They'll be turning a profit. They're cutting out the middleman - local phone retail stores.
I watched the video of the event from Scoble. I want this phone, but watching the video makes me really want the Snapdragon tablets that are going to show at CES. I am not really a fan of tablets, but I think I see where they're going with this 3D accelerated video thing on the Snapdragon and I like it.
HTC is a very big company. Google chose a good partner here.
These one in 10,000 geeks and their "I want open" bleating is especially annoying since the twits are everywhere. Somehow they manage to pollute every single thread about iPhone on every forum on the Internet, making one post out of three about "it would be better open". They can't just let mainstream folk like us have a mature discussion. It's as if they don't realize there are only four of them.
It wouldn't be so annoying if they weren't so prolific. They must each post thirty thousand times a day - unless there's an error in my calculation somehow.
I don't care for iTunes either. Amazon MP3s or rips from my CDs for me. The kids get iTunes cards for their iPods though. I try and tell them to stick with the MP3s, but I guess some lessons take some experience to learn. I don't use Bing - I tried it and it just doesn't give me what I need from a search engine. Pretty though. I don't care for voice recognition, even in the hypothetical cases that it works well.
Telepresence is essentially webcam chat. When I saw my son's Nintendo DSI (which has wifi and a webcam, but no telepresence app) I knew it was time. Dick Tracy watch, here we come!
Google is about to become Apple's biggest competitor in the phone space. And Apple doesn't play nicely with Google on their app store for apps where they compete on features apparently. Y'know, I still think Google will cut Apple a square deal anyway - at Google they like to hold the moral high ground.
Office for Mac? Is that still around? Does it still lack the most important features, like VBA or images? I always thought that buying it for compatibility was kind of pointless if you couldn't open the same documents with it. I have an XServe and work with the Macs a bit, but don't use them for daily work so I don't know.
W7 does run well on most netbooks, and that's surprising since the 945G chipset is not legendary for its graphics performance, to be kind. Apparently those problems Vista had with Intel video are gone.
Tablets? They're about to change, and not just a little.
In Zimbabwe since 2002 they've been engaging in an innovative agriculture program: seizing farms owned by white farmers and turning them over to military lackeys who know nothing about agriculture. Surprisingly, yields are down.
Zimbabwe was once a major food exporter to southern Africa. Now they can't even feed themselves.
So yeah, the sad part is that lot of farmers that could have feed their communities are pushed out of business by thugs who then don't know what to do with the land.
Agree about hand size. An iPhone that does telepresence well is fundamentally a different device. If the iSlate doesn't do it the new Android tablet will. Do you want to skate about diction, or shall we promote progress? The netbook happened despite you, not because of you.
If I had posted this comment - no matter how deep - on slashdot a year ago, there would be several dissenting replies both from ACs and signed in users of various UID ages (but mostly new ones), and then subcomments supporting the dissenting views. I would have used their ignorance to amplify my message with dozens of applicable links and so in the view of search engines amplify the importance of those links. I would have been motivated to do so by the challenge presented. The idiots would have continued to argue and let me post rebuttals with links for weeks, to the detriment of their message in favor of mine. But now there's not any of that. It would have been modded down first before the mods rescued it from obscurity and metamodded the downmods until the people who had downmodded it could no longer moderate.
Now with the new year it's a frist spot and there's not a dissenting opinion to be had, downmods are conspicuously absent.
I can only surmise that the MS Bangalore blog center has a new boss, and she/he is effective, or they've fired them all for negative competence. We should be aware of this and be prepared to thwart their new strategies.
Nominal contextual comment to invalidate "off topic" moderation: Yeah, "standards based" is gaining value in all fields, especially software. People are starting to understand in 2010 the only reason why your new stuff doesn't work with your old stuff is that you forgot to read on the package that the vendor would prefer you only use their stuff.
The persistence of IE6 is due to organizations standardizing on the MS suite from the server to the browser and building their business intellingence into that web platform. They embraced and were trapped by the consequences of that decision, after which getting themselves out of that trap involved huge expense and much opportunity cost as well as much lost face. Bearing the scars of that experience, its not surprising that they are wary of re-entering the same trap twice. They appear to be deciding that "standards are good". See? Are childrens can has learnings.
