Being scorched by molten metal at high velocity is not how I'd want to go.
I wonder if this would be ruled inhumane. As if it's any worse than a nuke, just on a smaller scale.
Have flamethrowers and napalm been ruled inhumane?
In any case, molten high velocity metal is already widely in use in anti-armor weapons. In the case of spalling, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spall, the molten metal is from your own vehicle not the weapon.
I agree, if they were smart they would have called it the "Trinity" chip, stuck a cross logo on the box, and sold it to the same Christian Fundamentalists who read the Lost Behind novels.
A failed core goes from being a sign of bad engineering, to a sign from God.
Which god, Jehovah (old testament) or Neo (The Matrix)? Matrix fanbois would probably be a more lucrative market. Use the name Trinity but make the CPU packaging a glossy black instead of matte black.
A failed core goes from being a sign of bad engineering, to a sign from God.
That would be manufacturing not engineering, and no one gets 100% yields out of manufacturing. Not even God, look at the defect rate in his creation, human beings.
Please someone explain why cores have to be a power of 2.
I'm a software guy who is guessing, but I expect that it has something to do with the density of circuits on a manufacturing wafer. Square or rectangular layouts may be more natural than other geometrically tight fitting shapes such as triangles or hexagons. If so, powers of two help preserve that geometry. A linear geometry, adding each core in a line, would technically preserve a rectangular geometry but the length of the "wires" is inefficient. Keeping things as square as possible probably optimized the tradeoff between length and layout.
Don't look at it from a marketing perspective, look at it from a manufacturing perspective. It is not a 3, it is a 4 - 1. A quad core with one broken core.
To AMD fanboi's who are reading, take a breath and do not interpret the above as an attack on AMD. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, why waste the three good cores and all the energy, time, and resources that went into producing them. Disable the failed core and sell the part as a trio at a discount relative to the quad.
I'm having flashbacks to the original Pentium, where a production line manufactured 120 MHz CPUs but when packaged the CPUs could be 75, 90, or 120 MHz. Some 75s were CPUs that failed at 120 and 90 but passed at 75, but many were good 120s that shipped as 75s because all the 120 orders were filled and 75 orders were pending. Hence the legendary overclocking of the 75. I wonder if dual cores will someday follow a similar pattern. The production line manufactures quads but they are packaged as quads or duos depending on testing and orders to be filled.
We need to move away from x86 to a modern design, rather than one that has gradually been modified beyond all recognition and hacked to gain 32 bit then 64 bit compatibility, etc. As an Amiga/Mac user for most of my early life, I've always thought of x86 as an inferior and inefficient chip design. Apple has demonstrated twice now how well they can adapt their OS for any architecture.
Apple is no longer free to change their CPU architecture. They are "locked in" to x86 due to their dependence on running Windows. Mac market share jumped significantly when they switched to Intel and jumped significantly again when they offered Windows compatibility. While Windows emulation has been available since at least G3 PowerPC Macs, it suffered greatly because it had to emulate the x86 CPU instruction set. The switch to Intel made that unnecessary and made emulation viable. The decades old question, should I go Mac or PC, largely ended. You could have both on a single machine. When dual boot became an option then the last barrier fell, those who needed absolute performance, gamers for example, could now have both on a single machine. Switching to a non-x86 Mac architecture would probably destroy the 50% increase in market share, 4% to 6%, that Intel brought them.
You are echoing the same argument that the PowerPC consortium made in the very early 90s. The flaw in their logic and yours is that Intel can overcome x86 inefficiency and difficulty of working with it by spending more money. PowerPC was more efficient and a modern design that could more easily be enhanced, but Intel could throw 10x the resources at x86. PowerPC did not really fail because it failed to improve, it failed because no one ever imagined that Intel could get the x86 to the levels of performance that they did. The PowerPC folks expected Intel to try to move x86 users to a new CPU, Itanium as it turned out, and that would break the x86 lock and allow buyers to consider other non-x86 alternatives. I believe you are making the same mistake. Consider that the x86 architecture is really a facade, that underneath this facade Intel is free to change from one modern RISC design to another, or to whatever is next, allowing them to increase performance without breaking compatibility. On the fly translation of x86 operations into RISC micro-ops combined with reordering and other technologies is going to be far harder to overcome than you suggest.
