(Sorry for the duplicate articles. I did not intend to be anonymous for this particular article but accidentally hit the "submit" button before entering my username and password. I am getting old in years, so please give me a break.)
How about putting the big bucks to help your own people?
Thank you for putting sanity and perspective back into the conversation. India has a number of hugely wasteful government programs: nuclear weapons, space program, etc.
There is no way to defend the nuclear weapons program. The only way to defend the space program is by saying that it is turning a profit. Does anyone have a link to an article showing that it is turning a profit?
Societies failed, are failing, or will fail for clearcut reasons. People in these societies make the wrong choices. There is no luck to success. It is merely hardwork and making the right choices.
The best example to my mind is all the war-ravaged European countries after WWII and Japan. I am most familiar with Japan. It spent no money on a nuclear weapons program and almost no money on a space program. Virtually all the money spent by the government went to building the public infrastructure and industrial infrastructure of Japan.
As for the mentality of the people, during 1945 - 1985, the majority of Japanese considered their own culture to be inferior to mainstream Western culture. Surprising? No. Admit the problem, and then you can solve it. Deny the problem, and it will never be solved. One characteristic of people in unsuccessful or poorly functioning societies is incredible, almost supremacist belief in the superiority of their cultures.
Just look at all the defenders of Indian society on SlashDot. To them, Indians can do no wrong.
Do you know what I admire most about Westerners (like Canadians, Japanese, etc.)? I often see them criticizing their own societies. Occasionally, there are huge protests. Martin Luther King is one of the best known protestors, and he was an awesome Westerner and rightly deserved his own holiday. Such criticism improves our Western societies in ways that a supremacist from India cannot understand.
Even though I disagree with Google's hiring practices (i.e. preferring H-1Bs when many American engineers are unemployed), I must admit that Google's search algorithm is the best one -- even better than Yahoo! Search, which I use regularly for socio-political reasons.
I will give you an example. If you search news (i.e., either Google News or Yahoo! News) for stories about the recent federal action (by Washington) involving Chinese companies and Iranians weapons improved by Chinese technology, you will discover that one of the popular news articles about this topic comes from the "New York Times". Several other newspapers redistributed the Times article, written by David Sanger (spelling?).
I read that article, but I also read articles from less popular Web news sites: e.g. "Taipei Times". The "Taipei Times" article does mention that a Taiwanese company was also implicated in the sale of weapons technology to Taiwan. Yet, "New York Times" article made no mention of this fact.
Is the "Taipei Times" telling the truth? It claims that Ecoma Enterprise Company, a Taiwanese company, was one of the culprits.
Guess how long I took on Google to find this information? 5 minutes. I kid you not. Even though I hate Google's employment practices, I am quite impressed with their technology.
Using Yahoo! Search, I was not able to locate the desired information.
Apparently, Google has an algorithm that, although it is unsupervised (i.e. without the kind of human interaction that corrupts Yahoo! Search), it captures the notion of what the typical person wants to find. The Google algorithm, dare I say "it", is on the verge of acquiring human sentience. THAT is, indeed, impressive.
Pray to Buddha that the middle name of the CEO is not "666" or Beelzebub. Just kidding.
What the Norwegian did is similar to me driving my Chevrolet Camaro and having my friend sitting in the passenger seat. Then, we pass by a computer store where I know that the owner is selling pirated software. I then tell my friend, "Look at that store. The owner is knowingly selling pirated software". My friend looks at the store.
The Machiavellian spirit in me says that Google is trying to creep into my desktop. The game plan apparently is to leverage Google's search fame into winning the web client market.
The web client is, in fact, the #1 application on the desktop these days. Literally, many people just click the "maximize" button after the browser is launched, and the web client occupies the entire surface of the screen. Off they go to read e-mail, look at porn, or cause a raucus on Slashdot by posting provocative articles.
Then, the next step for Google is to create Gunix (Google + Lunix), pronouced "goon-ix". With the Google client in place, you download Gunix and swap out M$ Window$.
Then...
