Wasteful duplication of effort, is also healthy competition.
Remember the Cold War? The Russians avoided duplication of effort through central planning, the west duplicated effort massively through having competition within economies.
Yes, different operating system also provide competition, but the competition between desktop environments is more immediate. I am a KDE user, but I try Gnome or XFCE every so often, and would switch is one was better. That is not true of Windows or MacOS which I have not seriously tried for much longer.
Well, $40 was a negotiating position, they would probably have accepted a bit more than the offer. They also have a clear duty to the shareholders to extract the most than MS would pay.
There is also the risk involved in the deal. There is a very good chance that it would have been blocked by regulators, or only been allowed with conditions would have caused MS to walk away. Would regulators let the two biggest webmail providers combine? Let two major IM networks combine? Allow MS to buy out a promising competitor to Exchange? Allow two major portal sites to combine?
If the deal had been agreed and then blocked, Yahoo shareholders would have been left a lot worse off.
Where exactly does MS hating come into my argument?
MS does not seem to be anything like as well run under Ballmer as it used to be my Bill Gates.
In addition, it is not in MS's interests for Yahoo to be well run as an independent entity. MS wants to buy Yahoo, or bits of it, as cheaply as possible.
The cleverest thing for MS to do at this point would be to keep the uncertainty going for as long as possible, cause as much disruption as possible, watch the price fall and aim to buy selected bits (the search engine, at least) as cheaply as possible.
In other words, it is precisely because I think MS is competent, that I think a board chosen by MS would be a bad thing for Yahoo.
Once MS buy, they might well return a better profit than the current Yahoo board. That is another matter entirely. Personally I doubt it, because big takeovers rarely work out well.
I mean really, Microsoft is basically saying "Help us replace your board of directors with one sympathetic to us, oh and hey no worries we still make a purchase offer in your best interests."
It is worse than that. MS is saying "replace your board of directors with a board especially appointed to sell the company to us".
The problem with that it that it rules out refusing to sell, which greatly weakens Yahoo's negotiating position - it is much harder to get a good price if the buyer knows you have to sell to them.
The current board should have sold at the higher price, but changing the board now will not help.
You are ahead on configuration, and do KDE better than Kubuntu, but you are behind on packaging.
I have come across several packages with minor problems (such as missing dependencies) which has hardly ever happened to me with Ubuntu. RPMDrake is also not as good as Synaptic, or even Adept, but I have complained about that before on the Mandriva forums.
The problems with packages is something I have come across more recently. I hope it is just a bad patch rather than showing an underlying lack of QC.
One more thing Adam, you and a few other people do a great job on the forums. Thanks.
It might be what journalists are supposed to do. It is not what they do.
I just read an excellent book on how the media works. It does have a website: Flat Earth News, but I strongly recommend reading the book for the mass for the detailed and complete picture.
Re:"Porn has made its way in there already"
on
Google Lively Review
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· Score: 1
Not if the couple is married!I've wondered if there could be a market for "Christian porn" that addresses all the issues they have with it.
Bit OT, but an interesting idea
1) Depict married couples in racey and stimulating scenes.
This has as much to do with the attitude of the viewer, as with the relationship of those depicted -for example seeing porn is likely to make you want to commit adultery with the people depicted.
Provide a system that ensures that the actors are not exploited.
How do you satisfactorily ensure that? There are lots of arguments about what constitutes exploitation.
I think it might just be possible, but is probably impractical.
That said, porn is really a pretty trivial issue. Sexual sins per se are fairly unimportant (as far as one can classify these things). Where they are serious there is either other element involved (e.g. betrayal and deceit with adultery), or there is some abuse of others (rape, child abuse) or extreme perversion involved.
RAW support depends somewhat on your camera. With my Panasonic FZ-18 Digikam 0.3.9 works fine with kipi-plugins installed. I have not tried without kipi plugins.
One gotcha is that if you upgrade, the thumbnails of images in previously unsupported RAW formats are not automatically updated.
In other words the GPL is more business friendly from the point of view of the developer - for example, you can ensure that proprietary competitors do not simply take chunks of your code and put it in their products.
The BSD can be characterised as more anarchist: you give your stuff away for the public good with no expectation of reward. Very laudable, but it does not seem realistic in a capitalist world.
I realise this is not altogether fair, but it is a stronger argument that common "BSD is more business friendly".
The US was actively supporting him while he was using chemical weapons on the Kurds.
Furthermore, neither the chemical weapons (which everyone except the US government had acknowledged for years) or possession of materials that showed that he wanted nukes (which, again, was never disputed) shows that he was anywhere near having weapons which posed an imminent threat - let alone had the intent of threatening the US or its allies (which would have been suicidal).
The invasion was illegal under international law in any case.
Finally, this stuff was found at the time of the invasions, and no-one thought it proved anything then: why does it prove something now, just because it has been sold?
