Linux has got big without the help of propietary drivers
Linux is small in the home market. In the U.S., Linux is microscopic in the home market.
True Believers are few and far between. No one will be trading in their high performance SLI DX10 video cards with the NVIDIA chip sets for the joys of migration to your "wonderful open source OS."
We're lucky that the early open source hackers weren't like you.
He isn't a hacker. He is a user. Pragmatic. Not ideological. That used to be a fair definition of the hacker as well. Before he got religion.
We don't need propietary drivers, fuck them.
And when the user replies, "We don't need Linux, fuck you," what then? OEM Linux has all but disappeared from Walmart.com. Heathkit is twenty years dead. This is not a not a country of system builders, DIY consumer electronics.
Windows strength is in the Bazaar. The marketplace. The middle class. Linux in the Cathedral. The French Parliament. The Munich city council. It has become the OS of choice of the Politically Correct.
Issues which are absolutely incomprehensible to anyone else take on overwhelming importance and are argued to exhaustion.
Pretty slick how they convinced a charitable trust to pony up six figures to grant us rights we pretty much already have.
You have the right to use editions of Mozart in the public domain.
That does not necessarily give you what you need for academic study, public or private performance.
How do you interpret Mozart's original manuscripts? What instruments did he write for? Under what conditions was his music performed?
It is not a trivial problem to resurrect a computer game that has been out of print for ten years. What do you suppose happens when the "source code" and secondary resources are over two hundred years old ?
It is a hard lesson that many companies need to learn, they are not in control the developers are ultimately in control.
you are small. your company is big.
you are in control only until a third-world developer more interested in a living wage than in ideological purity denonstrates that he can do your job better and cheaper.
WGA is a pain in the ass if he's using a pirated copy of Windows, which isn't atypical
Comp USA had a in-store Christmas sale on an entry-level AMD Windows XP home system. $200 after rebates. With the Vista upgrade included. Typical is the OEM system install from Dell, HP or Gateway.
System builders are rare, an endangered species, I've come to think, with the emergence of the desktop-replacement laptop.
somebody needs their OS reinstalled
I haven't found a compelling reason to re-install XP in five years.
Outside of Microsoft fanboys, I haven't found anyone who's really enthused about Windows.
I spent an instructive half-hour watching a nine-year old boy introduce his great-grandmother to Windows. The Geek will never find excitement in Windows because Windows isn't designed to entertain and excite the Geek.
I would imagine that it is because they know that they are alienating a large part of their user base (or potential user base)
Reality Check 101.
The Slashdot Geek is not Microsoft's core market.
Your employer likes the idea of Trusted Computing.
To the home user, WPA is Click. Click. Done. He doesn't hate Microsoft. He has never hated Microsoft. He lives in a country where corporate hardball is the true national sport.
DRM is paying $56 for two years of Y! Unlimited through your debit card in a seasonal promotion.
They'd point out that there are probably more people who earn less than $25,000 in the inner city who own new HDTVs than you'd find in most middle-class neighborhoods.
Well, why not? Movie theaters are in the suburbs. Ticket prices are high. Major league sports? Hopelessly out of reach.
Shop around. HD at entry level is $500 and under.
Time magazine suggested some time back that HD was gaining market share across the board. It wasn't just the young or the wealthy or the early adopter.
The short answer, I suspect, is geography and economics. It is easy to forget how low population densities can be in the states. How big the country.
You want penetration deep into suburban and rural areas? You transmit at low frequencies. You want competition in commercial television? You narrow the bandwidth to open up more channels.
In 1957 five VHF stations could be received in our area with a roof antenna at an average distance of around fifty miles.
That depends, are these "rapists" free? If you committed a crime and are released from prison, it's my position that you've paid your debt to society. If you haven't, then shouldn't you still be in prison?
You have a felony conviction for the kidnap and rape of a twelve year old girl. You threatened her with a knife.
You are offered two choices:
A lifetime in prison with no possibility of parole.
Twelve years in prison and twenty years of close supervision after.
From the linky, both revenue and earnings are a bit over 10%. Sounds fine, right? Newspapers consistently do about the same (going back as far as you want), but their investors are screaming for cost-cutting, and the general public thinks they're all in the toilet and about to go out of business.
That is an 11% growth in Microsoft earnings over the last quarter.
""Contrary to popular belief, newspapers aren't dying. Newspapers are making tons of money." Extra: Newspapers Aren't Dead
The magazine has a graphic: The operating profit margin for newspapers is 19% and debt is modest. Microsoft is debt-free and its operating margin is 39%.
Let's do away with the files/folders/desktop/dialogs metaphor and system. It's served us well, but I'd really like to see a groundbreaking way to work with my data.
