Come ooon.. it's software. The hardware is the same in the US and elsewhere. So if the software has already been developed for one region, it would automatically work in other regions, and should really cost them 'next to nothing' to make it available in a huge market like the USA (the 'marginal cost' of selling the same, already-developed software in the US must be so low that it would be nearly impossible not to offset that cost in sales - and there WOULD be sales). It's not as if they have to re-develop the software again for the US market, so it's a no-brainer. So there really HAS to be another reason why they are not making this available in the US. It seems logical that they are simply trying not to upset strategic partners, but there may be other explanations.
Actually, I am a mother tongue English speaker, and I also studied math, so I do know what I am talking about. It seems that you are the one not familiar with the English language, because (and since YOU brought 'ability to parse English' into this argument I'm going to turn it around on you) if you look PURELY at the English now: "Growth" is a "rate of change" of something AND a "rate" is also a "rate of change" of something, hence "growth rate" MUST be a double-derivative. That's looking PURELY at the English ONLY, and not at how people might use the expression in actual general use.
But uou are also wrong about the media and about people: the media (and people) actually uses "X growth rate" to mean BOTH the first and second derivatives, depending on (a) how the info was fed to them and what the original 'slant' was, (b) what slant they themselves want to give to the info, and (c) depending on how confused the individuals involved were. Take a careful look next time at articles that talk about "growth rates" (especially about issues like e.g. crime or population) and you'll see what I mean - both are used. This of course causes much of confusion amongst the public, and is a great way to "lie with statistics", but we are NOT bloody "Joe Public" here on/., we're a friggin community of engineers, scientists etc. (at least supposed to be).
You're also wrong about "major fields" using "growth rate" for anything. "Major fields" don't use such "Joe Public" terms specifically because they're confusing. E.g. Mathematicians and physicists talk about first/second/third etc. derivatives, at least at the real universities that I studied at.
Nope, a "rate" is a "rate of change", and a "growth" is too. Thus:
f(x) = number of users
f'(x) = rate of change of number of users (also called "growth")
f''(x) = rate of change of growth (also called "growth rate")
Hence, original was correct. If the "growth rate" is slowing down, that means f''(x) is decreasing i.e. getting less, but as long as f''(x) remains greater than 0, the total number of users f(x) will continue to grow indefinitely. f''(x) must be NEGATIVE before there can eventually be a decline in the number of users.
Not really, because there were also competing DOS clones! I remember some people I knew ran DR-DOS, for example, and it was not only compatible with DOS but had more features. If MS had had such an exclusivity clause with IBM, the PC market would simply have exploded anyway, but with different companies coming out on top as to today (e.g. Caldera might have gotten a lot bigger). The competing DOS manufacturers were eager to differentiate their products by adding new features and so on. However when MS came out with IIRC Windows 3, they added some code to deliberately make it only run on MS-DOS, thus "tying" the two products i.e. Windows 3 to DOS. This meant if you ran DR-DOS you couldn't run Windows, even though DR-DOS was technically capable of having Windows run on top of it). (The resultant MS-Caldera court case dragged out until long after DR-DOS was no longer relevant in the market, even though MS lost that case. Although they removed the exclusivity code later, the damage had already been done, and the message had been clear to competitors: "don't enter the market, we'll just crush you by locking you out".)
There was one reason PCs "could be built at cheaper cost", and it had nothing to do with Windows: The famous reverse-engineering of the "IBM PC" allowed the market to be flooded with hundreds of compatible clones, all competing vigorously on price. I still remember the days when just about every PC's major marketing tack was "IBM compatible".
Most PC purchases at this time were not even for the purpose of running Windows - most business and home users still ran DOS. Microsoft had nothing to do with "making PCs cheaper", they only took advantage of the fact that PCs were becoming cheaper anyway.
PCs also subsequently advanced at a rapid rate, getting more powerful very quickly. Combined with their low cost, flexibility and configurability, they just took off. And MS, as you say, were "in the right place at the right time".
