The "vote with the wallet" you put so much emphasis on doesn't work any longer in a monopolized market. Anyone who wanted to run Windows Office or play the newest PC-Games that accidentally only run under Windows had to buy Windows. Now you come along and say that they all bought Windows because of Microsofts design decision to integrate IE with it (and in the near future we'll have Media-Player integrated so deep into the OS you can't possibly remove it). In the same manner you could say that people "vote" for higher fuel prices: the stuff get's more and more expensive, yet people still buy it. They must really like their fuel to be expensive.
That MS couldn't push through their Net-Access is because there were easy alternatives, but the success of IE over Netscape (at that time IE was a joke) shows that Microsoft knew to leverage their OS-monopoly to grab the browser market. The paying public is mostly uninformed and lazy too and hadn't AOL peppered them with AOL-Disks we might as well have Microsoft dominating that market too. As for the formats: AFAIR Microsoft did rip out the mp3-encoder in WinXP-beta.
As for the "overambitious Brussels bureaucrats": I think they're better than their US-counterpart that gave up a process they had already won because G.W. Bush wanted them to be friendly with his Buddy Bill. But maybe those underamitious bureucrats were just redefining how corrupt 'big government' can get, in true capitalistic tradition.
As i said it's only a problem because Windows monopolizes the OS-Market. RH has no Linux-monopoly, let alone an OS-monopoly. Microsoft can do whatever they want to their "product" and they pretty much do. They don't need to sell you approximately what you want, their only diversification is "Home" and "Professional" but each one comes with all the extras included.
With automobiles you usually have the choice exactly which extras you want and are willing to pay for. That's because there is no monopoly on automobiles. If DC only sold cars with all the extras included (at a hefty pricetag) most people would go elsewhere.
The entire point of Microsoft bundling IE and WMP with windows isn't to give their customers approximately what they want. Their point is to extend their monopoly to the browser- and mediaplayer- market as well. There's lot's of money in those markets: to control the mediaformat everyone uses means to be able to take a toll from anyone using that format. That's even better than the.doc-Word-format and making everyone use Word.
That's the real Problem here. You can't just buy an OS, you have to buy a webbrowswer, a media-player, a CD-burning-program and whatnot too. Microsofts PR-Department presents it so that all these extras are just gifts that come for free but that's just not true.
The programers developing mediaplayer and IE work at Microsoft and are paid by Microsoft and so, in the end, anyone buying Windows pays for IE amd WMP too. If you don't need WMP since it's only an Office PC: tough luck, you have to pay for it anyway.
Or look at it another way: think of all these Windows-PCs you can buy readily configured, OS, Mediaplayer and all. Anyone selling those Windows-PCs has no choice but to pay Microsoft for WMP and IE. That means there is no true market for webbrowsers or media-players anymore and no competition. The effect can only be bad for the consumer as evidenced by the win of crappy IE (back then) over Netscape.
If Microsoft didn't sell IE and WMP bundled with Windows but as an extra package then others could compete in that market.
What makes this a problem is, that Microsoft Windows has a Monopoly in the desktop OS Market: If you want to sell PCs to the Masses you better put Windows on them and doing so you have no choice but take WMP and IE as well.
I assume these numbers are added to numbers to create (astonishingly) numbers. And this operation can even be applied to all prime numbers! This is really mindbending and puzzling and probably innovative too. Is this method patented yet? Hey, i got a great idea: let's use the "+" sign for this operation, something like "+(number1,number2)", i think i'll patent that.
Maybe that anonymous reader should've freed himself from the mindbended state briefly and taken the few extra seconds to specify "numbers" for the benefit of the readers.
Maybe i'm a little paranoid here, but i really don't think that anyone at Microsoft is willing to change one bit in their Licensing (and that's the top issue i have with all MS-Products). So what's the point in this "Discussion"? Judging from his answers i don't think that Mike will change his view and admit thet the Linux-License and -Pricing-modell might have its advantages in some cases. Also he won't be able to change anything at Microsoft anyway.
The whole discussion will probably only be pored over by the Marketing-department to come up with a campaign that's not as ridiculous as Microsofts usual Marketingblurb. Why help them with it? Let them do their campaign and *then* pick it apart in public.
