Good for you. But even in Canada, analogous tradeoffs exist: one organ transplant or 10000 fewer blind children halfway around the globe. Organ transplantation is still a luxury that only few people in the world can afford; overall human welfare would be increased if that money were redirected elsewhere. It's a choice Canadians, Europeans, and Americans make, a defensible choice, but certainly not a choice driven by an overriding concern for the "sanctity of human life".
Compared to the rock bottom eMachines which includes WinXP home,
I would view the inclusion of WinXP home to be a significant disadvantage: you pay for something you don't need, you have the maintenance hassles, and you are at risk of viruses and worms.
Re:it seems silly not to include a hard drive
on
Lindows Webstation
·
· Score: 1
Have you tried buying a 2G drive? I think you'll find it rather hard.
The cheapest drive you can get seems to be 20G at around $40, which would make the machine significantly more expensive.
That strikes me as pretty silly: CD-ROMs are used to play audio for hours on end, so drives are obviously up to it, and I have never seen CDs "heat crack" despite playing my share of games.
And just because death is inevitable, it doesn't mean that we should be flippant about it. I believe that the sanctity of human life is crucial in a just society.
Well, gee, maybe you should then rather be concerned with the 33 million of uninsured American adults, 11 million of uninsured American children, or the billions of people without any access to medical care in the world. Until our society provides basic medical care to everybody, an organ transplant costing costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars has nothing to do with "the sanctity of human life"--it's a luxury. It's a nice luxury, but please don't get sanctimonious about it.
Since death is inevitable, I will come over and get it over with for you right now.
If you have homicidal impulses, maybe you should seek professional help.
What's that? You haven't come to terms with death yet?
You don't need to come over for that: every time an SUV threatens to crush my little Honda Civic during my morning commute, I'm reminded of how temporary my existence is.
Sure, a few extra years would be nice, but you're never going to do anything great, and you'd probably waste them at star trek conventions and whatnot.
I don't consider the measure of my life doing "anything great"--that would just be vanity and pride.
As for Star Trek conventions, I have never been, but I imagine the people who go are having a lot of fun there. Maybe you should give it a try.
What's particularly ironic about this story is that Europe doesn't even have credit reporting agencies in the way the US has: if you want credit, European banks want to see collateral and income guarantees, not credit ratings. And European businesses aren't permitted to retain or exchange transaction records beyond what is needed for completing business transactions.
But in the US, your complete purchasing histories are being kept track of: between credit reporting agencies, supermarket affinity card records, and your credit/debit card records, there exists an almost complete record of what you buy, and it's not all that difficult for the government or even private entities to get a hold of it. The US government even has tried to get at records of book purchases and library loans.
The Beast' is actually the invention of Christian fiction writer Joe Musser,
This kind of fiction is "Christian" only in name. In reality, it's xenophobia and nationalism masquerading as Christianity. Some of the more modern varieties of this kind of drivel, like the "Left Behind" series, make the head of the UN the anti-Christ.
You don't need to put the GPS receiver in the camera. You can keep a GPS receiver in your pocket and correlate times and locations when you upload the images to the PC.
With Bluetooth-capable cameras and GPS receivers, the two will also likely be able to talk directly in the future.
GPS antennas are kind of big and need to be able to see the sky, so integrating everything into the camera isn't so good anyway.
There are plenty of car PCs. The Xenarc in particular is an in-dash PC, which is of pretty dubious utility. With WiFi, you can put your car PC in the trunk and you don't have the same silly space constraints as with an in-dash PC. Also, it's less likely to get stolen.
Ricoh has had cameras with PCMCIA slots that can take WiFi or cell phone cards for years, and Sony has digital cameras and camcorders with Bluetooth.
The Bluetooth option is probably the best of the bunch because it can be used to transmit images via regular cell phones or to a laptop. Range is comparable to WiFi, setup is easier, and power consumption is generally much less.