I'm so tired of marketing departments pretending their press releases are "accidental leaks" to generate "buzz" and excitement that people are supposedly seeing something they weren't supposed to be privy to. "Can't tell you how we got our hands on this image"? Oh please, it's a product launch (this was a product launch party), they want everyone to see the new XBOX and talk about it. It's called "advertising", "branding" and "hype". These pictures don't even look like they were taken surreptitiously, some of them look like they were taken in perfect diffuse-lit studio conditions and retouched with Photoshop. (This is not a Microsoft rant - almost everyone these days is issuing fake 'leaks' to media outlets.)
OK, that out the way.. it's not really ugly, although it looks a bit uninspired. The white colour is probably just following a trend set by someone else. Most important thing though is ultimately going to be the games.
What? No, the government of every modern economy these days (including the US) "interferes" (as you put it) to control the price of goods in shops by tweaking interest rates and various other factors (including levies on petrol/gas but also e.g. a.o. exchange rate controls by buying/selling other currencies) in order to do ONE THING: control inflation. It is now widely accepted that this is a very good idea, and surprise, it is happening every day in most countries. By tweaking interest rate vs. inflation, and e.g. exchange rates, governments can "steer" the economy in different directions, providing some loose control over borrowing vs. saving behaviour, investment, imports/exports, manufacturing, trade deficits etc.
Hear hear. It's friggin' 2005 already - how can it be that none of the major browsers has proper download management (e.g. resumable downloading) capability? A web browser's core function is ultimately "downloading stuff", if nothing else software should be very good at it's core function.
Put another way: regardless of your own opinions, can you be so certain that the 'boiling frog' analogy would not apply to the majority of the public?
Because if it would, then your viewpoint is "irrelevant" to what kind of legislation is going to end up being enacted. You have to work 'within the system' - you can't make progress if you assume an idealistic world where everyone else also will also understand what you understand.
The point is that with each new step (e.g. first cameras, now microphones, next.. ?) the concept of being "watched all the time" becomes normalised amongst the public (and you, regardless of whether you think you are immune to this effect). Thus each new step taken is approved by the public because it only marginally increases the amount of surveillance currently in place, which, whatever the level, is considered 'perfectly normal' because it's already there. Each marginal increment is very soon normalised too.
Maybe you personally are able to draw the line somewhere (e.g. public vs. private spaces), but I promise you, 99% of the other humans around you are not - they have not even thought about this at all, and do not have a 'line' that they will draw that cannot be crossed - as a result, there IS no upper limit to how omnipresent surveillance will become. It's not a matter of if the line between public/private surveillance is crossed, it's only a matter of when, and people will accept it because most people don't even think about these things like you do. For them, it will already be normal to be watched all the time, so it'll just be an extension of the same thing. It will start, of course, with spaces that are somewhere between public and private, e.g. shopping malls, restaurants.
The technological capability of universal surveillance may be inevitable, however socially and politically it is most certainly not an inevitability. If people protested it strongly enough it would never actually happen. It is only "inevitable" so long as people believe it is an inevitability, and thus simply accept it. You are doing precisely this. You will never be able to effectively legislate surveillance in a world where everyone regards surveillance as normal. The only way to prevent it is to evangalise and 'normalise' the idea that surveillance itself should be balked at, anytime. This is tricky though due to the positive practical purposes that surveillance can serve, e.g. lowering the crime rate.
1.) If I hit the middle mouse button and use auto-scrolling for something like this slashdot page, Firefox will use 30 to 40 percent CPU. And I wouldn't classify my system as slow(Athlon64 3200+ w/512Mb of RAM). Hopefully the can do something about this.
WTF - who cares? HOW does this actually affect you? I struggle to believe that a few brief moments of 40% CPU usage every now and again is actually affecting you in any way whatsoever. How does this become a "pet peeve"? (If you were just looking for something to criticise FF, there are better things you could have come up with, e.g. various shortcut keys stop working until you click in the gecko (HTML) area of the current tab.)
