The government body I'm working at for now has had all sorts of problems with.NET. People who've been around for longer than me tell me that Microsoft Consulting Services have convinced the CIO and his immediate advisors that.NET is the universal solution for everything IT, and it certainly seems to have been implemented with that in mind..NET seems to be a good fit for Web Services, but that's only a very small part of the set of applications that are being developed today. In particular, for anything with fairly rigid and auditable security requirements,.NET simply isn't a good fit, and nor is any competing Web Services model at the moment. When you consider that government bodies need to be paranoid about the security implications of any data that floats around their servers,.NET just isn't appropriate for a hell of a lot of situations without a lot of supporting "legacy" infrastructure alongside it.
You need to treat.NET as Just Another Piece Of The Puzzle.
As with Trustworthy Computing, MS seems to categorise.NET as "The Great Silver Bullet" when it comes to doing IT. As with Trustworthy Computing, MS is probably right if you consider the problem from a purely-MS perspective; both Trustworthy Computing and.NET position MS to sell product into markets that it previously couldn't touch, even though any end-user benefits seem highly debatable at best.
> Tennis - Due to new racket technology, it is > possible to just crush the ball. Because of this > new technology, the game is just turning into > serve-ace or serve-return-point. Wimbledon, > which is played on a very fast surface, has > become very boring to watch. Unless this trend > is reversed, expect tennis to become extremely > boring with all surfaces rendered obsolete.
Tennis is now considering reversing the trend somewhat by reducing the width of the face of racquets. In the days of wooden racquets, they all were about 9.5 inches wide, and were limited by the strength of wood - any bigger and they couldn't stand the force of impact.
Now they average about 13.5 inches wide, so that's nearly 40% larger. That's why there's so many clubbers around, and a skilful guy will almost always get beaten by a gorilla.
I believe the proposal is to reduce the size of racquets down to 11.5 inches in the next few years, then down to something like 10 inches after that. The idea is to basically bring some more skill back into the game.
As long as they don't do it before the Wimbledon final, where I'll be happy to watch a clubber win one more time. Go the Poo!!
> San Jose Mercury News has an interview with > Linus
Alright, always wanted to know what happened to that round headed kid and his delusional dog! Why didn't Schroeder ever make it as a concert pianist - was it drugs, or did the parental pressure finally get to him? And that little red headed girl - is she working in the "male entertainment" industry somewhere?
Unless the judge/jury have some serious scientific backgrounds, I think the prosecution has its work cut out convincing a SECOND court this is valid.
It might well be reasonable evidence, or even close to undeniable, but there's gotta be some doubt in the minds of those who decide the fate of the accused guy. I mean, they're going to convict this guy of a 15 year old killing on the basis of some extrapolated data out of a lab? Remember these are people who don't browse the same magazines as us...
Tough call finding people to do it once, much tougher getting a second group to confirm it...
There's a few ways to look at MS' market saturation, and the best way forward.
They can: - offer a big dividend - invest more in R&D, although $46b is probably going to push it - purchase other businesses, either as a way of extending their market saturation even further, locking it in even tighter, as loss leaders to sell more of their core product, and so on
MS also has the big problem of how to retain their employees once the share price stops rising. Many/most of their people were enticed by very cheap share options, and relatively low salaries; many of these are now paper millionaires and need new enticements to stay on. Many others have watched the value of their options disappear as the MS share price stagnated, and now find themselves working for only a low salary. Hows does MS retain these guys?
I suspect that paying a sizeable dividend will appease the paper millionaires to some point, although they'll now have a tax problem to deal with after they get their hefty dividend cheques. Those who've got relatively few shares (and a promise of wealth via MS share options that only pans out if the share price keeps rising) might not be so happy, and might decide that mediocre salaries aren't worth hanging around for. Remember that a lot of these guys may be extremely employable elsewhere, due to their MS product knowledge, and may not be facing long term unemployment if they decide to leave MS.
They *could* use huge chunks of that to buy out other companies.
