See, you're missing the point here. It's not whether a consumer might be able to violate FCC regulations. It's the fact that manufacture of a device that allows the consumer to transmit in a licensed band is itself a violation.
In other words, the manufacturers are prohibited by FCC rules from making a device that a consumer can run in a licensed band or at a higher-than-allowed output power. However, the part the manufacturers are ignoring is that the FCC seems to mean this in the context of the normal consumer-level interfaces, which doesn't include the source code. Changing the source code would be abnormal activity not sanctioned by the manufacturer and outside of normal use.
In the article he mentions open source drivers written under NDA that are essensially unmaintainable, whence of dubious quality.
No he doesn't. He says "Some Linux (and recently FreeBSD too) developers are willing to sign NDAs so that a few people get the documentation, and I believe that this is the largest problem facing the kernel side of the open source community today." Now, you'd have to ask him to clarify to be certain, but I would say the chances are extremely slim that he's talking about people writing open source drivers under NDA. Mostly I say the chances are slim because that's a totally ridiculous idea that no hardware company would consider; if you're going to let somebody write an open driver, what's the point of an NDA? On the other hand, I am familiar with at least one case (madwifi) where a developer (Sam Leffler) signed an NDA in order to produce a binary blob and an open-source interface component for a chipset (atheros) which had no driver available. I think it is extremely likely that these situations are the ones to which Theo referred.
As for FCC regulations and me as an EU citizen: I don't have to comply with FCC regulations while not in USA. The same goes for strong encryption. In this sense I don't care about FCC regulations. That US based companies think that I should care about FCC just means I go elsewhere with my money.
Your ignorance and lack of thought are astonishing. "US based companies" have nothing to do with it...where else are you going to go with your money? Every wifi chipset manufacturer sells its products in the US, and thus abides by FCC rules. The manufacturers in question here are mostly Taiwanese. The issue here is that, regardless of where a company is based or chooses to make its products, it invariably wants to sell those products in the US. Thus the manufacturer must comply with US regulations. So it doesn't matter whether you have to abide by US regulations...the people who make the products you use do. And once again, this is a great example. You can't have a certain driver, because it doesn't exist, because (ostensibly) of US regulations. Therefore US regulations impact you. Period.
Oh, forgot one other important detail from that article. 498,000 of those macs were laptops, and thus powered by the older G4, which if I understand it right was coming from Motorola/Freescale rather than IBM. Now, granted, I'm not sure I understand the relationships there right, but if that's true, that means only like 600k IBM-powered macs per quarter.
Now damn it, this is completely wrong. Read my other reply to your previous, identical statement, which I posted before you posted this. Our laws impact you because the hardware manufacturers want to sell their stuff here. So you are stuck with FCC compliant products, regardless of whether you are under FCC jurisdiction.
As a current and past employee of several companies that make wireless transceivers subject to FCC licensing, I can tell you that there is no cost effective way to limit a device to FCC restrictions purely in hardware.
I understood that sentence, but very little of the technical discussion that followed. However, it seems like you're making this too hard; if one wanted to limit the output of an RF transmitter in hardware, wouldn't it be trivial to simply put a couple of RF filters (one high-pass, one low-pass) in front of the antenna connector?
You did not really read that article, did you? OpenBSD wants hardware documentation...
I did indeed read the article...I just recognized the larger issue that was not explicitly stated therein. Yes, what he really wants is documentation, although I'm sure he would be just as happy if they simply released the source to their binary blob. In any case, the reason he wants documentation is so that FOSS developers can write a completely open source driver for their hardware. The reason the hardware manufacturers refuse is ostensibly that it would violate FCC rules. The argument for that is that the FCC prohibits devices that the consumer can change to a licensed frequency. TFA actually discusses this.
...and besides, why should I as an EU citizen care about FCC regulations?
Surely you are just making a joke, and are not so utterly naive. You'll note that Theo is Canadian, but he obviously seems to care. When you find a wifi chipset that isn't sold in the USA at all, let me know. Until then, the restrictions placed on hardware and software manufacturers by the US government will continue to have a strong impact on FOSS users, regardless of where they live. This is an excellent example; you aren't under FCC jurisdiction, but you're still stuck with binary blob drivers from companies that claim it's their only method of FCC compliance.