The article is reviewing the beta of OO 2. You are talking about OO 1. The article claims that file format compatibility has improved in 2. (Actually the article claims it is now "flawless" - that I don't believe, although I don't doubt it has improved.)
The problem you are referring to btw is precisely the whole "industry lock-in" problem (that allows Microsoft to "extort" it's customers and have such high profit margins) that keeps MS entrenched and what the article pitches OO as a possible solution to. Ref. "network effects" and "critical mass" in economics terms. In my opinion, much of industry is dying to get out of it... even if it's seldom explicitly stated, we can "feel" this sentiment in every new client of our software, they are ALL afraid of lock-in to proprietary formats and the extortion that they feel would inevitably result. They all demand that we support XML, so that they can never be totally locked in. The way I see it, there is one primary reason why everyone is so aware and afraid of the effects of lock-in to closed formats - they've all been burned, and are being burned, by MS.
Interesting, I've had the opposite experience, I've perpetually had various problems with Word's style system in every version of Office. In OpenOffice, OTOH, I've found the styles system always made more sense and was less buggy and just worked better.
My biggest 'nitpick' about OO is the time it takes to open. Since I'm always "in a hurry" when I work, I very much dislike applications that do not open quickly (e.g. VS.net also takes forever to open). And yes, I have the OO 'quickstart' loaded.
So you are saying the relevance of the content of that post is somehow dependent on, and influenced by, whether or not it is posted in "every topic" relating to electronic IDs and tracking? That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. "It's posted every time, therefore it's nonsense" - WTF!? Play the ball, try to refute the message itself.
Heh - neither!:) It was a desperate attempt to fit that into the very limited number of characters that/. allows for sigs, and I needed to cut it down by one more character... so unfortunately the apostrophe had to go, removing any letters would make it not make sense any more.
Not to be pedantic, but that's clearly a typo and not a spelling error.. there is a definite distinction between the two, as in the latter case it means a person doesn't know how to spell something, the former, not. Everyone makes typos.
FYI for the (shill/ignorant) moderators who modded parent flamebait: Microsoft really werefunding SCO for this lawsuit. This information was accidentally leaked some time back, and it was actually confirmed by Microsoft (who have since (claimed they) stopped the funding).
MS make virtually all their money from the "horizontal" markets of Windows and Office. Every startup that creates new software that runs on Windows adds value to the Windows platform and thus sells more copies of Windows. Since Microsoft doesn't really do "niche markets", it's still beneficial for them if niche market players develop software for the Windows platform - every copy of the niche market software sold is also a sale of Windows. If MS is seeing ISVs in these markets are starting to develop software for alternate platforms, it may be worthwhile to add competing products that run on Windows rather.
I have no idea if that's the actual reasoning behind this, it's just an idea, as you can be sure the press release is mostly just spin and it's hard to tell what the full story is here. Maybe it's just a kind of investment, with MS taking part ownership but still letting someone else manage these "niche market" businesses that they're not interested in. Perhaps their view is that they'll simply buy any startups that appear to be taking off and develop interesting technology.. offloading R&D costs onto others but still reaping benefits by "buying and integrating" whenever the R&D pays off - the same "buy all vaguely interesting startups" model they've been using for years (because MS never innovate, they only buy innovative technology from others and integrate it), maybe they're running out of innovative startups to buy;)
If by "ably-crafted products" you mean "mediocre poorly-copied products that can do what the competitor's product could do better five years ago already", then yup, you're right on the nose there. As a Microsoft customer, I can't wait until they integrate an Internet search feature into Longhorn that will be nearly as good as Google was a few years ago already (and also free). Gee, it's like Christmas.
