But Wal-Mart doesn't just force prices close to manufacturing costs, they force them *below* manufacturing costs. Their vendors either find ways to reduce their own costs, or they die. Its a model of capitalist efficiency in its own way, and its also horrible, because when you start trying to cut costs, eventually you *will* cut product quality as well. I NEVER buy electronics at walmart, because I know they're the el cheapo model and they'll break in a year or two. Maybe disposable is fine for some people, but it pisses me off.
Now, with computers specifically, you are aware that semiconductors is probably already the most competitive industry there is? Most companies in this field pretty much can't reduce prices anymore. I don't know what overpriced hardware you think you're buying, but we're talking about a field where a manufacturer goes out of business if somebody can produce chips for fractions of a cent less. No, not a company like Intel to be sure, but any of the more commodity components that go into computers. And I'm sure even Intel doesn't have enormous profit margins. Its a very competitive industry already, and if Wal-mart thinks they're going to do their usual cost-cutting business, we're going to end up with some pretty fragile machines.
Of course, these days you can clean up coal/oil plants to the point that they produce pretty negligable pollution as well. There's a coal plant near me thats stacks are so well scrubbed you hardly ever see anything coming out of them, and it runs 24x7.
Well I think its true that most of the Family Guy DVD sales and Cartoon Network viewers were already fans of the show, somehow I don't think Firefly is going to get even remotely the same kind of reception. Firstly, they didn't air more than a handful of episodes, so how big could the fanbase possibly be? Further, the fanbase is going to be strictly scifi types, which I suspect are nowheres near as plentiful as the Family Guy faithful. I mean, EVERY guy I knew at college knew about and worshiped Family Guy, from virtually all majors. In fact, it turned out my realtor was a big fan. I think Family Guy just had a more universal appeal than Firefly ever could have.
I, for one, didn't even like Firefly, and if you can't even win over people like me, you're not winning over the more mainstream audience, and you'll never see the same kind of out-of-woodwork support Family Guy has experienced.
Oh bah, if you do it right, or even remotely close to right, the ability to commit fraud is no greater than with paper ballots. In fact, its less, because right now any of the vote counters could be skewing the tally.
With electronic voting, all you want is very very dumb terminals in the booths that give you a list of people to vote for. You press a button (or maybe its touchscreen) to make your selection, the terminal says "Are you sure you want to vote for XXX?", you hit OK, and your vote is recorded in the database in the back room. Make it a closed-circuit network with a few cops wandering around, and theres no problem. And naturally, you could do some sort of authetication between terminals and the database machine, public key or whatever, just to make sure nobody's hijacked the line. As long as no dumb programmer puts a backdoor in something, theres little to worry about. When voting is done, the database machine writes its data to some kind of write-once media, and its taken to a central facility for aggregate counting by yet another machine. You can encrypt that too if you want. If you can devise a closed voting network that works beyond one building, you can do the counting over that, but you should still have the write-once media as a backup, and it should be counted as a check regardless. If you really want, you can print paper receipts at the terminals, drop them in a box, and make that a third check on the system.
I'm sorry, but electronic voting is just not a hard problem. When it becomes hard is when you try to do something stupid like do it over the internet. That should NEVER happen. But as long as you keep the system isolated and have a few checks in place, its as least as good as what we have, and probably a heck of a lot better.
I think at heart we all know that thats the way to do it, but at the same time we know that it can never happen that way. Nobody got anywhere in the end-user desktop market by being radically different from the rest of the pack. A company like Dell will never deliver Linux en masse until it is clear that their customers want it. And not a few customers either, it has to be pretty close to all of them.
So, as usual, the real problem is getting sufficient positive word of mouth going for Linux among non-uber-technical people, enough so that people start trying it. And of course, the software HAS to give them a positive experience when they do. Thats the grassroots approach.
The other approach is the corporate desktop, and letting it trickle down to homes from there. Maybe thats what you meant Dell and HP should promote? Well, in that case, I'm pretty sure they both will sell your company Linux desktop machines if you want them, so we're already doing the best we can there. Just gotta convince the CIOs of the world that they want Linux on their desktops, and I'm betting that by and large CIOs will not be influenced by magazine and TV ads. Chances are they already know Linux exists, or their staff does, and theres probably nothing the community can do at that point except make the software better. Companies will pick it up when it fits their needs.