Gates should put up or shut up. Maybe it's time to sue him for product libel so that he has to prove what IP supposedly made it into Linux. SCO has had a restraining order put on them in Germany for their unsubstantiated claims, and the same might happen to Microsoft.
Of course, as far as Windows is concerned, we don't have to guess: courts are establishing with regularity that Microsoft is violating other people's IP.
Random seeks on CD-ROMs are pretty abysmal, not to mention that they generate a lot of noise when running at 52x, and constant spinning up, when the interface freezes mid-sentence, and then spinning down in a second or two will drive you up the wall after a day's work.
Sounds like you have never used a CD-ROM based system: they cache lots of stuff in memory and don't need to do a lot of random seeks. CD-ROM based systems are quite usable.
Wait until YOU are the one who needs an organ transplant... I hope you never need, but think about it.
We all need to come to terms with our inevitable death. Medicine is nice when it can give us a few more years of good life, but we shouldn't come to expect it.
It's not entirely arbitrary. One mole is a visible, manageable amount of matter. It could have been one gram or one kilogram of carbon, but it was going to be somewhere around those orders of magnitude. And the fact that there seem to be, within a few orders of magnitude, as many stars in the universe as there are atoms in, say, a pound of ice cream or a human being is kind of interesting.
Of course, Google doesn't own USENET legally; in fact, I think Google's use of USENET is of questionable legality, since postings traditionally have been made with expiration dates in mind and Google's use far exceeds the implicit license posters to USENET have given people for using their postings.
What I'm saying is that the institution of USENET these days is to a large degree controlled by Google; Google has changed the way people post, Google archives everything, and most people, looking for an article, will go to Google. I would argue that the P2P aspects of USENET are related to Google these days in the same way the P2P aspects of Napster were related to Napster.
I stopped using USENET after the Google takeover; you may want to do the same.
I think, for practical purposes, Google owns most of USENET now, including its complete history; there will probably not be any other institutions (well, maybe the NSA) that keep a history of USENET postings.
Years ago when I wanted to know what POSIX really said, I just couldn't afford a copy. And I couldn't justify it to get the company to spring for it either. So I got an O'Reilly book instead.
That's fine: the author of the O'Reilly book looked at the POSIX spec and shared the results with you. The effect of POSIX was still to set an open standard that many people knew, understood, and were using, whether they had looked at the original standards documents or not.
This directly contradicts just about every piece of evangelizing about OSS that I've ever heard - that it is more innovative.
There are two classes of OSS.
One class is things like GNU C, Linux, Perl, gawk, OpenOffice, Apache, etc. They don't innovate--they are reimplementations of well-understood technologies. Individuals and companies spend time and money on them for economic reasons: sharing the development costs helps them lower costs.
Another class is things like X11, Mosix, ghc, Festival, etc. Those are academic research projects that happen to get released as open source for academic reasons. Those don't fit into open source business models or open source advocacy--those projects are usually financed by the government or big research institutes. And their initial development is quite expensive.
Of course, many commercial entities fail to innovate as well: neither Microsoft, Apple, or Sun has really innovated very much--for the most part, they have been commercializing results and ideas that have come out of academic communities. In fact, they often have taken academic open source software and turned it into commercial closed source software. Later, a new generation of open source developers may pick up the original academic open source software and beat it into shape, or they may just clone the commercial stuff.
So, there is one class of open source software that innovates--the software coming out of academic research; that will survive as long as research grants are coming, and it isn't under discussion. The other class of open source software is OSS for commercial purposes, and there I'm arguing that it will survive because it is part of an efficient market; that latter class doesn't usually innovate, and it doesn't have to.
No. Open source licenses like BSD impose almost no restrictions on you and don't affect any of your own source code.
Free software licenses like GPL might be described as "viral". But if the GPL is viral, many commercial software licenses are even more "viral".
If you care about your IP, you have to be careful no matter what license you agree to, whether it is the GPL or a Microsoft EULA. And it certainly isn't hard to preserve your IP and still use GPL'ed software if you spend the same amount of effort on it as you do on a commercial license.