Apple sold 1,112,000 Macs during the quarter, returning $1.572 billion in revenue - a 4 per cent increase in units shipped and 5 per cent increase in revenue year on year.
I sure wish he had taken a better position on the wifi "FCC Rules require Binary Blobs" issue. He basically agreed that the FCC does require that the consumer not be able to change the frequency, but claimed that it should be dealt with in hardware, not the driver. This line is particularly poorly thought out: "Let the FCC go after the vendors who made the flawed devices."
See, here's the thing...the people he needs to convince here are the hardware manufacturers. You aren't going to get them to release open drivers by suggesting that the FCC should "go after" them. In fact, it serves to reinforce their binary-blobs-only position; after all, that's their current protection. But worse, by tacitly agreeing with their position about the FCC rules, he cedes the important part of the argument...the part where he could have won it. That's because while the FCC does indeed require that the consumer not be able to change the frequency to licensed spectrum, they have never taken the position that changing the source code is normal consumer operation. After all, consumers can change the frequency on many other chipsets (even in Windows) with binary patches. This is simpler than changing source code and recompiling it. I have never heard anything from the FCC that says you can't distribute source code with this functionality. Which is good, because the current mainline Linux kernel does distribute code that does this. If FCC rules actually forbade this (as the hardware companies are claiming) then it would be illegal to distribute the Linux (and presumably OpenBSD) kernel in the USA.
There was a wonderful discussion of this on the LKML recently in context of Intel's binary blob driver.
Thanks for looking that up. I had a feeling that it would be dramatically less than the 10% I used, but seeing as how I was just guessing I figured I'd err on the high side. I was particularly surprised that Apple's share of the chip sales was so low...but I guess they are probably selling a lot of chips that aren't PPC as well. Anybody have any idea what percentage of their chip sales they expect the XBox 360 and PS3 to account for?
Oh, and a small note; from that link you gave they are saying Apple bought less than 2% of the chips produced at IBM's largest (but not only) chip fab. So, presumably significantly less than 2% of the total, although we don't know how many fabs they have...
That's just plain wrong. The original Xbox never achieved quarterly sales greater than 25% of Apple's quarterly sales by unit volume... And Apple put *two* of IBM's chips in a lot of those machines.
Time to work on reading comprehension. I said: the console market requires chip volumes a couple of orders of magnitude higher than Apple. Console market != XBox market. Both the XBox 360 and the PS3 [will] run on IBM chips.
And about Apple putting 2 IBM chips in each box...don't the XBox and PS3 each ship with more than 2 IBM chips? Isn't it 3 per XB360 and like 8 for the PS3? You've lost it if you don't think this will be a net increase in chip sales for IBM.
Oh, and while I'm at it, aren't the bulk of Apple's quarterly unit-volume sales ipods?
Apple may not count for a huge amount in sales, but the amount of hype Apple fan's created for PPC is worth more money then IBM has;-)
Delusional. "Hype" for one product that accounts for maybe 10% of IBM's business is worth more than the net worth of the company? I'll bet IBM's calculation here is that a)the "hype" generated by Mac PPC sales was worth little to nothing, given that the sales they care about are to large corporate buyers; b)console sales will generate hype themselves which will likely be similarly (read: not very) powerful; c)the console market requires chip volumes a couple of orders of magnitude higher than Apple; d)the new partnering fits better with future plans for Cell, which mostly involve consumer-electronics embedding.
Hype is not better than money. Companies that fail to recognize this don't last. Your nick and post are well-coordinated.
You're saying that to vote, you have to tell the people in the polling place the party you're voting for?
It depends on your state's laws; some of them have no declarations at all, some have an informal/optional setup that doesn't really mean anything (i.e. you can vote in the other party's primary if you like) and some require you to register party affiliation in order to vote that party's primary. Typically in the latter it means that you can only vote one party primary per election, but you can change those at any time and there's no checking or other attachment to it. It doesn't affect anything except which ballot you get.
The idea here is to prevent "raiding" where people from one party (who are not concerned with their own favored candidates' primary prospects) vote in the other party's primary to help give nominations to candidates they feel will be less electable.
At some point the stock holders are going to want the X-Box division to actually turn a profit, not just increase gross revenue. It can't just bleed money forever, and right now its not just bleeding, its gushing money. So the question is, does Microsoft actually have any plans to make any money on the X-Box? It seems they don't.