They're doomed in the same way IBM was doomed back in the late 80's
In the late 80's IBM stock was in the mid $20s. Now it is 6X higher at $120. As a Microsoft stockholder, I sure hope you are right!
And how did IBM's price do from say May 1987 to August 1993? From a high of 41.9 to a low of 10.5.
IBM then changed its business drastically, going heavily into services, getting out of a lot of businesses (I can think of printers and PCs off-hand, but there were more) and turned around.
Even with the turnaround, IBM never really made up for the under performance. The price is up 685% since January 1980, but the S P 500 is up 1164% over the same period.
You are not going to be a very happy MS shareholder if it follows that path, are you?
You are assuming that they are slowing down BT because they want to stop you breaching someone else's (not their) copyrights.
They are slowing it down because BT can use a a lot of bandwidth, which costs them money.
There's still no definitive evidence that there's a viable business model in an open source, software only company. Most profitable "open source" companies are in the closed hardware business and just use Linux inside
Firstly, there are profitable open source companies like Red Hat. MySQL was probably profitable or close to it, as were many others. Secondly, even when the revenues come from hardware or services, it makes open source economically viable.
Businesses open source because there is money to be made by doing so, but just to be nice.
Everything is fine until they want to copy some text from the web page and paste it to a document (simliarly to what you can do with IE6 and Word) without losing the format...
I just copied your comment from FF2 to Open Office and I can see the formatting. Is this a problem specific to Xandros?
Incidentally, copying from Konqueror to Open Office preserves formatting as well.
Being able to book restaurants and hotels when they are full to us hoi polloi? Everyone who seems passport, or hears your name knowing you are a someone?
Probably not worth much to Stephen Hawking given everyone knows who he is anyway, but I am sure some people find getting a knightood useful.
I want to play it on my mp3 player, in my car, on my home stereo, or on my computer, depending on where I am and what I'm doing. All of these are legal activities, and I don't need to buy 4 copies of a song. Not for long!
Except that those curses were for the actual theft of valuable property which had a physical existence.
Now the curse is for taking a copy.
These are altogether different. I would not want someone to steal my car. I have no objection to someone making a copy of my car.
And now we need someone else to vote for us and validate us, otherwise we'll be shown for the rotten crooks we are, and people will stop wanting to partake of our poison fruit. The Lords do not need to win votes: they are appointed for life.
They also tend to be rather better than the Commons in terms of serving the people (they have often voted against legislation that undermines civil liberties, for example), because they are far mroe independent from the executive.
Hosting a public website with some GPL code linked on the back end may spell trouble. No. Obviously.
Passing out CDs containing marketing materials at a trade show may constitute a software "release". If the CDs include GPLed software it must be accompanied by the source code or an offer to supply it. On the other hand, try passing out CDs with Windows on them at a trade show, you will find the restrictions a lot more stringent.
cautious distrust of the GPL when the consequences of the smallest touch could unintentionally taint a codebase What do you mean "taint"? If you copy someone else's code without permission, then you are breaching copyright. The GPL gives you automatic permission subject to some restrictions.
Slashdot Mirror
I am being very sloppy. For Russians please read "Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries".
Remember the Cold War? The Russians avoided duplication of effort through central planning, the west duplicated effort massively through having competition within economies.
Yes, different operating system also provide competition, but the competition between desktop environments is more immediate. I am a KDE user, but I try Gnome or XFCE every so often, and would switch is one was better. That is not true of Windows or MacOS which I have not seriously tried for much longer.
There is also the risk involved in the deal. There is a very good chance that it would have been blocked by regulators, or only been allowed with conditions would have caused MS to walk away. Would regulators let the two biggest webmail providers combine? Let two major IM networks combine? Allow MS to buy out a promising competitor to Exchange? Allow two major portal sites to combine?
If the deal had been agreed and then blocked, Yahoo shareholders would have been left a lot worse off.
MS does not seem to be anything like as well run under Ballmer as it used to be my Bill Gates.
In addition, it is not in MS's interests for Yahoo to be well run as an independent entity. MS wants to buy Yahoo, or bits of it, as cheaply as possible.
The cleverest thing for MS to do at this point would be to keep the uncertainty going for as long as possible, cause as much disruption as possible, watch the price fall and aim to buy selected bits (the search engine, at least) as cheaply as possible.
In other words, it is precisely because I think MS is competent, that I think a board chosen by MS would be a bad thing for Yahoo.
Once MS buy, they might well return a better profit than the current Yahoo board. That is another matter entirely. Personally I doubt it, because big takeovers rarely work out well.
I mean really, Microsoft is basically saying "Help us replace your board of directors with one sympathetic to us, oh and hey no worries we still make a purchase offer in your best interests."
It is worse than that. MS is saying "replace your board of directors with a board especially appointed to sell the company to us".
The problem with that it that it rules out refusing to sell, which greatly weakens Yahoo's negotiating position - it is much harder to get a good price if the buyer knows you have to sell to them.
