You talk as if AOL or Yahoo were real networks, that took millions to build. These companies have only developed a smal freeeware and operate some servers. They use as their basis internet protocols (that are in the public domain) and telephone and phiber optics networks (that are paid by their users).
For your knowledge: Jaber is also supported by a company. Yahoo and AOL are only doing this because they want a monopoly. But, as they have developed the protocols, they are in a strong position to prevent competition. Trillian is in a corner situation, and can only get his head above the water if gets a good user base and starts promoting and open protocol, like Jaber.
Was this post informative? I bet that Royal is using the commercial version of Qtopia, and has paid for it. I don't think that is bad: Trolltech is an important company for the Linux ecosystem, even if many people on the community don't like them (for the whole QT licensing debate and the connection with the Canopy group). And Qtopia has a bonus: if you want to develop free apps for it, you can get the source code and the SDK for free.
Do you really know what are you talking about? Workstation class cards are made for stability, game cards for performance or price/performance. See this review: using CAD applications with a game card will lead to crashes and freezes.
Comparing workstation graphic cards and games graphic cards is like saying you can put your white box PC on a high speed conection and use it as a server. Why do you think people still buy IBM servers with Penitum III when the Pentium 4 costs the same? Because they want stability, not only speed.
#8: US/British forces knowingly use illegal depleted uranium weapons in Gulf War
Bullets are designed to kill or injure. DU does it better! And for longer, too. Plus it sounds scary because people picture "nuclear bullets"!
The problem is that DU is causing diseases in american veterans that fought on the first Gulf War.
Many reports are exagerated, but most are true. For instance, the Bush administration was the only government that supported the military coup in Venezuela as the legitimate government, just to see them defeated by a massive non-violent uprising that was supported by low-ranking military officials.
In the long run an open source BeOS clone makes sense, but in between Zeta OS might keep the BeOS flame alive. I have talked to people that are leading the OpenBeOS, and they support Zeta and hope they succeed. If you think OpenBeOS is great, have you ever tough of giving them a help?
It looks like Motorola is stepping out of Symbian (check this report on CNET), so this emphasis on Linux makes sense. With Symbian, Motorola had to make it a more powerfull OS for the future smart phones, and with Linux it has to reduce the footprint and make a good interface. Both have advantages and trade-offs. But, if the future for smart phones lies in Java, the operating system beneath the VM is not very important.
These G5s processors have 64 bit processors and , what is more important to supercompters, 1 GHz frontside bus (one for each processor). However, it seems like an expensive choice for a supercomputer, as you have a lot of expensive accessories integrated on the board or bundled on the computer that are not used on a cluster - a powerfull Radeon graphics card and firewire 800 and 400 port. Apple also is not well know in the supercomputing field, and I wouldn't be surprised if this university picks a Linux kernel with a Mosix patch. But, when IBM starts to sell computers with the G5 processor and puts their team to develop clustering software for it, the Itanium and the Opteron will have a very tough opponent.
Windows is so big, bloated and unstable because you have great binary compatibility. I can get Visicalc, one of the first spreadsheet programs for PCs, and run it under Windows XP. Many closed source programs compiled for old version of glibc, with old gcc versions, don't run under new Linux systems, and kde programs can be even a greater pain. I know it sounds like a troll but, unless you stick with the RPMs provided by your distribution, you have difficulties to install binary software in Linux, as most open source programs are distributed on a source format. I heard that even if you use the source you might have problemas: the gcc 3.x might break some software that compilled under gcc 2.x, because the old version was more tolerant to bad writen code.
The FSF says: profit from services, not software
on
Open Source at TiVo
·
· Score: 1
Tivo applies this mantra really well. They sell their hardware and their software with a very thin margin, and make their profit from the service. The modules thing seems to me like a detail, but whoever has the copyright of the kernel has the last world. As Linux and most kernel developers say it is OK for Tivo to do that, there is no problem.
The author of the article completely misses the point. Someone who has 600 videogames is a huge fan, and writes for a fanzine. That is not journalism. Videogame journalism and reviews are good for someone to decide which game to buy, and are not art critiques. Even tough, I never relly only on reviews: I generally try to play the demo first.
