Microsoft has made some amazing improvements on the performance of Windows from the average user's perspectives. Face it, Windows XP was a very big and impressive release to the average user. MacOS X, even more so.
Linux now has the big players' attention and they are busting their balls to compete on merit. How are Linux developers going to respond to the tight integration in Windows and MacOS between the different teams building the parts of each OS?
What Linux developers will need to do is make sure that there are no weak links.That means that X.Org, Linux, KDE/GNOME, etc will have to fit into each other's design very well and as tightly as Windows and MacOS X.
So far so good, but just remember that these companies have a big advantage int hat area that cannot be underestimated.
Many scifi enthusiasts often assume that our outlook on life is primitive, and that alien races advanced enough to be space-faring races would "clearly" be more civilized than us. I have never seen the logic in that. What if our brutality is the norm for how most races behave? Do we really want to contact potentially many races that would regard us with at least the contempt, as a species, that we regard "lower life forms?" At least without making serious moves toward a more advanced state of technological advancement.
I remember an article on TechCentralStation discussed how absurd it was for anyone to assume that there couldn't be a race like the predators from the predator series. Who says that civilizations evolve the same way? A tribal warrior culture might actually thrive better in space than ours...
Ever notice how many of these bills get put together in the Senate, versus the House? There's a reason why the people didn't popularly elect the Senate in the original constitution: the state legislature is better able to control a state's senators than its own people.
What we need is to abolish the popular election of the Senate and let the state legislatures remove their senators whenever they feel they aren't doing a good job. Most of the millionaire/billionaire assholes that have been in the Senate in the past 30-50 years would probably never have gotten there if the states had control and could remove that at will for sponsoring bad legislation.
Let's face it, the number of voters informed enough to know the parallels between the Soviet Union and Tom Ridge's proposals are few enough that they couldn't vote these guys out.
Mainstream American audiences don't like anything that is really heavy on fantasy or sci fi, generally speaking, unless it has one of two things: spectacular visuals or has a plot that might as well be a fantasy/sci-fi take on modern day issues. LOTR and SW e 4-6 had the former, old Star Trek had the latter.
Don't get me wrong, I am salivating at the thought of getting my grubby mits on this after looking at the shots taken from it, and I was there opening night for Final Fantasy the movie. Just don't be surprised if this never gets anywhere in America. Imagination and the average American tend to be something akin to mortal enemies.
How do we know that the code that is actually on the machines we're voting with is the same as the public code? Even if the public code is compiled and built, then tested to see if it's the same binary instructions as what's going on the mass-produced machines, how do we know that each, individual machine that actually ends up at the voting booth won't be rigged? Who's to say that some dishonest, partisan fuck won't change it at the last minute?
I think Badnarik's solution is the best. Get rid of the official ballots and let everyone bring their own ballot with them so that they can vote for whoever they want, not whoever the ruling government wants to let them choose from. And naysays... believe it or not, but that system is probably less prone to corruption than what we have today.
Being a poor college student, I found that an Intel PC can be a great way to save on a heater. How's how you do it. You buy a stock Dell PC, put as many 7200 RPM hdds as you can into it, upgrade the video card and leave it on 24/7 with the windows closed. Voi la, not only do you have a fairly good computer, but you have a central heating system for at least a bed room on the cheap!
With physical mailing systems like the USPS and Fedex, the bulk mailers have to pay to send you their printed spam. In the case of the private services, they are paying for the cost of sending and receiving the communication, and with the USPS not only are they paying postage, but they are paying taxes that subsidize the USPS. With physical spam, they are paying for it.
Online spammers, however, are not paying for their usage of my email server. Most of my email is delivered to my website's hosting service, which I pay a monthly fee for. Any spam that is sent to me costs me money in the form of infrastructure that my hosting service has to maintain to keep the QoS acceptable. They are thus, even if only indirectly, burdening me with part of their cost. We are not paying into a subsidized system.