<waking up in a code sweat>
Google has a very good search engine, but I would prefer that Google stay off my desktop. I like Google just like it is -- a web site which I visit to read the latest news and to search for the best porn pictures.
The problem with Google taking over my desktop is that I would then be swapping one monopoly for another: Micro$oft. What I like about open source is the decentralization, anti-monopoly attitude of the folks behind the Free Software Foundation. This kind of environment tends to encourage programmers from all parts of the world to contribute her little bit to creating a peace of great software. No one group of developers becomes dominant like Micro$oft or eventually Google.
The obvious point in the original article starting this whole discussion is that the writer is clueless and takes a cavalier attitude towards, not only the Beijing authorities, but also towards the people who have been tortured by those authorities. Click on this link to learn about Rebiya Kadeer. Today, I received information from Amnesty International (AI), and it was an urgent plea to us in the AI community to help Rebiya. She has languished for several years in a Chinese prison.
What was her crime? He wanted to mail copies of publicly available news articles to her husband residing in the USA. The articles dealt with the plight of women in Chinese society. She is serving an 8 year prison sentence, starting in 2000.
Is anyone angered by this incident? I was infuriated when I received the documents from AI. Visiting China may be "safe" for foreigners, but should we not express our moral outrage by boycotting China and its products?
Need 1 More Purchase: Lucent (& Bell Labs)
on
SBC Might Buy AT&T
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I am not one to wax nostalgic for technology companies, but I feel that, in the interest of national security, SBC's CEO (Edward Whitacre, Jr.) should do 1 more purchase after AT&T. SBC should buy Lucent, which includes its famed Bell labs that produced more nobel prizes than any other industrial lab. Unfortunately, Lucent cannot really financially support Bell labs and has floated the idea of transferring it to the research triangle in North Carolina, consisting of Duke University, UC-Raleigh, and one other university. As well, I would not want Bell Labs to fall into the hands of, say, Ecoma Enterprises; Ecoma is a Taiwanese company that Washington has penalized (according to page 133 of "The Federal Register" for 2005 January) for assisting Iran in building better missiles with nuclear capability.
Anyhow, the telecommunications industry has changed dramatically since the breakup of AT&T, and the rationale for the breakup no longer exists. These days, cell phones are prevalent; competitors easily enter the market for cell phones, which can be used for local and long-distance calls. A re-united AT&T (SBC + Pacbell, which was purchases by SBC, + AT&T + Lucent, which includes Bell Labs) would not pose a monopolistic threat. Heck, a re-united AT&T would be no more monopolistic than Micro$oft.
Note that even the Internet poses additional competition in the telecommunication market. Many people use the Internet, via VOIP, to make telephone calls although they may not realize that their call is being routed via IP packets.
There has been a trend towards smaller, space-saving computers. One sign of the trend is moving from heavy 17" CRT monitors to lightweight LCD monitors. Another sign is the popularity of notebooks. Still another sign is the popularity of deskbooks (?), notebooks that essentially cannot be run on battery power and must be constantly plugged into the war although they are equipped with batteries. These deskbooks are essentially desktops crammed into the space of a notebook and use the high-performance, power-hungry versions of processors instead of the mobile, energy-efficient ones.
MacMini is just another part of the trend. Steve Jobs must have 9 lives or something like that; he always seems to know the fashion trend in technology.
One thing that most people have not mentioned is that the MacMini will be a smashing success in Japan. There, space is a premium, and small-form-factor computers and peripherals are a must.
Here is the part that I just do not understand. The evidence in support of global warming is overwhelming.
Liberals are not the only ones who are concerned. Even populists like Bill O'Reilly have cast their vote in support of efforts to reverse global warming.
Yet, why is Washington doing nothing? Just recently, there has been talk of easing emissions standards on SUVs and other toys of the rich Republicans. In the end, SUV sales will be phenomenal as long as they are amphibious.
Okay. I am just dreaming, but doubtless, Apple could build an awesome workstation subsidiary out of its current phalanx of Macintoshes. Apple just needs to add the ECC memory that normally are installed in the x86 workstations.
These low-end MacMinis with ECC memory would be great lowend workstations. The PowerMac G5 would be great highend workstations.