The trick when using a *nix on your notebook is to create a session which drops to the console, or replaces your nice GNOME, KDE or Aqua environment with a full-screen xterm. Just to scare them...;-)
Uh, I don't think attempting to scare law enforcement yields the same result as attempting to scare pointy headed bosses.;-)
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Note the word "unreasonable". One could argue that the federal government's constitutionally mandated powers regarding customs gives them the authority, digital goods have commercial value and may be subject to taxes, duties, or other controls. Therefore the reasonableness of the search with respect to the Constitution.
More importantly, in your passport application you agreed to be subject to all passport laws and regulations. You pre-agreed to the search before leaving, therefore no warrant is necessary.
... if you password-protect and encrypt your hard drive to thwart precisely this kind of unwarranted and unjustifiable privacy invasion, can Customs force you to divulge your passwords?
Probably, just like they can force you to unlock a suitcase and let them examine the contents.
Isn't it ironic that a whole generation of religious folks are doing nothing more than routing their kids into a backwater.
Isn't that statement as ill-informed and biased as those you criticize? When I was taking chemistry at a public university the professor who taught the class, and was also the dean of the department, was a Roman Catholic priest. So was the scientist who introduced the big bang theory, ironically some scientists rejected this theory because it was offered by a priest and "sounded" like creationism. The vatican operates a major observatory doing hard science in the field of astronomy.
The war between science and religion is waged by those with an agenda, many true scientists and many true religious believers don't have a one or the other perspective. Many religious people simply believe science is explaining the mechanics of God's universe.
But you don't really illustrate the point - the OP was talking about scientists, and you illustrated the point with a story about a journalist and an environmental activist.
I'll assist him. The big bang theory was initially rejected by some scientists because it was offered by a Roman Catholic priest and sounded too much like genesis.
One. scientists are human and subject to human biases. Two, scientists are dependent upon others and must serve those masters, if scientists are dependent upon politicians for money then politics will influence science to some degree. It is naive to expect otherwise. Three, there are few facts in science. Theories are merely our best current approximation/explanation and are limited by our current understanding. It is therefore quite legitimate and proper to question political sacred cows and investigate such questions as: is global warming predominantly a result of human action?
On one side we've got a bunch of scientists - who's philosophy espouses striving for neutrality, lack of bias, objectivity, etc.
That statement is as mythological as any found in a religious text.:-)
Scientists are biased too. The scientist who discovered the big bang theory was a Roman Catholic priest and some scientists rejected his theory because he was a priest and the theory sounded too much like genesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître
Furthermore, it is naive to think that science is devoid of politics. If scientists are dependent upon politicians for money then science will be politicized.
If there is a loss anywhere, it's that only a fraction of the $60 billion is winding up in the pockets of open source developers. Granted, they're in it for the satisfaction of writing well written code, and the peer recognition that comes from that, but it wouldn't hurt for them to see some green from it as well.
I'm going to play devil's advocate a bit. (1) Introduction of the profit motive will incentivize these developers to act more like the profit oriented companies they are displacing. (2) Doing so will just make them displaceable by other developers who are motivated by non-profit goals and allow users to retain the full savings.
Open source gives all power to the users, with that power goes the savings. It's a little late to claim that developers should receive a larger share of the savings "pie", open source developers have essentially engaged, perhaps unintentionally, in a pricing war characterized as "a race to the bottom" in economic terms. They are giving away their services for free to serve altruistic or educational goals, or possibly in the hopes that they will be selected for some possible customization in the future. Such "races to the bottom" are characterized by commodity pricing and interchangeability of suppliers.
Marketing would imply they gain anything from doing it. How many dudes who worked with id past open sourced engines are now working for a customer of id engines ?
That is the wrong question. You should be asking how many dudes working with old engines today will be customers tomorrow? More or fewer than if the old engines were not released?
id Software is going down by the way in the engine department. Nobody with self respect would touch the Doom 3 Engine and the only notable game that did it was Prey.
Not all marketing campaigns are successful, Coca Cola survived New Coke, id can survive Doom 3.
id open sourced engines are charity. There's not even one percent of the gaming community who cares or even know what open source is,...