At a minimum, I have a right to refuse all of their communications, and the only thing that keeps me from supporting massive litigation and regulation is the ineptitude of the legislatures to craft workable legislation that won't turn into another big lawyer feeding fest. Still, though, the Internet, unlike the USPS, is a totally private service, at least in the US. As such, if I choose to "censor" the spammers, that is my right as a paying user, especially since the government isn't doing it for me.
I think the solution to spamming might be to give a right of private action to infrastructure providers to fine the big guys for imposing cost on them. Seriously, let the hosting services and telecoms sue the pants off them for imposing the burden of supporting more bandwidth and hardware just to provide an adequate QoS.
And as for spyware, I think the best thing that could be done would be to amend the federal anti-cracking laws so that any software that is bundled that acts like spyware must inform the user on installation or the company that made it is guilty of federal anti-cracking law violations. Make every individual at Gator responsible, from the software developers to the CEO for criminal violations that could get them locked up for a few years if Gator as a corporation is found guilty.
At $185, even I as a student can afford to buy one of these just to play around with it. If AMD is smart, they will get a NIC for one of these and offer people the ability to run Linux on it. Think about that, Linux on one of these would make for a really good small business system. It's small, cheap and runs a free, but adequate OS. At $185 a unit, the thing could be replaced every 6 months by a business if need be.
But what AMD could really do to kick Microsoft's ass for not supporting the Athlon64 better would be to do three things with this. Offer for $200 a version of this that has: a NIC instead of a modem, a firewire port for an optical media drive and write a special distribution of linux that makes it easy for game designers to turn this into a console system. Imagine John Carmack being able to offer a boot CD with each new copy of Doom 3 that runs on one of these, without having to rewrite any code because the SDK for this box uses all the Linux tools he uses.
In recent news MySQL has defied all industry expectations in its latest performance tests. For the first time, MySQL wrote data faster than a second grader learning to write in cursive.
Industry insiders have hinted that an organization known as Infernal Industries has become a major investor in MySQL. Headed by one Baal Diablos II, this rising star has come to challenge Microsoft and Oracle for the title of most evil corporate entity.
When asked for comment, Mr. Diablos replied "we have 6,000 years of investment experience. We created the modern labor market with our first employees, Adam and Eve. Today, we are becoming the biggest player in IT products thanks to our efforts to bring this formidible experience to the table."
The new, high performance MySQL preemptively versioned at 6.66 comes with a complimentary familiar with no less than 20 years of SQL experience. When asked whether this new round of investment would cause the Roman Catholic Church to divest itself of MySQL products, the Holy See responded that it is strongly looking into PostegreSQL.
What exactly does malware have to do with this? Malware has always been an issue, internet or not. Spam is the only thing that is a problem and with that, I think it is only a matter of time before anti-spamming efforts get serious. Honestly, cracking down on the porn industry would probably cripple much of the spam out there. Another thing that would help would be to make spammers liable for $0.01 per email they send with no ability to declare bankrupcy. That way if they send a billion messages and are just a mom and pop shop, they still owe $10,000,000 and they will keep paying that off for life if necessary.
You know, it's one thing for a corporate guy to think that he can get away with this. It's quite another for an open source developer to pilfer and another open source developer's code, release his "modifications" online and claim it's his. The CherryOS guy(s) better watch out, they may find themselves next in line for a darwin award for being that stupid.
I mean seriously... this is about as bright as murdering your neighbor in your front lawn in the middle of the day and stretching their corpse out on a lawn chair in your yard while you cut the grass...
Theoretically, it is easy to write a RSS reader. For example you can create a RSS reader for your blog in PHP that will pull the latest headlines from your friends' blogs so that y'all can link back and forth to each other. I say theoretically because you have RSS 0.92, RSS/RDF 1.0 and RSS 2.0. That's why Atom came into being, a bunch of guys finally wanted a standard XML grammar that wouldn't change with the latest whims of its maintainers and users.
There really is nothing stopping you from writing plugins for MovableType or another blog package that supports plugins, that would allow you to send email or post to usenet. The question is... why would you want to do that as an alternative to RSS rather than maybe a compliment? Your automatically generated messages would probably just got shot down by a spam filter.