On a flight yesterday, I was reading about a meeting at Ford UK several years ago where they were trying to work out how to invest their huge wad of cash at the time. One of the suggestions that was raised was to buy a company called NCP (National Car Parks) in its entirety. NCP is/was the largest owner/operator of car parks in city areas in the UK.
Once Ford owned NCP, they could then either charge a premium for non-Ford car owners to park their cars there, offer much cheaper parking for Ford cars, or prevent non-Ford cars from parking there altogether. The thinking was that, as the primary value of a car for many people included the ability to park it somewhere in the city, this would encourage people to purchase their next car from Ford.
I'm not sure what the anti-monopoly laws are like in the UK, but given straight supply/demand drives the costs for parking in privately-owned car parks and alternative car parks do exist (albeit with probably not enough capacity to accept every non-Ford car), it might have been very difficult to stop Ford from doing this, or new laws might have needed to have been drafted specifically to prevent it. If necessary, Ford could potentially have offered ridiculously low costs for Ford-only parking at NCP, run NCP at a huge loss, and still made a bucket load on increased car sales.
For whatever reason, Ford didn't buy NCP so anything else is speculation.
Anyway, coming back to the point, there are valid D ("development") uses for absurd quantities of money such as this, and I'm sure MS would consider zillions of options for business growth before giving away such a huge stash.
There was an interview with Scott McNealy in one of the Linux magazines a few months back. In it, he said (paraphrasing) "if Sun ever pays out a sizeable dividend, it means we've run out of R&D ideas and the company's in trouble". I don't remember the exact wording, but that's the gist of it.
Essentially, Sun's policy is to reinvest all profits back into the company. Putting it another way, they're banking on being able to keep growing the company indefinitely and thus keeping shareholders happy solely through upward movement in the share price.
It seems that this may have been Microsoft's policy as well until now. Conspiracy theories aside, it'd be interesting to know what changed to make them issue a big dividend after all these years.
Here in Australia, there's been a fuss about people taking camera phones into gym change rooms. One of the current affairs TV shows did an "expose" (pardon the pun) where they showed just how easy it was for a woman reporter to go into a gym change room with a hidden cell phone; we got to see lots of pixellated naughty bits on TV while we were eating dinner.
Given this, I can see that camera phones will get killed off in the near future, before they get a chance to become deeply entrenched. At the moment, there's no real "killer app" for these devices and not huge market penetration, so I wouldn't expect a massive public outcry if governments were to ban either the phones themselves or legislate to stop phone networks carrying MMS data (which would be as good as banning the phones themselves).
Why does this give me a mental picture of a giant, half-naked female warrior beating off hordes of bad guys, armed only with a rolled up piece of paper?
I'd like to see browsers go down a similar path to XWT - become a cross-platform presentation layer with lots more GUI elements. In 2003, we should be using tools with a similar number of drag-and-drop controls as VB's GUI designer to draw our Web pages.
We've been stuck with the same, very limited set of GUI controls for years, and Web designers are resorting to all sorts of obscure DHTML tricks (that often only work on a single type of browser) to render tabs/menus/etc. on normal Web pages.
> I would recommend grabbing the latest developers > build of the Gimp (1.3.16) as long as you have > GTK2 on your system. The differences between 1.2 > and 1.3 are mind-blowing, and a definite upgrade.
Thanks for the tip.
One of the things my parents are having trouble with is the concept that software can be upgraded on a relatively frequent basis with individually-small-but-cumulatively-large changes along the way. As Windows users for a few years, they're used to everything staying the same for a while, then a new release comes out with lots of things changed and they have to re-learn how to do some stuff.
OSS just doesn't work that way; there's a nearly continual tradeoff between installing new versions of apps and getting new features, versus sticking with the version you already know, and that applies to a huge pile of different apps.
I'm quite happy to upgrade e.g. KDE every time a new minor release comes out, but my parents aren't. That's one of the few remaining issues I've got to sort out with them on their PCs - some sort of measure of how useful an upgrade is. Assuming they stick with Mandrake, I'll probably just upgrade them whenever a new Mandrake release comes out, and not worry about upgrading individual packages in the meantime.