Maybe, I am waxing "intellectual", but the fact that the x86 with its ugly instruction set and gross addressing modes has dominated the market really disappoints me. Why can't the better (from an engineering point of view) instruction set architecture (i.e. PowerPC) win in the desktop market?
Maximum Functionality at Minimal Price Point
on
Cell Phone On A Chip
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The marketing idea that Texas Instruments (TI) has developed is a rehash of an old idea: set a low price point and maximize the amount of functionality that can be sold at that point. One of the earliest examples is the VIC-20 computer from Commodore. It set the price of the contraption at (I think) $199.95, and then the engineers put as much functionality as they could into the product at the price point. The VIC was a smashing success even though William Shatner (ouch!) served as the spokesmodel.
Here, TI is setting a low price point for the chip/chipset and cramming as much functionality as TI's engineers can force into the chip/chipset. Over time, such efforts become easier because the feature size of integrated circuits becomes smaller, and you can simply put more "stuff" into a fixed area of chip. Further, the area of the chip determines its price to a first-order approximation.
I wish that someone would do another VIC-20. For $200.00, I bet that we could get an awesome computer, but I doubt that any of the traditional companies like HP, IBM, and Sony would be interested. The profit margin would be minimal. So, these companies continue to set a high price point, say, $2000.00, and sell a system with commensurate functionality -- a lot of functionality that I simply do not need for reading e-mail and posting articles to SlashDot.
Flamewars and forks to generate variations of a particular piece of GPLed software is the FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) version of a commercial market. In the commercial market (a.k.a. "THE" free market), when a product does not sell, it loses money, and the corporation stops developing it. Another corporation may have the vision for a better variation of said product, and that corporation will build it.
In the FOSS market, flamewars and forks generate different variations from a current path of development for software. These variations are then offered to the public and to computer-savy people. If they like it and there is interest in one variation over the others, then that variation wins in the FOSS market. More programmers will then sign on-board to develop winning the variation.
Thus, the FOSS market is a version of the commercial market.
I think that, in the FOSS market for people (like myself) with slow memory-limited computers, K-meleon has a good chance to dislodge Firefox. K-meleon is a fork from Firefox, and both are based on the same Gecko engine.
A movie is intended to be a shared experience in a social setting. Hence, DVDs and VHS tapes never wiped out the movie theaters even though the movie tickets are relatively pricey at $9.00 per pop. Even then, people tend to rent movies on DVDs/VHS tapes to watch as a group.
After people watch the movie, they want to talk about it with their friends. How much fun is watching a movie by yourself?
The only exception is pornography. Unless Napster intends that its service will be predominantly for pornography downloads, Napster will not achieve much market penetration (pun intended).
Perhaps, Napster should offer a special deal: After 10 downloads, you receive a free jar of vaseline. <chuckle>
If Ben Goodger is working for Google, I wonder how long before we see Google-optimizied features in FireFox. Google is now a profitable, public corporation with a stock-ownership structure patterned after Time-Warner. I doubt that Time-Warner would allows its employees, on company time, to work on Sony televisions unless the employees intend to add some specific features to the televisions to somehow enhance the media content from Time-Warner.
Will Google now become the default search engine on FireFox? So, if you enter a faulty URL, then suddenly, the Google web page appears and presents you with alternative Web links?
I prefer that the development team at FireFox be agnostic. Perhaps, now is the time to switch to Gecko. I hear that it is faster and has a tighter interface with Windows. I sure could use the speed for all my visits to picture-laden porn sites.
At the risk of sounding crass, I think that the goal is to mix advertisements and search results. When the user cannot easily distinguish the two, then she will accidentally click on the advertisement and see the product hawked by the seller paying for the ad. The seller actually benefits from this confusion, and the search engine company (SEC) also benefits because more clicks on the advertisement means more revenue for the SEC.
Given such a win for the seller and the SEC, there will be little motivation to fix this problem of confusion.
If Sun made Solaris compatible with Linux, then application development will quickly migrate from Solaris to Linux. Linux has significant momentum over Solaris. Software developers would develop exclusively on the Linux platform and compile their applications on Solaris only as an afterthought.
