YouTube made its billions violating copyrights, as did napster.
Huh. So what's YouTube's business model again? What's Napster's?
I bet every one of us' first exposure to youtube was watching some commercial productions.
Bullshit. The first time I even looked for anything possibly illegal was a couple Monty Python sketches and the "Mad World" music video.
My first exposure to YouTube was when Ask A Ninja started doing YouTube for a few of them instead of hosting the files themselves. My second was a beautiful, original piece of music. Since then, I've seen all kinds of things on YouTube, all of them user created, all of them interesting, and all of them legal.
It didn't even occur to me until very recently that someone might even try to upload something illegal, when BitTorrent+DivX looks so much better.
Quote me where I said they shouldn't consider anything else.
Oh, right, you just said they should consider it first. Which means that they should consider other things, but only after they've considered profit.
Specifically, you said:
Guy, without considering profits first and foremost a business will not remain a business for long.
So tell me what that looks like. When do they get to consider anything other than profit?
If businesses do not make money they cease to exist.
If I do not eat, I cease to exist. However, it's really a tiny concern -- there's plenty of food, and I don't have to work very hard to keep myself fed.
I certainly do not have to eat till I'm obese, or hoard food in some Y2K-inspired shelter. I don't have to steal food from the mouths of others.
Please, try to see this as an analogy, and not as a personal assault. I am not calling you Jabba the Hutt -- it's an analogy.
And, back in the real world, it's perfectly possible to run a business, and have it make money, and remain a business for a very long time, without ever putting profits first in the sense you're implying -- in the sense where you use it as an excuse for anything wrong they do.
Think of it this way: Will Dell cease to make profit if they start shipping OpenOffice? If that's what you're implying, then you should have said that, and I certainly don't agree. It seems like what you're implying is that Dell won't make as much profit -- which is really the way a business should operate, just as it's the way an individual should operate: Get enough profit, food, etc to stay alive, and then do the right thing.
Or, for that matter, I prefer to do the right thing, and then focus on staying alive. Or do you believe selfless acts are never justified? There's actually a theory about how while the selfless individual may be selected out, communities which never produce selfless individuals will also be selected out.
You missed bthe point about compiz -- compiz is not GPL'd, it is BSD/MIT or something less restrictive.
What this means is that Beryl, which is GPL'd, can rip off code wholesale from compiz. However, compiz cannot accept code from Beryl without accepting the GPL for their entire codebase -- which they don't want to do, in order to allow proprietary plugins.
Which means that Beryl tends to have more features than compiz, simply because of this one-way flow. It's true that compiz often re-implements features from Beryl. However, it strikes me as an annoyingly political problem -- compiz refuses to go GPL, and Beryl seems to have almost vindictively gone GPL, and they are diverging for no good reason. They each have their benefits, and each have their disadvantages, which is just as annoying as GNOME/KDE, only worse, because it becomes so obvious how they'd both be better with certain things the other has...
Thanks for correcting me about XGL, though -- last I checked, it was most certainly not the case. You had to choose between your 3D games and your 3D desktop -- and you probably still do, I imagine there's a fairly significant performance hit. I mean, if there's already a bit of a performance hit with AIGLX, even when the window's not wobbling...
This is also about when I started to really notice -- and get annoyed by -- the fact that his site uses JavaScript to filter out clicks (right or left), in an attempt to avoid you selecting text to copy and paste, or right-click+copy on any images or something.
I mean, just wow.
I see that maybe once a year -- some moron who tries to prevent you from copying something directly from a website through some sort of javascript hack. Other examples include a site which offered "encryption", wherein they have some JavaScript decrypt the entire page and document.write it out, including the same kind of anti-clicking prevention -- at least that one wasn't vulnerable to "view source", although several common Firefox extensions make it ludicrously easy to rip out the entire HTML, and I'm sure I could roll a GreaseMonkey script (if I properly understand what that is) to do the same.
In general, the kinds of people who do this are, I guess, people like him -- people who are actually so pathetically paranoid that someone might steal their content that they're willing to give up any other rights that might get in the way.
He just made an ass of himself on some TV interview, then tried to prevent them from airing it. He might be close to having a case if he xeroxed his ass or something, but it's not even that close -- it was an interview conducted solely for the purpose of being disseminated, and he knew that.
(Have to give credit to an AC buried farther down for pointing out his contact page...)
In addition to the phone # you've provided, here's a fax #: (315) 663-3036
He also seems to use IM a bit, he's got an AIM account (MikeFromSyracuse), an MSN Messenger account (mike@silentmike.us), and a Yahoo account (mikechatcny).