The problem of game journalism is the opposite described in the article: it seems to me every review is only praises, ooh and ahhs, and don't seem reliable. As many reviewrs on free websites write them because they get free games, they tend to write only good reviews not to hurt their relationships with the vendors.
It might be a 100% ATI product, but surely is a Radeon. Most of the original team that developed the Radeon 9700, the first ATI GPU to beat Nvidia for years, was formed by ArtX.
Very good point. It is also intersting to note that BSD and TCP/IP can be used by private companies any way they want (like, putting it on free software or on a proprietary software). An interesting point would be: shuold government fund GPL-licensed software? Only OSS software companies may benefit from it. Microsoft oposes it strongly, but professor Lessig thinks this kind of funding is OK, as governmenta also funds proprietary software and software patents, that can't be used on OOS.
One day, though, governments might find interesting to fund software that are essential to the internet (like, servers and clients for DNS, http, e-mail, etc).
That is one of the best example of software patents working against all of us (and one of the reasons for my first post). But can't it be fixed somehow? Something like a commercial pluggin for Gimp, or a program that transforms RGB images into CMYK? Or are we tied in a situation between the GPL, that prevents the developing a commercial software on top of the GIMP, and software patentes, that makes illegal the developing of a free software for this job?
Java is a threat to Linux. At least, according to Stallman. When I talked to him personally, I asked what is the equivalent to the KDE issue today. He answered in a second: Java. He thinks that anyone that writes Java code and make it free software should only use classes avaliable on Kaffe, and not those that are only on Sun's JVM.
An IBM exec said in 1943 that there was market for "only 5 computers in the world". He is ridiculled now, but he is taken out of context. Computers were things very big, expensive, and that demanded lots of skilled technicians. Computers like this (like Earth Simulator) are still rare. Clusters and SMPPs allowed lots of organizations to have supercomputer-grade computer power, as they could not have the real thing.
Vector processors are much faster, I know, but are they so faster to justify the increased price? Wouldn't it be better to improve scalar processors, or reduce the price of vector processors (like, finding other uses that would justify mass production and consequent reduce the production costs)?
If I was an american citizen, I wouldn't like to see public money invested in vector processors, and would favor the improvement of scalar processors and apps. Leave the market of vectors to the japanese and their playstations.
Have you checked your Mathematica CD? It has a directory called "Unix", and under that you can find subdirectory called Linux, Solaris, Irix and others.
You forgot to mention one thing of Kazaa: bad encoded music. I am not a hardcore music listener, but I don't like something like half of the music downloaded on Kazaa. Personally, I prefer Opennap servers (Lopster for Linux, WinMX for Windows), as they don't try to download the same file from different sources like Kazaa does. And, in a dial-up connection, I have dozens of incomplete songs that I tried to download from P2P networks.
I live in Brazil, where there is a similar service to Buy.com, www.imusica.com.br. It uses WMA, and most of the songs are 160 kbps. They have good servers, and even on dialup it does no take too long to download them. I bought a dozen musics when they had a promotion (each song was about US$ 0,15), and burned them to a normal audio CD. The quality of the encoded music was from very good to excelent, and now I have an unprotected copy, without any silly DRM. My take on WMA: it sucks, but if I need to use it temporarilly to buy musics at a bargain, I go with it.
The problem is that ellections have good media ccoverage, and all participants have acess to good data. In the prediction of terrorists atacks you have markets with with "asymmetric information" (check the 2001 Nobel Prize winners), highly unstable on the short term.
But what is the value of my opinion on Jordan's King assassination? And yours? Just because I have placed a 1000 dollars on the assassination, it might mean two things:
A) I have got some money to spend and feel like betting or
B) I know something that other people don't know yet.
If this future market is planned like a honeypot, there won't be much "B" people, and the market will not provide useful information, just noise (think of the value of Enron's stocks back in 2000 - thousands of people were trading stocks without knowing well the state of the company).