If 60 percent of your viewers use IE, then you had better make your web site compatible with IE.
If you're using a ten year old version of IE, you're comfortable with a ten year old view of the Internet because that's all you've ever seen. IE's shifting deliberate incompatibilities make version support even more of a nightmare than supporting three different browsers - and no doubt the next version will be even worse. As IE's share continues to erode the additional trouble of coding for it for the diminishing returns it provides should hopefully drive more sites to encourage use of browsers that support standards.
Third-party software publishers share the blame in being unable to adapt to platforms with less than 1 percent market share.
Please keep telling yourself that. These are not the markets you're looking for. [waves hand]
How well does an operating system that includes Wine and Compiz even on x86 run apps designed for Windows XP, compared to Windows Vista?
Who needs x86 apps designed for XP or Vista? What we need is apps that let us do what we want to do and there's no shortage of those in the App Stores or repositories for the various platforms. If you're running Android you don't need McAfee and Photoshop. Certainly on these platforms MS Office apps are a huge failure - they don't have the horsepower for real Office and the mobile and CE versions of Office apps lead people to seek counseling. You seem to have missed that these things are neither desktops nor laptops. They are different tools for different tasks and they should not need the old stuff to do their new stuff.
CE sucks. WiMo sucks. The fact that if you use ARM Microsoft and Intel can't swoop in on your party and run off with your guests like they did with netbooks isn't just not a fatal flaw - it's a main reason for going with ARM in the first place.
The netbook is just the first of many. We got a nice device outside of the Wintel duopoly and people discovered that they loved it. Then the duopoly imivated their own version, locking down specs and defining it to be what they wanted it to be - in the process driving up the price and netting them a bunch of embarassing low-margin sales, but at least preventing the other guys from reaping the full benefit of their innovation. If OEMs want to create new things and keep control of the markets they create all that's needed is to avoid platforms Windows can run on.
I think that OEMs are coming to understand that there is a market for any device that enables and empowers individuals to do new things - if it's portable and reliable and doesn't impose unnecessary restrictions. It's not really about the widget, it's about the people.
Oh, yeah. We a team need highly skilled specialists to assemble this stuff and configure it. Guys that know what attaches to which and what bandwidths and clock speeds and stuff are. Because that's all really complex and detailed. If we don't handle this ourselves we can shuffle along with much less competent people than can be found at the local voc tech, just by relying on the vendor to steer us right.
For folks who don't like OSS I did mention Windows Server, which has clustering and management just like all your other Windows servers. Microsoft is really underdelivering on their messaging here. Windows provides quite a competent storage solution that's very scalable and quite inexpensive for larger storage sizes.
People aren't really using the BackBlaze boxes so much as stuff like this. I just include the BackBlaze stuff because I think it's really cool.
If as a business grows it needs more and more storage in the hundreds of terabytes, don't you think that paying millions of dollars for SAN is going to rate limit growth somewhat? Most people aren't making Avatar you know.
In fact, Oedipus Rex must have been the summation of centuries of literature - a beautiful distillation of a multitude of plot devices to their purest form. It seems fairly certain. Today such a thing could be neither written nor performed. Does Oedipus not share some protected attributes with Beowulf, of recent cinematic success? Is not Jocasta too close a representation of the intellecually protected Cleopatra?
All art is derivative. The protection of individual pieces of art ignores this fact and grants to the author a super position over those (hopefully) great shoulders he stands upon as if newer thoughts were superior to older ones. The only purpose for this can be to completely halt progress in the arts.
The SAN argument is that your storage is so precious it must not be stranded. If you're paying $50K/TB with drives, controllers, FC switches, service, software, support, installation and all that jazz then that's absolutely true. If you're doing something like OpenFiler clusters on BackBlaze 90TB 5U Storage Pods for $90/TB and 720 TB/rack you have a different point of view. As for somebody showing up to replace a drive, I think I could ask Jimmy to put his jacket on and shuffle down to the server room to swap out a few failed drives every couple months - that's what hot and cold spares are for and he's just geeking on MyFace anyway. Low utilization? Use as much or as little as you like - at $90/TB we can afford to buy more. We can afford to overbuy our storage. We can afford to mirror our storage and back it up too. In practice the storage costs less than the meeting where we talk about where to put it or the guy that fills it. If you want to pay for the first tier OEM, it's available but costs 10x as much because first tier OEMs also sell SANs.