Oh, and his "email me" page doesn't have so much as a CAPTCHA on it.
You should note that I'm not advocating spamming the living shit out of his ugly, pathetic, lying ass. Indeed, I would never even suggest that you do the digital equivalent of ass-raping his ISP with a railroad spike! I'm just blatantly telling you what you need to know, should you ever hypothetically do such a thing, even though you won't, of course. Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more!
Well, for one thing, that's really 3. Novell/SuSE is closely related to OpenSUSE, same with Fedora/RedHat.
For another, if they pick a good Debian-based distro, it really isn't hard for us to switch in place to whatever we want. For instance, if they pick Ubuntu? I'm not sure you even have to switch repositories, just install kubuntu-desktop and uninstall ubuntu-desktop and you're done. If they install Debian Etch? Switch the repositories to Ubuntu Edgy and upgrade.
So, having it installed at least sometimes means it's much easier to make it the distro you want than it would be starting from scratch.
Then, too, as others have said, one working Linux that Dell supports means we at least have working hardware. The community will take care of making sure those drivers are available everywhere. If you buy a generic Windows box, it means you're not only supporting Microsoft, but there's a good chance a couple of pieces of hardware (wireless, etc) will either not work at all, won't work without binary blobs or even the Windows driver (ndiswrapper), need proprietary firmware from somewhere (probably the Windows driver again), or only have alpha-quality stuff. Or all of the above.
That's why selling us "blank" machines (or machines with FreeDOS) isn't enough, they need to actually have a working distro. It doesn't matter whether we use their distro, or even whether they offer phone support. I'd be happy if I could at least, say, test-drive it in the store and see that everything's working, without having to be allowed to bring my own Knoppix.
It would be nice if it was competitive price-wise too, but I'm willing to accept a small price hit (reasonable, like $10-20) until they can get enough crapware on there (not like it's hard to remove software from Linux) that they can make it cheaper than a comparable Windows machine.
Dell might have to manage one repository. Maybe. But they could easily just offer 2-3 packages to go with a vanilla Ubuntu setup. Consider that they seem to have very little trouble supporting Windows, and it's not as if they roll a Windows distro (if such a thing were possible).
Seriously, the rest of it? Config files, if even that. Have you tried a modern distro on a modern Dell lately? Most stuff works pretty well out of the box, including 3D acceleration -- hell, it isn't even far from there to Compiz. I suppose if you're picky, you want the "Internet" button, etc to work, but these things already exist for Linux, Dell would just have to have them installed and configured properly by default.
Also, Apple did a hell of a lot more than just put a proprietary GUI on top of BSD. Also, KDE is actually a good bit better than GNOME these days -- Linus makes some good points.
Steve Jobs will hire you a high-class hooker and let you breast feed. For $129, it's a bargain, but it's still more than you wanted, especially if you wanted help getting to sleep.
Microsoft will give you a cheap hooker, only charge $99, but there's a good chance she's carrying something, so you better buy a condom for $19 from Norton. When that one wears out, the next one will cost $49, and you'll have to keep telling yourself it's cheaper... somehow...
Linux will have plenty of geek girls who'll fuck you for free, unless you are an idiot. Some call them ugly because they wear glasses and go back to sucking on the Apple teat. Others get confused when "Suck it, bitch" doesn't work, and go back to the Microsoft slut.
And the patient ones among us will be in love... We want to bring her home to our parents (Dell), but we can't, because we're taking this joke much, much too far.
I've gone from being honest enough to admit that profits are a key to business success
You didn't say that. You said they were THE key, and that businesses shouldn't consider anything else.
Come back when you grow up a little.
Speak for yourself. Growing up means taking responsibility and demanding it of others, and not letting people get away with the excuse of "Businesses should make money."
Short comparison: XGL is an X server implemented in OpenGL, which currently means (at least on Linux) that it must be run on top of a traditional X server. You cannot run accelerated OpenGL apps on top of XGL -- you would have to find a way to run them inside the "real" X server, and they could not be composited. Since ATI has done nothing to support the compositing extensions, modern ATI cards require XGL to do any sort of compositing.
AIGLX is a way to allow a window manager running under the "real" X server to implement compositing stuff. I don't know what's supported, but I imagine it's similar to nVidia, which I'll describe below. It would generally be supported if you have a fully open source stack -- so, the Intel cards, for example.
nVidia implements the main things that AIGLX implements, but without actually using AIGLX to do it. While you can run XGL on an nVidia or Intel card, there's no point. This is what I'm running right now. It seems to support doing just about anything you want to any window, including actual OpenGL-accelerated windows -- I can drag World of Warcraft around and watch it warp out of control. Beryl can automatically disable the indirect rendering on fullscreen windows, meaning fullscreen games run pretty much at the speed they do without any compositing. I've also heard that the SVN version (which I can't get to run properly, myself) is capable of disabling indirection on any given window, meaning you can composite everything except your windowed OpenGL game.