It's not unheard of to have a division of your company devoted to loss-leader activities. As long as it's valuable to some higher grand strategy (in this case, moving into the entertainment and content industries and into more and more home appliances, thus ensuring embedded markets for MS software, and perhaps new subscription revenue streams) and management can convince the shareholders to trust them, the Xbox division can simply bleed money. And as a small shareholder since '96 and having seen the votes, I can say that nobody's considering deviating away from the "core team" and its vision any time soon. Oh, and about the flat stock price, people forget the big dividends they paid through most of that time. Not this past year, sad to say...
In any case, I'm sure MS (and its shareholders) would be tickled pink to have the X-Box division turn a profit. But with the amount of money they've got sitting around and with the long-term situation as it is, I don't perceive a real serious concern about its losses.
These huge monolithic desktops are an annoying departure from The Unix Way. What makes it more annoying is that it doesn't need to be as bad as it is. These middleware layers could be separated, standardized, and made generally available.
Well, we've already got Gnome/KDE/XFCE (each with several WM choices) on top of GTK+/QT on top of X on top of kernel interfaces. That's enough of an onion for me. Not to mention that you can happily go off and run any number of other window managers, minus the desktop environment (and you can even pick certain pieces of the desktop to keep). But I'm interested to know where you would put this multimedia API anyway. In X? In some new, fourth layer between X and the desktop? And how are you going to write this API, and what style guidelines will it use? Perhaps it has escaped you that Gnome is written almost entirely in C while KDE is in C++? I expect they also have rather different coding conventions. Not insurmountable, perhaps, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for those teams to write a whole new layer of the stack simply to hold API's like this. And I'll bet the X guys would laugh you right off your chair if you suggested they put this sort of thing there.
If you're looking for an environment that behaves exactly like OSX....
Might I suggest...
OSX?
Seriously, if your measure of acceptability is "closer to Apple standard" and your problem with a desktop is that it doesn't behave identically to OSX, why are you thinking of switching to anything? OSX is obviously already perfect.
On the other hand, I'm personally never likely to use any environment that's much like OSX very often. Just not my cup of tea. A lot of us think that OSX isn't the holy grail of desktop computing. Sorry about that.
If you were arguing something in your local civil or criminal court and the best case you could find to support your line of reasoning was from pre-revolutionary English common law, you're probably going to get laughed at.
Remember that scene in Goodwill Hunting when he's in court and the judge is giving him shit for breaking out the 1790's legal precedent that says it's ok to hit a cop if he's tyrannical? Man I thought that was fucking hilarious. But at least it was indigenous law...
But in all seriousness, the issue of whether British common law is workable here is pretty much over. Originally, sure...the guys in the robes in 1795 were mostly the same guys wearing them in 1775, doing business the same way. Our case law started with theirs. But the law (and in this case, also the mechanics of court proceedings and such) changes, is interpreted, rewritten, etc. and now finding someplace where there's not a newer case from this side of the ocean is well-nigh impossible. This, for instance, is certainly not such a situation; the Brits apparently are still using a 1600's contract statute, which is fine as long as it works (and it seems to be pretty encompassing, if email is covered) but I guarantee that there are much later-model U.S. statutes governing what is and isn't a contract.
So I guess the real question is this: If someone did find a situation that was governed under pre-revolutionary British law but wasn't touched at all under U.S. law, would U.S. courts honor that precedent? My bet is that they wouldn't let that old law force their judgement at all, although if they agreed with it they might go ahead and cite it. After all, it's not like judges don't overturn old precedents when they really feel like it.
Maybe certain electrical impulses cause this psycological change, and they happened to be generated by the gaming system. Or better, by the specific model (and peculiarly, only that model) of HDTV the testers used. Or, still better, by some piece of observational equipment used by the testers (and unrelated to gaming) only on the experimental group.
What if the tidal cycle was in different phases on the two test dates, and that caused the changes observed?
What if the "random" sampling actually turned out to be somehow skewed by chance so that some untested and unknown factor was able to cause the results?
Perhaps the testers simply subconciously changed the way they observed, questioned, or otherwise dealt with the test subjects.