Openfiler does CIFS/NFS and offers iSCSI shared storage for Oracle, Exchange and SAP. If you need support, they offer it. OpenFiler is nowhere near the only option for this. If you want to pay license fees you could also just run Windows Server clustered. There are BSD options and others as well. Solaris and Open Solaris are well spoken of, and ZFS is popular, though there are some tradeoffs there. Nexenta is gaining ground. There's also Lustre, which HP uses in its large capacity filers. Since you're building your own solution you can use as much RAM for cache as you like - modern dual socket servers go up to 192GB per node but 48GB is the sweet spot.
Now that we've moved redundancy into the software and performance into the local storage architecture, moving storage to the edge is exactly what we want to do: put it where you need it and if you need a copy for data mining then mirror it to the mining storage cluster. We still need some good dedicated fiber links to do multisite synchronous replication for HA, but that's true of SAN solutions also. We're about 20 years past when we should have ubiquitous metro fiber connections, and that's annoying. Right now without the metro fiber the best solution is to use application redundancy: putting a database cluster member server in the DR site with local shared storage.
Oh, and if you need a lot of IOPS then you choose the right motherboard and splurge on the 6TB of PCIe attached solid state storage per BackBlaze pod for over a million IOPs over 10Gig E. If you need high IOPS and big storage you can use adaptor brackets and 2.5" SSDs or mix in an array of The Collossus, though you're reaching for a $6K/TB price point there and cutting density in half but then the SSD performance SAN has an equal multiple and some serious capacity problems. If you go with the SSD drives you would want to cut down the SAS expanders to five drives per 4x SAS link because those bad boys can almost saturate a 3Gbps link while normal consumer SATA drives you can multiply 3:1.
If you're more compute focused then a BackBlaze node with fewer drives and a dual-quad motherboard with 4 GPGPUs is a better answer. At the high end you're paying almost as much for the network switches as you are for the media. If you're into the multipath SAS thing then buy 2x the controllers and buy the right backplanes for that - but
The optimal time is 15 years, to 99% certainty less than 38 years [pdf] according to Rufus Pollock, an economist at Cambridge specializing in intellectual property. An updated annoying Web slideshow from his most recent talk on the subject is here and the narrative is here.
Even assuming we made it 28 years from publication at the first go to stay straight with the WTO, every bit of content produced before 1/1/1982 would be in the public domain tomorrow including the movies "Chariots of Fire" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark", the books "Cujo" and "Red Dragon", the songs "9 to 5" and "Physical". The value of these works as cultural artifacts are worth far more now than their residual commercial value.
WinMo never did run right on any of the dozens of devices I've tried it on. It crashed, it memory leaked, it lost connection to its devices every couple minutes. It has an oboard critical task sensor that would cause it to fail when the loss of the minimal utility the device offered would do the most damage. It lost data - lots of it. It sucked the life from endless batteries in record time and many thousands of minutes from my life that I would like back. Platform diversity was the least of its problems. Please don't talk about somebody else's QA and WinMo in the same post.
Windows Mobile killed the PDA. The PDA was a great idea and many of them were quite cool - except that once you put WinMo on them they were universally craptacular.
Oh, and while I'm here, yeah. This thing looks cool and all, but that iSlate rumor is looking pretty sweet too. It would be nice if the Goog came up with a webcam tablet thingy that used low power processors and wireless or 3G.
It's important to the copyright lobby that old works become locked away, inaccessible to anyone. If you're reading Watership Down then you're not reading Harry Potter and the Basket of Radishes. The more historical culture is available to us the more we tend to stay with the stuff that's stood the test of time and less of today's releases which frankly have never been more good than bad.
This is probably a bigger motivator for endless copyrights than being able to milk a few additional dollars a year out of 20 year old works.