Slashdot Mirror
Come ooon .. it's software. The hardware is the same in the US and elsewhere. So if the software has already been developed for one region, it would automatically work in other regions, and should really cost them 'next to nothing' to make it available in a huge market like the USA (the 'marginal cost' of selling the same, already-developed software in the US must be so low that it would be nearly impossible not to offset that cost in sales - and there WOULD be sales). It's not as if they have to re-develop the software again for the US market, so it's a no-brainer. So there really HAS to be another reason why they are not making this available in the US. It seems logical that they are simply trying not to upset strategic partners, but there may be other explanations.
War has always, but ALWAYS, been about (a) resources or (b) control, with (b) in fact being only in order to secure more (a).
But hey, I guess it's true what they say about those who don't learn from history.
Actually, I am a mother tongue English speaker, and I also studied math, so I do know what I am talking about. It seems that you are the one not familiar with the English language, because (and since YOU brought 'ability to parse English' into this argument I'm going to turn it around on you) if you look PURELY at the English now: "Growth" is a "rate of change" of something AND a "rate" is also a "rate of change" of something, hence "growth rate" MUST be a double-derivative. That's looking PURELY at the English ONLY, and not at how people might use the expression in actual general use.
But uou are also wrong about the media and about people: the media (and people) actually uses "X growth rate" to mean BOTH the first and second derivatives, depending on (a) how the info was fed to them and what the original 'slant' was, (b) what slant they themselves want to give to the info, and (c) depending on how confused the individuals involved were. Take a careful look next time at articles that talk about "growth rates" (especially about issues like e.g. crime or population) and you'll see what I mean - both are used. This of course causes much of confusion amongst the public, and is a great way to "lie with statistics", but we are NOT bloody "Joe Public" here on /., we're a friggin community of engineers, scientists etc. (at least supposed to be).
You're also wrong about "major fields" using "growth rate" for anything. "Major fields" don't use such "Joe Public" terms specifically because they're confusing. E.g. Mathematicians and physicists talk about first/second/third etc. derivatives, at least at the real universities that I studied at.
Nope, a "rate" is a "rate of change", and a "growth" is too. Thus:
f(x) = number of users
f'(x) = rate of change of number of users (also called "growth")
f''(x) = rate of change of growth (also called "growth rate")
Hence, original was correct. If the "growth rate" is slowing down, that means f''(x) is decreasing i.e. getting less, but as long as f''(x) remains greater than 0, the total number of users f(x) will continue to grow indefinitely. f''(x) must be NEGATIVE before there can eventually be a decline in the number of users.
Not really, because there were also competing DOS clones! I remember some people I knew ran DR-DOS, for example, and it was not only compatible with DOS but had more features. If MS had had such an exclusivity clause with IBM, the PC market would simply have exploded anyway, but with different companies coming out on top as to today (e.g. Caldera might have gotten a lot bigger). The competing DOS manufacturers were eager to differentiate their products by adding new features and so on. However when MS came out with IIRC Windows 3, they added some code to deliberately make it only run on MS-DOS, thus "tying" the two products i.e. Windows 3 to DOS. This meant if you ran DR-DOS you couldn't run Windows, even though DR-DOS was technically capable of having Windows run on top of it). (The resultant MS-Caldera court case dragged out until long after DR-DOS was no longer relevant in the market, even though MS lost that case. Although they removed the exclusivity code later, the damage had already been done, and the message had been clear to competitors: "don't enter the market, we'll just crush you by locking you out".)
There was one reason PCs "could be built at cheaper cost", and it had nothing to do with Windows: The famous reverse-engineering of the "IBM PC" allowed the market to be flooded with hundreds of compatible clones, all competing vigorously on price. I still remember the days when just about every PC's major marketing tack was "IBM compatible".
Most PC purchases at this time were not even for the purpose of running Windows - most business and home users still ran DOS. Microsoft had nothing to do with "making PCs cheaper", they only took advantage of the fact that PCs were becoming cheaper anyway.
PCs also subsequently advanced at a rapid rate, getting more powerful very quickly. Combined with their low cost, flexibility and configurability, they just took off. And MS, as you say, were "in the right place at the right time".