However, if this stock exchange protects the anonymity of the users, it might attract intelligence agents that want to make extra money. Imagine you are a secret agent and know that Al Qaeda is going to attack somewhere: you might tell your superior or make a bet on the market. Theoretically, the secret agents would have an incentive to work really hard, because they could hit jackpot with it. It might also create a new market for freelance secret agents, that don't cost anything to the government and make a living from other's people bets.
But I don't believe it would work because the people that possess valuable information (the terrorists and their friends, of course) wouldn't trust this market. It think it would only be a sophisticated lottery, with some people making money and a lot loosing it, without any connection to the reality. Stock exchanges sometimes have this kind of behavior (like in the dotcom boom), but they generally have a strong connection and impact on economic reality.
Slashdot Mirror
For your knowledge: Jaber is also supported by a company. Yahoo and AOL are only doing this because they want a monopoly. But, as they have developed the protocols, they are in a strong position to prevent competition. Trillian is in a corner situation, and can only get his head above the water if gets a good user base and starts promoting and open protocol, like Jaber.
Was this post informative? I bet that Royal is using the commercial version of Qtopia, and has paid for it. I don't think that is bad: Trolltech is an important company for the Linux ecosystem, even if many people on the community don't like them (for the whole QT licensing debate and the connection with the Canopy group). And Qtopia has a bonus: if you want to develop free apps for it, you can get the source code and the SDK for free.
Comparing workstation graphic cards and games graphic cards is like saying you can put your white box PC on a high speed conection and use it as a server. Why do you think people still buy IBM servers with Penitum III when the Pentium 4 costs the same? Because they want stability, not only speed.
#8: US/British forces knowingly use illegal depleted uranium weapons in Gulf War
Bullets are designed to kill or injure. DU does it better! And for longer, too. Plus it sounds scary because people picture "nuclear bullets"!
The problem is that DU is causing diseases in american veterans that fought on the first Gulf War.
Many reports are exagerated, but most are true. For instance, the Bush administration was the only government that supported the military coup in Venezuela as the legitimate government, just to see them defeated by a massive non-violent uprising that was supported by low-ranking military officials.
In the long run an open source BeOS clone makes sense, but in between Zeta OS might keep the BeOS flame alive. I have talked to people that are leading the OpenBeOS, and they support Zeta and hope they succeed. If you think OpenBeOS is great, have you ever tough of giving them a help?
"Linux is already enterprise-ready"
-- Srikant Acharya, country director,
India and South-East Asia, The SCO Group
It looks like Motorola is stepping out of Symbian (check this report on CNET), so this emphasis on Linux makes sense. With Symbian, Motorola had to make it a more powerfull OS for the future smart phones, and with Linux it has to reduce the footprint and make a good interface. Both have advantages and trade-offs. But, if the future for smart phones lies in Java, the operating system beneath the VM is not very important.
These G5s processors have 64 bit processors and , what is more important to supercompters, 1 GHz frontside bus (one for each processor). However, it seems like an expensive choice for a supercomputer, as you have a lot of expensive accessories integrated on the board or bundled on the computer that are not used on a cluster - a powerfull Radeon graphics card and firewire 800 and 400 port. Apple also is not well know in the supercomputing field, and I wouldn't be surprised if this university picks a Linux kernel with a Mosix patch. But, when IBM starts to sell computers with the G5 processor and puts their team to develop clustering software for it, the Itanium and the Opteron will have a very tough opponent.
Windows is so big, bloated and unstable because you have great binary compatibility. I can get Visicalc, one of the first spreadsheet programs for PCs, and run it under Windows XP. Many closed source programs compiled for old version of glibc, with old gcc versions, don't run under new Linux systems, and kde programs can be even a greater pain. I know it sounds like a troll but, unless you stick with the RPMs provided by your distribution, you have difficulties to install binary software in Linux, as most open source programs are distributed on a source format. I heard that even if you use the source you might have problemas: the gcc 3.x might break some software that compilled under gcc 2.x, because the old version was more tolerant to bad writen code.