The word "Open" in "Open Group" really was meaningful and justified: using open APIs, APIs that anybody could implement, they created competition and already helped drive software prices down. Open source is just a further evolution of the software market, but you shouldn't underestimate the historical importance of open APIs.
The trend that Open Source software seems to encorage is a gradual but irreversable shift away from propriatary and profiting methods. As stated in the strategy, this is good for the majority (users) and bad for the minority (vendors). The question is wether or not this method of software development is sustainable if it's popularity grew to a point where it was the majority method of development.
No, that is not the question. The 40-70% profit margins achieved by vendors are clearly unsustainable--they can't exist in an efficient market. Open source software just happens to be the mechanism by which this market finally starts operating efficiently.
How sustainable do you think Open Source in it's current form
You are viewing open source software as some kind of alternative to proprietary development, but it is not. Rather, it is a stage in the evolution of a software market segment.
Something like the UNIX kernel used to cost lots of money because it provided functionality that was not widely available. But it was natural for it eventually to become open source. Ditto for software like Wordperfect and Microsoft word: initially, people could charge a premium for it because few people offered it (let's not get into the fact that the technology was invented elsewhere), but (absent monopolistic barriers), something like OpenOffice now gives you the same functionality for free.
You can make a big profit on some innovative piece of software for a few years, but then it gets commoditized and your price will go down from competition. Software is different from other goods there because it really has no physical component; generic drugs, electronics, etc., still have a non-zero cost even if there is no intellectual property. That's why it is ultimately open source programmers, not no-name manufacturers, that are driving software prices down, and in fact are driving them to how much it costs to make another unit of product: zero.
In short, open source software is sustainable--it's pretty much inevitable in an efficient market. The only thing that can kill it is government interference in the market or monopolistic practices.
Slashdot Mirror
Good for you. But even in Canada, analogous tradeoffs exist: one organ transplant or 10000 fewer blind children halfway around the globe. Organ transplantation is still a luxury that only few people in the world can afford; overall human welfare would be increased if that money were redirected elsewhere. It's a choice Canadians, Europeans, and Americans make, a defensible choice, but certainly not a choice driven by an overriding concern for the "sanctity of human life".
Compared to the rock bottom eMachines which includes WinXP home,
I would view the inclusion of WinXP home to be a significant disadvantage: you pay for something you don't need, you have the maintenance hassles, and you are at risk of viruses and worms.
Have you tried buying a 2G drive? I think you'll find it rather hard.
The cheapest drive you can get seems to be 20G at around $40, which would make the machine significantly more expensive.
That strikes me as pretty silly: CD-ROMs are used to play audio for hours on end, so drives are obviously up to it, and I have never seen CDs "heat crack" despite playing my share of games.
And just because death is inevitable, it doesn't mean that we should be flippant about it. I believe that the sanctity of human life is crucial in a just society.
Well, gee, maybe you should then rather be concerned with the 33 million of uninsured American adults, 11 million of uninsured American children, or the billions of people without any access to medical care in the world. Until our society provides basic medical care to everybody, an organ transplant costing costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars has nothing to do with "the sanctity of human life"--it's a luxury. It's a nice luxury, but please don't get sanctimonious about it.
Use the X-No-Archive header, and they won't snarf your posts.
They'll just snarf all the responses with bits-and-pieces quoted out of context; that's even worse.
Besides, Google has snarfed and republished, without permission, thousands of my posts from before X-No-Archive even existed.
Since death is inevitable, I will come over and get it over with for you right now.
If you have homicidal impulses, maybe you should seek professional help.
What's that? You haven't come to terms with death yet?
You don't need to come over for that: every time an SUV threatens to crush my little Honda Civic during my morning commute, I'm reminded of how temporary my existence is.
Sure, a few extra years would be nice, but you're never going to do anything great, and you'd probably waste them at star trek conventions and whatnot.
I don't consider the measure of my life doing "anything great"--that would just be vanity and pride.