These specific examples are not the point; there are infinite possibilities, limited only by one's imagination. The point is that no study or testing method can eliminate all biases and external variables with any degree of certainty. THAT'S WHY THE CORELLATION != CAUSATION MAXIM EXISTS! It is not nixed by double blind randomly sampled testing. In fact, most of the times I've heard it used in an acedemic context it was in discussion of studies with these methods. It is used as a specific caution to researchers to recognize that even with those methods, your testing only shows correlation. You cannot prove causal relationships this way. Period.
I'm sure I'll get modded into oblivion for standing up against an OSS viewpoint, however.
Well, maybe if it had been an honest and/or thoughtfull OSS viewpoint. Hell, I'm not sure it was even an OSS viewpoint at all. That, my friend, was a garden varietty troll, having a bit of fun...and you bit the hook.
I mean, come on...."the whole Will-MS-buyout-Sony situation"...you kidding me?
The "correlation != causation" caution applies when it is possible for there to a third, unexplained phenomenon which causes both the supposed cause and the supposed effect.
This statement may be technically correct; it's also extremely misleading, because the phrase "when it is possible for there to be a third, unexplained phenomenon which causes both the supposed cause and the supposed effect" is equivalent to "always"
This is why the maxim "correlation does not imply causation" is not instead, "correlation implies correlation once you've established that there are not other variables involved." The reason is that you can't eliminate all the possible factors, because you might not know about some of them. And your post above is an excellent example of how this thinking can progress so stupidly. Your entire argument starts by saying "correlation != causation only counts if there are other explanations" and then you totally and completely ignore the investigation for such variables. You simply assert that no such variables exist in this case, and go on from there to argue that in fact correlation does imply causation. Which ultimately is very handy for you, since the task of actually trying to eliminate all conceivable other variables is obviously not possible, much less practical.
Correlation does not imply causation. Period. Don't go dicking around trying to say that there aren't any other possible factors for a given case. It doesn't work that way.
Well, maybe you can't reprogram your TV (or maybe you can...) but the important, and really cool part here is that if you wanted to go off and build a TV, you'd have available a whole software platform from which to do it. Under GPL license. Sounds cool to me...
Re:DRM to be used in GNOME's multimedia backend
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Gnome 2.14 Released
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· Score: 1
Man, you are so fucking ass backwards here it's absurd. The weakness here is KDE's, because it's core libraries' GPL nature means DRM, and licensed, proprietary technology in general, can't be implemented. Gnome gets to have functionality that can't/won't be built into KDE because of legal restrictions and/or the reluctance of the developers/owners of said technology to open up their code. Gstreamer will be able to employ licensed plugins which are non-free, which will benefit all Gnome users. KDE's GPL backend will never be able to play mp3's legally in the US, or DVD's in a much wider area. The mere suggestion that this gives the advantage to KDE is baffling to even consider.
Re:DRM to be used in GNOME's multimedia backend
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Gnome 2.14 Released
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· Score: 1
You fucking jackass. The first time around you said:
the Free Software Foundation warns against using the LGPL [gnu.org] for any project.
Now anyone who actually read that article can tell you that the above statement is completely false. I already excerpted a quote from the article that completely contradicted your statement...here it is again:
Which license is best for a given library is a matter of strategy, and it depends on the details of the situation.
You say always, he says sometimes. But it gets better...I could have quoted this line instead:
Using the ordinary GPL is not advantageous for every library.
I mean, how much more black and white do you want it? Here, how about this?
This is why we used the Library GPL for the GNU C library. After all, there are plenty of other C libraries; using the GPL for ours would have driven proprietary software developers to use another--no problem for them, only for us.
He just cited a specific example of a project which he feels should (and is) licensed under the LGPL rather than the GPL. You can't say "you shouldn't use the LGPL for any projects" and then say "the LGPL is a good license for one of our flagship projects." What the fuck is going on in your head?
Not a single word of the quotes you just provided supports your position; neither does the article taken as a whole. It's clear that RMS feels that in some cases it is better to use the GPL than the LGPL. But it is also clear from the article that he feels that in some other cases the LGPL is a better choice. After all, he does explicitly state that severall times.
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See, you're missing the point here. It's not whether a consumer might be able to violate FCC regulations. It's the fact that manufacture of a device that allows the consumer to transmit in a licensed band is itself a violation.
