Negroponte has screwed open source by nearly doubling the OLPC price so it can run Windows. He's just back-stabbed all the people who donated a lot of time and effort into putting together a low cost laptop and the free as in speech software to run it.
OLPC is low-cost only if it can be produced and sold in the tens of millions of units. If open source can't deliver those millions today - when they are needed most - the problem isn't with Negroponte and the problem isn't with Windows.
There is nothing in OLPC tech that can't be replicated by others. There is nothing to stop the deployment of the $100 third-world Windows laptop. Not with academic pricing of XP or Vista SE and Office down to $3 per unit.
If MS can charge $3 for their software, but in other venues charge more then 300 for nearly the same, can that be considered as anti-competitive dumping?
When I look at OpenOffice, I see a project funded by Sun, managed by Sun, and staffed by Sun. I do not see its free distribution as a purely charitable enterprise.
Let's just hope that the next US government will break up Bills empire and throw the upper management in jail.
Nowhere is political naiveté more visible than in anti-trust.
The break-up of Standard Oil did nothing to save the small independents.
The Standard product was a stable formulation available everywhere - and customers remained as loyal to Rockefeller's regional operating companies as they had been to their parent.
So are they counting upgrade coupons as full sales? What if they're never used?
Those free upgrade coupons went to home users buying "Vista Rated" PCs over the Christmas holidays.
The geek who thinks those coupons aren't being redeemed is living in a dream world.
Yes, 30% for Microsoft is a lot of money, but after the hype they applied to Vista... I'm still not impressed.
I'll take the odds that it looks damn impressive to Red Hat, Linspire and Sun. Strength on the client side. Strength on the server side. Strength in Office.
How many thirty year old companies in a mature market - a market in which they hold a ninety percent share - see thirty percent growth in revenues in one quarter?
This makes me want to setup a computer with 25,000 junk audio files that resemble (but do not match) the names of actual artists.. then wait for the Mafriaa to come knocking and give them a hard drive that has 25,000 variations of F$%# You RIAA, I didn't do anything illegal.
Go right ahead. The more junk files you post the more worthless the P2P nets.
As evidenced by RIAA lawsuits, a new 100% reliable way to identify yourself online has been discovered - an IP address! After all, it's found to be a proof of identity in legal proceedings!
The IP address is sufficient to begin [or continue] your action.
Civil courts are not in the business of demanding certainty from anyone. They are in the business of resolving conflicts based on the evidence which is available. The balance of probabilities.
Evidence which seems to point in the right direction ought not to be excluded from consideration unless there is a very compelling reason to do so.
It would actually be interesting to see what the RIAA would do with IP's mapped to University Common Area machines. Should they then sue the University since they are the owners of the machines that are linked to the IP, like they do with ordinary people?
The answer is probably yes. Which is why it might be a good idea for the university to lock down these systems now rather than later.
Can anyone answer why slavery wasn't covered by "interstate commerce"? Even after fighting a war Congress still went through the motions of passing a Constitutional Amendment to give themselves the power to regulate that.
The point of the Civil War amendments was to make crystal clear to the South what the war had decided.
There would be no more talk of slavery, there would be no more talk of succession. There would be - ultimately - no legitimate legal argument for a second-class citizenship within the states based on race, creed or color.
Microsoft is adjusting prices to meet demand? Every sane business does this.
True. But how many of Microsoft's core middle class customers download a RC or OS beta? Almost none, I would think. How many will upgrade to Vista with their next PC? Almost all, I suspect.
At $751 for the only version worth a damn, it's no wonder Vista isn't selling.
The Geek quotes retail list, for the ultimate boxed set, in whatever currency makes the numbers look most dramatic. Everyone else buys the OEM install, the academic version, etc.
That is the basis of both "information wants to be free" and "copyright infringement is not theft [in the literal sense]"
Thomas Jefferson was born into the Virginia planter elite.
It is easy enough to say that "information wants to be free" when your unpaid slave labor is doing the actual work. Building and maintaining Monticello, Poplar Forest, The University of Virginia.
On April 13, the 264th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth, the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors unanimously passed an historic resolution...expressing the University's regret for its use of enslaved persons from 1819 to 1865. U.Va. is believed to be the first university whose governing board has made such a statement.University of Virginia's Board of Visitors Passes Resolution Expressing Regret for Use of Slaves April 13, 2007
Enlightenment, it seems, was not for everyone.
It would be 1950 before Gregory Swanson a black graduate of Harvard would be admitted to the UVa School of Law. Seventeen years more before the first women were admitted as undergraduates.