Who ever thought 'family support' would be such a minefield?;->
> I don't think he 'gets' the internet now any more > than he did in 1995.
I think he 'gets' it very well indeed.
It's just that 'his' Internet includes things like DRM, micropayments and browsers integrated with the OS, but 'my' Internet doesn't. Whether 'his' or 'mine' ultimately wins out, or whether they manage to co-exist, is a matter for market forces and/or the intervention of many governments to decide...
I've got Crossover Office at *my* house, since I still have to deal with ridiculously complex Word+PPT+Excel documents that have attachments and macros all over the place.
If Dad decides that he likes Linux, but wants Photoshop, then I'll get him started with Crossover. At the moment, though, he's making good headway with Gimp, so I'll leave him with that till he finds something he can't do with it.
I've been progressively educating my parents about using Linux, and a few months ago swapped one of their 2 PCs over to Lycoris. My parents didn't really see it as significantly different to Windows, but kept having problems at approximately the same rate as they did under Windows. I knew I wouldn't be faced with the regular 6-9 month full rebuild of the box any more, but the trivial end-user problems kept going at about the same rate.
Two weeks ago, I swapped that same PC over to Mandrake 9.1. It's now become mum's full-time PC, meaning that she doesn't work on the other, Windows PC at all. Dad's now starting to play with Gimp on Mandrake; his most common app is Photoshop on Windows. Dad's now asked me to let him dual boot the Windows PC, so he can run both Windows and Mandrake on it.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the most ringing endorsement possible for Mandrake's useability. While my parents are smart people, they're from a non-PC generation and sometimes struggle with concepts like folders and filenames. For whatever reason, Mandrake, even though it still uses folders and filenames, has let them get beyond the point they were at with Windows, and now I'm getting asked "can I do gamma transforms with Gimp like I do in Photoshop?" rather than "where's my file gone?"...
I think most of the posts have missed one of the key advantages of K12Linux.
My home, like many others around the globe, has a few aging PCs around. I've got 3 PCs that have 300-533MHz CPUs, which would be pretty well at their end of life as Windows boxes. What's more, I can get my hands on several other old PCs from my MS-loving mates as they upgrade their hardware every year or so and have no more use for their old boxes.
As Linux boxes, these old clunkers are perfect. I can install Linux plus everything my kids need for free on a box that would be otherwise useless. I can lock down the software on the box so that they can't break it. There's no need for me to keep updating virus checkers, or perform 99% of the other regular care-and-feeding that Windows boxes require. I can limit Internet access from the box as I see fit using a combination of firewall rules and local host entries. I can eliminate popups from Mozilla, which knocks out a huge quantity of porn sites. Finally, if they manage to break the hardware, then it doesn't cost me very much at all to replace it.
If a school adopted K12Linux as a standard, *and* had a few knowledgeable parents willing to help install a virtually identical desktop on old clunker PCs for kids to use at home, that's just about an unbeatable combination. MS might be able to offer software subsidies for schools, but the hardware to run current versions of MS products still costs a packet and needs to be upgraded every 2-3 years. MS can't offer useful PCs for free to parents to give their kids to use at home.
I agree with the parent post - a space elevator sounds like it'd be worth at least serious consideration for a chunk of that money.
However, there's some pretty big companies that stand to get reamed if the price of electricity or satellite launches drops by e.g. 90%, as could happen a few years down the track. For example, how are the US oil companies going to feel if electric cars are suddenly MUCH cheaper to run? How are the mobile phone companies who've deployed repeaters all over the place going to react if you could suddenly compete with them by launching a bunch of satellites, Iridium-like, and offer the same service globally without the cost of maintaining all those base stations that are only a few km apart?
In a perfect world, they'd be told "adapt or die", but at the moment things don't work that way. Any disruptive technology isn't going to get US government support at the moment, since they seem to feel the best path forward is to try to maintain the technology status quo indefinitely. They would kill off any attempt to get this done, pretty much regardless of who tried to do it.
Having said all that, I'd love it if the Chinese or Indian governments expressed an interest in investigating it further...
