Windows needs to be forked, preferably 3 or 4 ways. Microsoft should be forced to auction off unrestricted rights to use the Windows code base and all related patents. Likewise for Office -- there's too strong of a tie in. There's no need to break up MicroSoft. MicroSoft could even keep the cash from the sale. That's about as fair as you could ask for while returning competition to the marketplace. Of course, that's just a liberal fantasy that will never come to pass. And let's be honest. Taking Media Player out of Windows and lowering the wholesale price $5 ain't going to change a damn thing.
Boing Boing and Fark are news aggregators, while CNN is more traditional news. The difference being that Boing Boing and Fark link to sites like CNN, while CNN pays for the Reuters and AP news feeds themselves. What makes Slashdot different is that they're prepetually a day behind everyone else. But I still stick with Slashdot because FARK can be a little risque for work at times and I can generally pretend that Slashdot is somewhat related to the work I do.
Well, as you might expect, Sun has only a server mentality. The typical server runs few floating point instructions. In a lot of ways, Niagara would be very good at crunching through a database or serving up web pages. On the other hand, such a processor would be worthless on a desktop or a research cluster. I'd like to see actual real-world performance on these processors. I'd also like to see what Oracle charges them for a license.:)
You don't have to tell me that.:) My mom's a real estate agent and my brother in law a mortgage broker. Appraisers that don't come up with the right number simply end up with no customers. And hey, if you've got a buyer willing to pay your price, that must be what it's worth, eh?
Really now. The bread and butter of Microsoft's marketing department has long been about providing a suite of applications that play well together. Furthermore, the lack of a decent graphics editor has been a rather glaring hole in Microsoft's product line. And lastly, this ought to spice up the image editing market a bit. To this point, there's really only been Photoshop on the high end, Paint Shop Pro on the low end, and the Gimp for the open source enthusiast. This will put some long overdue price pressure on Photoshop and make things interesting for a while. I'll also point out that the existance of Microsoft Publisher has done very little to dent sales of Pagemaker. Outside of the OS and Office market, Microsoft really has to work hard to compete.
The problem is that Slashdot has no [OBVIOUS] tag. When you're told that your research funding will get canceled if you don't get the right results, odds are, you're going to find a way to get the right results. This isn't any different than real estate where appraisers are told what the sale price of the house is and then need to find a way to make the appraisal fit the price, or politicians who introduce legislation at the behest of the lobyists who got them elected.
Not that it would actually happen, but if Dell came to Apple and said, "we want to sell an OSX line of products." Apple would be all over that. They want to hang around until OSX can compete with Windows (yeah, right) and then start licensing it to select vendors. They'll be real picky about who gets it and what chipsets and video cards they use. Hardware is a commodity market. Apple has done quite well marketing luxary hardware, but their margins will likely drop on x86 as consumers will finally be able to, pardon the expression/pun, compare apples to Apples.
Funny thing, see, I build furniture. I sometimes tell people that the difference between a $200 piece and a $2000 piece is about 1/32 of an inch. Well, I often measure things with a very precise digital calipers which is accurate to.0005 inches. On the other hand, all of my tools have analog scales to (in some cases) 1/64 of an inch. So I need to be able to calculate back and forth pretty quickly (though truth be told, I have to whip out a pencil for anything finer than a sixteenth). Now, they make calipers that do fractions, and they make tools with digital rules as well, but I don't have them. As such, if I want to finish a project in a reasonable amount of time, I have to be able to convert decimals and fractions quickly and accurately, and not have to hunt all over my shop to find where I left my calculator. In the real world, people really do use math, and they often find they don't have a calculator handy.
Single file programs really don't preclude common dynamic libraries. There shouldn't be any reason you can't drag and drop Java or GTK+ on to your system and have other programs be able to call them. This I think would be preferable to programs installing select pieces of different libraries and runtimes. From a programming perspective this shouldn't be any different than the way one works with a Java or.NET namespace or creating a COM object.
Really, though, I'm more talking about the user experiance. The typical user should never know that a program is more than just one file. And from the system manager perspective, it should also be just that easy.