With my nVidia, the only windows which cannot be warped any way I like are XvMC windows, but normal xv windows are fine. (You only use XvMC if you're deliberately doing hardware mpeg2 decoding -- and you would know if you are.)
And it does make sense that they would ship compiz, though I do wonder where this is going. Beryl is a fork of compiz, but Beryl is GPL'd and compiz is not, so code from compiz can go into Beryl, but not vice versa. Beryl tends to have more features, and compiz tends to be more stable and better written, but that's overly generalizing and may have changed.
Indeed. In fact, if you have an nVidia card, you're better off without XGL -- they implement the compositing stuff directly. And if you have an Intel card, you should probably be using AIGLX.
Just using desktop compositon will actually reduce your CPU load.
Maybe, but I kind of doubt it with XGL -- XGL means running a whole second X server. And, at the very least, you're going to end up with more RAM usage, using ANY compositing manager -- probably a fair trade for most people, but it's still something to think about.
I don't think this is a wholly bad thing, so long as it's optional. Just keep in mind, there are pros and cons to this. K?
Guy, without considering profits first and foremost a business will not remain a business for long.
They have to be high on the list. They do not have to be first, and they do not get to be an excuse for being evil.
In fact, let me suggest to you that they cannot be first in any successful business. After all, it's technically more profitable to completely ignore the law, until you're caught. Do you really think all businesses should be the Mafia? After all, protection rackets are pretty profitable. So is prostitution.
And why do we tolerate this kind of behavior on the corporate scale, anyway? Typical retarded Slashdotter response: "Oh well, they're a business, they're in it for profit and nothing else." Do we tolerate similar behavior from individuals?
Think about what that would mean to an individual.
"Girl, I love you, and I wish I could marry you, but it costs money to buy all those flowers and stuff. Even the condoms cost money! We need to break up because, as you know, money is everything."
Do you still think profit should be everything? Why is it so much different for a business?
I suppose you could define "profit" as something else on the individual level. After all, profit for a business enables them to survive, so in a form of natural selection, the way a business survives is by being more profitable than everyone else. So maybe we should put reproduction -- or, hell, put all of the principles of natural selection to work on the individual level, as a moral code.
In that case, you should rape every member of the opposite sex you ever meet who could potentially have children with you -- or be more discriminating, only rape the really good-looking ones. And you should kill every other member of the same sex who wants the same people. You shouldn't go much for profit, only enough to feed you and your family/harem -- anything after that is a waste and isn't helping you reproduce, unless it's about attracting a mate, and why do that when you can just take one?
Oh, sure, there's the legal system and all that. Ok, so was it ethical for people to set up a legal system in the first place? Why would they be drafting legal documents when they could be fucking or caring for their children?
Certainly there's more to life than that! Certainly there are things we, as individuals, can and should do -- I'm not even talking about giving to charity, but at least make some friends, and don't kill or threaten your guy friends to ensure less competition for the girl. Makes sense, right?
So get this through your head: Profit is no excuse for a lack of ethics.
So if you consider bankruptcy as being lively, creative and good I guess you're not going to find many other kinds of businesses out there.
Nonprofit != Bankruptcy. In fact, just plain unprofitable still != bankruptcy.
It's very possible to make plenty of profit for the company and for the employees while maintaining some sort of ethical and moral standards.
It's also very possible you could make more by employing sweatshop labor, or monopolizing a market, or by stifling innovation. And if you do any of these, your business is unethical, and you are unethical, and you can keep telling yourself that profit is all that matters until you believe it, but you are still a pathetic, despicable bastard.
Doesn't mean anything. OpenOffice directly competes with iWork. Specifically, Pages competes pretty directly with Word and OpenOffice Writer, and Keynote competes pretty directly with PowerPoint and OpenOffice Impress.
As it is, the only word processor bundled with OS X is TextEdit, and there is no presentation software bundled. So at that point, a consumer could say "Mail is good enough, I don't need Entourage, but I do need some decent presentation software, and Keynote is better than PowerPoint, so I'll buy iWork." Or they could go through a similar process and end up with Office -- something like "I need Entourage," or "Keynote is great, but I need to save PowerPoint presentations."
Or, of course, they could just say "I don't need any presentation software, and TextEdit is good enough."