Irrelevant, the marketing is aimed at those who directly or indirectly influence decisions. Also, "open source" itself is irrelevant to the bulk of the community you speak of, all that is relevant is that they know id gives away the old game so it can be modded and fooled around with. That is far more common knowledge than licensing theory and it builds good will.
and the ones who knows do not work with the big boys of the industry, and even when they do, they don't buy id engines, they buy better techs like the Unreal engine.
Again, marketing attempts to manipulate the future, your arguments merely explain the past. When a company is having problems with its product line that is the time to increase marketing. Increase brand awareness today, build good will today, and tomorrow when you have a more competitive commercial engine you reap benefits.
This plan won't work. 50 gateways is too few the performance will suck profoundly. 4000 to 50 just doesn't work.
You sure? Maybe the folks at Internal Revenue, Social Security, etc don't need to be reaching rich media content outside the federal network and the federal network does not need to host rich media content for citizens from inside the federal network?
But just give it a chance! I hear the new Maginot-brand routers are great.
You do realize that there was nothing wrong with the Maginot line itself, that the problem was that it only ran the French/German border and did not include the French/Belgium border since Belgium was a friend and it would be insulting to arm that border? The Germans simply invaded Belgium on their way to France.
Or has the government said that only 4,000 of the 5,000 gateways will go behind the new line since the remaining 1,000 aren't currently giving them any problem? Perhaps I missed that.:-)
Well, I'll bet that ANHI takes a cut of that to run staff and transportation and such so let's say we're down to 75 USD. That 75 USD is probably used to buy from a predetermined company (usually not in Africa) and not at the best possible rate so we could probably estimate that 5 USD is trimmed off in pre-arranged agreements so we're down to 70 USD. Then whether or not that 70 USD of goods actually makes it to the village is another story.
If philanthropists start donating to open source in big ways the exact same thing will happen to open source. Many charities started as the donations of small amounts of money and time by individuals, just like open source. Once big money arrived so did the con men. Also, once big money arrives ad hoc networks will be replaced by more traditional organization and overhead will develop there as well. Organizations make accountability and monitoring easier, market will be necessary to make sure you get your share of donations, more lawyers, more accountants, programmers begin to look at open source as a career rather than a hobby and therefore needing a salary and benefits (the organization has money, why work for free?),...
Even if companies made a policy of open sourcing their abandonware and old products like ID games does with their old game engines it would help a lot.
When id gives away an old game engine that is marketing, not charity. They are as much in the business of licensing game engines as they are in the business of game sales. Getting future programmers to cut their teeth on an id engine is branding and familiarization, it makes their current licensable engine a little more valuable.
I'm not saying there is anything wrong with id's give aways, just lets not delude anyone into thinking it is a selfless act.
They had to learn windows sometime, install/update drivers for a new toy(ex. ati/nvidia), install new programs, edit documents/registry which is no different than playing with config files, get used to new GUIs (win3.1,95,98,nt,xp,vista). Now exactly what are they bitching about that they haven't done on windows already.
Learning the first system is a necessity. Learning a second system is not, that second system has to demonstrate cost savings in excess of the cost of learning and other switching costs.
... just save money(fewer hardware upgrade cycles, free apps)
Those are both red herrings. Home users generally don't upgrade their OS, they just get a new one when they get the next computer so hardware upgrades are not necessary. Many open source apps are available Windows, Open Office and Gimp for example, so free apps don't offer an incentive to switch to Linux.
This turned into a rant, its true, but still a rant. I also won't apologize for it as its well deserved.
The only thing I would say here is that some Linux advocacy is just as shallow and biased as some political advocacy.;-)
"Look at Macintosh. It is unix based, has a better user interface than Linux, more informal support, a major consumer brand name behind it, MS Office is natively available..."
...and only runs on one company's proprietary hardware, hence......it is around 5-6%
Proprietary hardware is a much smaller issue than you suggest. Most home users change operating systems when they buy a new computer. Furthermore the convenience of installing Linux on an existing computer that was spec'd for Windows, not Linux, must be balanced with problems related to driver issues, at least for the non-technical home users that are the topic of this thread.
Having to buy new hardware is a gigantic hurdle to take just to switch to another operating system.
No it is not, buying a new computer is exactly where most people get new operating systems. Few home users upgrade the OS on old machines. The same will be true for migration to Linux, the easiest point to get someone to switch is when they are shopping for a new system.