Hey, progress is progress. Point is, we're not losing marketshare. And I don't think many people would say that Linux was a usable desktop system 5 years ago. A usable replacement for a UNIX workstation, maybe, but thats like KDE 1/Gnome 1.2 timeframe.
However, such an argument fails precisely because a gun couldn't have stopped two airplanes from flying into the WTC. All the privately held guns in the US couldn't stop a military attack by the federal government, if the government really were so inclined to attack its own citizens.
Hmm... lets think about this statement for a second. First, let us remember that the planes that crashed into the WTC were hijacked by men carrying boxcutters. Seems to me that any amount of guns greater than zero would likely stop a handful of men with boxcutters.
The second part, to me, sounds as much like an argument against gun regulation as for it. After all, there are a lot more non-military citizens than there are military. If civilians could own the same sort of weapons the military does, well, we COULD fight the military should it coup. For the record, I'm not advocating such a position, just pointing out the obvious flaw in your argument.
I know this benchmark is about open source and all, but I would love to see Solaris thrown into the mix. With all its vaunted scalability and stability, I'd love to see what it actually does better. I guess it would have to be the Intel version, but I would think their kernel algorithms should be the same across architectures.
For what its worth, most audiophile-type reviews I've read have those numbers, usually in graph form. Of course, to most people that graph means nothing, so the summarizers of this world give us the fuzzy, marginally meaningful quotes from the reviewers.
Well, if you look at the bottom of the article, it links to this article, which is slightly more descriptive about the test setup. Still no hard numbers though.
Odds are you'll be pummeled for that post, but -- as I sit at my Linux box -- it occurs to me that I can't think of one desktop-oriented thing I do in Linux that I can't do in Windows or OSX.
Really? Nothing? Hmm... maybe I'm just an uber-l33t Linux desktop user, but I go crazy without my middle-click copy/pasting, my virtual desktops, and my focus-on-mouseover. Now I know for Windows at least, none of those things exist. Or rather, they exist, but only with additional software, and they still don't work properly, making them useless. And really, if we even include adding software, well your post is stating the obvious, because you can make X11 and most common Linux software run on Windows (and probably OSX too, but I've never used it)
But, Linux has faults, too. One big problem is part and parcel of its evelopment modeL: Because there's no single entity setting and enforcing standards, the highly touted benefits of "choice" often become a crapshoot of conflicting libraries, packaging schemes, and software compiled by God-Knows-Who in God-Know-Where.
I guess that can still be a problem, but for me at least it hardly happens anymore. As long as you use stable software and generally stick with software compiled for your distro (and really, how hard is that?), you'll almost never have problems.
Very little "jump"ing happened. The real reason IE rose to dominance is that MS bundled it with Win98 and later, and consumers were too lazy or ignorant to investigate alternatives.
Yeah, they started bundling it. Technically they started bundling IE3 with Win95 OSR2 (and possibly NT4SP4), but we forget that because it sucked and everybody just installed Netscape in those days and forgot about it. The big OEMs usually did it for you. Furthermore, there were (and still might be) many businesses that standardized on Netscape 4. Some of the bigger sites still go way out of their way to support it, etc, etc. And when broadband first came out (in my area anyway), the cable company went around installing Netscape 4 on everybody's computer.
I guess my point is that back in the day Joe user didn't know anything about browsers either. He just clicked on the big "N" instead of the big "E" to use the internet. If IE were to become a serious impediment to browsing again, I see no reason why the same sort of action wouldn't start taking place. It'd be gradual, just like the switch away from Netscape was, but it would happen. Frankly, I think that whole business about bundling IE being unfair has always been a bit of a red herring. Sure it sounds unfair, and it is a bit like cheating, but it had little to do with the move away from Netscape, and everything to do with Netscape 4 being a terrible, terrible program (and with IE being faster, more stable, and at certain points more standards-compliant).
Y'know, everybody's saying that, and it seems everybody's ignoring the fact that theres clearly a 'X' in the upper right corner, i.e. the standard close window widget. Now, whether clicking that will actually cancel loading the activex control or not is a matter for debate, but its still perfectly possible. It certainly is bad UI design not to have an explicit "CANCEL" button, but these ARE the people who brought us that whole "Luna" nonsense to begin with.