Schwartz' letter smacks of someone who is desparate and who thinks that Sun's hardware business will shrivel and die. In Schwartz' mind, in order to survive, Sun must grow its software business by using the Microsoft model. Namely, Sun locks people into Solaris, then with a captive audience, Sun charges monopoly profits for Solaris upgrades and exclusive Sun applications like StarOffice.
The big clue is
the disappointing financial report from last quarter for Sun. Revenue actually fell. Sun hardware is simply not competitive with IBM hardware or, even, HP hardware. Since Sun still largely depends on hardware revenue, Sun must quickly ramp up its sotware business and service business. Otherwise, Sun as a company will die along with its hardware division.
Note that Sun is expected to lose money in the remaining 2 quarters of its fiscal year.
At the risk of revealing a proclivity, I too use FireFox almost exclusively now even though FireFox is much slower on my computer than Micro$oft IE. For reasons of speed, I initially hesitated in using FireFox, but eventually I could not tolerate all the viruses and malware targetted at IE. On several occasions, my system was so badly infected with malware that I reinstalled Windows.
Admittedly, I am not a typical user. I visit numerous porn sites and am addicted to looking at gorgeous, naked women who would never spend time with me. Unfortunately, those sites are also boobytrapped with pop ups, viruses, and malware. If you do not believe me, then use IE on Windows and surf 1000 sites over the course of a month. At the end of the month, your computer will be unusable, and you will be forced to reinstall Windows.
With FireFox, I am relatively safe when I visit those sites. So far, none of the boobytraps have infected my computer. The only negative is that downloading the pictures takes a while with FireFox since it is not as tightly integrated into the OS as IE. Nonetheless, I am no longer reinstalling Windows on a monthly basis.
Now, where's that can of vaseline.... Just kidding.
What happened to consideration for our troops in Iraq? The money being wasted on a lavish inauguration could have been spent on buying more armor plating for the transport vehicles used by our troops.
Further, at a time when our soldiers are dying on the battlefield, is a pompous, lavish inauguration in bad taste? How can people officially be smiling and laughing when our soldiers are dying in Iraq?
In my opinion, the inauguration should be solemn and inexpensive. During the inauguration, we should spend 1 minute in silence to pay respect to our troops in Iraq.
What is happening to our country? Why does no one , besides the soldiers, make any sacrifices for our nation? In my neighbor, many folks drive huge SUVs that consume the oil which fuels the terrorists entering Iraq. Is there no shame?
I stopped at a hi-tech job fair today in Los Angeles. Most of the recruiters with whom I spoke told me that their management is currently exporting most of their information-technology (IT) jobs overseas. The most popular destinations are India and China. What is interesting is that the job tables (at the fair) having Indian immigrants tended to praise the benefits of offshoring to India. Meanwhile, the job tables having Chinese immigrants tended to praise the benefits of offshoring to China.
Even more interesting is that engineering jobs requiring minimal training are also being offshored. A good example is quality-assurance (QA) software engineers. A Chinese engineer, with a horribly thick accent, told me that his company does not hire any American QA engineers because doing QA is much cheaper in mainland China. So, when his company completes a major software package, the management ships it via Internet to mainland China, and the Chinese QA engineers will then test the package.
In this never ending offshoring, what is the next "bottom rung" (of engineering) to leave America? Verilog engineers?
When we talk about Internet news, we must talk about it in conjunction with search engines like Yahoo! Search. In that context, the Internet has 2 advantages over the old style of retrieving news. First, Internet news means instant access to the latest and most in-depth information. In the old days, the quickest access was television (e.g. CNN), but it was not the most in-depth. (How much depth can you get by 2 minutes of coverage on the nightly news?) Now, you can access instantaneous analyses written by the "Washington Post" and the "Wall Street Journal" for example. Further, web sites at CNN and Fox News also provide in-depth instantaneous news.