In other words, the manufacturers are prohibited by FCC rules from making a device that a consumer can run in a licensed band or at a higher-than-allowed output power. However, the part the manufacturers are ignoring is that the FCC seems to mean this in the context of the normal consumer-level interfaces, which doesn't include the source code. Changing the source code would be abnormal activity not sanctioned by the manufacturer and outside of normal use.
In the article he mentions open source drivers written under NDA that are essensially unmaintainable, whence of dubious quality.
No he doesn't. He says "Some Linux (and recently FreeBSD too) developers are willing to sign NDAs so that a few people get the documentation, and I believe that this is the largest problem facing the kernel side of the open source community today." Now, you'd have to ask him to clarify to be certain, but I would say the chances are extremely slim that he's talking about people writing open source drivers under NDA. Mostly I say the chances are slim because that's a totally ridiculous idea that no hardware company would consider; if you're going to let somebody write an open driver, what's the point of an NDA? On the other hand, I am familiar with at least one case (madwifi) where a developer (Sam Leffler) signed an NDA in order to produce a binary blob and an open-source interface component for a chipset (atheros) which had no driver available. I think it is extremely likely that these situations are the ones to which Theo referred.
As for FCC regulations and me as an EU citizen: I don't have to comply with FCC regulations while not in USA. The same goes for strong encryption. In this sense I don't care about FCC regulations. That US based companies think that I should care about FCC just means I go elsewhere with my money.
Your ignorance and lack of thought are astonishing. "US based companies" have nothing to do with it...where else are you going to go with your money? Every wifi chipset manufacturer sells its products in the US, and thus abides by FCC rules. The manufacturers in question here are mostly Taiwanese. The issue here is that, regardless of where a company is based or chooses to make its products, it invariably wants to sell those products in the US. Thus the manufacturer must comply with US regulations. So it doesn't matter whether you have to abide by US regulations...the people who make the products you use do. And once again, this is a great example. You can't have a certain driver, because it doesn't exist, because (ostensibly) of US regulations. Therefore US regulations impact you. Period.
Oh, forgot one other important detail from that article. 498,000 of those macs were laptops, and thus powered by the older G4, which if I understand it right was coming from Motorola/Freescale rather than IBM. Now, granted, I'm not sure I understand the relationships there right, but if that's true, that means only like 600k IBM-powered macs per quarter.
Now damn it, this is completely wrong. Read my other reply to your previous, identical statement, which I posted before you posted this. Our laws impact you because the hardware manufacturers want to sell their stuff here. So you are stuck with FCC compliant products, regardless of whether you are under FCC jurisdiction.
As a current and past employee of several companies that make wireless transceivers subject to FCC licensing, I can tell you that there is no cost effective way to limit a device to FCC restrictions purely in hardware.
I understood that sentence, but very little of the technical discussion that followed. However, it seems like you're making this too hard; if one wanted to limit the output of an RF transmitter in hardware, wouldn't it be trivial to simply put a couple of RF filters (one high-pass, one low-pass) in front of the antenna connector?
You did not really read that article, did you? OpenBSD wants hardware documentation...
I did indeed read the article...I just recognized the larger issue that was not explicitly stated therein. Yes, what he really wants is documentation, although I'm sure he would be just as happy if they simply released the source to their binary blob. In any case, the reason he wants documentation is so that FOSS developers can write a completely open source driver for their hardware. The reason the hardware manufacturers refuse is ostensibly that it would violate FCC rules. The argument for that is that the FCC prohibits devices that the consumer can change to a licensed frequency. TFA actually discusses this.
Surely you are just making a joke, and are not so utterly naive. You'll note that Theo is Canadian, but he obviously seems to care. When you find a wifi chipset that isn't sold in the USA at all, let me know. Until then, the restrictions placed on hardware and software manufacturers by the US government will continue to have a strong impact on FOSS users, regardless of where they live. This is an excellent example; you aren't under FCC jurisdiction, but you're still stuck with binary blob drivers from companies that claim it's their only method of FCC compliance.
Apple sells 5-8 million macs a quarter.
Where in the fuck are you getting these numbers?
My googling took me to Macworld where they claim:
Apple sold 1,112,000 Macs during the quarter, returning $1.572 billion in revenue - a 4 per cent increase in units shipped and 5 per cent increase in revenue year on year.