See, that's the issue. Programs should come as one single file that can be conveniantly added or removed. Drag and drop. Installing a program should never ever involve updating system files or altering any other applications files. There should be no "Package Managers". Microsoft doesn't get that. The Linux crowd doesn't get that. Apple, I think, wants to get that, but that's all a long ways off.
This is absolutely a property right. When I buy a copyrighted good, part of the value of it is that at some point the copyright will end and I will receive full public domain rights to the object. Changing the copyright duration arbitrarily changes the social contract and devalues (from my perspective) the value of the product. On the other hand, under the doctrine of first sale, some people might argue that a copyright extension enhances the value of the product. I would not be one of those people.:) In any event, it changes the social contract in a rather capricious and arbitrary manner. The value of some people's property goes up and the value of others' property goes down.
Of cousre it's not fair. It constitutes an uncompensated taking by the government and giving it to someone else. I purchase a CD on the expectation that at some specified date it will enter the public domain. Over here in the US, the Constitution explicitly forbids such a taking without compensating me. Unfortunately, Congress never, and the courts rarely, ever read the Constitution.
The problem here, and maybe it's a good thing, is that police departments adapt pretty quickly. I'm sure it is, or will be shortly, standard proceedure to get anyone who fails a brethalyzer test down to the station or a hospital so that a blood sample can be prmoptly taken. I have my doubts about the margin of error on breath testing, but blood samples are as reliable as any defendant or prosecutor could ask for.
It's not the internal hardware, it's the interface. Consoles tend to be very joystick/gamepad centric. That works great for a lot of games. FPS and 3D second person specifically (and let's not forget those long gone beloved sidescrollers). But RTS and most RPG formats are much more suited to keyboard and mouse. The graphics quality on consoles, especially with the switch to HDTV, is outstanding. I think it's really all about the interface. I want to play action games (sports, shooters, etc) on a console on the TV. I want to play strategy games on a computer, at a desk. Also, since as a programmer, I need to have a newer PC on my desk, I might as well use that for my gaming.
Open Office can strip out the plain text fairly well. Rendering all the binary only OLE data is near impossible without the MS source code. Any document that's merely Rich Text will easily convert, but embedded graphs, charts, equations, etc. will generally come out garbled or be skipped. This isn't going to change substantially in the new version. Objects will likely be serialized, and that won't do anyone any good unless they're using the MS libraries. Open formats aren't neccessarily useable formats.
Go over to NewEgg and try to buy a CPU. Your choices are AMD and Intel. Want a MB that supports something else? Good luck. Actually, I have some interest in VIA's latest low-power CPU. IBM isn't selling an x86 CPU, and no one builds generic Macs. Don't be so obtuse.
The existing Office document formats are all pretty well documented by 3rd parties. It hasn't even scratched Microsoft's sales. Microsoft's vision on this takes several forms. First, Office is a suite of programs that interoperate. You can embed your spreadsheet in your Word doc or your PowerPoint presentation. Update your spreadsheet and it also updates wherever those numbers also exist. Their second angle is for developers. They want you to use.NET for your in house development. Your user needs to send out a letter? Your program will pull up a document and prefill nearly everything. Thirdly, the now have something they can take to governments and other organizations that are demanding open formats. Finally, no matter how well it's documented, there will be dozens of odd little quirks. But that's ok, so long as you're using the tools that Microsoft provides. Proprietary formats get cracked, quickly and easily. Microsoft wants an end to end lock in.
Bah, I've said it before, and I'll say it one more time. The surest proof that intelligent life exits in the universe is that they have not bothered to contact us.
Posting nude pictures of her could very well be actionable. She may have a copyright interest in them. Some states, California for example, confer upon people a "right of publicity". That is, to use someone's image without their consent is illegal. All that said, the article doesn't give much information. Did the woman allege a copyright violation? Does Oregon recognize a right of publicity, do the servers hosting the pictures exist in a jurisdiction that recognizes such a right? Did the woman submit any evidence that her claims were legitimate? Who's responsible: Yahoo? Her ex? I don't know, but that's what we have courts for. Yahoo, whether they do or don't, should have a policy for dealing with complaints like this.