Come on mods .. overrated? Off-topic, maybe! ;)
I'm so tired of marketing departments pretending their press releases are "accidental leaks" to generate "buzz" and excitement that people are supposedly seeing something they weren't supposed to be privy to. "Can't tell you how we got our hands on this image"? Oh please, it's a product launch (this was a product launch party), they want everyone to see the new XBOX and talk about it. It's called "advertising", "branding" and "hype". These pictures don't even look like they were taken surreptitiously, some of them look like they were taken in perfect diffuse-lit studio conditions and retouched with Photoshop. (This is not a Microsoft rant - almost everyone these days is issuing fake 'leaks' to media outlets.)
OK, that out the way .. it's not really ugly, although it looks a bit uninspired. The white colour is probably just following a trend set by someone else. Most important thing though is ultimately going to be the games.
What? No, the government of every modern economy these days (including the US) "interferes" (as you put it) to control the price of goods in shops by tweaking interest rates and various other factors (including levies on petrol/gas but also e.g. a.o. exchange rate controls by buying/selling other currencies) in order to do ONE THING: control inflation. It is now widely accepted that this is a very good idea, and surprise, it is happening every day in most countries. By tweaking interest rate vs. inflation, and e.g. exchange rates, governments can "steer" the economy in different directions, providing some loose control over borrowing vs. saving behaviour, investment, imports/exports, manufacturing, trade deficits etc.
Hear hear. It's friggin' 2005 already - how can it be that none of the major browsers has proper download management (e.g. resumable downloading) capability? A web browser's core function is ultimately "downloading stuff", if nothing else software should be very good at it's core function.
Put another way: regardless of your own opinions, can you be so certain that the 'boiling frog' analogy would not apply to the majority of the public?
Because if it would, then your viewpoint is "irrelevant" to what kind of legislation is going to end up being enacted. You have to work 'within the system' - you can't make progress if you assume an idealistic world where everyone else also will also understand what you understand.
The point is that with each new step (e.g. first cameras, now microphones, next .. ?) the concept of being "watched all the time" becomes normalised amongst the public (and you, regardless of whether you think you are immune to this effect). Thus each new step taken is approved by the public because it only marginally increases the amount of surveillance currently in place, which, whatever the level, is considered 'perfectly normal' because it's already there. Each marginal increment is very soon normalised too.
Maybe you personally are able to draw the line somewhere (e.g. public vs. private spaces), but I promise you, 99% of the other humans around you are not - they have not even thought about this at all, and do not have a 'line' that they will draw that cannot be crossed - as a result, there IS no upper limit to how omnipresent surveillance will become. It's not a matter of if the line between public/private surveillance is crossed, it's only a matter of when, and people will accept it because most people don't even think about these things like you do. For them, it will already be normal to be watched all the time, so it'll just be an extension of the same thing. It will start, of course, with spaces that are somewhere between public and private, e.g. shopping malls, restaurants.
The technological capability of universal surveillance may be inevitable, however socially and politically it is most certainly not an inevitability. If people protested it strongly enough it would never actually happen. It is only "inevitable" so long as people believe it is an inevitability, and thus simply accept it. You are doing precisely this. You will never be able to effectively legislate surveillance in a world where everyone regards surveillance as normal. The only way to prevent it is to evangalise and 'normalise' the idea that surveillance itself should be balked at, anytime. This is tricky though due to the positive practical purposes that surveillance can serve, e.g. lowering the crime rate.
Heh - the location of the preferences/options menu in Windows Explorer actually moved three times between Win95 and WinXP.
1.) If I hit the middle mouse button and use auto-scrolling for something like this slashdot page, Firefox will use 30 to 40 percent CPU. And I wouldn't classify my system as slow(Athlon64 3200+ w/512Mb of RAM). Hopefully the can do something about this.
WTF - who cares? HOW does this actually affect you? I struggle to believe that a few brief moments of 40% CPU usage every now and again is actually affecting you in any way whatsoever. How does this become a "pet peeve"? (If you were just looking for something to criticise FF, there are better things you could have come up with, e.g. various shortcut keys stop working until you click in the gecko (HTML) area of the current tab.)