As others here pointed out the "invention" is nice but not truly revolutionary. JPEG compression has two steps, first one "lossy compression" step using wavelets and the result of that is more or less simply zipped in a second step. Apparently zipping is not really an efficient compression for the results of the first step, but that has already been known and there's already formats out there using a more efficient second compression step. So this is really not as revolutionary an invention as it's made to be, only the PR is better. But all of that is beside the point.
The point is, that to be widely used this format and the necessary compression/decompression tools have to make it into *a lot* of software, browsers for a start. Also the picture have to make it onto the web-pages. And if the format is encumbered by patents noone knows how the patent will be leveraged to make money. Will they just charge for compression-tools, for compression and decompression tools (it's already getting awkward for open source browsers, they'd have to use proprietary plugins) or will they ask money from every website with images in that format?
We already had this trouble with GIF. I clearly remember that the reaction was to pull gifs from the websites and go to jpeg. To me it clearly isn't worth the hassle to use that format at all if it might give someone so much leverage over you. Obviously it's quite sure that someone *will* come along and try to press every cent out of it he can, preferably utilizing lawyers. I really don't care if their invention is so ingenious that they can get a patent over it. It's just that available bandwith and storage capacities grow so fast that i prefer to have my images a little bigger to having them in a format that someone else controls.
The snide remark about RMS was completely uncalled for.
To be honest i don't care about the 30% compression if there's the slightest danger that anyone might start a patent-war over the image-format or the compression algorithm.
I've really seen enough of that (gif, mp3, jpeg) and i prefer spending the additional storage/bandwith capacity to another uppity "IP-shop" coming out to "0wn0rz" the internet with lawyering (maybe after a management-change).
Let's have another look at that compression algorithm in 20 years or so.
Microsoft never gets it right the first time, usually after about three or four tries they come up with something half-decent, still far inferior to the competition (remember Windows 3.1, or the early versions of IE?).
But they don't need to, they will heavily leverage it via Windows and IE, It'll be "built in" and soon it'll be such an "essential" component of the OS that no Windows-copy can be sold without it.
That's how MS leveraged DOS to spread Windows, and how they leveraged Windows to kill netscape with the (then) inferior IE, how they attempt to leverage Windows to spread their mediaplayer and, even more important, media-formats and how they try to muscle away free-for-all protocolls like TCP/IP in favour of their patented crap.
Another idea would be to leave out even numbers altogether. This could be done with some simple shift-operations and maybe a one-off in some places.
I don't know how that "wheel" is efficiently implemented, but a simple way of doing it might be just initialisation with that 210 bits in a periodic manner (or 105 if you just consider odd numbers), or, to avoid bit-operations, with the first 210 bytes. Since the low primes result in the most bit-operations that'd already help a lot.
Now our best hope is to pray that GWB [...] doesn't alienate the entire world in the next 4 years.
In fact i hope he does exactly that. I'm really fed up with the USA proclaiming themselves as self-elected world-leader, their unilateral politics and their export of run-away capitalism where war is just another way of doing business.
The bigotry of anti-abortionists that cheer Bush on to continue waging wars in which millions of civillians are killed (aparently it's ok to kill a pregnant mother if she happens to live in the wrong country) makes me puke.
In fact i doubt if Kerry would've done much better. To me he came over the perfedt opportunist. In that case we're better off with Bush anyway: at least the world already knows what an idiot he is.
Sorry for the rant, it's just how i feel about the whole affair. So at least Bush will make sure that a lot more people all over the world will feel the same.
The ATI drivers are bad, but not *that* bad
on
Linux GPU Performance
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I gathered some experience with the ATI drivers on Suse 9.1 recently and i too think that they're bad, but it got a little better lately.
While there *is* an "auto-installing" driver-package from ATI you'd better avoid that (unless they fixed a good number of bugs). Just running the package resulted in an error for me, googling around i found some hints and managed to install them: run the package in extract-mode, make manually, ignore error, make install accompanied by some messing with/usr/src/linux/.config.
there is also (for Suse 9.1) an rpm-package. Following the README in that path closely will get the video driver installed. Like nvidia ATIs driver combo too consists of a kernel driver and a n X-driver, and as usual the kernel-driver is a little fiddly to install. There is *no* (longer?) need to compile a custom kernel, you need to install the kernel source though (and really, read the README!).