Tivo applies this mantra really well. They sell their hardware and their software with a very thin margin, and make their profit from the service. The modules thing seems to me like a detail, but whoever has the copyright of the kernel has the last world. As Linux and most kernel developers say it is OK for Tivo to do that, there is no problem.
The problem of game journalism is the opposite described in the article: it seems to me every review is only praises, ooh and ahhs, and don't seem reliable. As many reviewrs on free websites write them because they get free games, they tend to write only good reviews not to hurt their relationships with the vendors.
It might be a 100% ATI product, but surely is a Radeon. Most of the original team that developed the Radeon 9700, the first ATI GPU to beat Nvidia for years, was formed by ArtX.
One day, though, governments might find interesting to fund software that are essential to the internet (like, servers and clients for DNS, http, e-mail, etc).
That is one of the best example of software patents working against all of us (and one of the reasons for my first post). But can't it be fixed somehow? Something like a commercial pluggin for Gimp, or a program that transforms RGB images into CMYK? Or are we tied in a situation between the GPL, that prevents the developing a commercial software on top of the GIMP, and software patentes, that makes illegal the developing of a free software for this job?
Many professional Photoshop users work for magazines, newspapers, etc, use 4 color printers and neeed CMYK!!
Can't believe this AC got modded up.
Does Gimp support CMYK, like Photoshop? Do you know it is REALLY important if you are doing graphics for a living?
Java is a threat to Linux. At least, according to Stallman. When I talked to him personally, I asked what is the equivalent to the KDE issue today. He answered in a second: Java. He thinks that anyone that writes Java code and make it free software should only use classes avaliable on Kaffe, and not those that are only on Sun's JVM.
But GNU/Linux/KDE.
Vector processors are much faster, I know, but are they so faster to justify the increased price? Wouldn't it be better to improve scalar processors, or reduce the price of vector processors (like, finding other uses that would justify mass production and consequent reduce the production costs)?
If I was an american citizen, I wouldn't like to see public money invested in vector processors, and would favor the improvement of scalar processors and apps. Leave the market of vectors to the japanese and their playstations.
The story doesn't have much information, but I bet these audio and video codecs are targeted to digital television, and not DVD or VCD players.
Have you checked your Mathematica CD? It has a directory called "Unix", and under that you can find subdirectory called Linux, Solaris, Irix and others.
I live in Brazil, where there is a similar service to Buy.com, www.imusica.com.br. It uses WMA, and most of the songs are 160 kbps. They have good servers, and even on dialup it does no take too long to download them. I bought a dozen musics when they had a promotion (each song was about US$ 0,15), and burned them to a normal audio CD. The quality of the encoded music was from very good to excelent, and now I have an unprotected copy, without any silly DRM. My take on WMA: it sucks, but if I need to use it temporarilly to buy musics at a bargain, I go with it.
According to the parent post, the research was conducted in Germany, not in the US.
The problem is that ellections have good media ccoverage, and all participants have acess to good data. In the prediction of terrorists atacks you have markets with with "asymmetric information" (check the 2001 Nobel Prize winners), highly unstable on the short term.
A) I have got some money to spend and feel like betting or
B) I know something that other people don't know yet.
If this future market is planned like a honeypot, there won't be much "B" people, and the market will not provide useful information, just noise (think of the value of Enron's stocks back in 2000 - thousands of people were trading stocks without knowing well the state of the company).
However, if this stock exchange protects the anonymity of the users, it might attract intelligence agents that want to make extra money. Imagine you are a secret agent and know that Al Qaeda is going to attack somewhere: you might tell your superior or make a bet on the market. Theoretically, the secret agents would have an incentive to work really hard, because they could hit jackpot with it. It might also create a new market for freelance secret agents, that don't cost anything to the government and make a living from other's people bets.
But I don't believe it would work because the people that possess valuable information (the terrorists and their friends, of course) wouldn't trust this market. It think it would only be a sophisticated lottery, with some people making money and a lot loosing it, without any connection to the reality. Stock exchanges sometimes have this kind of behavior (like in the dotcom boom), but they generally have a strong connection and impact on economic reality.