The second advantage is the real reason for the success of news on the Internet. The Internet serves as a huge database of old stories, facts, and analyses. In the old days, 2 years after you read a story in the "Washington Post", you may forget the exact details. Retrieving the original story requires a trip to the library and manually scanning through hundreds of reels of microfiche. In short, accessing the old story was prohibitively expensive, but that old story may contain critical information for assessing government policy towards, say, Taiwan.
Now, you can use Yahoo! Search to simply find the old story and access it within 15 seconds. You can quickly determine whether our government policy towards, say, Taiwan is correct. No longer can charlatans and quacks fool or manipulate you as easily.
In fact, I myself have used the power of the Internet to find the latest news about Taiwan and have summarized what I found. The reality of Taiwan is quite damning of current American policy.
The continued development of OpenOffice on Macintosh would have helped to establish Macintosh as the premier engineering workstation. Macintosh already has 2 of the 3 key ingredients: awesome processor (PowerPC) and a variant of UNIX. The Mac still needs ECC memory.
OpenOffice is one of those "business" applications that engineers need. Spreadsheets are used to draw graphs predicting the ascent of your own products and the demise of your competitor. Wordprocessors are needed to write engineering reports.
IBM has exited the PowerPC workstation market. Apple could be the de factor manufacturer of PowerPC workstations. A tieup between IBM and Apple would be a formidable force.
The workstation market is large enough for 2 major competing processors: AMD64 (and the Intel clone!) and PowerPC. (UltraSPARC is already dead.) Having two competitors is better than having monopoly (i.e. just AMD64), for competition spurs development and price reductions. The ultimate winner is the consumer.
We should ban anything that distracts the driver from the actual driving. The exception would be the radio.
Consider a study done by the American Automobile Association. Cell Phones are a distraction. Having prior experience with using such a phone during driving does not reduce the likelihood of distraction.
Some states now ban the use of a cell phone while driving.
If you hate what is happening to our nation, the USA, then write the following on the November ballot.
Is anyone concerned about the social impact of the Internet? Everything seems to be on-demand. If you want to hear the song, go to the nearest phone booth and download it into your iPod. If you want phone sex, dial the 1-900 number and whip out your credit card. If you want pornography, type the correct Web link.
Has anyone noticed how impatient the current generation is? Could there be a correlation between its attitude and the on-demand nature of current technology.
We should allow private enterprise to develop space travel. The free market (notwithstanding the Mexican government intervention generating hordes of illegal aliens flooding into the USA) has repeatedly shown that it is better at creating commercial solutions than the public sector.
The government should, in general, exit the free market and should stop funding technology projects. The only role that government should play is in funding pure-science projects. Commercial companies do not have the spare change or time horizon (i.e. shareholders expecting results each quarter) to invest in studying, for example, "The Theory of Everything".
Thus, NASA still has a role. NASA should focus on long-term projects like sending exploratory probes or people to Mars. The American government should spread its largesse to the physics department at top universities. Supporting the pure sciences requires government support.
By the way, exiting the free market also means that the American government should force the Mexican government, the Chinese government, and the Indian government out of the free market and should force them to enforce Western standards of human rights, workers' rights, and environmental and consumer protection, shutting down the H-1B program. If they do not comply, then we kick the Mexicans, the Chinese, and the Indians out of the American market. Free trade means that that we trade only with other nations who support free trade.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for putting sanity and perspective back into the conversation. India has a number of hugely wasteful government programs: nuclear weapons, space program, etc. There is no way to defend the nuclear weapons program. The only way to defend the space program is by saying that it is turning a profit. Does anyone have a link to an article showing that it is turning a profit?
Societies failed, are failing, or will fail for clearcut reasons. People in these societies make the wrong choices. There is no luck to success. It is merely hardwork and making the right choices.
The best example to my mind is all the war-ravaged European countries after WWII and Japan. I am most familiar with Japan. It spent no money on a nuclear weapons program and almost no money on a space program. Virtually all the money spent by the government went to building the public infrastructure and industrial infrastructure of Japan.