When I get my ^&*((ing server working again, and can do something more coherent than swear at stupid IDE discs and the idiot who designed them, I'll read through those sites properly and see where and how to add him in.
(Armed with fresh cup of tea and screwdriver, he descends into the depths of his office to do battle yet again...)
I think that's exactly it. If you don't send people up to do this stuff, then the population at large just isn't interested and it becomes that much more difficult to justify the next $1 billion or so that NASA needs to keep operating.
When a government has to choose between spending a few tens of millions on e.g. AIDS research or a whole lot more on investigating spider webs in space, you need a certain amount of PR to push the arachnids on their way. Whether that particular trace off is right or wrong is another issue, but you have to give the public some element of romance about "space exploration" to keep the funding coming.
Every English-speaking, non-American learns shortly after birth that Americans don't understand irony. It's one of the things that makes US TV comedy in particular so... um, "unintentionally funny" to the rest of us a lot of the time.
Of course, if you're reading this and you're American, no offence intended. After all, everyone knows you guys make the best TV shows.
I was in two minds about naming the artist, and decided not to. He seems like a decent sort of guy, and I think he was genuinely surprised that I wouldn't buy his CD because it was copy protected. In particular, I don't want to feel responsible for his Web site being trashed by irate script kiddies. He's Australian, and it's not Steve Irwin or The Wiggles;->
If he's signed to a major label (as distinct to just being distributed by a major label), maybe he's being used as some sort of test case by the label to gauge people's reaction to copy protected CDs. At the very most, he's not likely to sell more than a few 10s of thousands, so I could see that the label might not care if a few hundred or so people complain. The label might, however, be able to work out that e.g. 2% of people complain, decide whether that's acceptable or not, then plan the release of larger-selling artists based on that.
Alternately, maybe they're trying out some new sort of copy protection, and want to see whether it can be cracked or not and how quickly copies appear on the P2P networks. Again, it'd be smarter for the label to try this with a smaller, more obscure artist than one of the label's headline acts.
I went along to a show last week, where the artist was performing songs off his latest, copy-protected CD. After the show, there was a stall selling his CDs at the back, so went back to check it out.
Sure enough, out he came to sign copies of his CD for those who were going to buy a copy. I worked my way to the front with a copy of his CD in hand, and handed it over. I pointed out the copy protection notice, then said "although I really liked your show and your new stuff, I'm not going to buy a copy of your CD since I can't play it on my PC or in my car".
He looked a bit shocked, and asked what I was talking about. I said that the copy protection would prevent me from playing the CD on my PC or in my car, and that since that was where I listen to music 99% of the time, his CD wouldn't be much use to me. I handed him one of my business cards and told him to call me if he wanted to talk about it further - there was a bunch of people behind me waiting for their CDs to be signed...
I got the impression that he either didn't know his CD was released copy protected, that he wasn't sure what copy protection actually meant for a CD, or that he was surprised that someone like me (a 40 year old, normal looking guy, not an obviously raving half-wit) would confront him with something like this after his show.
I also got the impression that he was going to look into it further - he's a 40ish guy also, with a fairly niche appeal and presumably wife/kids/mortgage etc. like the rest of us. He probably didn't like hearing a fan tell him people couldn't play his music in the car or at their PC.
I'll check out his CD in the stores again in another month or so to see if it's had the copy protection removed.
> The SPOT watches use FM as the method of data > transmission. FM. Like FM Radio. The watches are > one way. You can get info on weather, IMs, stocks, > etc, but you cannot send any data out. Any > perception of "asking" for data is faked- the > watch simply filters out data that doesn't apply > to it.
Yep, just like that big Russian TV I've got in the loungeroom. Funny thing though: I still like it's watching me...
Slashdot Mirror
The government body I'm working at for now has had all sorts of problems with .NET. People who've been around for longer than me tell me that Microsoft Consulting Services have convinced the CIO and his immediate advisors that .NET is the universal solution for everything IT, and it certainly seems to have been implemented with that in mind. .NET seems to be a good fit for Web Services, but that's only a very small part of the set of applications that are being developed today. In particular, for anything with fairly rigid and auditable security requirements, .NET simply isn't a good fit, and nor is any competing Web Services model at the moment. When you consider that government bodies need to be paranoid about the security implications of any data that floats around their servers, .NET just isn't appropriate for a hell of a lot of situations without a lot of supporting "legacy" infrastructure alongside it.