I think you just missed the entire "boiling frog" point.
The article is reviewing the beta of OO 2. You are talking about OO 1. The article claims that file format compatibility has improved in 2. (Actually the article claims it is now "flawless" - that I don't believe, although I don't doubt it has improved.)
The problem you are referring to btw is precisely the whole "industry lock-in" problem (that allows Microsoft to "extort" it's customers and have such high profit margins) that keeps MS entrenched and what the article pitches OO as a possible solution to. Ref. "network effects" and "critical mass" in economics terms. In my opinion, much of industry is dying to get out of it ... even if it's seldom explicitly stated, we can "feel" this sentiment in every new client of our software, they are ALL afraid of lock-in to proprietary formats and the extortion that they feel would inevitably result. They all demand that we support XML, so that they can never be totally locked in. The way I see it, there is one primary reason why everyone is so aware and afraid of the effects of lock-in to closed formats - they've all been burned, and are being burned, by MS.
Interesting, I've had the opposite experience, I've perpetually had various problems with Word's style system in every version of Office. In OpenOffice, OTOH, I've found the styles system always made more sense and was less buggy and just worked better.
My biggest 'nitpick' about OO is the time it takes to open. Since I'm always "in a hurry" when I work, I very much dislike applications that do not open quickly (e.g. VS.net also takes forever to open). And yes, I have the OO 'quickstart' loaded.
So you are saying the relevance of the content of that post is somehow dependent on, and influenced by, whether or not it is posted in "every topic" relating to electronic IDs and tracking? That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. "It's posted every time, therefore it's nonsense" - WTF!? Play the ball, try to refute the message itself.
Hmm .. no, I didn't, but I suppose it's possible.
Heh - neither! :) It was a desperate attempt to fit that into the very limited number of characters that /. allows for sigs, and I needed to cut it down by one more character ... so unfortunately the apostrophe had to go, removing any letters would make it not make sense any more.
I don't think MS would need the source code to be able to do that.
Not to be pedantic, but that's clearly a typo and not a spelling error .. there is a definite distinction between the two, as in the latter case it means a person doesn't know how to spell something, the former, not. Everyone makes typos.
FYI for the (shill/ignorant) moderators who modded parent flamebait: Microsoft really were funding SCO for this lawsuit. This information was accidentally leaked some time back, and it was actually confirmed by Microsoft (who have since (claimed they) stopped the funding).
MS make virtually all their money from the "horizontal" markets of Windows and Office. Every startup that creates new software that runs on Windows adds value to the Windows platform and thus sells more copies of Windows. Since Microsoft doesn't really do "niche markets", it's still beneficial for them if niche market players develop software for the Windows platform - every copy of the niche market software sold is also a sale of Windows. If MS is seeing ISVs in these markets are starting to develop software for alternate platforms, it may be worthwhile to add competing products that run on Windows rather.
I have no idea if that's the actual reasoning behind this, it's just an idea, as you can be sure the press release is mostly just spin and it's hard to tell what the full story is here. Maybe it's just a kind of investment, with MS taking part ownership but still letting someone else manage these "niche market" businesses that they're not interested in. Perhaps their view is that they'll simply buy any startups that appear to be taking off and develop interesting technology .. offloading R&D costs onto others but still reaping benefits by "buying and integrating" whenever the R&D pays off - the same "buy all vaguely interesting startups" model they've been using for years (because MS never innovate, they only buy innovative technology from others and integrate it), maybe they're running out of innovative startups to buy ;)
If by "ably-crafted products" you mean "mediocre poorly-copied products that can do what the competitor's product could do better five years ago already", then yup, you're right on the nose there. As a Microsoft customer, I can't wait until they integrate an Internet search feature into Longhorn that will be nearly as good as Google was a few years ago already (and also free). Gee, it's like Christmas.