The landed aristocrat lives on borrowed time and borrowed money. Jefferson can be as expansive as he wishes because he will never get around to paying his bills. That is a luxury the creative minds and talents of the lower and middle classes do not have.
The current administration isn't interested in prosecuting monopolies who abuse their power. That's why Microsoft got off their guilty verdict so easy when Bush came into office. Hopefully our next president believes in a fair, competitive market.
Anti-trust sentiment in the states has always been notoriously short-lived.
The break-up of Standard Oil into regional operating companies did nothing to hurt Rockefeller and left the small independents even more vulnerable than before. The "Baby Bells" have merged into something that looks very much like the old AT&T.
The mid-line DX10 card will arrive this is spring and will be everywhere by this fall. The high-end DX 10 card of 2007 will be the mid-line card of 2008. Direct X (which is more than graphics) tends to evolve faster than OGL.
American pizza is far removed from the Italian original.
Pizza crossed the Atlantic with the four million Italians who by the 1920s had sought a better life on American shores. Most Italians weren't familiar with the many regional variations their fragmented homeland had produced, but a longing for pan-Italian unity inspired a widespread embrace of a simplified pizza as their "national" dish. Fraternal "pizza and sausage" clubs, formed to foster Italian pride, sprouted in cities across the Northeast. Women got in on it too, participating in communal pizza exchanges in which entrants competed with unique pies, some molded into unusual shapes, some with the family name baked into the dough.
Although non-Italians could partake of pizza as early as 1905, when the venerable Lombardi's--the nation's first licensed pizzeria--opened its doors in Lower Manhattan, most middle-class Americans stuck to boiled fish and toast. The pungent combination of garlic and oregano signaled pizza as "foreign food," sure to upset native digestions. If pizza hoped to gain an American following beyond New York City and New Haven, it would have to become less like pizza. By the 1940s a few entrepreneurs had initiated the transformation, starting a craze that forever changed the American culinary landscape.
The modern pizza industry was born in the Midwest, not coincidentally a place of sparse Italian settlement. Although pizza had pushed into the suburbs as second-generation Italians relocated, most of the heartland was pizza-free. Its inhabitants had neither allegiance nor aversion to the traditional pie. The region also boasted an enviable supply of cheese.
Despite such advantages, Ike Sewell still wasn't thinking pies when he partnered with Ric Riccardo to open a Chicago restaurant. Sewell, a native of Texas, planned on offering a menu of Mexican specialties. Riccardo willingly agreed, having never tried Mexican food. His first meal changed his mind so completely that, he liked to say later, he fled to Italy to recover from it. While there, he sampled classic Neapolitan pizza and found it much better than Sewell's Mexican offerings. Sewell eventually agreed to forgo enchiladas for pizza, but not until he'd inflated the thin-crusted Neapolitan recipe to make it more palatable to Americans. "Ike tasted it and said nobody would eat it, it's not enough," Evelyne Slomon, author of The Pizza Book, said. "So he put gobs and gobs of stuff on it."
Sewell's lightly seasoned deep-dish pie, introduced in 1943, the signature item at Pizzeria Uno, was the first true American pizza. The pie was a uniquely Chicago institution, like a perennially losing major-league baseball team, that other cities showed no interest in adopting. Until Uno's opened its first location outside Chicago in 1979, people had to go to East Ohio Street to sample anything like Sewell's idea of a pie. But its success liberated pizzeria owners nationwide to tinker with their product, ultimately paving the way for the megafranchises. American Pie
When OEM's are providing customers an option to stay with XP, there no longer is an automatic 'Vista migration' anymore. The trick just went away. If Dell decides that they can't sell PC's with Vista but they can with XP, then Dell will continue to sell XP and customers will continue to get XP systems.
and if Dell decides that it has been spammed by a handful of geeks demanding consumer products - XP or Linux - they have no real intention of buying, what then?
it didn't take Walmart long to discover what geek cred was worth when it came time to count up sales.
Actually, New Coke was put on the market as a distraction so they could switch the Coke Classic recipe from sugar to corn syrup.
Coke first used corn syrup in World War Two.
In 1980 - five years before the introduction of New Coke - half the cane sugar in Coke had been replaced by corn syrup. Six months before New Coke - all the cane sugar had been replaced by syrup.
Syrup was cheaper. Diet drinks were cutting deep into sales and profits. Knew Coke
DX 10. Games for Windows marketing. Games for Windows--Live. The mid-line DX 10 card will be out this spring.
By fall, the designed-for-Vista PC will be everywhere.
It may look very different from the generic XP box. HP TouchSmart PC It may be designed to compliment products like HP MediaSmart Server But it will be dominate the consumer market - and it will gain strength in other markets. Apple has conceded as much. You do not shift focus to the murderously competitive cell phone market if you truly believe that the Mac and OSX has an opportunity to gain significant ground in the PC market.