.NET as Just Another Piece Of The Puzzle.
.NET as "The Great Silver Bullet" when it comes to doing IT. As with Trustworthy Computing, MS is probably right if you consider the problem from a purely-MS perspective; both Trustworthy Computing and .NET position MS to sell product into markets that it previously couldn't touch, even though any end-user benefits seem highly debatable at best.
You need to treat
As with Trustworthy Computing, MS seems to categorise
Oh yeah, can't wait for that...
Clippy: "You appear to be driving towards an Oracle dealer. Would you like me to:
- redirect you to Microsoft?
- set fire to your vehicle?"
> Tennis - Due to new racket technology, it is
> possible to just crush the ball. Because of this
> new technology, the game is just turning into
> serve-ace or serve-return-point. Wimbledon,
> which is played on a very fast surface, has
> become very boring to watch. Unless this trend
> is reversed, expect tennis to become extremely
> boring with all surfaces rendered obsolete.
Tennis is now considering reversing the trend somewhat by reducing the width of the face of racquets. In the days of wooden racquets, they all were about 9.5 inches wide, and were limited by the strength of wood - any bigger and they couldn't stand the force of impact.
Now they average about 13.5 inches wide, so that's nearly 40% larger. That's why there's so many clubbers around, and a skilful guy will almost always get beaten by a gorilla.
I believe the proposal is to reduce the size of racquets down to 11.5 inches in the next few years, then down to something like 10 inches after that. The idea is to basically bring some more skill back into the game.
As long as they don't do it before the Wimbledon final, where I'll be happy to watch a clubber win one more time. Go the Poo!!
> San Jose Mercury News has an interview with
> Linus
Alright, always wanted to know what happened to that round headed kid and his delusional dog! Why didn't Schroeder ever make it as a concert pianist - was it drugs, or did the parental pressure finally get to him? And that little red headed girl - is she working in the "male entertainment" industry somewhere?
And don't get me started on that bossy Lucy...
Unless the judge/jury have some serious scientific backgrounds, I think the prosecution has its work cut out convincing a SECOND court this is valid.
It might well be reasonable evidence, or even close to undeniable, but there's gotta be some doubt in the minds of those who decide the fate of the accused guy. I mean, they're going to convict this guy of a 15 year old killing on the basis of some extrapolated data out of a lab? Remember these are people who don't browse the same magazines as us...
Tough call finding people to do it once, much tougher getting a second group to confirm it...
Ah, hate to enlighten you, but...
The reason they made T2 is because they made a lot of money from T1. The reason they made T3 is because they made a lot of money from T2.
That's what Hollywood calls causality...
There's a few ways to look at MS' market saturation, and the best way forward.
They can:
- offer a big dividend
- invest more in R&D, although $46b is probably going to push it
- purchase other businesses, either as a way of extending their market saturation even further, locking it in even tighter, as loss leaders to sell more of their core product, and so on
MS also has the big problem of how to retain their employees once the share price stops rising. Many/most of their people were enticed by very cheap share options, and relatively low salaries; many of these are now paper millionaires and need new enticements to stay on. Many others have watched the value of their options disappear as the MS share price stagnated, and now find themselves working for only a low salary. Hows does MS retain these guys?
I suspect that paying a sizeable dividend will appease the paper millionaires to some point, although they'll now have a tax problem to deal with after they get their hefty dividend cheques. Those who've got relatively few shares (and a promise of wealth via MS share options that only pans out if the share price keeps rising) might not be so happy, and might decide that mediocre salaries aren't worth hanging around for. Remember that a lot of these guys may be extremely employable elsewhere, due to their MS product knowledge, and may not be facing long term unemployment if they decide to leave MS.
They *could* use huge chunks of that to buy out other companies.