No. That has been a Linux advantage for *many* years and failed to overcome inertia. The switching costs of Linux exceeds getting AV software and learning not to run things sent to you in email or downloaded from unknown web sites.
Not having to reinstall the machine every six months is a very important advantage.
A delusional anecdote. That is not part of the average Windows home user's experience.
Then we have the licensing costs of windows and applications.
Largely insignificant when bundled with a new computer, which is where most Windows home users get Word and Excel.
Then we have the fact that you can't get Windows XP anymore and you will be bringing to his knees any computer that runs Vista. On the other hand, Linux is quite happy with older computers.
Wrong. I just checked Dell's Home and Home Office channel, they still have a pair of big buttons saying "Configure with Windows Vista" and "Configure with Windows XP". More importantly, few home users upgrade their OS merely because an OS is released, they change OS when they buy their next computer. The older computers argument is a red herring, the older computer works just fine with the version of Windows, Word, and Excel they came with. Hell, I'm still using Office 97 at home.
In my opinion, and excuse "my french" is that "Money Talks". And the guys at RED HAT, are only interested on that. I Figured this out went they decided to seperate the Servers....from the desktop distros...when Fedora appeared.
What they don't realize is that the growing Desktop Linux Community may be the fuel for more Sales on Linux Sales on the server market.
I call BS.;-) Of all the organizations on the planet Red Hat may have the most experience with selling a consumer oriented Linux in traditional retail channels. Fedora was not really separating from servers, it was giving up on commercial desktop Linux after many years of trying to make it work. Also, a commercial perspective is an asset here not a liability. If commercial desktop Linux were to become viable then a profit oriented company like Red Hat would get behind it. Open Source greatly diminishes the chicken and the egg problem by creating that all important base of initial users that is necessary for large scale growth into the main population of users. The points I made in the GP support the notion that the potential for growth is not here yet.
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Being scorched by molten metal at high velocity is not how I'd want to go. I wonder if this would be ruled inhumane. As if it's any worse than a nuke, just on a smaller scale.
Have flamethrowers and napalm been ruled inhumane?
In any case, molten high velocity metal is already widely in use in anti-armor weapons. In the case of spalling, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spall, the molten metal is from your own vehicle not the weapon.
Anything that makes AMD more competitive and sell more processors is a good thing in my book. After all, healthy competition keeps them honest, eh?
And it is a greener strategy, less waste of resources and energy, so there are public relations and marketing benefits as well.
I agree, if they were smart they would have called it the "Trinity" chip, stuck a cross logo on the box, and sold it to the same Christian Fundamentalists who read the Lost Behind novels. A failed core goes from being a sign of bad engineering, to a sign from God.
Which god, Jehovah (old testament) or Neo (The Matrix)? Matrix fanbois would probably be a more lucrative market. Use the name Trinity but make the CPU packaging a glossy black instead of matte black.
A failed core goes from being a sign of bad engineering, to a sign from God.
That would be manufacturing not engineering, and no one gets 100% yields out of manufacturing. Not even God, look at the defect rate in his creation, human beings.
Please someone explain why cores have to be a power of 2.
I'm a software guy who is guessing, but I expect that it has something to do with the density of circuits on a manufacturing wafer. Square or rectangular layouts may be more natural than other geometrically tight fitting shapes such as triangles or hexagons. If so, powers of two help preserve that geometry. A linear geometry, adding each core in a line, would technically preserve a rectangular geometry but the length of the "wires" is inefficient. Keeping things as square as possible probably optimized the tradeoff between length and layout.
I was expecting 2, 4, 8, etc. ... not 3 ?!?
Don't look at it from a marketing perspective, look at it from a manufacturing perspective. It is not a 3, it is a 4 - 1. A quad core with one broken core.
To AMD fanboi's who are reading, take a breath and do not interpret the above as an attack on AMD. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, why waste the three good cores and all the energy, time, and resources that went into producing them. Disable the failed core and sell the part as a trio at a discount relative to the quad.
I'm having flashbacks to the original Pentium, where a production line manufactured 120 MHz CPUs but when packaged the CPUs could be 75, 90, or 120 MHz. Some 75s were CPUs that failed at 120 and 90 but passed at 75, but many were good 120s that shipped as 75s because all the 120 orders were filled and 75 orders were pending. Hence the legendary overclocking of the 75. I wonder if dual cores will someday follow a similar pattern. The production line manufactures quads but they are packaged as quads or duos depending on testing and orders to be filled.