Be careful though when configuring the XF86config. fglrxconfig is *not* a good idea since it asks you about mouse settings, monitor modes and whatnot, things that are running perfectly well and shouldn't be touched anyway. NVIDIA does a much better job just telling you the few lines you have to change in the config, fglrxconfig produces an XF86config-4 that is mostly useless and contains heaps of garbage.
To make the kernelmodule load automatically add two lines to the "modprobe.conf.local" (i think the first is unnecessary):
In XF86config load "glx" and "dri" in the Modules sections and put
Driver "fglrx"
Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no" in the device section. If you've got access problems put:
Section "DRI"
Group "video"
Mode 0666 EndSection
After restarting the X-server (twice to be sure, and check if the kernel module loaded) "fglrxinfo" should tell you something about ATI (and not Mesa), if that works do a "sync" for good measure and try tuxracer.
In my experience the nvidia-drivers are definitely easier to install, but it's really not impossible to get the ATI-stuff running.
Re:It doesn't take a scientist to figure out...
on
Bush vs. Kerry on Science
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm sorry to rob you of your illusions, but there's some nations out there with less schoolyard killing-sprees than the US sees and without terrorists (let's not elaborate on USAs "shock and awe" war that killed a good number of iraqui civilians), and those nations are getting fed up with the USAs unilateral policies.
Yeah, i know France is not too popular in the USA now since they had the guts to stand up against Bushs private war on Iraq (for which still no legitimation exists: there were no WMDs, Bin Laden has better connections to Saudi-Arabia and the Bush Family than to Iraq, and had this really been about evil dictators with WMDs the war should have taken place in Vietnam). Neither is Germany, or the Chinese, those evil commies (the hysterical american reaction to anything that reeks of communism is really funny).
The USA are pushing through their foreign policy without any scruples, even by war if they think it'll get them to their goals. There's lots of nations perceiving the US in that way and not all of them are radicals and terrorists.
Do go on and mod me down if you can't stand criticism, i don't care.
My interpretation is, that you just can't get at the satelite pictures via FOIA. That might even be a good thing for those who wish to market the same picture commercially: they don't have to compete with images they sold to the government and that were published via FOIA.
OTOH the american citizens already paid for those pictures with their taxes.
The scientific magazines provide a service by organizing the review, choosing the material, organising it, then printing and delivering it. They don't do the review, that's done by other scientists. Now either that service is worth the money they're demanding or it isn't. If there's a cheaper way by spending the money on a few websites instead of all those magazines then they should either adapt their prices or go out of business.
At the moment the situation is unbearable. The scientists have to invest time, work and some money to get their articles printed and they have to spend a lot of money to read their own and other scientists work. I work in science and i think those magazines are simply too expensive and they're much too restrictive. The content they provide is contributed by scientists, yet those scientists may not even copy their own articles freely and give them away (or have them printed somewhere else).
This is really ridiculous. But for the editorial process (choosing and organizing what to publish) the scientists do all the work. This work is publicly funded. Yet the magazines insist that it's their god-given right to control the publication of that research and demand as much as they like for it. Now they even want to bar the scientists from publishing their work in a more convenient way.
I really don't want people put out of work, but those magazines definitely have to rethink their pricing. Also i think it's better to spend the money on a few more scientists than on greedy publishers.
The usual Air conditioning System uses a heatpump and needs electricity to cool the air (just like a refridgerator). That electricity ends up as heat (outside) as well. So looking at totals it's more efficient to use cold water from the lake for cooling (if available) than to use heat exchangers that run on electricity that just ends up as more heat *and* has to be produced by a powerplant producing even more excess heat.
The concern where the excess heat ends up is valid though, but apparently they use it to warm up drinking water that would've been taken from the lake anyway.
With that press statement they practically invite anyone to put it just that way: "Hey, Microsoft says all asians are too dumb to handle more than three windows at once".
Why couldn't MS be honest about it and say "sure, we target the low-cost market segment here with an XP-version with reduced capabilities. If you want/need the whole functionality of our powerfull Windows XP(tm) you'll still have to pay the full price (What you get is what you pay for)."
It's obvious to anyone what MS is doing here, they could as well be open about it and avoid abusing their (potential) asian userbase. But no, the PR-department had their say and decided it's better to lie and not only imply that asian users are too dumb to run more than three aplications but also that they're too dumb to spot such a poor lie.
The device uses USB 2.0 to hook up to a PC running Sony's own SonicStage software
So that means apart from the fact that i have to rely on Sonys proprietary Formats for the audio and i need Windows just to interface with the thing i can't even use the thing as an external HD? How silly is that?