On a flight yesterday, I was reading about a meeting at Ford UK several years ago where they were trying to work out how to invest their huge wad of cash at the time. One of the suggestions that was raised was to buy a company called NCP (National Car Parks) in its entirety. NCP is/was the largest owner/operator of car parks in city areas in the UK.
Once Ford owned NCP, they could then either charge a premium for non-Ford car owners to park their cars there, offer much cheaper parking for Ford cars, or prevent non-Ford cars from parking there altogether. The thinking was that, as the primary value of a car for many people included the ability to park it somewhere in the city, this would encourage people to purchase their next car from Ford.
I'm not sure what the anti-monopoly laws are like in the UK, but given straight supply/demand drives the costs for parking in privately-owned car parks and alternative car parks do exist (albeit with probably not enough capacity to accept every non-Ford car), it might have been very difficult to stop Ford from doing this, or new laws might have needed to have been drafted specifically to prevent it. If necessary, Ford could potentially have offered ridiculously low costs for Ford-only parking at NCP, run NCP at a huge loss, and still made a bucket load on increased car sales.
For whatever reason, Ford didn't buy NCP so anything else is speculation.
Anyway, coming back to the point, there are valid D ("development") uses for absurd quantities of money such as this, and I'm sure MS would consider zillions of options for business growth before giving away such a huge stash.
There was an interview with Scott McNealy in one of the Linux magazines a few months back. In it, he said (paraphrasing) "if Sun ever pays out a sizeable dividend, it means we've run out of R&D ideas and the company's in trouble". I don't remember the exact wording, but that's the gist of it.
Essentially, Sun's policy is to reinvest all profits back into the company. Putting it another way, they're banking on being able to keep growing the company indefinitely and thus keeping shareholders happy solely through upward movement in the share price.
It seems that this may have been Microsoft's policy as well until now. Conspiracy theories aside, it'd be interesting to know what changed to make them issue a big dividend after all these years.
Here in Australia, there's been a fuss about people taking camera phones into gym change rooms. One of the current affairs TV shows did an "expose" (pardon the pun) where they showed just how easy it was for a woman reporter to go into a gym change room with a hidden cell phone; we got to see lots of pixellated naughty bits on TV while we were eating dinner.
Given this, I can see that camera phones will get killed off in the near future, before they get a chance to become deeply entrenched. At the moment, there's no real "killer app" for these devices and not huge market penetration, so I wouldn't expect a massive public outcry if governments were to ban either the phones themselves or legislate to stop phone networks carrying MMS data (which would be as good as banning the phones themselves).
> Amazon will use the DMCA to defend itself.
Why does this give me a mental picture of a giant, half-naked female warrior beating off hordes of bad guys, armed only with a rolled up piece of paper?
Gotta get out more...
I'd like to see browsers go down a similar path to XWT - become a cross-platform presentation layer with lots more GUI elements. In 2003, we should be using tools with a similar number of drag-and-drop controls as VB's GUI designer to draw our Web pages.
We've been stuck with the same, very limited set of GUI controls for years, and Web designers are resorting to all sorts of obscure DHTML tricks (that often only work on a single type of browser) to render tabs/menus/etc. on normal Web pages.
> I would recommend grabbing the latest developers
;->
> build of the Gimp (1.3.16) as long as you have
> GTK2 on your system. The differences between 1.2
> and 1.3 are mind-blowing, and a definite upgrade.
Thanks for the tip.
One of the things my parents are having trouble with is the concept that software can be upgraded on a relatively frequent basis with individually-small-but-cumulatively-large changes along the way. As Windows users for a few years, they're used to everything staying the same for a while, then a new release comes out with lots of things changed and they have to re-learn how to do some stuff.
OSS just doesn't work that way; there's a nearly continual tradeoff between installing new versions of apps and getting new features, versus sticking with the version you already know, and that applies to a huge pile of different apps.
I'm quite happy to upgrade e.g. KDE every time a new minor release comes out, but my parents aren't. That's one of the few remaining issues I've got to sort out with them on their PCs - some sort of measure of how useful an upgrade is. Assuming they stick with Mandrake, I'll probably just upgrade them whenever a new Mandrake release comes out, and not worry about upgrading individual packages in the meantime.