OpenOffice would provide one more reason to just stick with bundled software. "I have a full-featured office suite, including Impress. I don't need Keynote; shiny as it is, it's just not worth $80."
Don't get me wrong, I wish they did it. But then again, I also wish they open-sourced iWork, and OS X while they're at it. None of these are going to happen.
Asimov gets bonus points for having actually written nothing but nonfiction science books for a number of years.
Fantastic Voyage (2 especially) might be cool, too. Keep in mind, the movie sucked -- Asimov was hired to do the novelization and to be a scientific adviser, and he did advise them to change the deminaturization sequence, as miniturized humans should not be able to breathe unminaturized air.
Dune. Not particularly accurate with respect to our own universe, but wow, what a thoroughly done and rigorously consistent universe he created.
But there's lots of fun scifi stuff out there. Stay away from Star Wars, even most Star Trek (technobabble). Also, if you can't find anything perfect, take something close enough and play a game of spot-the-inconsistency. Also consider videogames, movies, TV. Play with comic book physics (think "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex"), and certainly everyday scenarios.
Get the kids interested enough that they bring you ideas, so you don't have to go to Slashdot for them.
And the business processes that go into rolling something like this out are probably far more complex than the technical processes.
Are there any business processes besides contracts? It certainly doesn't seem to take long to, say, roll your own webcomic and start selling tshirts for it. I mean, not three days, but far less than three months, right?
It's not as if they can just flip a switch. There are a lot of things that would have to happen at the back end to support this, not to mention a client update may even be needed.
Regarding business? You tell me, but I'm betting it's those contracts.
They do client updates all the time. Even if it would be a fairly massive change on the backend, worst case, they could buy a DRM-free label (Magnatune, Mindawn, Jamendo, eMusic, the list goes on...) and use their store until they can get it integrated properly into iTunes.
I realize they hate to do that kind of thing. Apple doesn't like to give you anything half-done, or even news of it. Frankly, we're lucky Steve said anything -- if they were really serious about this, and followed standard procedure, we'd have gotten the Jobs letter on the day the client update was available for download, along with tools to integrate it with the Zune, Rio, Archos, and everything, the ability to burn unlimited CDs, perhaps even a tool to share with your friends -- with the iPhone, it could be like the Zune's "squirt", only you get unlimited plays -- this is legal with Magnatune (you may distribute up to 5 copies to your friends, no strings attached).
That's the kind of launch Apple likes to do. Not a half-baked, unintegrated kludge -- but that's exactly what would be really nice right now, at least to convince us that they're doing something -- although it would probably help as much for Steve to write a followup letter and explain to us what you just did -- that they're really working hard on it, or that they can't do it yet for legal reasons.
In fact, you can get eMusic content and play it on your iPod, right alongside protected iTunes Music Store content. Why is this so difficult?
It's slightly more of a hassle than dealing with what I described above, and much more of a hassle than when Apple finally gets it fully integrated, and you can impulse-buy straight from inside iTunes. However, a buyout from Apple would be a hell of a statement, even if it changed nothing about the current situation (yet).
In their parlance, "you know, artists that people have actually heard of."
Slightly offtopic, but sure. The way to get these people to wake up and check out things other than iTMS is to play them some other music. Send them over to some of these Internet Radio sites (my local station, KRUU, would be one), or simply play them some interesting music.
Of course, some people won't be swayed at all. I know a few people who just pay for a music service and that's it -- and they do have a point. These are the people who love DRM, because they do have a subscription fee (of course), but it's only some, what, $10/month. Given the amount of music they've already downloaded, they could download nothing else and still go some 15 or 20 years before it starts costing them money (vs iTunes or CDs). And if the service dies, or they don't like it, they can switch to another one -- no need to backup their music, even, just re-download the same stuff.
But seeing as that isn't Apple's business model here, they should be doing DRM-free stuff. And I can see why they wouldn't have it done already, or even confirm that they're working on it, but I think it's a stupid move, because it make Steve Jobs look like a hypocritical asshat.
That's assuming benefit of the doubt. You don't know, and I don't know, that he isn't really being a hypocritical asshat.
Extra cost for the chips, connectors, etc. Likely higher power requirements. The need to change your production line for the new interface. etc. etc.
Connectors are smaller and probably cheaper. Chips are likely cheaper, considering they've already changed their production line for a new interface anyway. And why don't you come back when you know for sure it's higher power requirements? I bet it's not.
You can do exactly the same with PATA, just about as easily.
My PATA doesn't support hotplugging.
the difference in connectors makes a trivially small difference.
