The goal of a hardware vendor is to sell as much hardware as possible. Whether it's laptop wireless chipsets, motherboard chipsets, webcams or whatnot the goal is to move product. XP is still two thirds of the Windows software market. If a hardware vendor ignores the vast majority if their established market, what else could the purpose be? We're not talking about drivers for OS-X here, or Linux with a tiny market share. We're talking about more than half of the people in the world who might use the product. It just does not make sense for a hardware developer to spend the money to develop only for the smaller fraction and not the larger one unless there is some other motivation.
Ah, back in the day this was a huge argument against Linux - and stayed so long after it was patently untrue. Back then you had to check the specs quite carefully, do your research and make sure that your product was supported by the community because some component vendors weren't just non-supportive of Linux, they were actively hostile. They would obscure the interface and not make public specs so everything had to be reverse engineered.
Now development of an XP driver, which as the fine article plainly states serves two thirds of the device market, is a well established process, requires no new training or hiring. It's a sunk investment for hardware manufacturers. The only possible reason to withhold this driver is to force people to move on to the next version of Windows - and that's neither any of the hardware vendors' business nor is it in their best interest to ignore two thirds of the Windows market. So if XP drivers are getting scarce it's not because of lack of demand. Whatever could the reason be? The reason could not be in your best interest as a consumer.
Whatever. Turnabout is fair play. You have to check the Internet and the vendor website to make sure drivers are provided before you buy a PC to move your XP experience to. If the vendor won't provide XP drivers there's no reason to just throw it away. Linux works with just about everything out of the box, and it won't stop working just because Linus wants you to "move along" to the next version.
The Fine Summary mentions the potential for Facebook to sell followers. Although I don't know if Facebook is involved, you can already buy Facebook Fans, Likes and Followers as you can see in the ads here. This may be how the Microsoft KIN got 200,000 followers.
XP is still available through downgrade rights for another decade. After your friends and family get a new PC there's no need for them to throw out all that expensive software they paid for that doesn't run in Windows 7.
Try and imagine this: there was a computer game called "Star Trek" where you navigated a ship (actually a text glyph that looked like the Enterprise) around a universe populated by Romulans, Klingons, &c and used phasers and photon torpedos, where you got repairs at starbases and so on. And it wasn't authorized or accepted by anybody in Hollywood. But nobody got sued for appropriation of intellectual property. Weird, hunh? It's like grandpa lived in a different world than you entirely, where people could use the icons of their culture freely. There was a guy who wrote a book about this. His name was Ray Bradbury. Celcius 233 or something like that.
I'm not the one fighting the trend line. If you see a positive outcome for American manned space exploration, please share the story line that gets us from here to there. I don't see it.
Microsoft sued HTC before and got a settlement. They're trolling. These lawsuits are nothing more than advertising for their Windows Phone 7 phone, which offers indemnification against lawsuits from... them. "That's a nice phone you got there. It would be a shame if anybody sued you over it."
Microsoft is suing their own customers here, and not retail customers, but billion-dollar manufacturing partners. That's not a good plan. SCO tried that plan and even with the Microsoft-backed investments from unsuccessfully indirect partners, it didn't work out for SCO.
The patents are bullshit. They're software patents, and even Microsoft admits almost all software patents are bullshit. Microsoft is looking for help from all of us to solve this argument for them both ways in favor. It's a fool's game.
If this is their plan to put Windows Phone 7 over then they're hosed. "Buy it or we'll sue you" never works.
Kid, the Library of Congress was founded in 1800 - longer ago than your grandfather's grandfather's dad could remember. 210 years ago. Most of the stuff they had then, they still have now. They're not worried about preserving the top40 from your middle school days until you're disrespecting it in college. They want to be the repository for our culture forever. They're sort of like preemptive anthropologists and archaeologists. They know that you don't care but they're expecting that someone, someday will because cultural sensitivity is a cyclical thing.
It's customary that new generations forget what has gone before and then rediscover it as if it were a new thing. This forgetting is not required. If we can quit forgetting then artists can stand on the shoulders of giants once again and build things of great and complex beauty like they once did.