From what I've seen, the thing that makes or breaks a leader is whether they want to get the job done or whether they want to get recognition. Those that lead to get the job done, are the ones that tend to be very effective, and those that want to be constantly recognized tend to not be. It's really common sense. When you're secure enough about your own abilities, you don't need to have them constantly reinforced and recognized.
What I think America needs more of us is a military-influenced leadership culture. Not too heavily influenced, but enough that people understand that when you work in a team, even as the leader, your success and the team's success are one-in-the-same.
Of course schools often discredit this by having teachers who will grade down an entire team because of a slacker or two's stupidity, whereas in the real world the slackers would get fired for bad performance. I have had a class before in college where I got graded off because another team screwed up and made it impossible for my team to finish our work.
It seems to me that the best anti-dilbert solution is to instill from an early age the value that if you screw up, you'll be accountable, and that when you succeed that you share your success with those that made it possible.
I recently bought a PC from Compaq for only $445 including free s&h and it has a a Sempron 2800. I got it as a replacement for my AthlonXP 2400+ box which had its motherboard die, and I needed a drop in replacement for my CS classes to run Linux on and the PC works like a charm. It's fast, it runs SuSE 9.1 well and was dirt cheap compared to the Intel alternative.
Those were such great magazines. I always had this feeling that they'd be great for a nerd/geek house training a puppy. Puppy pees on the floor, roll up a computer shopper issue, and give the puppy a smart whack to the butt. The dog will from that point on hold it for hours at the mere sight of a computer shopper issue in your hands.
It never ceases to amaze me how so many people who use their computers for just basic, simple tasks like office functions act like they have this incredible need for powerful hardware. I bought a Compaq Presario with a Sempron 2800, 256MB DDR Ram and a 80GB hdd for only $445 including S&H, and with SuSE 9.1 it does everything I need. It's not a game machine, so uhhh why exactly when it's just going to run Java and C++ programs for class, would I need the latest Athlon64 or Pentium4?
The reason for owning a Mac has never been about power, but utility. Every convert to MacOS X from Windows that I know switched because Macs are actually much more useful in many areas than Windows PCs. The hardest pill for many of them to swallow is that the "Apple way" really is significantly easier and more productive than the "Microsoft way."
The average computer user who could afford one, would actually be much better off with an iMac or iBook than a typical off the shelf PC. It gets the job done, and done well and it is made much better than the usual PC.
If Microsoft were to release the project under a OSS license and then nail a competitor that uses it for patent infringement, couldn't the competitor nail them for antitrust violations? That to me is the epitome of predatory business practice. Same thing with patents and mono. Companies like MS should be required by law to make their intentions match up with their public statements. If they go through an open process, standardize and such, enforcement of patents against those who use the open specs and products should be illegal under antitrust laws.
This could create huge problems for people to stay on the right side of copyright law. A medium that pulls information from several different sources could potentially make it much harder to avoid copyright infringement. For example, you pull from a Wikipedia entry, a NY Times entry and a Reason editorial. You better keep track of where you got each part if you use them in any of your own research, commentary, etc.
How does it combine information from different sources in a way that keeps the user knowledgeable about where the data came from? How do you know who to cite, or whether something you're excerpting can be used in the context you want, when your "semantic web browser" pulled the data and combined it coherently or incoherently into a mish mosh of data sources?
Am I the only one who thinks that this could be an IP trial lawyer's wet dream?
AOL put a lot of money into working on Mozilla and didn't pull any corporate shenanigans a la Sun's debacle with OpenOffice. Where would Mozilla be today had AOL/Netscape not pull millions of dollars of R&D money into building it up? Probably nowhere, or just now becoming remotely useful.
OSS fans need to adopt a bit of political realism here. Corporate entities are amoral, and that means that they will side with those who best serve their owners' interests. It is thus in the interest of OSS users to actively encourage them to see OSS like Mozilla, OpenOffice and the Linux kernel as being in their interests to support.