That article is dated 12 days ago (4/20/2006).
I sure wish he had taken a better position on the wifi "FCC Rules require Binary Blobs" issue. He basically agreed that the FCC does require that the consumer not be able to change the frequency, but claimed that it should be dealt with in hardware, not the driver. This line is particularly poorly thought out: "Let the FCC go after the vendors who made the flawed devices."
See, here's the thing...the people he needs to convince here are the hardware manufacturers. You aren't going to get them to release open drivers by suggesting that the FCC should "go after" them. In fact, it serves to reinforce their binary-blobs-only position; after all, that's their current protection. But worse, by tacitly agreeing with their position about the FCC rules, he cedes the important part of the argument...the part where he could have won it. That's because while the FCC does indeed require that the consumer not be able to change the frequency to licensed spectrum, they have never taken the position that changing the source code is normal consumer operation. After all, consumers can change the frequency on many other chipsets (even in Windows) with binary patches. This is simpler than changing source code and recompiling it. I have never heard anything from the FCC that says you can't distribute source code with this functionality. Which is good, because the current mainline Linux kernel does distribute code that does this. If FCC rules actually forbade this (as the hardware companies are claiming) then it would be illegal to distribute the Linux (and presumably OpenBSD) kernel in the USA.
There was a wonderful discussion of this on the LKML recently in context of Intel's binary blob driver.
Thanks for looking that up. I had a feeling that it would be dramatically less than the 10% I used, but seeing as how I was just guessing I figured I'd err on the high side. I was particularly surprised that Apple's share of the chip sales was so low...but I guess they are probably selling a lot of chips that aren't PPC as well. Anybody have any idea what percentage of their chip sales they expect the XBox 360 and PS3 to account for?
Oh, and a small note; from that link you gave they are saying Apple bought less than 2% of the chips produced at IBM's largest (but not only) chip fab. So, presumably significantly less than 2% of the total, although we don't know how many fabs they have...
That's just plain wrong. The original Xbox never achieved quarterly sales greater than 25% of Apple's quarterly sales by unit volume... And Apple put *two* of IBM's chips in a lot of those machines.
Time to work on reading comprehension. I said: the console market requires chip volumes a couple of orders of magnitude higher than Apple. Console market != XBox market. Both the XBox 360 and the PS3 [will] run on IBM chips.
And about Apple putting 2 IBM chips in each box...don't the XBox and PS3 each ship with more than 2 IBM chips? Isn't it 3 per XB360 and like 8 for the PS3? You've lost it if you don't think this will be a net increase in chip sales for IBM.
Oh, and while I'm at it, aren't the bulk of Apple's quarterly unit-volume sales ipods?
Apple may not count for a huge amount in sales, but the amount of hype Apple fan's created for PPC is worth more money then IBM has ;-)
Delusional. "Hype" for one product that accounts for maybe 10% of IBM's business is worth more than the net worth of the company? I'll bet IBM's calculation here is that a)the "hype" generated by Mac PPC sales was worth little to nothing, given that the sales they care about are to large corporate buyers; b)console sales will generate hype themselves which will likely be similarly (read: not very) powerful; c)the console market requires chip volumes a couple of orders of magnitude higher than Apple; d)the new partnering fits better with future plans for Cell, which mostly involve consumer-electronics embedding.
Hype is not better than money. Companies that fail to recognize this don't last. Your nick and post are well-coordinated.
Great. So here I go, getting a 4-Informative for sitting around licking Ballmer's balls, and what do I get in return?
MSFT down more than 11%Wonderful.
You're saying that to vote, you have to tell the people in the polling place the party you're voting for?
It depends on your state's laws; some of them have no declarations at all, some have an informal/optional setup that doesn't really mean anything (i.e. you can vote in the other party's primary if you like) and some require you to register party affiliation in order to vote that party's primary. Typically in the latter it means that you can only vote one party primary per election, but you can change those at any time and there's no checking or other attachment to it. It doesn't affect anything except which ballot you get.
The idea here is to prevent "raiding" where people from one party (who are not concerned with their own favored candidates' primary prospects) vote in the other party's primary to help give nominations to candidates they feel will be less electable.