I bet it's equally as small a difference for them to support SATA or SATA2. If you look online, prices for SATA drives just about exactly match prices for similar PATA drives -- so why wouldn't I use them, unless my motherboard only supports PATA?
Slashdot Mirror
Huh. So what's YouTube's business model again? What's Napster's?
Bullshit. The first time I even looked for anything possibly illegal was a couple Monty Python sketches and the "Mad World" music video.
My first exposure to YouTube was when Ask A Ninja started doing YouTube for a few of them instead of hosting the files themselves. My second was a beautiful, original piece of music. Since then, I've seen all kinds of things on YouTube, all of them user created, all of them interesting, and all of them legal.
It didn't even occur to me until very recently that someone might even try to upload something illegal, when BitTorrent+DivX looks so much better.
I Is Not A Laywer?
Oh, right, you just said they should consider it first. Which means that they should consider other things, but only after they've considered profit.
Specifically, you said:
So tell me what that looks like. When do they get to consider anything other than profit?
If I do not eat, I cease to exist. However, it's really a tiny concern -- there's plenty of food, and I don't have to work very hard to keep myself fed.
I certainly do not have to eat till I'm obese, or hoard food in some Y2K-inspired shelter. I don't have to steal food from the mouths of others.
Please, try to see this as an analogy, and not as a personal assault. I am not calling you Jabba the Hutt -- it's an analogy.
And, back in the real world, it's perfectly possible to run a business, and have it make money, and remain a business for a very long time, without ever putting profits first in the sense you're implying -- in the sense where you use it as an excuse for anything wrong they do.
Think of it this way: Will Dell cease to make profit if they start shipping OpenOffice? If that's what you're implying, then you should have said that, and I certainly don't agree. It seems like what you're implying is that Dell won't make as much profit -- which is really the way a business should operate, just as it's the way an individual should operate: Get enough profit, food, etc to stay alive, and then do the right thing.
Or, for that matter, I prefer to do the right thing, and then focus on staying alive. Or do you believe selfless acts are never justified? There's actually a theory about how while the selfless individual may be selected out, communities which never produce selfless individuals will also be selected out.
You missed bthe point about compiz -- compiz is not GPL'd, it is BSD/MIT or something less restrictive.
What this means is that Beryl, which is GPL'd, can rip off code wholesale from compiz. However, compiz cannot accept code from Beryl without accepting the GPL for their entire codebase -- which they don't want to do, in order to allow proprietary plugins.
Which means that Beryl tends to have more features than compiz, simply because of this one-way flow. It's true that compiz often re-implements features from Beryl. However, it strikes me as an annoyingly political problem -- compiz refuses to go GPL, and Beryl seems to have almost vindictively gone GPL, and they are diverging for no good reason. They each have their benefits, and each have their disadvantages, which is just as annoying as GNOME/KDE, only worse, because it becomes so obvious how they'd both be better with certain things the other has...
Thanks for correcting me about XGL, though -- last I checked, it was most certainly not the case. You had to choose between your 3D games and your 3D desktop -- and you probably still do, I imagine there's a fairly significant performance hit. I mean, if there's already a bit of a performance hit with AIGLX, even when the window's not wobbling...
This is also about when I started to really notice -- and get annoyed by -- the fact that his site uses JavaScript to filter out clicks (right or left), in an attempt to avoid you selecting text to copy and paste, or right-click+copy on any images or something.
I mean, just wow.
I see that maybe once a year -- some moron who tries to prevent you from copying something directly from a website through some sort of javascript hack. Other examples include a site which offered "encryption", wherein they have some JavaScript decrypt the entire page and document.write it out, including the same kind of anti-clicking prevention -- at least that one wasn't vulnerable to "view source", although several common Firefox extensions make it ludicrously easy to rip out the entire HTML, and I'm sure I could roll a GreaseMonkey script (if I properly understand what that is) to do the same.
In general, the kinds of people who do this are, I guess, people like him -- people who are actually so pathetically paranoid that someone might steal their content that they're willing to give up any other rights that might get in the way.
There were no nude pics! EVER!
He just made an ass of himself on some TV interview, then tried to prevent them from airing it. He might be close to having a case if he xeroxed his ass or something, but it's not even that close -- it was an interview conducted solely for the purpose of being disseminated, and he knew that.
(Have to give credit to an AC buried farther down for pointing out his contact page...)
In addition to the phone # you've provided, here's a fax #: (315) 663-3036
He also seems to use IM a bit, he's got an AIM account (MikeFromSyracuse), an MSN Messenger account (mike@silentmike.us), and a Yahoo account (mikechatcny).
Oh, and his "email me" page doesn't have so much as a CAPTCHA on it.