It's a huge loss because it's the remixing of the old with the new that allows us to find new heights of imagination and build identification with our culture. Very few people can build a solid attachment to a culture that's perpetually two years old. The net result of this is that of course we become less interested in civics and nationalism - at our peril. Unrestrained nationalism is a bad thing of course, but the complete lack of national identity leads people to the necessary conclusion that their nation lacks redeeming values worth preserving.
Yeah, it looks like that to me too. But a team leader position with a group of OSS bashers is probably the wrong way to go. Probably involves some input to the scripts for the blog center in Bangalore. I hope they get somebody good for that - the astroturf has been pretty weak the last few years.
They really need several people for this gig. A cuddler or two to get up close to the community, a handler to dump their data, some "perception change agents" (PCAs) to pump the results to their pets in the press. Maybe a blogging coach to fly to Bangalore and teach people not to paste all of their talking points into every post or ask obviously knowledgable people to cite. They're probably trying to hire the handler, but don't know what they need.
I'd probably add to that a whole herd of temps from the local LUGs in focal regions as focus groups to laugh at the pitches the PCAs come up with and so refine them -- you could probably get those guys for pizza and Bawlz, and a tour of the Campus of Serene Giving.
If they don't structure this so that some of these folks are consultants who provide input as "consultancy" under their own corps and deliver the rest gratis, they're going to get outed through lack of plausible deniability and a few years from now the next version of the Halloween Documents or Comes Documents will burn them yet again. They're really flailing up there. Since BillG left the subtlety just isn't there, which is probably why the stock is flat over the last decade.
Hey, maybe I'd be good at this - except for the whole dancing with the devil part.
For sure the HR department needs a performance review - "MICROSOFT NEEDS A MACHIAVELLIAN JERK TO BEAT OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE" isn't really the type of job ad you want to hang out there where everyone can see it.
Slashdot Mirror
They'll be turning a profit. They're cutting out the middleman - local phone retail stores.
I watched the video of the event from Scoble. I want this phone, but watching the video makes me really want the Snapdragon tablets that are going to show at CES. I am not really a fan of tablets, but I think I see where they're going with this 3D accelerated video thing on the Snapdragon and I like it.
HTC is a very big company. Google chose a good partner here.
Well it's torches and pitchforks time then.
These one in 10,000 geeks and their "I want open" bleating is especially annoying since the twits are everywhere. Somehow they manage to pollute every single thread about iPhone on every forum on the Internet, making one post out of three about "it would be better open". They can't just let mainstream folk like us have a mature discussion. It's as if they don't realize there are only four of them.
It wouldn't be so annoying if they weren't so prolific. They must each post thirty thousand times a day - unless there's an error in my calculation somehow.
I don't care for iTunes either. Amazon MP3s or rips from my CDs for me. The kids get iTunes cards for their iPods though. I try and tell them to stick with the MP3s, but I guess some lessons take some experience to learn. I don't use Bing - I tried it and it just doesn't give me what I need from a search engine. Pretty though. I don't care for voice recognition, even in the hypothetical cases that it works well.
Telepresence is essentially webcam chat. When I saw my son's Nintendo DSI (which has wifi and a webcam, but no telepresence app) I knew it was time. Dick Tracy watch, here we come!
Google is about to become Apple's biggest competitor in the phone space. And Apple doesn't play nicely with Google on their app store for apps where they compete on features apparently. Y'know, I still think Google will cut Apple a square deal anyway - at Google they like to hold the moral high ground.
Office for Mac? Is that still around? Does it still lack the most important features, like VBA or images? I always thought that buying it for compatibility was kind of pointless if you couldn't open the same documents with it. I have an XServe and work with the Macs a bit, but don't use them for daily work so I don't know.
W7 does run well on most netbooks, and that's surprising since the 945G chipset is not legendary for its graphics performance, to be kind. Apparently those problems Vista had with Intel video are gone.
Tablets? They're about to change, and not just a little.
In Zimbabwe since 2002 they've been engaging in an innovative agriculture program: seizing farms owned by white farmers and turning them over to military lackeys who know nothing about agriculture. Surprisingly, yields are down.
Zimbabwe was once a major food exporter to southern Africa. Now they can't even feed themselves.