Given the current state of copyright though, you can't whistle any four notes in a row in public without getting sued. Anything like a symphony is right out.
It is essential to the people who will sell us our culture in the future that we forget all that has gone before. If we remembered our heritage it would be necesary to innovate new things. If we can't, then recycled things will suffice - which cuts down the production cost.
The goal therefore of the media giants is to make us nye culturne. A people devoid of culture. They're having great success at this.
If I could get the hours lost back from Barren Realms Elite, I'd be young again. It was just an evolution of a game called Hamurabi for the IBM Model 5150 I learned to write machine code, Basic and APL on, but the addition of online opponents and leagues made it cool. We also had a Star Trek game, and football with random-generated game events and leagues and computer generated text play-by-play.
And then there was LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon), Solar Realms Elite, Trade Wars, and the other door games.
Ah, old times. Kids these days think games began with Quake.
Look at those year numbers you're throwing out. When is this manned spaceflight effort going to happen? How likely is it that control of government will shift from one party to the other more than once in that span? How likely is it that the project will be on time and under budget and not get axed just for overruns and schedule?
The budget numbers for 2014 are looking pretty grim. Other nations are already starting to balk at supporting our deficit spending, and by then our debt will more than double. It's over $87,000 per taxpayer now. Support for a manned space program is weak now. What's it going to be like to be a polititian supporting that spending when we're also capitulating on our commitments to federal retirement, social security, medicare?
The current spend is a sop to fiends like us who still wish something could be done. But it can't. US manned spaceflight is over. After the next shuttle lands a manned American spacecraft will never again light the sky. We'll pay for flights from other countries for a while... but as their space industries become self-sufficient other nations will be less and less inclined to let us influence their spaceflight missions. Eventually they won't even want us aboard as passengers - and we won't have the hard money to pay the fare anyway.
Others will go. They'll lead the way to the asteriods, the moons of Mars. They'll establish the first durable colonies, tap the sun's energy. We may be the ones to discover usable fusion energy, but they'll be the ones to take it to space and build the foundries and factories that let Men live between the planets and take the next step to the stars. If we're nice they may let us see the neat things they bring back.
Apparently over at TG Daily Emma Woollacott thinks WebP is a Microsoft innovation. They've also reassigned Richard Rabbat to Redmond, which will probably be quite a surprise to him.
Meanwhile, in 2016 when the IE team gets around to implementing this image format they'll find a way to put an exploitable buffer overflow into it.
If this planet is truly as described and we can see it from here then earthlike planets must be common in the universe. If the seeds of life arrived here rather than arose here as some believe is possible, this planet only 20 lightyears away also likely was planted in the same way. The odds of us being alone in the universe just went down by a large factor.
I pondered for quite a while whether a/sarcasm tagline was required on that post. I figured this audience would drive it to "funny" because they knew me. I guess the sarcasm thing is not well accepted here, and the average folk who moderate don't know me as well as I thought they did. Oh well.
Now I have to be on-topic for this post. China is moving up in supercomputers. They're moving ahead in basic physics and chemistry too. They're growing in these fields without our help. They're building launch capability too. When Americans get to the Asteriods we may find that not only does China own them, but they are prepared to defend them. That would be awkward.
Scary: They have this amazing new supercompoter OS called Windows HPC. That professionally designed supercompute OS is going to totally dominate the 95% of supers that now muddle along with some OS designed by hobbyists.
The network is not trusted. Not the one inside, and not the one outside your firewall. It's not trusted if you're running Windows, OS-X nor BSD. The network is not trusted when you're fully patched, nor when you've just done a fresh install. The network is not trusted FatRichie, not at all.
I suspect this is over concerns about liability and tech support rather than strategic issues like preferring Chrome OS. There's also some overblown concern about the apps scaling well on a larger display.
Slashdot Mirror
The goal of a hardware vendor is to sell as much hardware as possible. Whether it's laptop wireless chipsets, motherboard chipsets, webcams or whatnot the goal is to move product. XP is still two thirds of the Windows software market. If a hardware vendor ignores the vast majority if their established market, what else could the purpose be? We're not talking about drivers for OS-X here, or Linux with a tiny market share. We're talking about more than half of the people in the world who might use the product. It just does not make sense for a hardware developer to spend the money to develop only for the smaller fraction and not the larger one unless there is some other motivation.