We need to move away from x86 to a modern design, rather than one that has gradually been modified beyond all recognition and hacked to gain 32 bit then 64 bit compatibility, etc. As an Amiga/Mac user for most of my early life, I've always thought of x86 as an inferior and inefficient chip design. Apple has demonstrated twice now how well they can adapt their OS for any architecture.
Apple is no longer free to change their CPU architecture. They are "locked in" to x86 due to their dependence on running Windows. Mac market share jumped significantly when they switched to Intel and jumped significantly again when they offered Windows compatibility. While Windows emulation has been available since at least G3 PowerPC Macs, it suffered greatly because it had to emulate the x86 CPU instruction set. The switch to Intel made that unnecessary and made emulation viable. The decades old question, should I go Mac or PC, largely ended. You could have both on a single machine. When dual boot became an option then the last barrier fell, those who needed absolute performance, gamers for example, could now have both on a single machine. Switching to a non-x86 Mac architecture would probably destroy the 50% increase in market share, 4% to 6%, that Intel brought them.
You are echoing the same argument that the PowerPC consortium made in the very early 90s. The flaw in their logic and yours is that Intel can overcome x86 inefficiency and difficulty of working with it by spending more money. PowerPC was more efficient and a modern design that could more easily be enhanced, but Intel could throw 10x the resources at x86. PowerPC did not really fail because it failed to improve, it failed because no one ever imagined that Intel could get the x86 to the levels of performance that they did. The PowerPC folks expected Intel to try to move x86 users to a new CPU, Itanium as it turned out, and that would break the x86 lock and allow buyers to consider other non-x86 alternatives. I believe you are making the same mistake. Consider that the x86 architecture is really a facade, that underneath this facade Intel is free to change from one modern RISC design to another, or to whatever is next, allowing them to increase performance without breaking compatibility. On the fly translation of x86 operations into RISC micro-ops combined with reordering and other technologies is going to be far harder to overcome than you suggest.
The trick when using a *nix on your notebook is to create a session which drops to the console, or replaces your nice GNOME, KDE or Aqua environment with a full-screen xterm. Just to scare them... ;-)
;-)
Uh, I don't think attempting to scare law enforcement yields the same result as attempting to scare pointy headed bosses.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Note the word "unreasonable". One could argue that the federal government's constitutionally mandated powers regarding customs gives them the authority, digital goods have commercial value and may be subject to taxes, duties, or other controls. Therefore the reasonableness of the search with respect to the Constitution.
More importantly, in your passport application you agreed to be subject to all passport laws and regulations. You pre-agreed to the search before leaving, therefore no warrant is necessary.
... if you password-protect and encrypt your hard drive to thwart precisely this kind of unwarranted and unjustifiable privacy invasion, can Customs force you to divulge your passwords?
Probably, just like they can force you to unlock a suitcase and let them examine the contents.
Isn't it ironic that a whole generation of religious folks are doing nothing more than routing their kids into a backwater.
Isn't that statement as ill-informed and biased as those you criticize? When I was taking chemistry at a public university the professor who taught the class, and was also the dean of the department, was a Roman Catholic priest. So was the scientist who introduced the big bang theory, ironically some scientists rejected this theory because it was offered by a priest and "sounded" like creationism. The vatican operates a major observatory doing hard science in the field of astronomy.
The war between science and religion is waged by those with an agenda, many true scientists and many true religious believers don't have a one or the other perspective. Many religious people simply believe science is explaining the mechanics of God's universe.
But you don't really illustrate the point - the OP was talking about scientists, and you illustrated the point with a story about a journalist and an environmental activist.
I'll assist him. The big bang theory was initially rejected by some scientists because it was offered by a Roman Catholic priest and sounded too much like genesis.
One. scientists are human and subject to human biases. Two, scientists are dependent upon others and must serve those masters, if scientists are dependent upon politicians for money then politics will influence science to some degree. It is naive to expect otherwise. Three, there are few facts in science. Theories are merely our best current approximation/explanation and are limited by our current understanding. It is therefore quite legitimate and proper to question political sacred cows and investigate such questions as: is global warming predominantly a result of human action?