And when the choice is not acceptable to the consumer, they put on their producer hat and make it for themselves and to share.
That's OSS!!
when did the programmer become the consumer in any ordinary meaning of the word?
programming is and will remain as alien a skill as brain surgery to the overwhelming majority of users. communication between the OSS programmer and the non-technical end user remains poor.
This happens dozens, maybe hundreds of times per day in civil cases; 90% of civil cases never reach a verdict.
"The percentage of tort cases concluded by trial in U.S. district courts has...declined from 10% in the early 1970s to 2% in 2003." Civil Justice Statistics
Well the one thing that's decided me is the lack of region encoding on HD-DVD. It's a huge advantage for the format and I can't believe it's not being talked about more.
It isn't talked about much in the states because almost no one gives a damn. The American market for video produced in Asia, Africa and the Middle East remains very small.
Similarly, if you want to upgrade a public library, the cost of a book is the price on the cover, not the price of that plus the price of the infrastructure itself (the building, bills, etc).
which is precisely the point. if you can't afford to house the book, you can't afford to buy the book.
It's fine to question movitation, intent and commitment, but at the end of the day they've done something and you haven't.
what MIT has done is design a rugged PDA or laptop for kids. the question is whether the project can go the distance. or end as projects like the Simputer have ended:
in another useful gadget for the economic and technical elite.
A computer with internet access can supply you with more that $100, $1000, or even $10,000 worth of textbooks. I thought the whole idea of the $100 laptop was that the Internet is the easiest way to lots of knowledge.
The easiest way to find what you need in your native language, to access a body of knowledge localized, written down and illustrated in a way that you can understand it?
Amazon.com offers The Complete Penguin Classics, 1000 titles in modern English translations, for $8000 in paperback. But it took over fifty years for a publisher with world-wide sales to build a catalog that size.
bullshit, it doesn't filter out "bad people" it only shows the ones that have been caught. you could still be placing your trust in a person guilty of the worst crimes.
a filter doesn't have to be perfect, it only has to be useful.
if you run a day care center, you will probably save yourself some grief you don't hire someone with a history of child abuse.
All of the legalease (as well as I can read it) states is that you can't make these or higher some one else to make them. Well, he didn't, he just created a program that COULD
only a Geek would believe that this kind of argument plays well in court.
There is no "double jeopardy" until there is a criminal trial and acquital.
There is no double jeopardy if the second trial is on a different charge and requires proof of a somewhat different set of facts.
There is no double jeopardy if the second trial or hearing is a civil action---no barrier to suing O.J. Simpson for wrongful death even after he has been acquitted of murder.
If people are worried about others reading RFID tags at will, why not add a mechanical switch to the tag that must be pressed for the tag to power up?
correct me if I am wrong, but I thought RFID tags were passive reflectors. which can be read without contact in somewhat the same sense as an optical bar code can be read without contact.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux is small in the home market. In the U.S., Linux is microscopic in the home market.
True Believers are few and far between. No one will be trading in their high performance SLI DX10 video cards with the NVIDIA chip sets for the joys of migration to your "wonderful open source OS."
We're lucky that the early open source hackers weren't like you.
He isn't a hacker. He is a user. Pragmatic. Not ideological. That used to be a fair definition of the hacker as well. Before he got religion.
We don't need propietary drivers, fuck them.
And when the user replies, "We don't need Linux, fuck you," what then? OEM Linux has all but disappeared from Walmart.com. Heathkit is twenty years dead. This is not a not a country of system builders, DIY consumer electronics.
Windows strength is in the Bazaar. The marketplace. The middle class. Linux in the Cathedral. The French Parliament. The Munich city council. It has become the OS of choice of the Politically Correct.
Issues which are absolutely incomprehensible to anyone else take on overwhelming importance and are argued to exhaustion.
Interest dies and momentum is lost.
You have the right to use editions of Mozart in the public domain.
That does not necessarily give you what you need for academic study, public or private performance.
How do you interpret Mozart's original manuscripts? What instruments did he write for? Under what conditions was his music performed?
It is not a trivial problem to resurrect a computer game that has been out of print for ten years. What do you suppose happens when the "source code" and secondary resources are over two hundred years old ?
This edition is copyrighted.
Mozart in the original would be of use only to an academic --- How do you read his notation? What instruments was he writing for? --- and so on.
Students are being given "fair use" rights to study modern "translations" of Mozart.
Musicians are not being given rights to public performance of the scores. There is a difference and it is a difference that matters.
you are small. your company is big.
you are in control only until a third-world developer more interested in a living wage than in ideological purity denonstrates that he can do your job better and cheaper.