When i buy what is in effect a 20GB HD with headphones i want to be able to carry some data on that. Now my mobile doubles as digital camera, organizer, handheld game and whatnot, but that sony thing serves only as a walkman just because they lobotomized the PC-Interface?
No matter that their main investor dumped SCO they'll present it as earnings. They got $37M ($50M-$13M) in exchange for roughly 2.8M shares (2.1M for Baystar,.7M for RBC). that means they sold these shares at about $13/share when the current market price is $5 (in fact it's even worse than that: those shares are newly minted and cost SCO zilch, they only cost the common shareholder money by watering down SCOX).
SCO already delayed their earnings report to take these recent developments into account. Probably they're trying to find some way of creative accounting to assign some of these "earnings" to Q2 (difficult, since this really happened in Q3).
But the bottom line is: SCO screwed their investor and will advertise this as a good deal. Maybe SCOs common shareholders should consider that they're also just a bunch of investors, only with less privileges than BayStar had with their A-1 preferred shares.
Hey, i don't work in tech support and even i know that most people don't even bother look into a manual, let alone read it. Even the best manual doesn't help if noone reads it.
And no, i don't want to pay for morons who don't read the manual because they're too macho for that.
If MS in the future decides that patches are a premium-service (with premium license-fees), then so be it. I also think that anyone who uses MS-software should pay their price.
If you don't like their prices or their conditions turn to the alternatives.
That's what i find most disturbing: There's a deal over $50 million and the fine is such a small percentage that it's really neglible.
The big numbers look impressive, but if you made a wrongful $50,000 deal and got fined $800 or if you made a $50 deal and got fined $0.80, wouldn't you laugh it off and gleefully hand over that "fine"? This fine is totally out of proportion, BG probably just considers it a small tax he has to figure in in future transactions of that kind.
Slashdot Mirror
The "vote with the wallet" you put so much emphasis on doesn't work any longer in a monopolized market. Anyone who wanted to run Windows Office or play the newest PC-Games that accidentally only run under Windows had to buy Windows. Now you come along and say that they all bought Windows because of Microsofts design decision to integrate IE with it (and in the near future we'll have Media-Player integrated so deep into the OS you can't possibly remove it). In the same manner you could say that people "vote" for higher fuel prices: the stuff get's more and more expensive, yet people still buy it. They must really like their fuel to be expensive.
That MS couldn't push through their Net-Access is because there were easy alternatives, but the success of IE over Netscape (at that time IE was a joke) shows that Microsoft knew to leverage their OS-monopoly to grab the browser market. The paying public is mostly uninformed and lazy too and hadn't AOL peppered them with AOL-Disks we might as well have Microsoft dominating that market too. As for the formats: AFAIR Microsoft did rip out the mp3-encoder in WinXP-beta.
As for the "overambitious Brussels bureaucrats": I think they're better than their US-counterpart that gave up a process they had already won because G.W. Bush wanted them to be friendly with his Buddy Bill. But maybe those underamitious bureucrats were just redefining how corrupt 'big government' can get, in true capitalistic tradition.
As i said it's only a problem because Windows monopolizes the OS-Market. RH has no Linux-monopoly, let alone an OS-monopoly. Microsoft can do whatever they want to their "product" and they pretty much do. They don't need to sell you approximately what you want, their only diversification is "Home" and "Professional" but each one comes with all the extras included.
.doc-Word-format and making everyone use Word.
With automobiles you usually have the choice exactly which extras you want and are willing to pay for. That's because there is no monopoly on automobiles. If DC only sold cars with all the extras included (at a hefty pricetag) most people would go elsewhere.
The entire point of Microsoft bundling IE and WMP with windows isn't to give their customers approximately what they want. Their point is to extend their monopoly to the browser- and mediaplayer- market as well. There's lot's of money in those markets: to control the mediaformat everyone uses means to be able to take a toll from anyone using that format. That's even better than the
That's the real Problem here. You can't just buy an OS, you have to buy a webbrowswer, a media-player, a CD-burning-program and whatnot too. Microsofts PR-Department presents it so that all these extras are just gifts that come for free but that's just not true.