As for the mentality of the people, during 1945 - 1985, the majority of Japanese considered their own culture to be inferior to mainstream Western culture. Surprising? No. Admit the problem, and then you can solve it. Deny the problem, and it will never be solved. One characteristic of people in unsuccessful or poorly functioning societies is incredible, almost supremacist belief in the superiority of their cultures.
Just look at all the defenders of Indian society on SlashDot. To them, Indians can do no wrong.
Do you know what I admire most about Westerners (like Canadians, Japanese, etc.)? I often see them criticizing their own societies. Occasionally, there are huge protests. Martin Luther King is one of the best known protestors, and he was an awesome Westerner and rightly deserved his own holiday. Such criticism improves our Western societies in ways that a supremacist from India cannot understand.
I will give you an example. If you search news (i.e., either Google News or Yahoo! News) for stories about the recent federal action (by Washington) involving Chinese companies and Iranians weapons improved by Chinese technology, you will discover that one of the popular news articles about this topic comes from the "New York Times". Several other newspapers redistributed the Times article, written by David Sanger (spelling?).
I read that article, but I also read articles from less popular Web news sites: e.g. "Taipei Times". The "Taipei Times" article does mention that a Taiwanese company was also implicated in the sale of weapons technology to Taiwan. Yet, "New York Times" article made no mention of this fact.
Is the "Taipei Times" telling the truth? It claims that Ecoma Enterprise Company, a Taiwanese company, was one of the culprits.
At this point, I fired up both Yahoo! Search and Google. Only on Google was I successful in locating the the ORIGINAL source of the information about American penalties against the 7 Chinese companies and the 1 Taiwanese company. The information is on page 133 of the "Federal Register" (volume 70, number 1). So, I discovered that the "Taipei Times" was telling the truth.
Guess how long I took on Google to find this information? 5 minutes. I kid you not. Even though I hate Google's employment practices, I am quite impressed with their technology.
Using Yahoo! Search, I was not able to locate the desired information.
Apparently, Google has an algorithm that, although it is unsupervised (i.e. without the kind of human interaction that corrupts Yahoo! Search), it captures the notion of what the typical person wants to find. The Google algorithm, dare I say "it", is on the verge of acquiring human sentience. THAT is, indeed, impressive.
Pray to Buddha that the middle name of the CEO is not "666" or Beelzebub. Just kidding.
How have I committed a crime?
The web client is, in fact, the #1 application on the desktop these days. Literally, many people just click the "maximize" button after the browser is launched, and the web client occupies the entire surface of the screen. Off they go to read e-mail, look at porn, or cause a raucus on Slashdot by posting provocative articles.
Then, the next step for Google is to create Gunix (Google + Lunix), pronouced "goon-ix". With the Google client in place, you download Gunix and swap out M$ Window$.
Then ...
<waking up in a code sweat>
Google has a very good search engine, but I would prefer that Google stay off my desktop. I like Google just like it is -- a web site which I visit to read the latest news and to search for the best porn pictures.
The problem with Google taking over my desktop is that I would then be swapping one monopoly for another: Micro$oft. What I like about open source is the decentralization, anti-monopoly attitude of the folks behind the Free Software Foundation. This kind of environment tends to encourage programmers from all parts of the world to contribute her little bit to creating a peace of great software. No one group of developers becomes dominant like Micro$oft or eventually Google.
What was her crime? He wanted to mail copies of publicly available news articles to her husband residing in the USA. The articles dealt with the plight of women in Chinese society. She is serving an 8 year prison sentence, starting in 2000.
Is anyone angered by this incident? I was infuriated when I received the documents from AI. Visiting China may be "safe" for foreigners, but should we not express our moral outrage by boycotting China and its products?
Anyhow, the telecommunications industry has changed dramatically since the breakup of AT&T, and the rationale for the breakup no longer exists. These days, cell phones are prevalent; competitors easily enter the market for cell phones, which can be used for local and long-distance calls. A re-united AT&T (SBC + Pacbell, which was purchases by SBC, + AT&T + Lucent, which includes Bell Labs) would not pose a monopolistic threat. Heck, a re-united AT&T would be no more monopolistic than Micro$oft.