Hmm... well that all sounds very nice, except that it doesn't seem to really work. Why do I say that? Because GAIM at least (and supposedly Trillian pro) already have Jabber connectivity. And you know what? Nobody's transitioning. Its still far easier to just use my AIM account to talk to my Windows friends rather than try and convince them to use Jabber, and my Linux friends feel the same, so everybody just uses AIM. For that matter, I don't even know anybody who uses Jabber. Its a real "if it ain't broke..." type of problem. Currently we can all use AIM, ICQ, and (once again) Yahoo, so nobody sees the need to go to something like Jabber. One day perhaps they will, and fortunately the clients are already available to help, but I still think that day is a ways off.
Obviously he was exaggerating to make a point, but the argument could be made (and has been in many other posts under other stories), that the US government does in a way 'sponsor' Windows. They certainly use a lot of it, they let them off the hook on that whole Sherman act thing, etc... no, they didn't write it, but they have the effect of promoting it.
For your second comment, I note that you left out the part about illegal invasions (illegal by international law for those who are confused). Seems to me that part alone is plenty to be comparable to Tianaman square.
It may be true that people trivialize the brutality of the Chinese, but I'd argue that even more people trivialize the brutality the US has shown. I'm not making a comparison between the two, because really how can you? Both are horrible in their own separate ways. And as an American, I'm personally MUCH more concerned with the actions of my own government than those of a foreign power. Really, who are we to complain to the Chinese, or anyone else for that matter, if we can't keep ourselves in check?
I think the parent is being facetious, but somehow it got modded insightful... this confuses me greatly. How this could be taken for anything but sarcasm is beyond me, so I guess I have to hope that the moderators were being sarcastic as well. Otherwise I think we're in real trouble.
Seems to me that Redhat, probably among others, has been going this way for some time now. Last time I used it I definitely appreciated that they renamed their Mozilla launcher to "Web Browser", and their gaim launcher to "Instant Messenger", etc. And it certainly didn't install lynx or konqueror along with mozilla. I guess what I'm saying is that what you describe is (almost) a solved problem, and the real issue for adopters these days seems to be, as always, availability and familiarity of applications, and just plain old getting people to try Linux in the first place (and stick with it for more than 24 hours). Of course none of this is relevant to the article, which was about web servers switching to Win2k3. "Average Joe" doesn't do much http serving, and he probably shouldn't.
Hence, copying music to which you are not entitled is illegal, but not necessarily immoral or unethical. That may be your opinion but I don't think it's exactly been proven.
Bit of a rant, but it seriously bugs me when people try to explain to me that I can't morally or ethically do something. It just sounds very holier-than-thou to me. I mean, who is this guy (grandparent) and who gave him a monopoly on morality? And related to the parent, how does one "prove" that something is immoral or unethical? I feel like people throw around those words to create some kind of emotional appeal in their arguments, and really its tantamount to spin-doctoring.
If you ask me, morality and ethics can only be quantified as what the majority of people believe them to be. I'm skeptical that the majority of people find fileswapping to be reprehensible, else it wouldn't occur to the degree it does. Given that, any appeal to "morality" is really nothing more than blustering and evidence of a steadfast belief that you know better than everyone else.
Hmm... gotta disagree w/the parent and agree with the grandparent. HP48s are sloooowww! Mine's only a 48G, but afaik its exactly the same as the GX except with less memory and no expansion slot. And its gross, really gross. It takes around half a second just to refresh when I put a number on the stack, nevermind trying to do more intensive things. I guess if all you do with it is basic arithmetic its fast enough, but otherwise forget about it. The thing drove me crazy years ago and sent me running to TI, which is a shame because I always liked RPN.
"But what about spam in ICQ, AIM, NewsGroups, MSN, Popup software, Spyware software, and Net Sends?"
"I suspect they were largely an invention of the media. The idea that such methods could exist under my very nose is laughable!::chough::::choke:: Well, you all know what laughter sounds like..."