At some point the stock holders are going to want the X-Box division to actually turn a profit, not just increase gross revenue. It can't just bleed money forever, and right now its not just bleeding, its gushing money. So the question is, does Microsoft actually have any plans to make any money on the X-Box? It seems they don't.
It's not unheard of to have a division of your company devoted to loss-leader activities. As long as it's valuable to some higher grand strategy (in this case, moving into the entertainment and content industries and into more and more home appliances, thus ensuring embedded markets for MS software, and perhaps new subscription revenue streams) and management can convince the shareholders to trust them, the Xbox division can simply bleed money. And as a small shareholder since '96 and having seen the votes, I can say that nobody's considering deviating away from the "core team" and its vision any time soon. Oh, and about the flat stock price, people forget the big dividends they paid through most of that time. Not this past year, sad to say...
In any case, I'm sure MS (and its shareholders) would be tickled pink to have the X-Box division turn a profit. But with the amount of money they've got sitting around and with the long-term situation as it is, I don't perceive a real serious concern about its losses.
All right, you win. That was the first one that actually made me laugh out loud.
Hope somebody with mods finds you...
These huge monolithic desktops are an annoying departure from The Unix Way. What makes it more annoying is that it doesn't need to be as bad as it is. These middleware layers could be separated, standardized, and made generally available.
Well, we've already got Gnome/KDE/XFCE (each with several WM choices) on top of GTK+/QT on top of X on top of kernel interfaces. That's enough of an onion for me. Not to mention that you can happily go off and run any number of other window managers, minus the desktop environment (and you can even pick certain pieces of the desktop to keep). But I'm interested to know where you would put this multimedia API anyway. In X? In some new, fourth layer between X and the desktop? And how are you going to write this API, and what style guidelines will it use? Perhaps it has escaped you that Gnome is written almost entirely in C while KDE is in C++? I expect they also have rather different coding conventions. Not insurmountable, perhaps, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for those teams to write a whole new layer of the stack simply to hold API's like this. And I'll bet the X guys would laugh you right off your chair if you suggested they put this sort of thing there.
If you're looking for an environment that behaves exactly like OSX....
Might I suggest...
OSX?
Seriously, if your measure of acceptability is "closer to Apple standard" and your problem with a desktop is that it doesn't behave identically to OSX, why are you thinking of switching to anything? OSX is obviously already perfect.
On the other hand, I'm personally never likely to use any environment that's much like OSX very often. Just not my cup of tea. A lot of us think that OSX isn't the holy grail of desktop computing. Sorry about that.
SCO has customers?
No...didn't you see, he said "it's not their customer's fault."
customer's
...is a singular-possessive.
customers'
...is the plural form.
SCO doesn't have customers. They have a customer.
If you were arguing something in your local civil or criminal court and the best case you could find to support your line of reasoning was from pre-revolutionary English common law, you're probably going to get laughed at.
Remember that scene in Goodwill Hunting when he's in court and the judge is giving him shit for breaking out the 1790's legal precedent that says it's ok to hit a cop if he's tyrannical? Man I thought that was fucking hilarious. But at least it was indigenous law...
But in all seriousness, the issue of whether British common law is workable here is pretty much over. Originally, sure...the guys in the robes in 1795 were mostly the same guys wearing them in 1775, doing business the same way. Our case law started with theirs. But the law (and in this case, also the mechanics of court proceedings and such) changes, is interpreted, rewritten, etc. and now finding someplace where there's not a newer case from this side of the ocean is well-nigh impossible. This, for instance, is certainly not such a situation; the Brits apparently are still using a 1600's contract statute, which is fine as long as it works (and it seems to be pretty encompassing, if email is covered) but I guarantee that there are much later-model U.S. statutes governing what is and isn't a contract.
So I guess the real question is this: If someone did find a situation that was governed under pre-revolutionary British law but wasn't touched at all under U.S. law, would U.S. courts honor that precedent? My bet is that they wouldn't let that old law force their judgement at all, although if they agreed with it they might go ahead and cite it. After all, it's not like judges don't overturn old precedents when they really feel like it.
Ok, now you're just being obtuse.
Maybe certain electrical impulses cause this psycological change, and they happened to be generated by the gaming system. Or better, by the specific model (and peculiarly, only that model) of HDTV the testers used. Or, still better, by some piece of observational equipment used by the testers (and unrelated to gaming) only on the experimental group.