Prohibition is really a poor analogy for file swapping. It does however provide wonderful insight into the war on drugs. But that's a whole 'nother story. File swapping is really more about civil disobediance. Copyrights are granted as a social contract to give artists fair compensation for their creative works. And 99.9% of the population will happily pay reasonable prices for legitimate copies of copyrighted and patented works. However, prices have become rather unresonable. The balance has swung too far in favor of media interests and the peasants are revolting (They certainly are!). Unfortunately, politicians are idiots. They see this and instead of thinking there must be something wrong with copyright laws, they think "we need to give even more protection to the media interests." Rather like the war on drugs, where prohibition has made drugs very profitable, which leads to more dealers, which leads to tougher laws and sentences which leads to more expensive drugs and more incentive to sell them. Or as Chris Rock has opined, "People wanna get high." Well, maybe prohibition isn't such a bad analogy after all.
It's about software, dude. Mac OS X has a much larger installed desktop base than Linux. There's a lot more standard business software available for it. Stuff you can actually buy in a store. Like MS Office, Photoshop, and whatever else. The kinds of things someone working in the real world might care about. Apple has a very strong incentive to make sure these things are available and working. Plus, Mac has the best iPod support out there. You might be supprised what a selling point that is for some people.
And Google was hardly first to market a map product. However, to my mind, Google has far and away the best map product right now. And that's without the satelite maps. Sure, Google was first to offer the very neat sat maps, but what this really means is that there's a very competitive market out there in both search and mapping. As such, we're seeing some great products from the major players, and that's a good thing for everyone.
Studies have shown that a mother-to-be's diet high in calcium and magnesium including milk, beans, cereals, cheese and nuts may favor a baby girl, whereas a diet high in pizza and coke apparantly favors the conception of a baby boy.
Other studies have also shown that a diet high in coconut rum simply favors conception.
You poor innocent child. You are so terribly naive. Unions exist strictly to protect themselves. They will always put their own power and existance ahead of any interest of their members. Teachers' unions, auto workers, SAG, you name it. Unions only advance the interest of their constituents to enhance the power of the union. Love it or leave it. Lucas made his choice. In a lot of ways we're better off for it. What I find terribly ironic is that by any other group, the actions of unions would be grossly illegal under antitrust and racketeering laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows needs to be forked, preferably 3 or 4 ways. Microsoft should be forced to auction off unrestricted rights to use the Windows code base and all related patents. Likewise for Office -- there's too strong of a tie in. There's no need to break up MicroSoft. MicroSoft could even keep the cash from the sale. That's about as fair as you could ask for while returning competition to the marketplace. Of course, that's just a liberal fantasy that will never come to pass. And let's be honest. Taking Media Player out of Windows and lowering the wholesale price $5 ain't going to change a damn thing.
Boing Boing and Fark are news aggregators, while CNN is more traditional news. The difference being that Boing Boing and Fark link to sites like CNN, while CNN pays for the Reuters and AP news feeds themselves. What makes Slashdot different is that they're prepetually a day behind everyone else. But I still stick with Slashdot because FARK can be a little risque for work at times and I can generally pretend that Slashdot is somewhat related to the work I do.
Well, as you might expect, Sun has only a server mentality. The typical server runs few floating point instructions. In a lot of ways, Niagara would be very good at crunching through a database or serving up web pages. On the other hand, such a processor would be worthless on a desktop or a research cluster. I'd like to see actual real-world performance on these processors. I'd also like to see what Oracle charges them for a license. :)
You don't have to tell me that. :) My mom's a real estate agent and my brother in law a mortgage broker. Appraisers that don't come up with the right number simply end up with no customers. And hey, if you've got a buyer willing to pay your price, that must be what it's worth, eh?
Really now. The bread and butter of Microsoft's marketing department has long been about providing a suite of applications that play well together. Furthermore, the lack of a decent graphics editor has been a rather glaring hole in Microsoft's product line. And lastly, this ought to spice up the image editing market a bit. To this point, there's really only been Photoshop on the high end, Paint Shop Pro on the low end, and the Gimp for the open source enthusiast. This will put some long overdue price pressure on Photoshop and make things interesting for a while. I'll also point out that the existance of Microsoft Publisher has done very little to dent sales of Pagemaker. Outside of the OS and Office market, Microsoft really has to work hard to compete.