So yeah, the sad part is that lot of farmers that could have feed their communities are pushed out of business by thugs who then don't know what to do with the land.
Agree about hand size. An iPhone that does telepresence well is fundamentally a different device. If the iSlate doesn't do it the new Android tablet will. Do you want to skate about diction, or shall we promote progress? The netbook happened despite you, not because of you.
What have you got that innovates here?
If I had posted this comment - no matter how deep - on slashdot a year ago, there would be several dissenting replies both from ACs and signed in users of various UID ages (but mostly new ones), and then subcomments supporting the dissenting views. I would have used their ignorance to amplify my message with dozens of applicable links and so in the view of search engines amplify the importance of those links. I would have been motivated to do so by the challenge presented. The idiots would have continued to argue and let me post rebuttals with links for weeks, to the detriment of their message in favor of mine. But now there's not any of that. It would have been modded down first before the mods rescued it from obscurity and metamodded the downmods until the people who had downmodded it could no longer moderate.
Now with the new year it's a frist spot and there's not a dissenting opinion to be had, downmods are conspicuously absent.
I can only surmise that the MS Bangalore blog center has a new boss, and she/he is effective, or they've fired them all for negative competence. We should be aware of this and be prepared to thwart their new strategies.
Nominal contextual comment to invalidate "off topic" moderation: Yeah, "standards based" is gaining value in all fields, especially software. People are starting to understand in 2010 the only reason why your new stuff doesn't work with your old stuff is that you forgot to read on the package that the vendor would prefer you only use their stuff.
I don't think that 'phone like' devices will ever be much larger than the current iPhone.
I disagree. The iPhone is too small for telepresence.
These are the same people who would have put Vista over the hump to acceptance, and who are diligently trying to get W7 to work. They just can't.
MS really euchred themselves here.
The persistence of IE6 is due to organizations standardizing on the MS suite from the server to the browser and building their business intellingence into that web platform. They embraced and were trapped by the consequences of that decision, after which getting themselves out of that trap involved huge expense and much opportunity cost as well as much lost face. Bearing the scars of that experience, its not surprising that they are wary of re-entering the same trap twice. They appear to be deciding that "standards are good". See? Are childrens can has learnings.
click
He's not looking for that one. He's looking for this one. [Google cache]
If 60 percent of your viewers use IE, then you had better make your web site compatible with IE.
If you're using a ten year old version of IE, you're comfortable with a ten year old view of the Internet because that's all you've ever seen. IE's shifting deliberate incompatibilities make version support even more of a nightmare than supporting three different browsers - and no doubt the next version will be even worse. As IE's share continues to erode the additional trouble of coding for it for the diminishing returns it provides should hopefully drive more sites to encourage use of browsers that support standards.
Third-party software publishers share the blame in being unable to adapt to platforms with less than 1 percent market share.
Please keep telling yourself that. These are not the markets you're looking for. [waves hand]
How well does an operating system that includes Wine and Compiz even on x86 run apps designed for Windows XP, compared to Windows Vista?
Who needs x86 apps designed for XP or Vista? What we need is apps that let us do what we want to do and there's no shortage of those in the App Stores or repositories for the various platforms. If you're running Android you don't need McAfee and Photoshop. Certainly on these platforms MS Office apps are a huge failure - they don't have the horsepower for real Office and the mobile and CE versions of Office apps lead people to seek counseling. You seem to have missed that these things are neither desktops nor laptops. They are different tools for different tasks and they should not need the old stuff to do their new stuff.
CE sucks. WiMo sucks. The fact that if you use ARM Microsoft and Intel can't swoop in on your party and run off with your guests like they did with netbooks isn't just not a fatal flaw - it's a main reason for going with ARM in the first place.
The netbook is just the first of many. We got a nice device outside of the Wintel duopoly and people discovered that they loved it. Then the duopoly imivated their own version, locking down specs and defining it to be what they wanted it to be - in the process driving up the price and netting them a bunch of embarassing low-margin sales, but at least preventing the other guys from reaping the full benefit of their innovation. If OEMs want to create new things and keep control of the markets they create all that's needed is to avoid platforms Windows can run on.