Ah, back in the day this was a huge argument against Linux - and stayed so long after it was patently untrue. Back then you had to check the specs quite carefully, do your research and make sure that your product was supported by the community because some component vendors weren't just non-supportive of Linux, they were actively hostile. They would obscure the interface and not make public specs so everything had to be reverse engineered.
Now development of an XP driver, which as the fine article plainly states serves two thirds of the device market, is a well established process, requires no new training or hiring. It's a sunk investment for hardware manufacturers. The only possible reason to withhold this driver is to force people to move on to the next version of Windows - and that's neither any of the hardware vendors' business nor is it in their best interest to ignore two thirds of the Windows market. So if XP drivers are getting scarce it's not because of lack of demand. Whatever could the reason be? The reason could not be in your best interest as a consumer.
Whatever. Turnabout is fair play. You have to check the Internet and the vendor website to make sure drivers are provided before you buy a PC to move your XP experience to. If the vendor won't provide XP drivers there's no reason to just throw it away. Linux works with just about everything out of the box, and it won't stop working just because Linus wants you to "move along" to the next version.
The Fine Summary mentions the potential for Facebook to sell followers. Although I don't know if Facebook is involved, you can already buy Facebook Fans, Likes and Followers as you can see in the ads here. This may be how the Microsoft KIN got 200,000 followers.
XP is still available through downgrade rights for another decade. After your friends and family get a new PC there's no need for them to throw out all that expensive software they paid for that doesn't run in Windows 7.
Try and imagine this: there was a computer game called "Star Trek" where you navigated a ship (actually a text glyph that looked like the Enterprise) around a universe populated by Romulans, Klingons, &c and used phasers and photon torpedos, where you got repairs at starbases and so on. And it wasn't authorized or accepted by anybody in Hollywood. But nobody got sued for appropriation of intellectual property. Weird, hunh? It's like grandpa lived in a different world than you entirely, where people could use the icons of their culture freely. There was a guy who wrote a book about this. His name was Ray Bradbury. Celcius 233 or something like that.
I'm not the one fighting the trend line. If you see a positive outcome for American manned space exploration, please share the story line that gets us from here to there. I don't see it.
Microsoft sued HTC before and got a settlement. They're trolling. These lawsuits are nothing more than advertising for their Windows Phone 7 phone, which offers indemnification against lawsuits from... them. "That's a nice phone you got there. It would be a shame if anybody sued you over it."
Microsoft is suing their own customers here, and not retail customers, but billion-dollar manufacturing partners. That's not a good plan. SCO tried that plan and even with the Microsoft-backed investments from unsuccessfully indirect partners, it didn't work out for SCO.
The patents are bullshit. They're software patents, and even Microsoft admits almost all software patents are bullshit. Microsoft is looking for help from all of us to solve this argument for them both ways in favor. It's a fool's game.
If this is their plan to put Windows Phone 7 over then they're hosed. "Buy it or we'll sue you" never works.
That's like, forever, man.
Kid, the Library of Congress was founded in 1800 - longer ago than your grandfather's grandfather's dad could remember. 210 years ago. Most of the stuff they had then, they still have now. They're not worried about preserving the top40 from your middle school days until you're disrespecting it in college. They want to be the repository for our culture forever. They're sort of like preemptive anthropologists and archaeologists. They know that you don't care but they're expecting that someone, someday will because cultural sensitivity is a cyclical thing.
It's customary that new generations forget what has gone before and then rediscover it as if it were a new thing. This forgetting is not required. If we can quit forgetting then artists can stand on the shoulders of giants once again and build things of great and complex beauty like they once did.
Given the current state of copyright though, you can't whistle any four notes in a row in public without getting sued. Anything like a symphony is right out.
It is essential to the people who will sell us our culture in the future that we forget all that has gone before. If we remembered our heritage it would be necesary to innovate new things. If we can't, then recycled things will suffice - which cuts down the production cost.
The goal therefore of the media giants is to make us nye culturne. A people devoid of culture. They're having great success at this.