AOL has given a lot, and I can't think of them actually taking anything. Does anyone seriously expect the average AOL user to jump over to Firefox? It's hard to believe that people as smart as many OSS users are so detatched from the public that they don't see how incompetent most AOL users are. AOL knows that, most of us should too.
The people who are hooked on AOL are not a significant enough block anymore to be the pivotal base to win over. If AOL is smart, they'll capitalize on their investment into Mozilla by making the Mac version of AOL software use Gecko. That's more than enough users to make a dent in the market. AOL, last I heard, had two million Mac users. That'd be over twice the number of people that downloaded Firefox 1.0PR.
In the end, people should be amazed that AOL has given so much to OSS communities, without playing battered wife to the Evil Empire like Sun is doing now after their settlement.
They're preventing people from walking off with free books. If Google doesn't do that, then they cannot offer this service. Sometimes it is better to accept a little inconvenience. There is nothing stopping you from retyping an entire small passage if you want to quote it.
Parse the news stories for things like names, places and products and substitute on Google News those stories for Google search links. That way, Google can pull the readers to its paid services and can probably innocently say "but we're just providing readers with the ability to find out more information about the story."
Google learned from Netscape's mistakes and instead of going to the government crying about MSN is constantly working on beating Microsoft to new markets in aways that tie the new markets back to Google's old original base. Knowing how competitive Google is, one would think that Microsoft, which talked about buying them out or competing directly against them, would just accept Google's existance and work with them to save money. At the rate Google is going, it'll probably be the one battle that Microsoft can't win.
Sometimes I have to wonder how it is that Microsoft, with all of their talent and wealth, can have so many problems that people of the calibre that their senior engineers are supposed to be could make. I remember talking to one of my professors about software processes and he was convinced that it's possible to have an "error-free" program, this side of the 2nd coming of God and our programming being outsourced to the angels to do for us. Is it a sign that we have matured as users, or that development has regressed that we now consider holes and bugs to be par for the course?
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Microsoft has made some amazing improvements on the performance of Windows from the average user's perspectives. Face it, Windows XP was a very big and impressive release to the average user. MacOS X, even more so.
Linux now has the big players' attention and they are busting their balls to compete on merit. How are Linux developers going to respond to the tight integration in Windows and MacOS between the different teams building the parts of each OS?
What Linux developers will need to do is make sure that there are no weak links.That means that X.Org, Linux, KDE/GNOME, etc will have to fit into each other's design very well and as tightly as Windows and MacOS X.
So far so good, but just remember that these companies have a big advantage int hat area that cannot be underestimated.
Many scifi enthusiasts often assume that our outlook on life is primitive, and that alien races advanced enough to be space-faring races would "clearly" be more civilized than us. I have never seen the logic in that. What if our brutality is the norm for how most races behave? Do we really want to contact potentially many races that would regard us with at least the contempt, as a species, that we regard "lower life forms?" At least without making serious moves toward a more advanced state of technological advancement.
I remember an article on TechCentralStation discussed how absurd it was for anyone to assume that there couldn't be a race like the predators from the predator series. Who says that civilizations evolve the same way? A tribal warrior culture might actually thrive better in space than ours...
Ever notice how many of these bills get put together in the Senate, versus the House? There's a reason why the people didn't popularly elect the Senate in the original constitution: the state legislature is better able to control a state's senators than its own people.
What we need is to abolish the popular election of the Senate and let the state legislatures remove their senators whenever they feel they aren't doing a good job. Most of the millionaire/billionaire assholes that have been in the Senate in the past 30-50 years would probably never have gotten there if the states had control and could remove that at will for sponsoring bad legislation.
Let's face it, the number of voters informed enough to know the parallels between the Soviet Union and Tom Ridge's proposals are few enough that they couldn't vote these guys out.
Mainstream American audiences don't like anything that is really heavy on fantasy or sci fi, generally speaking, unless it has one of two things: spectacular visuals or has a plot that might as well be a fantasy/sci-fi take on modern day issues. LOTR and SW e 4-6 had the former, old Star Trek had the latter.