You should note that I'm not advocating spamming the living shit out of his ugly, pathetic, lying ass. Indeed, I would never even suggest that you do the digital equivalent of ass-raping his ISP with a railroad spike! I'm just blatantly telling you what you need to know, should you ever hypothetically do such a thing, even though you won't, of course. Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more!
Les is the guy??
But I guess it's interesting...
I much prefer "Two thumbscrews in the back" to "Four screws that make me get a screwdriver just to peek inside my case."
Well, for one thing, that's really 3. Novell/SuSE is closely related to OpenSUSE, same with Fedora/RedHat.
For another, if they pick a good Debian-based distro, it really isn't hard for us to switch in place to whatever we want. For instance, if they pick Ubuntu? I'm not sure you even have to switch repositories, just install kubuntu-desktop and uninstall ubuntu-desktop and you're done. If they install Debian Etch? Switch the repositories to Ubuntu Edgy and upgrade.
So, having it installed at least sometimes means it's much easier to make it the distro you want than it would be starting from scratch.
Then, too, as others have said, one working Linux that Dell supports means we at least have working hardware. The community will take care of making sure those drivers are available everywhere. If you buy a generic Windows box, it means you're not only supporting Microsoft, but there's a good chance a couple of pieces of hardware (wireless, etc) will either not work at all, won't work without binary blobs or even the Windows driver (ndiswrapper), need proprietary firmware from somewhere (probably the Windows driver again), or only have alpha-quality stuff. Or all of the above.
That's why selling us "blank" machines (or machines with FreeDOS) isn't enough, they need to actually have a working distro. It doesn't matter whether we use their distro, or even whether they offer phone support. I'd be happy if I could at least, say, test-drive it in the store and see that everything's working, without having to be allowed to bring my own Knoppix.
It would be nice if it was competitive price-wise too, but I'm willing to accept a small price hit (reasonable, like $10-20) until they can get enough crapware on there (not like it's hard to remove software from Linux) that they can make it cheaper than a comparable Windows machine.
Dell might have to manage one repository. Maybe. But they could easily just offer 2-3 packages to go with a vanilla Ubuntu setup. Consider that they seem to have very little trouble supporting Windows, and it's not as if they roll a Windows distro (if such a thing were possible).
Seriously, the rest of it? Config files, if even that. Have you tried a modern distro on a modern Dell lately? Most stuff works pretty well out of the box, including 3D acceleration -- hell, it isn't even far from there to Compiz. I suppose if you're picky, you want the "Internet" button, etc to work, but these things already exist for Linux, Dell would just have to have them installed and configured properly by default.
Also, Apple did a hell of a lot more than just put a proprietary GUI on top of BSD. Also, KDE is actually a good bit better than GNOME these days -- Linus makes some good points.
This is already true. I believe their "Open Source" offerings do cost more, when you can even find them.
Worse, if you remember, Dell once asked how much we would pay for computers not to come with crap.
I really wish there was some legal way to end the demo crap and simply have computers cost more, for everyone.
Steve Jobs will hire you a high-class hooker and let you breast feed. For $129, it's a bargain, but it's still more than you wanted, especially if you wanted help getting to sleep.
Microsoft will give you a cheap hooker, only charge $99, but there's a good chance she's carrying something, so you better buy a condom for $19 from Norton. When that one wears out, the next one will cost $49, and you'll have to keep telling yourself it's cheaper... somehow...
Linux will have plenty of geek girls who'll fuck you for free, unless you are an idiot. Some call them ugly because they wear glasses and go back to sucking on the Apple teat. Others get confused when "Suck it, bitch" doesn't work, and go back to the Microsoft slut.
And the patient ones among us will be in love... We want to bring her home to our parents (Dell), but we can't, because we're taking this joke much, much too far.
You didn't say that. You said they were THE key, and that businesses shouldn't consider anything else.
Speak for yourself. Growing up means taking responsibility and demanding it of others, and not letting people get away with the excuse of "Businesses should make money."
I'll direct everyone to the Wikipedia page.
Short comparison: XGL is an X server implemented in OpenGL, which currently means (at least on Linux) that it must be run on top of a traditional X server. You cannot run accelerated OpenGL apps on top of XGL -- you would have to find a way to run them inside the "real" X server, and they could not be composited. Since ATI has done nothing to support the compositing extensions, modern ATI cards require XGL to do any sort of compositing.
