sector for data = more for error correction.
Blah blah blah exactly how much of a difference would your average user notice?
It would be nice, but he has no political base in government. The powers that be will appoint someone whose interests coincide with their own, since power likes privacy. Too much sunshine is bad for backroom deals.
When they get to "P" it damn well better be "Platypus".
How do you test for negative long term effects before implementing any geoengineering method? You can't. I sincerely hope that no geoengineering scheme is ever even seriously contemplated, much less implemented. The entire concept of Geoengineering is scientific hubris in the extreme.