As for Star Trek conventions, I have never been, but I imagine the people who go are having a lot of fun there. Maybe you should give it a try.
What's particularly ironic about this story is that Europe doesn't even have credit reporting agencies in the way the US has: if you want credit, European banks want to see collateral and income guarantees, not credit ratings. And European businesses aren't permitted to retain or exchange transaction records beyond what is needed for completing business transactions.
But in the US, your complete purchasing histories are being kept track of: between credit reporting agencies, supermarket affinity card records, and your credit/debit card records, there exists an almost complete record of what you buy, and it's not all that difficult for the government or even private entities to get a hold of it. The US government even has tried to get at records of book purchases and library loans.
The Beast' is actually the invention of Christian fiction writer Joe Musser,
This kind of fiction is "Christian" only in name. In reality, it's xenophobia and nationalism masquerading as Christianity. Some of the more modern varieties of this kind of drivel, like the "Left Behind" series, make the head of the UN the anti-Christ.
You don't need to put the GPS receiver in the camera. You can keep a GPS receiver in your pocket and correlate times and locations when you upload the images to the PC.
With Bluetooth-capable cameras and GPS receivers, the two will also likely be able to talk directly in the future.
GPS antennas are kind of big and need to be able to see the sky, so integrating everything into the camera isn't so good anyway.
There are plenty of car PCs. The Xenarc in particular is an in-dash PC, which is of pretty dubious utility. With WiFi, you can put your car PC in the trunk and you don't have the same silly space constraints as with an in-dash PC. Also, it's less likely to get stolen.
Ricoh has had cameras with PCMCIA slots that can take WiFi or cell phone cards for years, and Sony has digital cameras and camcorders with Bluetooth.
The Bluetooth option is probably the best of the bunch because it can be used to transmit images via regular cell phones or to a laptop. Range is comparable to WiFi, setup is easier, and power consumption is generally much less.
Gates should put up or shut up. Maybe it's time to sue him for product libel so that he has to prove what IP supposedly made it into Linux. SCO has had a restraining order put on them in Germany for their unsubstantiated claims, and the same might happen to Microsoft.
Of course, as far as Windows is concerned, we don't have to guess: courts are establishing with regularity that Microsoft is violating other people's IP.
I find working in public in a Cafe is great: few real distractions, no net access (leave the WiFi card at home), and an endless supply of coffee.
The TigerDirect box is pretty ugly... I think these kinds of boxes should be much smaller and have a non-PC design.
Random seeks on CD-ROMs are pretty abysmal, not to mention that they generate a lot of noise when running at 52x, and constant spinning up, when the interface freezes mid-sentence, and then spinning down in a second or two will drive you up the wall after a day's work.
Sounds like you have never used a CD-ROM based system: they cache lots of stuff in memory and don't need to do a lot of random seeks. CD-ROM based systems are quite usable.
Wait until YOU are the one who needs an organ transplant... I hope you never need, but think about it.
We all need to come to terms with our inevitable death. Medicine is nice when it can give us a few more years of good life, but we shouldn't come to expect it.
this number is entirely arbitrary.
It's not entirely arbitrary. One mole is a visible, manageable amount of matter. It could have been one gram or one kilogram of carbon, but it was going to be somewhere around those orders of magnitude. And the fact that there seem to be, within a few orders of magnitude, as many stars in the universe as there are atoms in, say, a pound of ice cream or a human being is kind of interesting.
Of course, Google doesn't own USENET legally; in fact, I think Google's use of USENET is of questionable legality, since postings traditionally have been made with expiration dates in mind and Google's use far exceeds the implicit license posters to USENET have given people for using their postings.
What I'm saying is that the institution of USENET these days is to a large degree controlled by Google; Google has changed the way people post, Google archives everything, and most people, looking for an article, will go to Google. I would argue that the P2P aspects of USENET are related to Google these days in the same way the P2P aspects of Napster were related to Napster.
I stopped using USENET after the Google takeover; you may want to do the same.