The problem is that Slashdot has no [OBVIOUS] tag. When you're told that your research funding will get canceled if you don't get the right results, odds are, you're going to find a way to get the right results. This isn't any different than real estate where appraisers are told what the sale price of the house is and then need to find a way to make the appraisal fit the price, or politicians who introduce legislation at the behest of the lobyists who got them elected.
Not that it would actually happen, but if Dell came to Apple and said, "we want to sell an OSX line of products." Apple would be all over that. They want to hang around until OSX can compete with Windows (yeah, right) and then start licensing it to select vendors. They'll be real picky about who gets it and what chipsets and video cards they use. Hardware is a commodity market. Apple has done quite well marketing luxary hardware, but their margins will likely drop on x86 as consumers will finally be able to, pardon the expression/pun, compare apples to Apples.
Funny thing, see, I build furniture. I sometimes tell people that the difference between a $200 piece and a $2000 piece is about 1/32 of an inch. Well, I often measure things with a very precise digital calipers which is accurate to .0005 inches. On the other hand, all of my tools have analog scales to (in some cases) 1/64 of an inch. So I need to be able to calculate back and forth pretty quickly (though truth be told, I have to whip out a pencil for anything finer than a sixteenth). Now, they make calipers that do fractions, and they make tools with digital rules as well, but I don't have them. As such, if I want to finish a project in a reasonable amount of time, I have to be able to convert decimals and fractions quickly and accurately, and not have to hunt all over my shop to find where I left my calculator. In the real world, people really do use math, and they often find they don't have a calculator handy.
Single file programs really don't preclude common dynamic libraries. There shouldn't be any reason you can't drag and drop Java or GTK+ on to your system and have other programs be able to call them. This I think would be preferable to programs installing select pieces of different libraries and runtimes. From a programming perspective this shouldn't be any different than the way one works with a Java or .NET namespace or creating a COM object.
Really, though, I'm more talking about the user experiance. The typical user should never know that a program is more than just one file. And from the system manager perspective, it should also be just that easy.
See, that's the issue. Programs should come as one single file that can be conveniantly added or removed. Drag and drop. Installing a program should never ever involve updating system files or altering any other applications files. There should be no "Package Managers". Microsoft doesn't get that. The Linux crowd doesn't get that. Apple, I think, wants to get that, but that's all a long ways off.
This is absolutely a property right. When I buy a copyrighted good, part of the value of it is that at some point the copyright will end and I will receive full public domain rights to the object. Changing the copyright duration arbitrarily changes the social contract and devalues (from my perspective) the value of the product. On the other hand, under the doctrine of first sale, some people might argue that a copyright extension enhances the value of the product. I would not be one of those people. :) In any event, it changes the social contract in a rather capricious and arbitrary manner. The value of some people's property goes up and the value of others' property goes down.
Of cousre it's not fair. It constitutes an uncompensated taking by the government and giving it to someone else. I purchase a CD on the expectation that at some specified date it will enter the public domain. Over here in the US, the Constitution explicitly forbids such a taking without compensating me. Unfortunately, Congress never, and the courts rarely, ever read the Constitution.
The problem here, and maybe it's a good thing, is that police departments adapt pretty quickly. I'm sure it is, or will be shortly, standard proceedure to get anyone who fails a brethalyzer test down to the station or a hospital so that a blood sample can be prmoptly taken. I have my doubts about the margin of error on breath testing, but blood samples are as reliable as any defendant or prosecutor could ask for.
It's not the internal hardware, it's the interface. Consoles tend to be very joystick/gamepad centric. That works great for a lot of games. FPS and 3D second person specifically (and let's not forget those long gone beloved sidescrollers). But RTS and most RPG formats are much more suited to keyboard and mouse. The graphics quality on consoles, especially with the switch to HDTV, is outstanding. I think it's really all about the interface. I want to play action games (sports, shooters, etc) on a console on the TV. I want to play strategy games on a computer, at a desk. Also, since as a programmer, I need to have a newer PC on my desk, I might as well use that for my gaming.
Open Office can strip out the plain text fairly well. Rendering all the binary only OLE data is near impossible without the MS source code. Any document that's merely Rich Text will easily convert, but embedded graphs, charts, equations, etc. will generally come out garbled or be skipped. This isn't going to change substantially in the new version. Objects will likely be serialized, and that won't do anyone any good unless they're using the MS libraries. Open formats aren't neccessarily useable formats.