I am not a gamer. I don't particularly yet care about HD TV. What is the big deal? *IF* I used Windows, I would not be upgrading from XP yet as there is no real incentive. What is the incentive to care which of these formats win? Either one will slide into the player, I'll open my beer and sit back and watch the movie.
The big deal is that the market doesn't see these products in isolation.
The family buying an HDTV at Walmart is likely to take an interest in HD video, in the XBox 360, Vista, and Windows Home Server.
It doesn't happen overnight. But the winner in these format wars casts a very long shadow.
Slashdot Mirror
Because OEM Linux was a big win for Walmart in retail...
OLPC is low-cost only if it can be produced and sold in the tens of millions of units. If open source can't deliver those millions today - when they are needed most - the problem isn't with Negroponte and the problem isn't with Windows.
There is nothing in OLPC tech that can't be replicated by others. There is nothing to stop the deployment of the $100 third-world Windows laptop. Not with academic pricing of XP or Vista SE and Office down to $3 per unit.
When I look at OpenOffice, I see a project funded by Sun, managed by Sun, and staffed by Sun. I do not see its free distribution as a purely charitable enterprise.
Let's just hope that the next US government will break up Bills empire and throw the upper management in jail.
Nowhere is political naiveté more visible than in anti-trust.
The break-up of Standard Oil did nothing to save the small independents.
The Standard product was a stable formulation available everywhere - and customers remained as loyal to Rockefeller's regional operating companies as they had been to their parent.
meaning that the specs are now more realistic and more marketable.
But it will be running Windows. OLPC: Now $175 and Windows XP Ready
Yeah.
I read about it on Slashdot and only on Slashdot.
Microsoft isn't marketing Vista to the Geek and neither are Dell or HP.
Those free upgrade coupons went to home users buying "Vista Rated" PCs over the Christmas holidays. The geek who thinks those coupons aren't being redeemed is living in a dream world.
Drop the deferred income from the picture and it's still an impressive quarter--client revenue was up 30 percent over last year, at $4.1 billion. Vista, Office 2007 drive record profits for Microsoft
I'll take the odds that it looks damn impressive to Red Hat, Linspire and Sun. Strength on the client side. Strength on the server side. Strength in Office.
How many thirty year old companies in a mature market - a market in which they hold a ninety percent share - see thirty percent growth in revenues in one quarter?
Go right ahead. The more junk files you post the more worthless the P2P nets.
The IP address is sufficient to begin [or continue] your action.
Civil courts are not in the business of demanding certainty from anyone. They are in the business of resolving conflicts based on the evidence which is available. The balance of probabilities. Evidence which seems to point in the right direction ought not to be excluded from consideration unless there is a very compelling reason to do so.
The winner of a civil war gets to define the political meaning of the victory it paid for in blood.
The answer is probably yes. Which is why it might be a good idea for the university to lock down these systems now rather than later.
The point of the Civil War amendments was to make crystal clear to the South what the war had decided.
There would be no more talk of slavery, there would be no more talk of succession. There would be - ultimately - no legitimate legal argument for a second-class citizenship within the states based on race, creed or color.
True. But how many of Microsoft's core middle class customers download a RC or OS beta? Almost none, I would think. How many will upgrade to Vista with their next PC? Almost all, I suspect.
The Geek quotes retail list, for the ultimate boxed set, in whatever currency makes the numbers look most dramatic. Everyone else buys the OEM install, the academic version, etc.
Thomas Jefferson was born into the Virginia planter elite.
It is easy enough to say that "information wants to be free" when your unpaid slave labor is doing the actual work. Building and maintaining Monticello, Poplar Forest, The University of Virginia.
On April 13, the 264th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth, the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors unanimously passed an historic resolution...expressing the University's regret for its use of enslaved persons from 1819 to 1865. U.Va. is believed to be the first university whose governing board has made such a statement.University of Virginia's Board of Visitors Passes Resolution Expressing Regret for Use of Slaves April 13, 2007
Enlightenment, it seems, was not for everyone.
It would be 1950 before Gregory Swanson a black graduate of Harvard would be admitted to the UVa School of Law. Seventeen years more before the first women were admitted as undergraduates.
The landed aristocrat lives on borrowed time and borrowed money. Jefferson can be as expansive as he wishes because he will never get around to paying his bills. That is a luxury the creative minds and talents of the lower and middle classes do not have.
Anti-trust sentiment in the states has always been notoriously short-lived.