AIGLX is a way to allow a window manager running under the "real" X server to implement compositing stuff. I don't know what's supported, but I imagine it's similar to nVidia, which I'll describe below. It would generally be supported if you have a fully open source stack -- so, the Intel cards, for example.
nVidia implements the main things that AIGLX implements, but without actually using AIGLX to do it. While you can run XGL on an nVidia or Intel card, there's no point. This is what I'm running right now. It seems to support doing just about anything you want to any window, including actual OpenGL-accelerated windows -- I can drag World of Warcraft around and watch it warp out of control. Beryl can automatically disable the indirect rendering on fullscreen windows, meaning fullscreen games run pretty much at the speed they do without any compositing. I've also heard that the SVN version (which I can't get to run properly, myself) is capable of disabling indirection on any given window, meaning you can composite everything except your windowed OpenGL game.
With my nVidia, the only windows which cannot be warped any way I like are XvMC windows, but normal xv windows are fine. (You only use XvMC if you're deliberately doing hardware mpeg2 decoding -- and you would know if you are.)
And it does make sense that they would ship compiz, though I do wonder where this is going. Beryl is a fork of compiz, but Beryl is GPL'd and compiz is not, so code from compiz can go into Beryl, but not vice versa. Beryl tends to have more features, and compiz tends to be more stable and better written, but that's overly generalizing and may have changed.
Indeed. In fact, if you have an nVidia card, you're better off without XGL -- they implement the compositing stuff directly. And if you have an Intel card, you should probably be using AIGLX.
Maybe, but I kind of doubt it with XGL -- XGL means running a whole second X server. And, at the very least, you're going to end up with more RAM usage, using ANY compositing manager -- probably a fair trade for most people, but it's still something to think about.
I don't think this is a wholly bad thing, so long as it's optional. Just keep in mind, there are pros and cons to this. K?
They have to be high on the list. They do not have to be first, and they do not get to be an excuse for being evil.
In fact, let me suggest to you that they cannot be first in any successful business. After all, it's technically more profitable to completely ignore the law, until you're caught. Do you really think all businesses should be the Mafia? After all, protection rackets are pretty profitable. So is prostitution.
And why do we tolerate this kind of behavior on the corporate scale, anyway? Typical retarded Slashdotter response: "Oh well, they're a business, they're in it for profit and nothing else." Do we tolerate similar behavior from individuals?
Think about what that would mean to an individual.
"Girl, I love you, and I wish I could marry you, but it costs money to buy all those flowers and stuff. Even the condoms cost money! We need to break up because, as you know, money is everything."
Do you still think profit should be everything? Why is it so much different for a business?
I suppose you could define "profit" as something else on the individual level. After all, profit for a business enables them to survive, so in a form of natural selection, the way a business survives is by being more profitable than everyone else. So maybe we should put reproduction -- or, hell, put all of the principles of natural selection to work on the individual level, as a moral code.
In that case, you should rape every member of the opposite sex you ever meet who could potentially have children with you -- or be more discriminating, only rape the really good-looking ones. And you should kill every other member of the same sex who wants the same people. You shouldn't go much for profit, only enough to feed you and your family/harem -- anything after that is a waste and isn't helping you reproduce, unless it's about attracting a mate, and why do that when you can just take one?
Oh, sure, there's the legal system and all that. Ok, so was it ethical for people to set up a legal system in the first place? Why would they be drafting legal documents when they could be fucking or caring for their children?
Certainly there's more to life than that! Certainly there are things we, as individuals, can and should do -- I'm not even talking about giving to charity, but at least make some friends, and don't kill or threaten your guy friends to ensure less competition for the girl. Makes sense, right?
So get this through your head: Profit is no excuse for a lack of ethics.
Nonprofit != Bankruptcy. In fact, just plain unprofitable still != bankruptcy.
It's very possible to make plenty of profit for the company and for the employees while maintaining some sort of ethical and moral standards.
It's also very possible you could make more by employing sweatshop labor, or monopolizing a market, or by stifling innovation. And if you do any of these, your business is unethical, and you are unethical, and you can keep telling yourself that profit is all that matters until you believe it, but you are still a pathetic, despicable bastard.
Doesn't mean anything. OpenOffice directly competes with iWork. Specifically, Pages competes pretty directly with Word and OpenOffice Writer, and Keynote competes pretty directly with PowerPoint and OpenOffice Impress.
As it is, the only word processor bundled with OS X is TextEdit, and there is no presentation software bundled. So at that point, a consumer could say "Mail is good enough, I don't need Entourage, but I do need some decent presentation software, and Keynote is better than PowerPoint, so I'll buy iWork." Or they could go through a similar process and end up with Office -- something like "I need Entourage," or "Keynote is great, but I need to save PowerPoint presentations."