I think that OEMs are coming to understand that there is a market for any device that enables and empowers individuals to do new things - if it's portable and reliable and doesn't impose unnecessary restrictions. It's not really about the widget, it's about the people.
Oh, yeah. We a team need highly skilled specialists to assemble this stuff and configure it. Guys that know what attaches to which and what bandwidths and clock speeds and stuff are. Because that's all really complex and detailed. If we don't handle this ourselves we can shuffle along with much less competent people than can be found at the local voc tech, just by relying on the vendor to steer us right.
For folks who don't like OSS I did mention Windows Server, which has clustering and management just like all your other Windows servers. Microsoft is really underdelivering on their messaging here. Windows provides quite a competent storage solution that's very scalable and quite inexpensive for larger storage sizes.
People aren't really using the BackBlaze boxes so much as stuff like this. I just include the BackBlaze stuff because I think it's really cool.
If as a business grows it needs more and more storage in the hundreds of terabytes, don't you think that paying millions of dollars for SAN is going to rate limit growth somewhat? Most people aren't making Avatar you know.
In fact, Oedipus Rex must have been the summation of centuries of literature - a beautiful distillation of a multitude of plot devices to their purest form. It seems fairly certain. Today such a thing could be neither written nor performed. Does Oedipus not share some protected attributes with Beowulf, of recent cinematic success? Is not Jocasta too close a representation of the intellecually protected Cleopatra?
All art is derivative. The protection of individual pieces of art ignores this fact and grants to the author a super position over those (hopefully) great shoulders he stands upon as if newer thoughts were superior to older ones. The only purpose for this can be to completely halt progress in the arts.
The SAN argument is that your storage is so precious it must not be stranded. If you're paying $50K/TB with drives, controllers, FC switches, service, software, support, installation and all that jazz then that's absolutely true. If you're doing something like OpenFiler clusters on BackBlaze 90TB 5U Storage Pods for $90/TB and 720 TB/rack you have a different point of view. As for somebody showing up to replace a drive, I think I could ask Jimmy to put his jacket on and shuffle down to the server room to swap out a few failed drives every couple months - that's what hot and cold spares are for and he's just geeking on MyFace anyway. Low utilization? Use as much or as little as you like - at $90/TB we can afford to buy more. We can afford to overbuy our storage. We can afford to mirror our storage and back it up too. In practice the storage costs less than the meeting where we talk about where to put it or the guy that fills it. If you want to pay for the first tier OEM, it's available but costs 10x as much because first tier OEMs also sell SANs.
Openfiler does CIFS/NFS and offers iSCSI shared storage for Oracle, Exchange and SAP. If you need support, they offer it. OpenFiler is nowhere near the only option for this. If you want to pay license fees you could also just run Windows Server clustered. There are BSD options and others as well. Solaris and Open Solaris are well spoken of, and ZFS is popular, though there are some tradeoffs there. Nexenta is gaining ground. There's also Lustre, which HP uses in its large capacity filers. Since you're building your own solution you can use as much RAM for cache as you like - modern dual socket servers go up to 192GB per node but 48GB is the sweet spot.
Now that we've moved redundancy into the software and performance into the local storage architecture, moving storage to the edge is exactly what we want to do: put it where you need it and if you need a copy for data mining then mirror it to the mining storage cluster. We still need some good dedicated fiber links to do multisite synchronous replication for HA, but that's true of SAN solutions also. We're about 20 years past when we should have ubiquitous metro fiber connections, and that's annoying. Right now without the metro fiber the best solution is to use application redundancy: putting a database cluster member server in the DR site with local shared storage.
Oh, and if you need a lot of IOPS then you choose the right motherboard and splurge on the 6TB of PCIe attached solid state storage per BackBlaze pod for over a million IOPs over 10Gig E. If you need high IOPS and big storage you can use adaptor brackets and 2.5" SSDs or mix in an array of The Collossus, though you're reaching for a $6K/TB price point there and cutting density in half but then the SSD performance SAN has an equal multiple and some serious capacity problems. If you go with the SSD drives you would want to cut down the SAS expanders to five drives per 4x SAS link because those bad boys can almost saturate a 3Gbps link while normal consumer SATA drives you can multiply 3:1.