See I dunno... MSN search has been around for several years now. Its been the default in IE for several years as well. And IE has been the dominant browser for, you guessed it, several years. And you know what? MSN search is not the most popular engine out there, not even close. In my experience, the more technically inclined love google (and not just the uber-geek linux users either), and pretty much everyone else uses yahoo. I don't think I've ever seen anyone use MSN search except by accident. Microsoft has had unfair competitive advantage in this space for a while, and hasn't capitalized. I find it hard to believe that better image searching will fix their problem.
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But Wal-Mart doesn't just force prices close to manufacturing costs, they force them *below* manufacturing costs. Their vendors either find ways to reduce their own costs, or they die. Its a model of capitalist efficiency in its own way, and its also horrible, because when you start trying to cut costs, eventually you *will* cut product quality as well. I NEVER buy electronics at walmart, because I know they're the el cheapo model and they'll break in a year or two. Maybe disposable is fine for some people, but it pisses me off.
Now, with computers specifically, you are aware that semiconductors is probably already the most competitive industry there is? Most companies in this field pretty much can't reduce prices anymore. I don't know what overpriced hardware you think you're buying, but we're talking about a field where a manufacturer goes out of business if somebody can produce chips for fractions of a cent less. No, not a company like Intel to be sure, but any of the more commodity components that go into computers. And I'm sure even Intel doesn't have enormous profit margins. Its a very competitive industry already, and if Wal-mart thinks they're going to do their usual cost-cutting business, we're going to end up with some pretty fragile machines.
Of course, these days you can clean up coal/oil plants to the point that they produce pretty negligable pollution as well. There's a coal plant near me thats stacks are so well scrubbed you hardly ever see anything coming out of them, and it runs 24x7.
Well I think its true that most of the Family Guy DVD sales and Cartoon Network viewers were already fans of the show, somehow I don't think Firefly is going to get even remotely the same kind of reception. Firstly, they didn't air more than a handful of episodes, so how big could the fanbase possibly be? Further, the fanbase is going to be strictly scifi types, which I suspect are nowheres near as plentiful as the Family Guy faithful. I mean, EVERY guy I knew at college knew about and worshiped Family Guy, from virtually all majors. In fact, it turned out my realtor was a big fan. I think Family Guy just had a more universal appeal than Firefly ever could have.
I, for one, didn't even like Firefly, and if you can't even win over people like me, you're not winning over the more mainstream audience, and you'll never see the same kind of out-of-woodwork support Family Guy has experienced.
Funny how that sounds almost exactly like what you'd do if you needed to install custom software under Debian...
Not bashing ports, just saying it doesn't do any fancy magic apt doesn't.
Oh bah, if you do it right, or even remotely close to right, the ability to commit fraud is no greater than with paper ballots. In fact, its less, because right now any of the vote counters could be skewing the tally.
With electronic voting, all you want is very very dumb terminals in the booths that give you a list of people to vote for. You press a button (or maybe its touchscreen) to make your selection, the terminal says "Are you sure you want to vote for XXX?", you hit OK, and your vote is recorded in the database in the back room. Make it a closed-circuit network with a few cops wandering around, and theres no problem. And naturally, you could do some sort of authetication between terminals and the database machine, public key or whatever, just to make sure nobody's hijacked the line. As long as no dumb programmer puts a backdoor in something, theres little to worry about. When voting is done, the database machine writes its data to some kind of write-once media, and its taken to a central facility for aggregate counting by yet another machine. You can encrypt that too if you want. If you can devise a closed voting network that works beyond one building, you can do the counting over that, but you should still have the write-once media as a backup, and it should be counted as a check regardless. If you really want, you can print paper receipts at the terminals, drop them in a box, and make that a third check on the system.
I'm sorry, but electronic voting is just not a hard problem. When it becomes hard is when you try to do something stupid like do it over the internet. That should NEVER happen. But as long as you keep the system isolated and have a few checks in place, its as least as good as what we have, and probably a heck of a lot better.
I think at heart we all know that thats the way to do it, but at the same time we know that it can never happen that way. Nobody got anywhere in the end-user desktop market by being radically different from the rest of the pack. A company like Dell will never deliver Linux en masse until it is clear that their customers want it. And not a few customers either, it has to be pretty close to all of them.
So, as usual, the real problem is getting sufficient positive word of mouth going for Linux among non-uber-technical people, enough so that people start trying it. And of course, the software HAS to give them a positive experience when they do. Thats the grassroots approach.