What if the tidal cycle was in different phases on the two test dates, and that caused the changes observed?
What if the "random" sampling actually turned out to be somehow skewed by chance so that some untested and unknown factor was able to cause the results?
Perhaps the testers simply subconciously changed the way they observed, questioned, or otherwise dealt with the test subjects.
These specific examples are not the point; there are infinite possibilities, limited only by one's imagination. The point is that no study or testing method can eliminate all biases and external variables with any degree of certainty. THAT'S WHY THE CORELLATION != CAUSATION MAXIM EXISTS! It is not nixed by double blind randomly sampled testing. In fact, most of the times I've heard it used in an acedemic context it was in discussion of studies with these methods. It is used as a specific caution to researchers to recognize that even with those methods, your testing only shows correlation. You cannot prove causal relationships this way. Period.
I'm sure I'll get modded into oblivion for standing up against an OSS viewpoint, however.
Well, maybe if it had been an honest and/or thoughtfull OSS viewpoint. Hell, I'm not sure it was even an OSS viewpoint at all. That, my friend, was a garden varietty troll, having a bit of fun...and you bit the hook.
I mean, come on...."the whole Will-MS-buyout-Sony situation" ...you kidding me?
The "correlation != causation" caution applies when it is possible for there to a third, unexplained phenomenon which causes both the supposed cause and the supposed effect.
This statement may be technically correct; it's also extremely misleading, because the phrase "when it is possible for there to be a third, unexplained phenomenon which causes both the supposed cause and the supposed effect" is equivalent to "always"
This is why the maxim "correlation does not imply causation" is not instead, "correlation implies correlation once you've established that there are not other variables involved." The reason is that you can't eliminate all the possible factors, because you might not know about some of them. And your post above is an excellent example of how this thinking can progress so stupidly. Your entire argument starts by saying "correlation != causation only counts if there are other explanations" and then you totally and completely ignore the investigation for such variables. You simply assert that no such variables exist in this case, and go on from there to argue that in fact correlation does imply causation. Which ultimately is very handy for you, since the task of actually trying to eliminate all conceivable other variables is obviously not possible, much less practical.
Correlation does not imply causation. Period. Don't go dicking around trying to say that there aren't any other possible factors for a given case. It doesn't work that way.
I knew it was too good to be true. :(
Well, maybe you can't reprogram your TV (or maybe you can...) but the important, and really cool part here is that if you wanted to go off and build a TV, you'd have available a whole software platform from which to do it. Under GPL license. Sounds cool to me...
Man, you are so fucking ass backwards here it's absurd. The weakness here is KDE's, because it's core libraries' GPL nature means DRM, and licensed, proprietary technology in general, can't be implemented. Gnome gets to have functionality that can't/won't be built into KDE because of legal restrictions and/or the reluctance of the developers/owners of said technology to open up their code. Gstreamer will be able to employ licensed plugins which are non-free, which will benefit all Gnome users. KDE's GPL backend will never be able to play mp3's legally in the US, or DVD's in a much wider area. The mere suggestion that this gives the advantage to KDE is baffling to even consider.
You fucking jackass. The first time around you said:
the Free Software Foundation warns against using the LGPL [gnu.org] for any project.
Now anyone who actually read that article can tell you that the above statement is completely false. I already excerpted a quote from the article that completely contradicted your statement...here it is again:
Which license is best for a given library is a matter of strategy, and it depends on the details of the situation.
You say always, he says sometimes. But it gets better...I could have quoted this line instead:
Using the ordinary GPL is not advantageous for every library.
I mean, how much more black and white do you want it? Here, how about this?
This is why we used the Library GPL for the GNU C library. After all, there are plenty of other C libraries; using the GPL for ours would have driven proprietary software developers to use another--no problem for them, only for us.
He just cited a specific example of a project which he feels should (and is) licensed under the LGPL rather than the GPL. You can't say "you shouldn't use the LGPL for any projects" and then say "the LGPL is a good license for one of our flagship projects." What the fuck is going on in your head?
Not a single word of the quotes you just provided supports your position; neither does the article taken as a whole. It's clear that RMS feels that in some cases it is better to use the GPL than the LGPL. But it is also clear from the article that he feels that in some other cases the LGPL is a better choice. After all, he does explicitly state that severall times.