On one side we've got a bunch of scientists - who's philosophy espouses striving for neutrality, lack of bias, objectivity, etc.
:-)
That statement is as mythological as any found in a religious text.
Scientists are biased too. The scientist who discovered the big bang theory was a Roman Catholic priest and some scientists rejected his theory because he was a priest and the theory sounded too much like genesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître
Furthermore, it is naive to think that science is devoid of politics. If scientists are dependent upon politicians for money then science will be politicized.
If there is a loss anywhere, it's that only a fraction of the $60 billion is winding up in the pockets of open source developers. Granted, they're in it for the satisfaction of writing well written code, and the peer recognition that comes from that, but it wouldn't hurt for them to see some green from it as well.
I'm going to play devil's advocate a bit. (1) Introduction of the profit motive will incentivize these developers to act more like the profit oriented companies they are displacing. (2) Doing so will just make them displaceable by other developers who are motivated by non-profit goals and allow users to retain the full savings.
Open source gives all power to the users, with that power goes the savings. It's a little late to claim that developers should receive a larger share of the savings "pie", open source developers have essentially engaged, perhaps unintentionally, in a pricing war characterized as "a race to the bottom" in economic terms. They are giving away their services for free to serve altruistic or educational goals, or possibly in the hopes that they will be selected for some possible customization in the future. Such "races to the bottom" are characterized by commodity pricing and interchangeability of suppliers.
Marketing would imply they gain anything from doing it. How many dudes who worked with id past open sourced engines are now working for a customer of id engines ?
...
That is the wrong question. You should be asking how many dudes working with old engines today will be customers tomorrow? More or fewer than if the old engines were not released?
id Software is going down by the way in the engine department. Nobody with self respect would touch the Doom 3 Engine and the only notable game that did it was Prey.
Not all marketing campaigns are successful, Coca Cola survived New Coke, id can survive Doom 3.
id open sourced engines are charity. There's not even one percent of the gaming community who cares or even know what open source is,
Irrelevant, the marketing is aimed at those who directly or indirectly influence decisions. Also, "open source" itself is irrelevant to the bulk of the community you speak of, all that is relevant is that they know id gives away the old game so it can be modded and fooled around with. That is far more common knowledge than licensing theory and it builds good will.
and the ones who knows do not work with the big boys of the industry, and even when they do, they don't buy id engines, they buy better techs like the Unreal engine.
Again, marketing attempts to manipulate the future, your arguments merely explain the past. When a company is having problems with its product line that is the time to increase marketing. Increase brand awareness today, build good will today, and tomorrow when you have a more competitive commercial engine you reap benefits.
This plan won't work. 50 gateways is too few the performance will suck profoundly. 4000 to 50 just doesn't work.
You sure? Maybe the folks at Internal Revenue, Social Security, etc don't need to be reaching rich media content outside the federal network and the federal network does not need to host rich media content for citizens from inside the federal network?
But just give it a chance! I hear the new Maginot-brand routers are great.
:-)
You do realize that there was nothing wrong with the Maginot line itself, that the problem was that it only ran the French/German border and did not include the French/Belgium border since Belgium was a friend and it would be insulting to arm that border? The Germans simply invaded Belgium on their way to France.
Or has the government said that only 4,000 of the 5,000 gateways will go behind the new line since the remaining 1,000 aren't currently giving them any problem? Perhaps I missed that.
Well, I'll bet that ANHI takes a cut of that to run staff and transportation and such so let's say we're down to 75 USD. That 75 USD is probably used to buy from a predetermined company (usually not in Africa) and not at the best possible rate so we could probably estimate that 5 USD is trimmed off in pre-arranged agreements so we're down to 70 USD. Then whether or not that 70 USD of goods actually makes it to the village is another story.
...
If philanthropists start donating to open source in big ways the exact same thing will happen to open source. Many charities started as the donations of small amounts of money and time by individuals, just like open source. Once big money arrived so did the con men. Also, once big money arrives ad hoc networks will be replaced by more traditional organization and overhead will develop there as well. Organizations make accountability and monitoring easier, market will be necessary to make sure you get your share of donations, more lawyers, more accountants, programmers begin to look at open source as a career rather than a hobby and therefore needing a salary and benefits (the organization has money, why work for free?),
Even if companies made a policy of open sourcing their abandonware and old products like ID games does with their old game engines it would help a lot.