Note that even the Internet poses additional competition in the telecommunication market. Many people use the Internet, via VOIP, to make telephone calls although they may not realize that their call is being routed via IP packets.
MacMini is just another part of the trend. Steve Jobs must have 9 lives or something like that; he always seems to know the fashion trend in technology.
One thing that most people have not mentioned is that the MacMini will be a smashing success in Japan. There, space is a premium, and small-form-factor computers and peripherals are a must.
Liberals are not the only ones who are concerned. Even populists like Bill O'Reilly have cast their vote in support of efforts to reverse global warming.
Yet, why is Washington doing nothing? Just recently, there has been talk of easing emissions standards on SUVs and other toys of the rich Republicans. In the end, SUV sales will be phenomenal as long as they are amphibious.
These low-end MacMinis with ECC memory would be great lowend workstations. The PowerMac G5 would be great highend workstations.
Maybe, I am waxing "intellectual", but the fact that the x86 with its ugly instruction set and gross addressing modes has dominated the market really disappoints me. Why can't the better (from an engineering point of view) instruction set architecture (i.e. PowerPC) win in the desktop market?
Here, TI is setting a low price point for the chip/chipset and cramming as much functionality as TI's engineers can force into the chip/chipset. Over time, such efforts become easier because the feature size of integrated circuits becomes smaller, and you can simply put more "stuff" into a fixed area of chip. Further, the area of the chip determines its price to a first-order approximation.
I wish that someone would do another VIC-20. For $200.00, I bet that we could get an awesome computer, but I doubt that any of the traditional companies like HP, IBM, and Sony would be interested. The profit margin would be minimal. So, these companies continue to set a high price point, say, $2000.00, and sell a system with commensurate functionality -- a lot of functionality that I simply do not need for reading e-mail and posting articles to SlashDot.
In the FOSS market, flamewars and forks generate different variations from a current path of development for software. These variations are then offered to the public and to computer-savy people. If they like it and there is interest in one variation over the others, then that variation wins in the FOSS market. More programmers will then sign on-board to develop winning the variation.
Thus, the FOSS market is a version of the commercial market.
I think that, in the FOSS market for people (like myself) with slow memory-limited computers, K-meleon has a good chance to dislodge Firefox. K-meleon is a fork from Firefox, and both are based on the same Gecko engine.
After people watch the movie, they want to talk about it with their friends. How much fun is watching a movie by yourself?
The only exception is pornography. Unless Napster intends that its service will be predominantly for pornography downloads, Napster will not achieve much market penetration (pun intended).
Perhaps, Napster should offer a special deal: After 10 downloads, you receive a free jar of vaseline. <chuckle>
Will Google now become the default search engine on FireFox? So, if you enter a faulty URL, then suddenly, the Google web page appears and presents you with alternative Web links?
I prefer that the development team at FireFox be agnostic. Perhaps, now is the time to switch to Gecko. I hear that it is faster and has a tighter interface with Windows. I sure could use the speed for all my visits to picture-laden porn sites.
Given such a win for the seller and the SEC, there will be little motivation to fix this problem of confusion.
Schwartz' letter smacks of someone who is desparate and who thinks that Sun's hardware business will shrivel and die. In Schwartz' mind, in order to survive, Sun must grow its software business by using the Microsoft model. Namely, Sun locks people into Solaris, then with a captive audience, Sun charges monopoly profits for Solaris upgrades and exclusive Sun applications like StarOffice.
The big clue is the disappointing financial report from last quarter for Sun. Revenue actually fell. Sun hardware is simply not competitive with IBM hardware or, even, HP hardware. Since Sun still largely depends on hardware revenue, Sun must quickly ramp up its sotware business and service business. Otherwise, Sun as a company will die along with its hardware division.
Note that Sun is expected to lose money in the remaining 2 quarters of its fiscal year.
For whom does the bell toll? It tolls for Sun.
Admittedly, I am not a typical user. I visit numerous porn sites and am addicted to looking at gorgeous, naked women who would never spend time with me. Unfortunately, those sites are also boobytrapped with pop ups, viruses, and malware. If you do not believe me, then use IE on Windows and surf 1000 sites over the course of a month. At the end of the month, your computer will be unusable, and you will be forced to reinstall Windows.