Comp USA had a in-store Christmas sale on an entry-level AMD Windows XP home system. $200 after rebates. With the Vista upgrade included. Typical is the OEM system install from Dell, HP or Gateway.
System builders are rare, an endangered species, I've come to think, with the emergence of the desktop-replacement laptop.
somebody needs their OS reinstalled
I haven't found a compelling reason to re-install XP in five years.
Outside of Microsoft fanboys, I haven't found anyone who's really enthused about Windows.
I spent an instructive half-hour watching a nine-year old boy introduce his great-grandmother to Windows. The Geek will never find excitement in Windows because Windows isn't designed to entertain and excite the Geek.
Reality Check 101.
The Slashdot Geek is not Microsoft's core market.
Your employer likes the idea of Trusted Computing.
To the home user, WPA is Click. Click. Done. He doesn't hate Microsoft. He has never hated Microsoft. He lives in a country where corporate hardball is the true national sport.
DRM is paying $56 for two years of Y! Unlimited through your debit card in a seasonal promotion.
Wise up before it is too late.
Well, why not? Movie theaters are in the suburbs. Ticket prices are high. Major league sports? Hopelessly out of reach.
Shop around. HD at entry level is $500 and under.
Time magazine suggested some time back that HD was gaining market share across the board. It wasn't just the young or the wealthy or the early adopter.
The short answer, I suspect, is geography and economics. It is easy to forget how low population densities can be in the states. How big the country.
You want penetration deep into suburban and rural areas? You transmit at low frequencies. You want competition in commercial television? You narrow the bandwidth to open up more channels.
In 1957 five VHF stations could be received in our area with a roof antenna at an average distance of around fifty miles.
You have a felony conviction for the kidnap and rape of a twelve year old girl. You threatened her with a knife.
You are offered two choices:
A lifetime in prison with no possibility of parole.
Twelve years in prison and twenty years of close supervision after.
Which do you choose?
That is an 11% growth in Microsoft earnings over the last quarter.
""Contrary to popular belief, newspapers aren't dying. Newspapers are making tons of money." Extra: Newspapers Aren't Dead The magazine has a graphic: The operating profit margin for newspapers is 19% and debt is modest. Microsoft is debt-free and its operating margin is 39%.
In what alternate reality is Microsoft struggling for sales? It sure as heck doesn't look like this reality: MSFT: Key Statistics
if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
That's OSS!!
when did the programmer become the consumer in any ordinary meaning of the word?
programming is and will remain as alien a skill as brain surgery to the overwhelming majority of users. communication between the OSS programmer and the non-technical end user remains poor.
"The percentage of tort cases concluded by trial in U.S. district courts has...declined from 10% in the early 1970s to 2% in 2003." Civil Justice Statistics
and works only until restaurants begin selling their waste fats and oils to commercial recycling plants.
It isn't talked about much in the states because almost no one gives a damn. The American market for video produced in Asia, Africa and the Middle East remains very small.
From the HD-DVD Best Seller List at Amazon:
$42
Forbidden Planet - Ultimate Collector's Edition
$28
Suoerman Returns - Std and HD Combo Disk
$20
V for Vendetta
Serenity
Superman - The Movie
Casablanca
Forbidden Planet
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride
The Searchers
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
You want a taste of what HD projection has to offer, Robin Hood or The Searchers would be a good place to begin.
which is precisely the point. if you can't afford to house the book, you can't afford to buy the book.
what MIT has done is design a rugged PDA or laptop for kids. the question is whether the project can go the distance. or end as projects like the Simputer have ended:
in another useful gadget for the economic and technical elite.
The easiest way to find what you need in your native language, to access a body of knowledge localized, written down and illustrated in a way that you can understand it?
Amazon.com offers The Complete Penguin Classics, 1000 titles in modern English translations, for $8000 in paperback. But it took over fifty years for a publisher with world-wide sales to build a catalog that size.
a filter doesn't have to be perfect, it only has to be useful.
if you run a day care center, you will probably save yourself some grief you don't hire someone with a history of child abuse.
only a Geek would believe that this kind of argument plays well in court.
There is no "double jeopardy" until there is a criminal trial and acquital.
There is no double jeopardy if the second trial is on a different charge and requires proof of a somewhat different set of facts.
There is no double jeopardy if the second trial or hearing is a civil action---no barrier to suing O.J. Simpson for wrongful death even after he has been acquitted of murder.
so what do the RFID tags tell Macy's that can't be extracted from a video scan?
age, sex, style of dress, etc. since the beginning of time, salesmen have known what to look for in a prospect.
correct me if I am wrong, but I thought RFID tags were passive reflectors. which can be read without contact in somewhat the same sense as an optical bar code can be read without contact.