The current board should have sold at the higher price, but changing the board now will not help.
It does usually happen in contrib not main. Unfortunately a lot of useful stuff is in contrib.
I have come across several packages with minor problems (such as missing dependencies) which has hardly ever happened to me with Ubuntu. RPMDrake is also not as good as Synaptic, or even Adept, but I have complained about that before on the Mandriva forums.
The problems with packages is something I have come across more recently. I hope it is just a bad patch rather than showing an underlying lack of QC.
One more thing Adam, you and a few other people do a great job on the forums. Thanks.
I just read an excellent book on how the media works. It does have a website: Flat Earth News, but I strongly recommend reading the book for the mass for the detailed and complete picture.
Not if the couple is married!I've wondered if there could be a market for "Christian porn" that addresses all the issues they have with it.
Bit OT, but an interesting idea
1) Depict married couples in racey and stimulating scenes.
This has as much to do with the attitude of the viewer, as with the relationship of those depicted -for example seeing porn is likely to make you want to commit adultery with the people depicted.
Provide a system that ensures that the actors are not exploited.
How do you satisfactorily ensure that? There are lots of arguments about what constitutes exploitation.
I think it might just be possible, but is probably impractical.
That said, porn is really a pretty trivial issue. Sexual sins per se are fairly unimportant (as far as one can classify these things). Where they are serious there is either other element involved (e.g. betrayal and deceit with adultery), or there is some abuse of others (rape, child abuse) or extreme perversion involved.
RAW support depends somewhat on your camera. With my Panasonic FZ-18 Digikam 0.3.9 works fine with kipi-plugins installed. I have not tried without kipi plugins. One gotcha is that if you upgrade, the thumbnails of images in previously unsupported RAW formats are not automatically updated.
I think the GP means the producer and recipient of a derived work.
The BSD can be characterised as more anarchist: you give your stuff away for the public good with no expectation of reward. Very laudable, but it does not seem realistic in a capitalist world.
I realise this is not altogether fair, but it is a stronger argument that common "BSD is more business friendly".
Furthermore, neither the chemical weapons (which everyone except the US government had acknowledged for years) or possession of materials that showed that he wanted nukes (which, again, was never disputed) shows that he was anywhere near having weapons which posed an imminent threat - let alone had the intent of threatening the US or its allies (which would have been suicidal).
The invasion was illegal under international law in any case.
Finally, this stuff was found at the time of the invasions, and no-one thought it proved anything then: why does it prove something now, just because it has been sold?
They're doomed in the same way IBM was doomed back in the late 80's
In the late 80's IBM stock was in the mid $20s. Now it is 6X higher at $120. As a Microsoft stockholder, I sure hope you are right!
And how did IBM's price do from say May 1987 to August 1993? From a high of 41.9 to a low of 10.5.
IBM then changed its business drastically, going heavily into services, getting out of a lot of businesses (I can think of printers and PCs off-hand, but there were more) and turned around.
Even with the turnaround, IBM never really made up for the under performance. The price is up 685% since January 1980, but the S P 500 is up 1164% over the same period.
You are not going to be a very happy MS shareholder if it follows that path, are you?
You are assuming that they are slowing down BT because they want to stop you breaching someone else's (not their) copyrights. They are slowing it down because BT can use a a lot of bandwidth, which costs them money.
There's still no definitive evidence that there's a viable business model in an open source, software only company. Most profitable "open source" companies are in the closed hardware business and just use Linux inside
Firstly, there are profitable open source companies like Red Hat. MySQL was probably profitable or close to it, as were many others. Secondly, even when the revenues come from hardware or services, it makes open source economically viable.
Businesses open source because there is money to be made by doing so, but just to be nice.
The problem is that they are likely to kill someone else (especially pedestrians) rather than themselves.
Everything is fine until they want to copy some text from the web page and paste it to a document (simliarly to what you can do with IE6 and Word) without losing the format...
I just copied your comment from FF2 to Open Office and I can see the formatting. Is this a problem specific to Xandros? Incidentally, copying from Konqueror to Open Office preserves formatting as well.
1) SSL certificates do get issued to phishing sites
2) Some banks have login forms on un-encrypted pages
see: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/12/28/more_than_450_phishing_attacks_used_ssl_in_2005.html and http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/13/2143251
Being able to book restaurants and hotels when they are full to us hoi polloi? Everyone who seems passport, or hears your name knowing you are a someone? Probably not worth much to Stephen Hawking given everyone knows who he is anyway, but I am sure some people find getting a knightood useful.
Except that those curses were for the actual theft of valuable property which had a physical existence. Now the curse is for taking a copy. These are altogether different. I would not want someone to steal my car. I have no objection to someone making a copy of my car.
They also tend to be rather better than the Commons in terms of serving the people (they have often voted against legislation that undermines civil liberties, for example), because they are far mroe independent from the executive.
If IBM are shipping mainframes with Linux, their customers are presumably using Linux for something mission critical.