The break-up of Standard Oil into regional operating companies did nothing to hurt Rockefeller and left the small independents even more vulnerable than before. The "Baby Bells" have merged into something that looks very much like the old AT&T.
The mid-line DX10 card will arrive this is spring and will be everywhere by this fall. The high-end DX 10 card of 2007 will be the mid-line card of 2008. Direct X (which is more than graphics) tends to evolve faster than OGL.
American pizza is far removed from the Italian original.
Pizza crossed the Atlantic with the four million Italians who by the 1920s had sought a better life on American shores. Most Italians weren't familiar with the many regional variations their fragmented homeland had produced, but a longing for pan-Italian unity inspired a widespread embrace of a simplified pizza as their "national" dish. Fraternal "pizza and sausage" clubs, formed to foster Italian pride, sprouted in cities across the Northeast. Women got in on it too, participating in communal pizza exchanges in which entrants competed with unique pies, some molded into unusual shapes, some with the family name baked into the dough.
Although non-Italians could partake of pizza as early as 1905, when the venerable Lombardi's--the nation's first licensed pizzeria--opened its doors in Lower Manhattan, most middle-class Americans stuck to boiled fish and toast. The pungent combination of garlic and oregano signaled pizza as "foreign food," sure to upset native digestions. If pizza hoped to gain an American following beyond New York City and New Haven, it would have to become less like pizza. By the 1940s a few entrepreneurs had initiated the transformation, starting a craze that forever changed the American culinary landscape.
The modern pizza industry was born in the Midwest, not coincidentally a place of sparse Italian settlement. Although pizza had pushed into the suburbs as second-generation Italians relocated, most of the heartland was pizza-free. Its inhabitants had neither allegiance nor aversion to the traditional pie. The region also boasted an enviable supply of cheese.
Despite such advantages, Ike Sewell still wasn't thinking pies when he partnered with Ric Riccardo to open a Chicago restaurant. Sewell, a native of Texas, planned on offering a menu of Mexican specialties. Riccardo willingly agreed, having never tried Mexican food. His first meal changed his mind so completely that, he liked to say later, he fled to Italy to recover from it. While there, he sampled classic Neapolitan pizza and found it much better than Sewell's Mexican offerings. Sewell eventually agreed to forgo enchiladas for pizza, but not until he'd inflated the thin-crusted Neapolitan recipe to make it more palatable to Americans. "Ike tasted it and said nobody would eat it, it's not enough," Evelyne Slomon, author of The Pizza Book, said. "So he put gobs and gobs of stuff on it."
Sewell's lightly seasoned deep-dish pie, introduced in 1943, the signature item at Pizzeria Uno, was the first true American pizza. The pie was a uniquely Chicago institution, like a perennially losing major-league baseball team, that other cities showed no interest in adopting. Until Uno's opened its first location outside Chicago in 1979, people had to go to East Ohio Street to sample anything like Sewell's idea of a pie. But its success liberated pizzeria owners nationwide to tinker with their product, ultimately paving the way for the megafranchises. American Pie
But the jury will understand what a stack of DVDs means in this case - and that is all they get to decide.
and if Dell decides that it has been spammed by a handful of geeks demanding consumer products - XP or Linux - they have no real intention of buying, what then?
it didn't take Walmart long to discover what geek cred was worth when it came time to count up sales.
Coke first used corn syrup in World War Two.
In 1980 - five years before the introduction of New Coke - half the cane sugar in Coke had been replaced by corn syrup. Six months before New Coke - all the cane sugar had been replaced by syrup.
Syrup was cheaper. Diet drinks were cutting deep into sales and profits. Knew Coke
When the New York Times talks about a revival of interest in PC gaming, it is talking about Windows and Vista. Not the Mac. Not Linux.
PC Games, Once Down, Show Signs of Rebound
DX 10. Games for Windows marketing. Games for Windows--Live. The mid-line DX 10 card will be out this spring.
By fall, the designed-for-Vista PC will be everywhere.
It may look very different from the generic XP box. HP TouchSmart PC It may be designed to compliment products like HP MediaSmart Server But it will be dominate the consumer market - and it will gain strength in other markets. Apple has conceded as much. You do not shift focus to the murderously competitive cell phone market if you truly believe that the Mac and OSX has an opportunity to gain significant ground in the PC market.
The big deal is that the market doesn't see these products in isolation.
The family buying an HDTV at Walmart is likely to take an interest in HD video, in the XBox 360, Vista, and Windows Home Server.
It doesn't happen overnight. But the winner in these format wars casts a very long shadow.
Hewlett-Packard - Only cares about data, not movies
Dell has had considerable success in HDTV. HP has its MediaSmart Server. If you are in the consumer market, you are care about both movies and data.