The other approach is the corporate desktop, and letting it trickle down to homes from there. Maybe thats what you meant Dell and HP should promote? Well, in that case, I'm pretty sure they both will sell your company Linux desktop machines if you want them, so we're already doing the best we can there. Just gotta convince the CIOs of the world that they want Linux on their desktops, and I'm betting that by and large CIOs will not be influenced by magazine and TV ads. Chances are they already know Linux exists, or their staff does, and theres probably nothing the community can do at that point except make the software better. Companies will pick it up when it fits their needs.
Possibly... for certain unorthodox definitions of the word "rhetoric".
Hey, progress is progress. Point is, we're not losing marketshare. And I don't think many people would say that Linux was a usable desktop system 5 years ago. A usable replacement for a UNIX workstation, maybe, but thats like KDE 1/Gnome 1.2 timeframe.
Hmm... lets think about this statement for a second. First, let us remember that the planes that crashed into the WTC were hijacked by men carrying boxcutters. Seems to me that any amount of guns greater than zero would likely stop a handful of men with boxcutters.
The second part, to me, sounds as much like an argument against gun regulation as for it. After all, there are a lot more non-military citizens than there are military. If civilians could own the same sort of weapons the military does, well, we COULD fight the military should it coup. For the record, I'm not advocating such a position, just pointing out the obvious flaw in your argument.
I know this benchmark is about open source and all, but I would love to see Solaris thrown into the mix. With all its vaunted scalability and stability, I'd love to see what it actually does better. I guess it would have to be the Intel version, but I would think their kernel algorithms should be the same across architectures.
For what its worth, most audiophile-type reviews I've read have those numbers, usually in graph form. Of course, to most people that graph means nothing, so the summarizers of this world give us the fuzzy, marginally meaningful quotes from the reviewers.
Well, if you look at the bottom of the article, it links to this article, which is slightly more descriptive about the test setup. Still no hard numbers though.
Really? Nothing? Hmm... maybe I'm just an uber-l33t Linux desktop user, but I go crazy without my middle-click copy/pasting, my virtual desktops, and my focus-on-mouseover. Now I know for Windows at least, none of those things exist. Or rather, they exist, but only with additional software, and they still don't work properly, making them useless. And really, if we even include adding software, well your post is stating the obvious, because you can make X11 and most common Linux software run on Windows (and probably OSX too, but I've never used it)
I guess that can still be a problem, but for me at least it hardly happens anymore. As long as you use stable software and generally stick with software compiled for your distro (and really, how hard is that?), you'll almost never have problems.
Yeah, they started bundling it. Technically they started bundling IE3 with Win95 OSR2 (and possibly NT4SP4), but we forget that because it sucked and everybody just installed Netscape in those days and forgot about it. The big OEMs usually did it for you. Furthermore, there were (and still might be) many businesses that standardized on Netscape 4. Some of the bigger sites still go way out of their way to support it, etc, etc. And when broadband first came out (in my area anyway), the cable company went around installing Netscape 4 on everybody's computer.
I guess my point is that back in the day Joe user didn't know anything about browsers either. He just clicked on the big "N" instead of the big "E" to use the internet. If IE were to become a serious impediment to browsing again, I see no reason why the same sort of action wouldn't start taking place. It'd be gradual, just like the switch away from Netscape was, but it would happen. Frankly, I think that whole business about bundling IE being unfair has always been a bit of a red herring. Sure it sounds unfair, and it is a bit like cheating, but it had little to do with the move away from Netscape, and everything to do with Netscape 4 being a terrible, terrible program (and with IE being faster, more stable, and at certain points more standards-compliant).
Y'know, everybody's saying that, and it seems everybody's ignoring the fact that theres clearly a 'X' in the upper right corner, i.e. the standard close window widget. Now, whether clicking that will actually cancel loading the activex control or not is a matter for debate, but its still perfectly possible. It certainly is bad UI design not to have an explicit "CANCEL" button, but these ARE the people who brought us that whole "Luna" nonsense to begin with.