Don't get me wrong, I am salivating at the thought of getting my grubby mits on this after looking at the shots taken from it, and I was there opening night for Final Fantasy the movie. Just don't be surprised if this never gets anywhere in America. Imagination and the average American tend to be something akin to mortal enemies.
How do we know that the code that is actually on the machines we're voting with is the same as the public code? Even if the public code is compiled and built, then tested to see if it's the same binary instructions as what's going on the mass-produced machines, how do we know that each, individual machine that actually ends up at the voting booth won't be rigged? Who's to say that some dishonest, partisan fuck won't change it at the last minute?
I think Badnarik's solution is the best. Get rid of the official ballots and let everyone bring their own ballot with them so that they can vote for whoever they want, not whoever the ruling government wants to let them choose from. And naysays... believe it or not, but that system is probably less prone to corruption than what we have today.
Being a poor college student, I found that an Intel PC can be a great way to save on a heater. How's how you do it. You buy a stock Dell PC, put as many 7200 RPM hdds as you can into it, upgrade the video card and leave it on 24/7 with the windows closed. Voi la, not only do you have a fairly good computer, but you have a central heating system for at least a bed room on the cheap!
With physical mailing systems like the USPS and Fedex, the bulk mailers have to pay to send you their printed spam. In the case of the private services, they are paying for the cost of sending and receiving the communication, and with the USPS not only are they paying postage, but they are paying taxes that subsidize the USPS. With physical spam, they are paying for it.
Online spammers, however, are not paying for their usage of my email server. Most of my email is delivered to my website's hosting service, which I pay a monthly fee for. Any spam that is sent to me costs me money in the form of infrastructure that my hosting service has to maintain to keep the QoS acceptable. They are thus, even if only indirectly, burdening me with part of their cost. We are not paying into a subsidized system.
At a minimum, I have a right to refuse all of their communications, and the only thing that keeps me from supporting massive litigation and regulation is the ineptitude of the legislatures to craft workable legislation that won't turn into another big lawyer feeding fest. Still, though, the Internet, unlike the USPS, is a totally private service, at least in the US. As such, if I choose to "censor" the spammers, that is my right as a paying user, especially since the government isn't doing it for me.
I think the solution to spamming might be to give a right of private action to infrastructure providers to fine the big guys for imposing cost on them. Seriously, let the hosting services and telecoms sue the pants off them for imposing the burden of supporting more bandwidth and hardware just to provide an adequate QoS.
And as for spyware, I think the best thing that could be done would be to amend the federal anti-cracking laws so that any software that is bundled that acts like spyware must inform the user on installation or the company that made it is guilty of federal anti-cracking law violations. Make every individual at Gator responsible, from the software developers to the CEO for criminal violations that could get them locked up for a few years if Gator as a corporation is found guilty.
At $185, even I as a student can afford to buy one of these just to play around with it. If AMD is smart, they will get a NIC for one of these and offer people the ability to run Linux on it. Think about that, Linux on one of these would make for a really good small business system. It's small, cheap and runs a free, but adequate OS. At $185 a unit, the thing could be replaced every 6 months by a business if need be.
But what AMD could really do to kick Microsoft's ass for not supporting the Athlon64 better would be to do three things with this. Offer for $200 a version of this that has: a NIC instead of a modem, a firewire port for an optical media drive and write a special distribution of linux that makes it easy for game designers to turn this into a console system. Imagine John Carmack being able to offer a boot CD with each new copy of Doom 3 that runs on one of these, without having to rewrite any code because the SDK for this box uses all the Linux tools he uses.
In recent news MySQL has defied all industry expectations in its latest performance tests. For the first time, MySQL wrote data faster than a second grader learning to write in cursive.
Industry insiders have hinted that an organization known as Infernal Industries has become a major investor in MySQL. Headed by one Baal Diablos II, this rising star has come to challenge Microsoft and Oracle for the title of most evil corporate entity.