When id gives away an old game engine that is marketing, not charity. They are as much in the business of licensing game engines as they are in the business of game sales. Getting future programmers to cut their teeth on an id engine is branding and familiarization, it makes their current licensable engine a little more valuable.
I'm not saying there is anything wrong with id's give aways, just lets not delude anyone into thinking it is a selfless act.
They had to learn windows sometime, install/update drivers for a new toy(ex. ati/nvidia), install new programs, edit documents/registry which is no different than playing with config files, get used to new GUIs (win3.1,95,98,nt,xp,vista). Now exactly what are they bitching about that they haven't done on windows already.
... just save money(fewer hardware upgrade cycles, free apps)
;-)
Learning the first system is a necessity. Learning a second system is not, that second system has to demonstrate cost savings in excess of the cost of learning and other switching costs.
Those are both red herrings. Home users generally don't upgrade their OS, they just get a new one when they get the next computer so hardware upgrades are not necessary. Many open source apps are available Windows, Open Office and Gimp for example, so free apps don't offer an incentive to switch to Linux.
This turned into a rant, its true, but still a rant. I also won't apologize for it as its well deserved.
The only thing I would say here is that some Linux advocacy is just as shallow and biased as some political advocacy.
"Look at Macintosh. It is unix based, has a better user interface than Linux, more informal support, a major consumer brand name behind it, MS Office is natively available..."
...and only runs on one company's proprietary hardware, hence... ...it is around 5-6%
Proprietary hardware is a much smaller issue than you suggest. Most home users change operating systems when they buy a new computer. Furthermore the convenience of installing Linux on an existing computer that was spec'd for Windows, not Linux, must be balanced with problems related to driver issues, at least for the non-technical home users that are the topic of this thread.
Having to buy new hardware is a gigantic hurdle to take just to switch to another operating system.
No it is not, buying a new computer is exactly where most people get new operating systems. Few home users upgrade the OS on old machines. The same will be true for migration to Linux, the easiest point to get someone to switch is when they are shopping for a new system.
Easy, virus and malware.
No. That has been a Linux advantage for *many* years and failed to overcome inertia. The switching costs of Linux exceeds getting AV software and learning not to run things sent to you in email or downloaded from unknown web sites.
Not having to reinstall the machine every six months is a very important advantage.
A delusional anecdote. That is not part of the average Windows home user's experience.
Then we have the licensing costs of windows and applications.
Largely insignificant when bundled with a new computer, which is where most Windows home users get Word and Excel.
Then we have the fact that you can't get Windows XP anymore and you will be bringing to his knees any computer that runs Vista. On the other hand, Linux is quite happy with older computers.
Wrong. I just checked Dell's Home and Home Office channel, they still have a pair of big buttons saying "Configure with Windows Vista" and "Configure with Windows XP". More importantly, few home users upgrade their OS merely because an OS is released, they change OS when they buy their next computer. The older computers argument is a red herring, the older computer works just fine with the version of Windows, Word, and Excel they came with. Hell, I'm still using Office 97 at home.
In my opinion, and excuse "my french" is that "Money Talks". And the guys at RED HAT, are only interested on that. I Figured this out went they decided to seperate the Servers....from the desktop distros...when Fedora appeared. What they don't realize is that the growing Desktop Linux Community may be the fuel for more Sales on Linux Sales on the server market.
;-) Of all the organizations on the planet Red Hat may have the most experience with selling a consumer oriented Linux in traditional retail channels. Fedora was not really separating from servers, it was giving up on commercial desktop Linux after many years of trying to make it work. Also, a commercial perspective is an asset here not a liability. If commercial desktop Linux were to become viable then a profit oriented company like Red Hat would get behind it. Open Source greatly diminishes the chicken and the egg problem by creating that all important base of initial users that is necessary for large scale growth into the main population of users. The points I made in the GP support the notion that the potential for growth is not here yet.
I call BS.
Starship Troopers (the book) should be the main scifi reference to powered suits.
Supplemented of course with Haldeman's The Forever War. Some interesting additions to the concept in there.