I think, for practical purposes, Google owns most of USENET now, including its complete history; there will probably not be any other institutions (well, maybe the NSA) that keep a history of USENET postings.
Years ago when I wanted to know what POSIX really said, I just couldn't afford a copy. And I couldn't justify it to get the company to spring for it either. So I got an O'Reilly book instead.
That's fine: the author of the O'Reilly book looked at the POSIX spec and shared the results with you. The effect of POSIX was still to set an open standard that many people knew, understood, and were using, whether they had looked at the original standards documents or not.
This directly contradicts just about every piece of evangelizing about OSS that I've ever heard - that it is more innovative.
There are two classes of OSS.
One class is things like GNU C, Linux, Perl, gawk, OpenOffice, Apache, etc. They don't innovate--they are reimplementations of well-understood technologies. Individuals and companies spend time and money on them for economic reasons: sharing the development costs helps them lower costs.
Another class is things like X11, Mosix, ghc, Festival, etc. Those are academic research projects that happen to get released as open source for academic reasons. Those don't fit into open source business models or open source advocacy--those projects are usually financed by the government or big research institutes. And their initial development is quite expensive.
Of course, many commercial entities fail to innovate as well: neither Microsoft, Apple, or Sun has really innovated very much--for the most part, they have been commercializing results and ideas that have come out of academic communities. In fact, they often have taken academic open source software and turned it into commercial closed source software. Later, a new generation of open source developers may pick up the original academic open source software and beat it into shape, or they may just clone the commercial stuff.
So, there is one class of open source software that innovates--the software coming out of academic research; that will survive as long as research grants are coming, and it isn't under discussion. The other class of open source software is OSS for commercial purposes, and there I'm arguing that it will survive because it is part of an efficient market; that latter class doesn't usually innovate, and it doesn't have to.
No. Open source licenses like BSD impose almost no restrictions on you and don't affect any of your own source code.
Free software licenses like GPL might be described as "viral". But if the GPL is viral, many commercial software licenses are even more "viral".
If you care about your IP, you have to be careful no matter what license you agree to, whether it is the GPL or a Microsoft EULA. And it certainly isn't hard to preserve your IP and still use GPL'ed software if you spend the same amount of effort on it as you do on a commercial license.
The word "Open" in "Open Group" really was meaningful and justified: using open APIs, APIs that anybody could implement, they created competition and already helped drive software prices down. Open source is just a further evolution of the software market, but you shouldn't underestimate the historical importance of open APIs.
The trend that Open Source software seems to encorage is a gradual but irreversable shift away from propriatary and profiting methods. As stated in the strategy, this is good for the majority (users) and bad for the minority (vendors). The question is wether or not this method of software development is sustainable if it's popularity grew to a point where it was the majority method of development.
No, that is not the question. The 40-70% profit margins achieved by vendors are clearly unsustainable--they can't exist in an efficient market. Open source software just happens to be the mechanism by which this market finally starts operating efficiently.
How sustainable do you think Open Source in it's current form
You are viewing open source software as some kind of alternative to proprietary development, but it is not. Rather, it is a stage in the evolution of a software market segment.
Something like the UNIX kernel used to cost lots of money because it provided functionality that was not widely available. But it was natural for it eventually to become open source. Ditto for software like Wordperfect and Microsoft word: initially, people could charge a premium for it because few people offered it (let's not get into the fact that the technology was invented elsewhere), but (absent monopolistic barriers), something like OpenOffice now gives you the same functionality for free.
You can make a big profit on some innovative piece of software for a few years, but then it gets commoditized and your price will go down from competition. Software is different from other goods there because it really has no physical component; generic drugs, electronics, etc., still have a non-zero cost even if there is no intellectual property. That's why it is ultimately open source programmers, not no-name manufacturers, that are driving software prices down, and in fact are driving them to how much it costs to make another unit of product: zero.
In short, open source software is sustainable--it's pretty much inevitable in an efficient market. The only thing that can kill it is government interference in the market or monopolistic practices.