When asked for comment, Mr. Diablos replied "we have 6,000 years of investment experience. We created the modern labor market with our first employees, Adam and Eve. Today, we are becoming the biggest player in IT products thanks to our efforts to bring this formidible experience to the table."
The new, high performance MySQL preemptively versioned at 6.66 comes with a complimentary familiar with no less than 20 years of SQL experience. When asked whether this new round of investment would cause the Roman Catholic Church to divest itself of MySQL products, the Holy See responded that it is strongly looking into PostegreSQL.
What exactly does malware have to do with this? Malware has always been an issue, internet or not. Spam is the only thing that is a problem and with that, I think it is only a matter of time before anti-spamming efforts get serious. Honestly, cracking down on the porn industry would probably cripple much of the spam out there. Another thing that would help would be to make spammers liable for $0.01 per email they send with no ability to declare bankrupcy. That way if they send a billion messages and are just a mom and pop shop, they still owe $10,000,000 and they will keep paying that off for life if necessary.
You know, it's one thing for a corporate guy to think that he can get away with this. It's quite another for an open source developer to pilfer and another open source developer's code, release his "modifications" online and claim it's his. The CherryOS guy(s) better watch out, they may find themselves next in line for a darwin award for being that stupid.
I mean seriously... this is about as bright as murdering your neighbor in your front lawn in the middle of the day and stretching their corpse out on a lawn chair in your yard while you cut the grass...
Theoretically, it is easy to write a RSS reader. For example you can create a RSS reader for your blog in PHP that will pull the latest headlines from your friends' blogs so that y'all can link back and forth to each other. I say theoretically because you have RSS 0.92, RSS/RDF 1.0 and RSS 2.0. That's why Atom came into being, a bunch of guys finally wanted a standard XML grammar that wouldn't change with the latest whims of its maintainers and users.
There really is nothing stopping you from writing plugins for MovableType or another blog package that supports plugins, that would allow you to send email or post to usenet. The question is... why would you want to do that as an alternative to RSS rather than maybe a compliment? Your automatically generated messages would probably just got shot down by a spam filter.
From what I've seen, the thing that makes or breaks a leader is whether they want to get the job done or whether they want to get recognition. Those that lead to get the job done, are the ones that tend to be very effective, and those that want to be constantly recognized tend to not be. It's really common sense. When you're secure enough about your own abilities, you don't need to have them constantly reinforced and recognized.
What I think America needs more of us is a military-influenced leadership culture. Not too heavily influenced, but enough that people understand that when you work in a team, even as the leader, your success and the team's success are one-in-the-same.
Of course schools often discredit this by having teachers who will grade down an entire team because of a slacker or two's stupidity, whereas in the real world the slackers would get fired for bad performance. I have had a class before in college where I got graded off because another team screwed up and made it impossible for my team to finish our work.
It seems to me that the best anti-dilbert solution is to instill from an early age the value that if you screw up, you'll be accountable, and that when you succeed that you share your success with those that made it possible.
I recently bought a PC from Compaq for only $445 including free s&h and it has a a Sempron 2800. I got it as a replacement for my AthlonXP 2400+ box which had its motherboard die, and I needed a drop in replacement for my CS classes to run Linux on and the PC works like a charm. It's fast, it runs SuSE 9.1 well and was dirt cheap compared to the Intel alternative.
do we get RoboLAPDCops to beat down and mangle anyone who breaks their end of the deals signed by the RoboLawyer on our behalf?
Those were such great magazines. I always had this feeling that they'd be great for a nerd/geek house training a puppy. Puppy pees on the floor, roll up a computer shopper issue, and give the puppy a smart whack to the butt. The dog will from that point on hold it for hours at the mere sight of a computer shopper issue in your hands.
It never ceases to amaze me how so many people who use their computers for just basic, simple tasks like office functions act like they have this incredible need for powerful hardware. I bought a Compaq Presario with a Sempron 2800, 256MB DDR Ram and a 80GB hdd for only $445 including S&H, and with SuSE 9.1 it does everything I need. It's not a game machine, so uhhh why exactly when it's just going to run Java and C++ programs for class, would I need the latest Athlon64 or Pentium4?