Or, of course, they could just say "I don't need any presentation software, and TextEdit is good enough."
OpenOffice would provide one more reason to just stick with bundled software. "I have a full-featured office suite, including Impress. I don't need Keynote; shiny as it is, it's just not worth $80."
Don't get me wrong, I wish they did it. But then again, I also wish they open-sourced iWork, and OS X while they're at it. None of these are going to happen.
Asimov gets bonus points for having actually written nothing but nonfiction science books for a number of years.
Fantastic Voyage (2 especially) might be cool, too. Keep in mind, the movie sucked -- Asimov was hired to do the novelization and to be a scientific adviser, and he did advise them to change the deminaturization sequence, as miniturized humans should not be able to breathe unminaturized air.
Dune. Not particularly accurate with respect to our own universe, but wow, what a thoroughly done and rigorously consistent universe he created.
But there's lots of fun scifi stuff out there. Stay away from Star Wars, even most Star Trek (technobabble). Also, if you can't find anything perfect, take something close enough and play a game of spot-the-inconsistency. Also consider videogames, movies, TV. Play with comic book physics (think "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex"), and certainly everyday scenarios.
Get the kids interested enough that they bring you ideas, so you don't have to go to Slashdot for them.
Are there any business processes besides contracts? It certainly doesn't seem to take long to, say, roll your own webcomic and start selling tshirts for it. I mean, not three days, but far less than three months, right?
Regarding business? You tell me, but I'm betting it's those contracts.
They do client updates all the time. Even if it would be a fairly massive change on the backend, worst case, they could buy a DRM-free label (Magnatune, Mindawn, Jamendo, eMusic, the list goes on...) and use their store until they can get it integrated properly into iTunes.
I realize they hate to do that kind of thing. Apple doesn't like to give you anything half-done, or even news of it. Frankly, we're lucky Steve said anything -- if they were really serious about this, and followed standard procedure, we'd have gotten the Jobs letter on the day the client update was available for download, along with tools to integrate it with the Zune, Rio, Archos, and everything, the ability to burn unlimited CDs, perhaps even a tool to share with your friends -- with the iPhone, it could be like the Zune's "squirt", only you get unlimited plays -- this is legal with Magnatune (you may distribute up to 5 copies to your friends, no strings attached).
That's the kind of launch Apple likes to do. Not a half-baked, unintegrated kludge -- but that's exactly what would be really nice right now, at least to convince us that they're doing something -- although it would probably help as much for Steve to write a followup letter and explain to us what you just did -- that they're really working hard on it, or that they can't do it yet for legal reasons.
It's slightly more of a hassle than dealing with what I described above, and much more of a hassle than when Apple finally gets it fully integrated, and you can impulse-buy straight from inside iTunes. However, a buyout from Apple would be a hell of a statement, even if it changed nothing about the current situation (yet).
Slightly offtopic, but sure. The way to get these people to wake up and check out things other than iTMS is to play them some other music. Send them over to some of these Internet Radio sites (my local station, KRUU, would be one), or simply play them some interesting music.
Of course, some people won't be swayed at all. I know a few people who just pay for a music service and that's it -- and they do have a point. These are the people who love DRM, because they do have a subscription fee (of course), but it's only some, what, $10/month. Given the amount of music they've already downloaded, they could download nothing else and still go some 15 or 20 years before it starts costing them money (vs iTunes or CDs). And if the service dies, or they don't like it, they can switch to another one -- no need to backup their music, even, just re-download the same stuff.
But seeing as that isn't Apple's business model here, they should be doing DRM-free stuff. And I can see why they wouldn't have it done already, or even confirm that they're working on it, but I think it's a stupid move, because it make Steve Jobs look like a hypocritical asshat.
That's assuming benefit of the doubt. You don't know, and I don't know, that he isn't really being a hypocritical asshat.
Why would Apple encourage competition for their own office suite? You may as well ask MS to distribute Ubuntu.
Frankly, you'd be a boring, unimaginative, and evil business. You also wouldn't be a particularly uncommon business.
Is this still a facto for anyone these days? Other than Apple, I guess...
Connectors are smaller and probably cheaper. Chips are likely cheaper, considering they've already changed their production line for a new interface anyway. And why don't you come back when you know for sure it's higher power requirements? I bet it's not.
My PATA doesn't support hotplugging.
I bet it's equally as small a difference for them to support SATA or SATA2. If you look online, prices for SATA drives just about exactly match prices for similar PATA drives -- so why wouldn't I use them, unless my motherboard only supports PATA?
Ugh. Of course I mean, much LESS convenient than FireWire target mode...