An opposing project would be Musopen.
If I could get the hours lost back from Barren Realms Elite, I'd be young again. It was just an evolution of a game called Hamurabi for the IBM Model 5150 I learned to write machine code, Basic and APL on, but the addition of online opponents and leagues made it cool. We also had a Star Trek game, and football with random-generated game events and leagues and computer generated text play-by-play.
And then there was LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon), Solar Realms Elite, Trade Wars, and the other door games.
Ah, old times. Kids these days think games began with Quake.
/onion, belt, off my lawn and so on.
You're not a great rocket scientist until there's somebody in the world who wants you dead.
Look at those year numbers you're throwing out. When is this manned spaceflight effort going to happen? How likely is it that control of government will shift from one party to the other more than once in that span? How likely is it that the project will be on time and under budget and not get axed just for overruns and schedule?
The budget numbers for 2014 are looking pretty grim. Other nations are already starting to balk at supporting our deficit spending, and by then our debt will more than double. It's over $87,000 per taxpayer now. Support for a manned space program is weak now. What's it going to be like to be a polititian supporting that spending when we're also capitulating on our commitments to federal retirement, social security, medicare?
The current spend is a sop to fiends like us who still wish something could be done. But it can't. US manned spaceflight is over. After the next shuttle lands a manned American spacecraft will never again light the sky. We'll pay for flights from other countries for a while... but as their space industries become self-sufficient other nations will be less and less inclined to let us influence their spaceflight missions. Eventually they won't even want us aboard as passengers - and we won't have the hard money to pay the fare anyway.
Others will go. They'll lead the way to the asteriods, the moons of Mars. They'll establish the first durable colonies, tap the sun's energy. We may be the ones to discover usable fusion energy, but they'll be the ones to take it to space and build the foundries and factories that let Men live between the planets and take the next step to the stars. If we're nice they may let us see the neat things they bring back.
There's always plenty of work in third-world rockets with suborbital payloads.
Over at WSJ they're posting that the new HP CEO is making $1.2B/year. But hey, what's three orders of magnitude among friends?
Apparently over at TG Daily Emma Woollacott thinks WebP is a Microsoft innovation. They've also reassigned Richard Rabbat to Redmond, which will probably be quite a surprise to him.
Meanwhile, in 2016 when the IE team gets around to implementing this image format they'll find a way to put an exploitable buffer overflow into it.
Is a document where Brazil establishes an embassy in Tuvalu. Hm. Gotta be a Godwin in there somewhere.
If this planet is truly as described and we can see it from here then earthlike planets must be common in the universe. If the seeds of life arrived here rather than arose here as some believe is possible, this planet only 20 lightyears away also likely was planted in the same way. The odds of us being alone in the universe just went down by a large factor.
I pondered for quite a while whether a /sarcasm tagline was required on that post. I figured this audience would drive it to "funny" because they knew me. I guess the sarcasm thing is not well accepted here, and the average folk who moderate don't know me as well as I thought they did. Oh well.
Now I have to be on-topic for this post. China is moving up in supercomputers. They're moving ahead in basic physics and chemistry too. They're growing in these fields without our help. They're building launch capability too. When Americans get to the Asteriods we may find that not only does China own them, but they are prepared to defend them. That would be awkward.
This is your whoosh: Whoosh.
Scary: They have this amazing new supercompoter OS called Windows HPC. That professionally designed supercompute OS is going to totally dominate the 95% of supers that now muddle along with some OS designed by hobbyists.
Somebody's confused about the difference between "an internet" and "The Internet".
The network is not trusted. Not the one inside, and not the one outside your firewall. It's not trusted if you're running Windows, OS-X nor BSD. The network is not trusted when you're fully patched, nor when you've just done a fresh install. The network is not trusted FatRichie, not at all.
The tablet is for printing web pages. You navigate to the web page, then put the tablet face down on the scanner.
I suspect this is over concerns about liability and tech support rather than strategic issues like preferring Chrome OS. There's also some overblown concern about the apps scaling well on a larger display.
It's reported elsewhere. HP is a big company. They don't need everything to run the same OS.