The reason for owning a Mac has never been about power, but utility. Every convert to MacOS X from Windows that I know switched because Macs are actually much more useful in many areas than Windows PCs. The hardest pill for many of them to swallow is that the "Apple way" really is significantly easier and more productive than the "Microsoft way."
The average computer user who could afford one, would actually be much better off with an iMac or iBook than a typical off the shelf PC. It gets the job done, and done well and it is made much better than the usual PC.
If Microsoft were to release the project under a OSS license and then nail a competitor that uses it for patent infringement, couldn't the competitor nail them for antitrust violations? That to me is the epitome of predatory business practice. Same thing with patents and mono. Companies like MS should be required by law to make their intentions match up with their public statements. If they go through an open process, standardize and such, enforcement of patents against those who use the open specs and products should be illegal under antitrust laws.
This could create huge problems for people to stay on the right side of copyright law. A medium that pulls information from several different sources could potentially make it much harder to avoid copyright infringement. For example, you pull from a Wikipedia entry, a NY Times entry and a Reason editorial. You better keep track of where you got each part if you use them in any of your own research, commentary, etc.
How does it combine information from different sources in a way that keeps the user knowledgeable about where the data came from? How do you know who to cite, or whether something you're excerpting can be used in the context you want, when your "semantic web browser" pulled the data and combined it coherently or incoherently into a mish mosh of data sources?
Am I the only one who thinks that this could be an IP trial lawyer's wet dream?
Because he was there to serve a notice of a lawsuit to the CPD...
AOL put a lot of money into working on Mozilla and didn't pull any corporate shenanigans a la Sun's debacle with OpenOffice. Where would Mozilla be today had AOL/Netscape not pull millions of dollars of R&D money into building it up? Probably nowhere, or just now becoming remotely useful.
OSS fans need to adopt a bit of political realism here. Corporate entities are amoral, and that means that they will side with those who best serve their owners' interests. It is thus in the interest of OSS users to actively encourage them to see OSS like Mozilla, OpenOffice and the Linux kernel as being in their interests to support.
AOL has given a lot, and I can't think of them actually taking anything. Does anyone seriously expect the average AOL user to jump over to Firefox? It's hard to believe that people as smart as many OSS users are so detatched from the public that they don't see how incompetent most AOL users are. AOL knows that, most of us should too.
The people who are hooked on AOL are not a significant enough block anymore to be the pivotal base to win over. If AOL is smart, they'll capitalize on their investment into Mozilla by making the Mac version of AOL software use Gecko. That's more than enough users to make a dent in the market. AOL, last I heard, had two million Mac users. That'd be over twice the number of people that downloaded Firefox 1.0PR.
In the end, people should be amazed that AOL has given so much to OSS communities, without playing battered wife to the Evil Empire like Sun is doing now after their settlement.
They're preventing people from walking off with free books. If Google doesn't do that, then they cannot offer this service. Sometimes it is better to accept a little inconvenience. There is nothing stopping you from retyping an entire small passage if you want to quote it.
Parse the news stories for things like names, places and products and substitute on Google News those stories for Google search links. That way, Google can pull the readers to its paid services and can probably innocently say "but we're just providing readers with the ability to find out more information about the story."
Google learned from Netscape's mistakes and instead of going to the government crying about MSN is constantly working on beating Microsoft to new markets in aways that tie the new markets back to Google's old original base. Knowing how competitive Google is, one would think that Microsoft, which talked about buying them out or competing directly against them, would just accept Google's existance and work with them to save money. At the rate Google is going, it'll probably be the one battle that Microsoft can't win.
Sometimes I have to wonder how it is that Microsoft, with all of their talent and wealth, can have so many problems that people of the calibre that their senior engineers are supposed to be could make. I remember talking to one of my professors about software processes and he was convinced that it's possible to have an "error-free" program, this side of the 2nd coming of God and our programming being outsourced to the angels to do for us. Is it a sign that we have matured as users, or that development has regressed that we now consider holes and bugs to be par for the course?