The programers developing mediaplayer and IE work at Microsoft and are paid by Microsoft and so, in the end, anyone buying Windows pays for IE amd WMP too. If you don't need WMP since it's only an Office PC: tough luck, you have to pay for it anyway.
Or look at it another way: think of all these Windows-PCs you can buy readily configured, OS, Mediaplayer and all. Anyone selling those Windows-PCs has no choice but to pay Microsoft for WMP and IE. That means there is no true market for webbrowsers or media-players anymore and no competition. The effect can only be bad for the consumer as evidenced by the win of crappy IE (back then) over Netscape.
If Microsoft didn't sell IE and WMP bundled with Windows but as an extra package then others could compete in that market.
What makes this a problem is, that Microsoft Windows has a Monopoly in the desktop OS Market: If you want to sell PCs to the Masses you better put Windows on them and doing so you have no choice but take WMP and IE as well.
I assume these numbers are added to numbers to create (astonishingly) numbers. And this operation can even be applied to all prime numbers! This is really mindbending and puzzling and probably innovative too. Is this method patented yet? Hey, i got a great idea: let's use the "+" sign for this operation, something like "+(number1,number2)", i think i'll patent that.
Maybe that anonymous reader should've freed himself from the mindbended state briefly and taken the few extra seconds to specify "numbers" for the benefit of the readers.
Maybe i'm a little paranoid here, but i really don't think that anyone at Microsoft is willing to change one bit in their Licensing (and that's the top issue i have with all MS-Products). So what's the point in this "Discussion"? Judging from his answers i don't think that Mike will change his view and admit thet the Linux-License and -Pricing-modell might have its advantages in some cases. Also he won't be able to change anything at Microsoft anyway.
The whole discussion will probably only be pored over by the Marketing-department to come up with a campaign that's not as ridiculous as Microsofts usual Marketingblurb. Why help them with it? Let them do their campaign and *then* pick it apart in public.
As others here pointed out the "invention" is nice but not truly revolutionary. JPEG compression has two steps, first one "lossy compression" step using wavelets and the result of that is more or less simply zipped in a second step. Apparently zipping is not really an efficient compression for the results of the first step, but that has already been known and there's already formats out there using a more efficient second compression step. So this is really not as revolutionary an invention as it's made to be, only the PR is better. But all of that is beside the point.
The point is, that to be widely used this format and the necessary compression/decompression tools have to make it into *a lot* of software, browsers for a start. Also the picture have to make it onto the web-pages. And if the format is encumbered by patents noone knows how the patent will be leveraged to make money. Will they just charge for compression-tools, for compression and decompression tools (it's already getting awkward for open source browsers, they'd have to use proprietary plugins) or will they ask money from every website with images in that format?
We already had this trouble with GIF. I clearly remember that the reaction was to pull gifs from the websites and go to jpeg. To me it clearly isn't worth the hassle to use that format at all if it might give someone so much leverage over you. Obviously it's quite sure that someone *will* come along and try to press every cent out of it he can, preferably utilizing lawyers. I really don't care if their invention is so ingenious that they can get a patent over it. It's just that available bandwith and storage capacities grow so fast that i prefer to have my images a little bigger to having them in a format that someone else controls.
The snide remark about RMS was completely uncalled for.
To be honest i don't care about the 30% compression if there's the slightest danger that anyone might start a patent-war over the image-format or the compression algorithm.
I've really seen enough of that (gif, mp3, jpeg) and i prefer spending the additional storage/bandwith capacity to another uppity "IP-shop" coming out to "0wn0rz" the internet with lawyering (maybe after a management-change).
Let's have another look at that compression algorithm in 20 years or so.
Yeah, i'd like one, could you send it to :o)
gotan at gmx.net
thanks
It's a little frustrating, reading about all those gmail-features and then, everytime when i head over there, not being able to sign up.
Thus it'd be nice to mention that it's still in the trial stage in the slashdot-article so i don't need to bother.
Microsoft never gets it right the first time, usually after about three or four tries they come up with something half-decent, still far inferior to the competition (remember Windows 3.1, or the early versions of IE?).
But they don't need to, they will heavily leverage it via Windows and IE, It'll be "built in" and soon it'll be such an "essential" component of the OS that no Windows-copy can be sold without it.
That's how MS leveraged DOS to spread Windows, and how they leveraged Windows to kill netscape with the (then) inferior IE, how they attempt to leverage Windows to spread their mediaplayer and, even more important, media-formats and how they try to muscle away free-for-all protocolls like TCP/IP in favour of their patented crap.