Who ever thought 'family support' would be such a minefield?
> I don't think he 'gets' the internet now any more
> than he did in 1995.
I think he 'gets' it very well indeed.
It's just that 'his' Internet includes things like DRM, micropayments and browsers integrated with the OS, but 'my' Internet doesn't. Whether 'his' or 'mine' ultimately wins out, or whether they manage to co-exist, is a matter for market forces and/or the intervention of many governments to decide...
I've got Crossover Office at *my* house, since I still have to deal with ridiculously complex Word+PPT+Excel documents that have attachments and macros all over the place.
If Dad decides that he likes Linux, but wants Photoshop, then I'll get him started with Crossover. At the moment, though, he's making good headway with Gimp, so I'll leave him with that till he finds something he can't do with it.
I've been progressively educating my parents about using Linux, and a few months ago swapped one of their 2 PCs over to Lycoris. My parents didn't really see it as significantly different to Windows, but kept having problems at approximately the same rate as they did under Windows. I knew I wouldn't be faced with the regular 6-9 month full rebuild of the box any more, but the trivial end-user problems kept going at about the same rate.
Two weeks ago, I swapped that same PC over to Mandrake 9.1. It's now become mum's full-time PC, meaning that she doesn't work on the other, Windows PC at all. Dad's now starting to play with Gimp on Mandrake; his most common app is Photoshop on Windows. Dad's now asked me to let him dual boot the Windows PC, so he can run both Windows and Mandrake on it.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the most ringing endorsement possible for Mandrake's useability. While my parents are smart people, they're from a non-PC generation and sometimes struggle with concepts like folders and filenames. For whatever reason, Mandrake, even though it still uses folders and filenames, has let them get beyond the point they were at with Windows, and now I'm getting asked "can I do gamma transforms with Gimp like I do in Photoshop?" rather than "where's my file gone?"...
I think most of the posts have missed one of the key advantages of K12Linux.
My home, like many others around the globe, has a few aging PCs around. I've got 3 PCs that have 300-533MHz CPUs, which would be pretty well at their end of life as Windows boxes. What's more, I can get my hands on several other old PCs from my MS-loving mates as they upgrade their hardware every year or so and have no more use for their old boxes.
As Linux boxes, these old clunkers are perfect. I can install Linux plus everything my kids need for free on a box that would be otherwise useless. I can lock down the software on the box so that they can't break it. There's no need for me to keep updating virus checkers, or perform 99% of the other regular care-and-feeding that Windows boxes require. I can limit Internet access from the box as I see fit using a combination of firewall rules and local host entries. I can eliminate popups from Mozilla, which knocks out a huge quantity of porn sites. Finally, if they manage to break the hardware, then it doesn't cost me very much at all to replace it.
If a school adopted K12Linux as a standard, *and* had a few knowledgeable parents willing to help install a virtually identical desktop on old clunker PCs for kids to use at home, that's just about an unbeatable combination. MS might be able to offer software subsidies for schools, but the hardware to run current versions of MS products still costs a packet and needs to be upgraded every 2-3 years. MS can't offer useful PCs for free to parents to give their kids to use at home.
I agree with the parent post - a space elevator sounds like it'd be worth at least serious consideration for a chunk of that money.
However, there's some pretty big companies that stand to get reamed if the price of electricity or satellite launches drops by e.g. 90%, as could happen a few years down the track. For example, how are the US oil companies going to feel if electric cars are suddenly MUCH cheaper to run? How are the mobile phone companies who've deployed repeaters all over the place going to react if you could suddenly compete with them by launching a bunch of satellites, Iridium-like, and offer the same service globally without the cost of maintaining all those base stations that are only a few km apart?
In a perfect world, they'd be told "adapt or die", but at the moment things don't work that way. Any disruptive technology isn't going to get US government support at the moment, since they seem to feel the best path forward is to try to maintain the technology status quo indefinitely. They would kill off any attempt to get this done, pretty much regardless of who tried to do it.