Hmm... well that all sounds very nice, except that it doesn't seem to really work. Why do I say that? Because GAIM at least (and supposedly Trillian pro) already have Jabber connectivity. And you know what? Nobody's transitioning. Its still far easier to just use my AIM account to talk to my Windows friends rather than try and convince them to use Jabber, and my Linux friends feel the same, so everybody just uses AIM. For that matter, I don't even know anybody who uses Jabber. Its a real "if it ain't broke..." type of problem. Currently we can all use AIM, ICQ, and (once again) Yahoo, so nobody sees the need to go to something like Jabber. One day perhaps they will, and fortunately the clients are already available to help, but I still think that day is a ways off.
Obviously he was exaggerating to make a point, but the argument could be made (and has been in many other posts under other stories), that the US government does in a way 'sponsor' Windows. They certainly use a lot of it, they let them off the hook on that whole Sherman act thing, etc... no, they didn't write it, but they have the effect of promoting it.
For your second comment, I note that you left out the part about illegal invasions (illegal by international law for those who are confused). Seems to me that part alone is plenty to be comparable to Tianaman square.
It may be true that people trivialize the brutality of the Chinese, but I'd argue that even more people trivialize the brutality the US has shown. I'm not making a comparison between the two, because really how can you? Both are horrible in their own separate ways. And as an American, I'm personally MUCH more concerned with the actions of my own government than those of a foreign power. Really, who are we to complain to the Chinese, or anyone else for that matter, if we can't keep ourselves in check?
I think the parent is being facetious, but somehow it got modded insightful... this confuses me greatly. How this could be taken for anything but sarcasm is beyond me, so I guess I have to hope that the moderators were being sarcastic as well. Otherwise I think we're in real trouble.
Its fun too!
Seems to me that Redhat, probably among others, has been going this way for some time now. Last time I used it I definitely appreciated that they renamed their Mozilla launcher to "Web Browser", and their gaim launcher to "Instant Messenger", etc. And it certainly didn't install lynx or konqueror along with mozilla. I guess what I'm saying is that what you describe is (almost) a solved problem, and the real issue for adopters these days seems to be, as always, availability and familiarity of applications, and just plain old getting people to try Linux in the first place (and stick with it for more than 24 hours). Of course none of this is relevant to the article, which was about web servers switching to Win2k3. "Average Joe" doesn't do much http serving, and he probably shouldn't.
Bit of a rant, but it seriously bugs me when people try to explain to me that I can't morally or ethically do something. It just sounds very holier-than-thou to me. I mean, who is this guy (grandparent) and who gave him a monopoly on morality? And related to the parent, how does one "prove" that something is immoral or unethical? I feel like people throw around those words to create some kind of emotional appeal in their arguments, and really its tantamount to spin-doctoring.
If you ask me, morality and ethics can only be quantified as what the majority of people believe them to be. I'm skeptical that the majority of people find fileswapping to be reprehensible, else it wouldn't occur to the degree it does. Given that, any appeal to "morality" is really nothing more than blustering and evidence of a steadfast belief that you know better than everyone else.
Hmm... gotta disagree w/the parent and agree with the grandparent. HP48s are sloooowww! Mine's only a 48G, but afaik its exactly the same as the GX except with less memory and no expansion slot. And its gross, really gross. It takes around half a second just to refresh when I put a number on the stack, nevermind trying to do more intensive things. I guess if all you do with it is basic arithmetic its fast enough, but otherwise forget about it. The thing drove me crazy years ago and sent me running to TI, which is a shame because I always liked RPN.
"People, Gray Davis has won your war on spam!"
::chough:: ::choke:: Well, you all know what laughter sounds like..."
"But what about spam in ICQ, AIM, NewsGroups, MSN, Popup software, Spyware software, and Net Sends?"
"I suspect they were largely an invention of the media. The idea that such methods could exist under my very nose is laughable!
Dammit! I had no idea the definition of "pint" was different between the US and UK. I've been getting ripped off by bartenders for years!
See I dunno... MSN search has been around for several years now. Its been the default in IE for several years as well. And IE has been the dominant browser for, you guessed it, several years. And you know what? MSN search is not the most popular engine out there, not even close. In my experience, the more technically inclined love google (and not just the uber-geek linux users either), and pretty much everyone else uses yahoo. I don't think I've ever seen anyone use MSN search except by accident. Microsoft has had unfair competitive advantage in this space for a while, and hasn't capitalized. I find it hard to believe that better image searching will fix their problem.