Why should it be different this time?
Another idea would be to leave out even numbers altogether. This could be done with some simple shift-operations and maybe a one-off in some places.
I don't know how that "wheel" is efficiently implemented, but a simple way of doing it might be just initialisation with that 210 bits in a periodic manner (or 105 if you just consider odd numbers), or, to avoid bit-operations, with the first 210 bytes. Since the low primes result in the most bit-operations that'd already help a lot.
Now our best hope is to pray that GWB [...] doesn't alienate the entire world in the next 4 years.
In fact i hope he does exactly that. I'm really fed up with the USA proclaiming themselves as self-elected world-leader, their unilateral politics and their export of run-away capitalism where war is just another way of doing business.
The bigotry of anti-abortionists that cheer Bush on to continue waging wars in which millions of civillians are killed (aparently it's ok to kill a pregnant mother if she happens to live in the wrong country) makes me puke.
In fact i doubt if Kerry would've done much better. To me he came over the perfedt opportunist. In that case we're better off with Bush anyway: at least the world already knows what an idiot he is.
Sorry for the rant, it's just how i feel about the whole affair. So at least Bush will make sure that a lot more people all over the world will feel the same.
I gathered some experience with the ATI drivers on Suse 9.1 recently and i too think that they're bad, but it got a little better lately.
/usr/src/linux/.config.
/sbin/modprobe --ignore-install fglrx && { /sbin /modprobe nvidia_agp; /bin/true; } alias char-major-226-0 fglrx
While there *is* an "auto-installing" driver-package from ATI you'd better avoid that (unless they fixed a good number of bugs). Just running the package resulted in an error for me, googling around i found some hints and managed to install them: run the package in extract-mode, make manually, ignore error, make install accompanied by some messing with
there is also (for Suse 9.1) an rpm-package. Following the README in that path closely will get the video driver installed. Like nvidia ATIs driver combo too consists of a kernel driver and a n X-driver, and as usual the kernel-driver is a little fiddly to install. There is *no* (longer?) need to compile a custom kernel, you need to install the kernel source though (and really, read the README!).
Be careful though when configuring the XF86config. fglrxconfig is *not* a good idea since it asks you about mouse settings, monitor modes and whatnot, things that are running perfectly well and shouldn't be touched anyway. NVIDIA does a much better job just telling you the few lines you have to change in the config, fglrxconfig produces an XF86config-4 that is mostly useless and contains heaps of garbage.
To make the kernelmodule load automatically add two lines to the "modprobe.conf.local" (i think the first is unnecessary):
install fglrx
In XF86config load "glx" and "dri" in the Modules sections and put
Driver "fglrx"
Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no"
in the device section. If you've got access problems put:
Section "DRI"
Group "video"
Mode 0666
EndSection
After restarting the X-server (twice to be sure, and check if the kernel module loaded) "fglrxinfo" should tell you something about ATI (and not Mesa), if that works do a "sync" for good measure and try tuxracer.
In my experience the nvidia-drivers are definitely easier to install, but it's really not impossible to get the ATI-stuff running.
I'm sorry to rob you of your illusions, but there's some nations out there with less schoolyard killing-sprees than the US sees and without terrorists (let's not elaborate on USAs "shock and awe" war that killed a good number of iraqui civilians), and those nations are getting fed up with the USAs unilateral policies.
Yeah, i know France is not too popular in the USA now since they had the guts to stand up against Bushs private war on Iraq (for which still no legitimation exists: there were no WMDs, Bin Laden has better connections to Saudi-Arabia and the Bush Family than to Iraq, and had this really been about evil dictators with WMDs the war should have taken place in Vietnam). Neither is Germany, or the Chinese, those evil commies (the hysterical american reaction to anything that reeks of communism is really funny).
The USA are pushing through their foreign policy without any scruples, even by war if they think it'll get them to their goals. There's lots of nations perceiving the US in that way and not all of them are radicals and terrorists.
Do go on and mod me down if you can't stand criticism, i don't care.
My interpretation is, that you just can't get at the satelite pictures via FOIA. That might even be a good thing for those who wish to market the same picture commercially: they don't have to compete with images they sold to the government and that were published via FOIA.
OTOH the american citizens already paid for those pictures with their taxes.