Go over to NewEgg and try to buy a CPU. Your choices are AMD and Intel. Want a MB that supports something else? Good luck. Actually, I have some interest in VIA's latest low-power CPU. IBM isn't selling an x86 CPU, and no one builds generic Macs. Don't be so obtuse.
The existing Office document formats are all pretty well documented by 3rd parties. It hasn't even scratched Microsoft's sales. Microsoft's vision on this takes several forms. First, Office is a suite of programs that interoperate. You can embed your spreadsheet in your Word doc or your PowerPoint presentation. Update your spreadsheet and it also updates wherever those numbers also exist. Their second angle is for developers. They want you to use .NET for your in house development. Your user needs to send out a letter? Your program will pull up a document and prefill nearly everything. Thirdly, the now have something they can take to governments and other organizations that are demanding open formats. Finally, no matter how well it's documented, there will be dozens of odd little quirks. But that's ok, so long as you're using the tools that Microsoft provides. Proprietary formats get cracked, quickly and easily. Microsoft wants an end to end lock in.
Bah, I've said it before, and I'll say it one more time. The surest proof that intelligent life exits in the universe is that they have not bothered to contact us.
Posting nude pictures of her could very well be actionable. She may have a copyright interest in them. Some states, California for example, confer upon people a "right of publicity". That is, to use someone's image without their consent is illegal. All that said, the article doesn't give much information. Did the woman allege a copyright violation? Does Oregon recognize a right of publicity, do the servers hosting the pictures exist in a jurisdiction that recognizes such a right? Did the woman submit any evidence that her claims were legitimate? Who's responsible: Yahoo? Her ex? I don't know, but that's what we have courts for. Yahoo, whether they do or don't, should have a policy for dealing with complaints like this.
we are all naked in god's eyes anyway.
This "God" fellow sounds like a bit of a pervert, wouldn't you say?
Prohibition is really a poor analogy for file swapping. It does however provide wonderful insight into the war on drugs. But that's a whole 'nother story. File swapping is really more about civil disobediance. Copyrights are granted as a social contract to give artists fair compensation for their creative works. And 99.9% of the population will happily pay reasonable prices for legitimate copies of copyrighted and patented works. However, prices have become rather unresonable. The balance has swung too far in favor of media interests and the peasants are revolting (They certainly are!). Unfortunately, politicians are idiots. They see this and instead of thinking there must be something wrong with copyright laws, they think "we need to give even more protection to the media interests." Rather like the war on drugs, where prohibition has made drugs very profitable, which leads to more dealers, which leads to tougher laws and sentences which leads to more expensive drugs and more incentive to sell them. Or as Chris Rock has opined, "People wanna get high." Well, maybe prohibition isn't such a bad analogy after all.
It's about software, dude. Mac OS X has a much larger installed desktop base than Linux. There's a lot more standard business software available for it. Stuff you can actually buy in a store. Like MS Office, Photoshop, and whatever else. The kinds of things someone working in the real world might care about. Apple has a very strong incentive to make sure these things are available and working. Plus, Mac has the best iPod support out there. You might be supprised what a selling point that is for some people.
And Google was hardly first to market a map product. However, to my mind, Google has far and away the best map product right now. And that's without the satelite maps. Sure, Google was first to offer the very neat sat maps, but what this really means is that there's a very competitive market out there in both search and mapping. As such, we're seeing some great products from the major players, and that's a good thing for everyone.
Studies have shown that a mother-to-be's diet high in calcium and magnesium including milk, beans, cereals, cheese and nuts may favor a baby girl, whereas a diet high in pizza and coke apparantly favors the conception of a baby boy.
Other studies have also shown that a diet high in coconut rum simply favors conception.
You poor innocent child. You are so terribly naive. Unions exist strictly to protect themselves. They will always put their own power and existance ahead of any interest of their members. Teachers' unions, auto workers, SAG, you name it. Unions only advance the interest of their constituents to enhance the power of the union. Love it or leave it. Lucas made his choice. In a lot of ways we're better off for it. What I find terribly ironic is that by any other group, the actions of unions would be grossly illegal under antitrust and racketeering laws.