If you're more compute focused then a BackBlaze node with fewer drives and a dual-quad motherboard with 4 GPGPUs is a better answer. At the high end you're paying almost as much for the network switches as you are for the media. If you're into the multipath SAS thing then buy 2x the controllers and buy the right backplanes for that - but
The optimal time is 15 years, to 99% certainty less than 38 years [pdf] according to Rufus Pollock, an economist at Cambridge specializing in intellectual property. An updated annoying Web slideshow from his most recent talk on the subject is here and the narrative is here.
Even assuming we made it 28 years from publication at the first go to stay straight with the WTO, every bit of content produced before 1/1/1982 would be in the public domain tomorrow including the movies "Chariots of Fire" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark", the books "Cujo" and "Red Dragon", the songs "9 to 5" and "Physical". The value of these works as cultural artifacts are worth far more now than their residual commercial value.
$1 for the first year, $2 for the second, redoubling each day thereafter. Prepaid or you lose it forever. A public registry of all expired works.
WinMo never did run right on any of the dozens of devices I've tried it on. It crashed, it memory leaked, it lost connection to its devices every couple minutes. It has an oboard critical task sensor that would cause it to fail when the loss of the minimal utility the device offered would do the most damage. It lost data - lots of it. It sucked the life from endless batteries in record time and many thousands of minutes from my life that I would like back. Platform diversity was the least of its problems. Please don't talk about somebody else's QA and WinMo in the same post.
Windows Mobile killed the PDA. The PDA was a great idea and many of them were quite cool - except that once you put WinMo on them they were universally craptacular.
Oh, and while I'm here, yeah. This thing looks cool and all, but that iSlate rumor is looking pretty sweet too. It would be nice if the Goog came up with a webcam tablet thingy that used low power processors and wireless or 3G.
It's important to the copyright lobby that old works become locked away, inaccessible to anyone. If you're reading Watership Down then you're not reading Harry Potter and the Basket of Radishes. The more historical culture is available to us the more we tend to stay with the stuff that's stood the test of time and less of today's releases which frankly have never been more good than bad.
This is probably a bigger motivator for endless copyrights than being able to milk a few additional dollars a year out of 20 year old works.
It's a huge loss because it's the remixing of the old with the new that allows us to find new heights of imagination and build identification with our culture. Very few people can build a solid attachment to a culture that's perpetually two years old. The net result of this is that of course we become less interested in civics and nationalism - at our peril. Unrestrained nationalism is a bad thing of course, but the complete lack of national identity leads people to the necessary conclusion that their nation lacks redeeming values worth preserving.
Thomas Macaulay, 1842.
I've submitted it. If you like it, please vote it up.
Yeah, it looks like that to me too. But a team leader position with a group of OSS bashers is probably the wrong way to go. Probably involves some input to the scripts for the blog center in Bangalore. I hope they get somebody good for that - the astroturf has been pretty weak the last few years.
They really need several people for this gig. A cuddler or two to get up close to the community, a handler to dump their data, some "perception change agents" (PCAs) to pump the results to their pets in the press. Maybe a blogging coach to fly to Bangalore and teach people not to paste all of their talking points into every post or ask obviously knowledgable people to cite. They're probably trying to hire the handler, but don't know what they need.
I'd probably add to that a whole herd of temps from the local LUGs in focal regions as focus groups to laugh at the pitches the PCAs come up with and so refine them -- you could probably get those guys for pizza and Bawlz, and a tour of the Campus of Serene Giving.
If they don't structure this so that some of these folks are consultants who provide input as "consultancy" under their own corps and deliver the rest gratis, they're going to get outed through lack of plausible deniability and a few years from now the next version of the Halloween Documents or Comes Documents will burn them yet again. They're really flailing up there. Since BillG left the subtlety just isn't there, which is probably why the stock is flat over the last decade.
Hey, maybe I'd be good at this - except for the whole dancing with the devil part.
For sure the HR department needs a performance review - "MICROSOFT NEEDS A MACHIAVELLIAN JERK TO BEAT OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE" isn't really the type of job ad you want to hang out there where everyone can see it.