In this case it's different though:
The scientific magazines provide a service by organizing the review, choosing the material, organising it, then printing and delivering it. They don't do the review, that's done by other scientists. Now either that service is worth the money they're demanding or it isn't. If there's a cheaper way by spending the money on a few websites instead of all those magazines then they should either adapt their prices or go out of business.
At the moment the situation is unbearable. The scientists have to invest time, work and some money to get their articles printed and they have to spend a lot of money to read their own and other scientists work. I work in science and i think those magazines are simply too expensive and they're much too restrictive. The content they provide is contributed by scientists, yet those scientists may not even copy their own articles freely and give them away (or have them printed somewhere else).
This is really ridiculous. But for the editorial process (choosing and organizing what to publish) the scientists do all the work. This work is publicly funded. Yet the magazines insist that it's their god-given right to control the publication of that research and demand as much as they like for it. Now they even want to bar the scientists from publishing their work in a more convenient way.
I really don't want people put out of work, but those magazines definitely have to rethink their pricing. Also i think it's better to spend the money on a few more scientists than on greedy publishers.
The usual Air conditioning System uses a heatpump and needs electricity to cool the air (just like a refridgerator). That electricity ends up as heat (outside) as well. So looking at totals it's more efficient to use cold water from the lake for cooling (if available) than to use heat exchangers that run on electricity that just ends up as more heat *and* has to be produced by a powerplant producing even more excess heat.
The concern where the excess heat ends up is valid though, but apparently they use it to warm up drinking water that would've been taken from the lake anyway.
With that press statement they practically invite anyone to put it just that way: "Hey, Microsoft says all asians are too dumb to handle more than three windows at once".
Why couldn't MS be honest about it and say "sure, we target the low-cost market segment here with an XP-version with reduced capabilities. If you want/need the whole functionality of our powerfull Windows XP(tm) you'll still have to pay the full price (What you get is what you pay for)."
It's obvious to anyone what MS is doing here, they could as well be open about it and avoid abusing their (potential) asian userbase. But no, the PR-department had their say and decided it's better to lie and not only imply that asian users are too dumb to run more than three aplications but also that they're too dumb to spot such a poor lie.
The device uses USB 2.0 to hook up to a PC running Sony's own SonicStage software
So that means apart from the fact that i have to rely on Sonys proprietary Formats for the audio and i need Windows just to interface with the thing i can't even use the thing as an external HD? How silly is that?
When i buy what is in effect a 20GB HD with headphones i want to be able to carry some data on that. Now my mobile doubles as digital camera, organizer, handheld game and whatnot, but that sony thing serves only as a walkman just because they lobotomized the PC-Interface?
It worked for him, why shouldn't it work for me?
No matter that their main investor dumped SCO they'll present it as earnings. They got $37M ($50M-$13M) in exchange for roughly 2.8M shares (2.1M for Baystar, .7M for RBC). that means they sold these shares at about $13/share when the current market price is $5 (in fact it's even worse than that: those shares are newly minted and cost SCO zilch, they only cost the common shareholder money by watering down SCOX).
SCO already delayed their earnings report to take these recent developments into account. Probably they're trying to find some way of creative accounting to assign some of these "earnings" to Q2 (difficult, since this really happened in Q3).
But the bottom line is: SCO screwed their investor and will advertise this as a good deal. Maybe SCOs common shareholders should consider that they're also just a bunch of investors, only with less privileges than BayStar had with their A-1 preferred shares.
How about making a comprehensive manual?
Hey, i don't work in tech support and even i know that most people don't even bother look into a manual, let alone read it. Even the best manual doesn't help if noone reads it.
And no, i don't want to pay for morons who don't read the manual because they're too macho for that.
Similar line of reasoning as SCO: sue your (potential) customers if they don't pay your prices.
If MS in the future decides that patches are a premium-service (with premium license-fees), then so be it. I also think that anyone who uses MS-software should pay their price.
If you don't like their prices or their conditions turn to the alternatives.
That's what i find most disturbing: There's a deal over $50 million and the fine is such a small percentage that it's really neglible.
The big numbers look impressive, but if you made a wrongful $50,000 deal and got fined $800 or if you made a $50 deal and got fined $0.80, wouldn't you laugh it off and gleefully hand over that "fine"? This fine is totally out of proportion, BG probably just considers it a small tax he has to figure in in future transactions of that kind.