Having said all that, I'd love it if the Chinese or Indian governments expressed an interest in investigating it further...
No, and no.
When I get my ^&*((ing server working again, and can do something more coherent than swear at stupid IDE discs and the idiot who designed them, I'll read through those sites properly and see where and how to add him in.
(Armed with fresh cup of tea and screwdriver, he descends into the depths of his office to do battle yet again...)
> Because we can.
I think that's exactly it. If you don't send people up to do this stuff, then the population at large just isn't interested and it becomes that much more difficult to justify the next $1 billion or so that NASA needs to keep operating.
When a government has to choose between spending a few tens of millions on e.g. AIDS research or a whole lot more on investigating spider webs in space, you need a certain amount of PR to push the arachnids on their way. Whether that particular trace off is right or wrong is another issue, but you have to give the public some element of romance about "space exploration" to keep the funding coming.
Every English-speaking, non-American learns shortly after birth that Americans don't understand irony. It's one of the things that makes US TV comedy in particular so ... um, "unintentionally funny" to the rest of us a lot of the time.
Of course, if you're reading this and you're American, no offence intended. After all, everyone knows you guys make the best TV shows.
I was in two minds about naming the artist, and decided not to. He seems like a decent sort of guy, and I think he was genuinely surprised that I wouldn't buy his CD because it was copy protected. In particular, I don't want to feel responsible for his Web site being trashed by irate script kiddies. He's Australian, and it's not Steve Irwin or The Wiggles ;->
If he's signed to a major label (as distinct to just being distributed by a major label), maybe he's being used as some sort of test case by the label to gauge people's reaction to copy protected CDs. At the very most, he's not likely to sell more than a few 10s of thousands, so I could see that the label might not care if a few hundred or so people complain. The label might, however, be able to work out that e.g. 2% of people complain, decide whether that's acceptable or not, then plan the release of larger-selling artists based on that.
Alternately, maybe they're trying out some new sort of copy protection, and want to see whether it can be cracked or not and how quickly copies appear on the P2P networks. Again, it'd be smarter for the label to try this with a smaller, more obscure artist than one of the label's headline acts.
I went along to a show last week, where the artist was performing songs off his latest, copy-protected CD. After the show, there was a stall selling his CDs at the back, so went back to check it out.
Sure enough, out he came to sign copies of his CD for those who were going to buy a copy. I worked my way to the front with a copy of his CD in hand, and handed it over. I pointed out the copy protection notice, then said "although I really liked your show and your new stuff, I'm not going to buy a copy of your CD since I can't play it on my PC or in my car".
He looked a bit shocked, and asked what I was talking about. I said that the copy protection would prevent me from playing the CD on my PC or in my car, and that since that was where I listen to music 99% of the time, his CD wouldn't be much use to me. I handed him one of my business cards and told him to call me if he wanted to talk about it further - there was a bunch of people behind me waiting for their CDs to be signed...
I got the impression that he either didn't know his CD was released copy protected, that he wasn't sure what copy protection actually meant for a CD, or that he was surprised that someone like me (a 40 year old, normal looking guy, not an obviously raving half-wit) would confront him with something like this after his show.
I also got the impression that he was going to look into it further - he's a 40ish guy also, with a fairly niche appeal and presumably wife/kids/mortgage etc. like the rest of us. He probably didn't like hearing a fan tell him people couldn't play his music in the car or at their PC.
I'll check out his CD in the stores again in another month or so to see if it's had the copy protection removed.
> maybe i should extend my tin-foil hat to a tin-foil
> facemask and a pair of shiny gloves... that way
> they'll never recognise me!
Nice idea, C3PO, but I don't think you'll get away with it...
> The SPOT watches use FM as the method of data
> transmission. FM. Like FM Radio. The watches are
> one way. You can get info on weather, IMs, stocks,
> etc, but you cannot send any data out. Any
> perception of "asking" for data is faked- the
> watch simply filters out data that doesn't apply
> to it.
Yep, just like that big Russian TV I've got in the loungeroom. Funny thing though: I still like it's watching me...