With FireFox, I am relatively safe when I visit those sites. So far, none of the boobytraps have infected my computer. The only negative is that downloading the pictures takes a while with FireFox since it is not as tightly integrated into the OS as IE. Nonetheless, I am no longer reinstalling Windows on a monthly basis.
Now, where's that can of vaseline.... Just kidding.
Further, at a time when our soldiers are dying on the battlefield, is a pompous, lavish inauguration in bad taste? How can people officially be smiling and laughing when our soldiers are dying in Iraq?
In my opinion, the inauguration should be solemn and inexpensive. During the inauguration, we should spend 1 minute in silence to pay respect to our troops in Iraq.
What is happening to our country? Why does no one , besides the soldiers, make any sacrifices for our nation? In my neighbor, many folks drive huge SUVs that consume the oil which fuels the terrorists entering Iraq. Is there no shame?
Even more interesting is that engineering jobs requiring minimal training are also being offshored. A good example is quality-assurance (QA) software engineers. A Chinese engineer, with a horribly thick accent, told me that his company does not hire any American QA engineers because doing QA is much cheaper in mainland China. So, when his company completes a major software package, the management ships it via Internet to mainland China, and the Chinese QA engineers will then test the package.
In this never ending offshoring, what is the next "bottom rung" (of engineering) to leave America? Verilog engineers?
The second advantage is the real reason for the success of news on the Internet. The Internet serves as a huge database of old stories, facts, and analyses. In the old days, 2 years after you read a story in the "Washington Post", you may forget the exact details. Retrieving the original story requires a trip to the library and manually scanning through hundreds of reels of microfiche. In short, accessing the old story was prohibitively expensive, but that old story may contain critical information for assessing government policy towards, say, Taiwan.
Now, you can use Yahoo! Search to simply find the old story and access it within 15 seconds. You can quickly determine whether our government policy towards, say, Taiwan is correct. No longer can charlatans and quacks fool or manipulate you as easily.
In fact, I myself have used the power of the Internet to find the latest news about Taiwan and have summarized what I found. The reality of Taiwan is quite damning of current American policy.
OpenOffice is one of those "business" applications that engineers need. Spreadsheets are used to draw graphs predicting the ascent of your own products and the demise of your competitor. Wordprocessors are needed to write engineering reports.
IBM has exited the PowerPC workstation market. Apple could be the de factor manufacturer of PowerPC workstations. A tieup between IBM and Apple would be a formidable force.
The workstation market is large enough for 2 major competing processors: AMD64 (and the Intel clone!) and PowerPC. (UltraSPARC is already dead.) Having two competitors is better than having monopoly (i.e. just AMD64), for competition spurs development and price reductions. The ultimate winner is the consumer.
Consider a study done by the American Automobile Association. Cell Phones are a distraction. Having prior experience with using such a phone during driving does not reduce the likelihood of distraction.
Some states now ban the use of a cell phone while driving.
If you hate what is happening to our nation, the USA, then write the following on the November ballot.
president: Bill O'Reilly
vice-president: Tammy Bruce
Has anyone noticed how impatient the current generation is? Could there be a correlation between its attitude and the on-demand nature of current technology.
The government should, in general, exit the free market and should stop funding technology projects. The only role that government should play is in funding pure-science projects. Commercial companies do not have the spare change or time horizon (i.e. shareholders expecting results each quarter) to invest in studying, for example, "The Theory of Everything".
Thus, NASA still has a role. NASA should focus on long-term projects like sending exploratory probes or people to Mars. The American government should spread its largesse to the physics department at top universities. Supporting the pure sciences requires government support.
By the way, exiting the free market also means that the American government should force the Mexican government, the Chinese government, and the Indian government out of the free market and should force them to enforce Western standards of human rights, workers' rights, and environmental and consumer protection, shutting down the H-1B program. If they do not comply, then we kick the Mexicans, the Chinese, and the Indians out of the American market. Free trade means that that we trade only with other nations who support free trade.