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User: pscottdv

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Comments · 419

  1. Re:Not a Gates "prediction", still only 1% size of on In Your Face, Critics! Red Hat Passes $1 Billion In Revenue · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If anything, Microsoft is probably thrilled to have a relatively tiny, but still growing competitor in the market to keep the anti-trust folks at bay. (Remember those guys from about 10 years ago?)

    No. They are not. Because that $1 Billion revenue of RedHat's represents Hundreds of Billions of dollars of lost revenue to Microsoft. Every server running Linux is a server that MIGHT have a Windows license if free offerings such as Linux weren't so capable.

    Without RedHat and other tiddling (compared to Microsoft) companies improving Linux every day, Microsoft would be the highest revenue company in the world and their stock would still be increasing in value.

  2. Why is Gly Moody's Quote Included? on In Your Face, Critics! Red Hat Passes $1 Billion In Revenue · · Score: 1

    “Indeed, I would go so far as to say that very few open source startups will ever get anywhere near to $1 billion. Not because they are incompetent, or because open source will ‘fail’ in any sense. But because the economics of open source software – and therefore the business dynamics – are so different from those of traditional software that it simply won’t be possible in most markets.” – Glyn Moody

    There have been, in fact, very few open source startups to get to $1 billion. His quote seems right on.

    And before I get flamed, I and my family use Linux exclusively. I sold a mildly-successful, Linux-based business a few years ago.

    Of course, if you include any business for which open-source software is critical to its operations, like Google, Facebook or Amazon, then yeah, the quote is nonsense.

  3. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... on In Your Face, Critics! Red Hat Passes $1 Billion In Revenue · · Score: 1

    I've been using Gnome 3 exclusively for nearly a year now. I love it.

    All four of my daughters have been using it. They love it.

    My wife uses it. She loves it.

    The only tweak I made was to reinstate the minimize button because I like it for a very specific workflow situation.

    I haven't tried unity, though, only Gnome shell

  4. Re:portability on Javascript Game of Tron In 226 Bytes · · Score: 1

    Huge as compared to 226 bytes.

  5. Re:Football? on HDTV Expert Alfred Poor Tells You What to Buy and What Not to Buy (Video) · · Score: 1

    Either:

    a North American game in which a ball is normally carried by hand and passed from hand-to-hand;

    or:

    a rest-of-the-world game in which a ball is controlled and passed by use of foot or head.

    No. In the North American game, there is no ball. Balls are spherical.

  6. Re:No justification for the current media pricing? on With Cinavia DRM, Is Blu-ray On a Path To Self-Destruction? · · Score: 1

    All that may be true, but the further the media companies go in the direction of locking down their formats and equipment, the more attractive the illegal alternatives become. They are spending more and more and more to deliver less and less and less to their customers at ever higher prices, while the pirates are working ever harder to deliver ever more and more and more for essentially free.

    How can that work for them as an economic model?

    And I can see this as someone who doesn't pirate anything. I watch tv on hulu and cbs.com (despite cbs' lousy player--C'mon CBS, just join Hulu so survivor doesn't look like a grainy slideshow!), I rent DVDs from redbox, and I take my kids to the discount theater on Tuesdays when it's a buck-a-ticket.

    I realize that I don't pay, so the industry doesn't care about me at all and that's fine with me. But their prices are creating more and more people like me. $10 for a first-run theater ticket ($15 if it's 3D)? $30 for a movie in a box? $129 a month for cable television? $60 for a video game? Are they NUTS? Apparently not, because people keep paying. But eventually, there will be more and more people like me and fewer and fewer willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month for something they don't need.

  7. Re:What is the difference between this and xbox? on New Samsung TV Watches You Watching It · · Score: 1

    I've been saying since the mid-90s that eventually our phones, computers and televisions would merge into a single appliance. What I didn't know was what that device would be called. 16 years later, I know a little more. I know that the name will start with an "i".

  8. Re:I'm divided on Kim Dotcom's Assets Seizure Order Ruled "Null and Void" · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How can you possible be defending Kimble? He's not some patriotic defender of our IP rights. He has, time and time again, setup illegal businesses, had the government stop them and move on with a slap on wrists. He is a crook.

    Exactly, only honest people have the right to expect due process and the rule of law.

    People who share copyrighted works shouldn't be protected by the rule of law!

  9. Re:Its all a Business Model on Crying Foul At the BSA's "Nauseating" Anti-Piracy Tactics · · Score: 1

    Why is that a surprise? That's exactly what MS did in the U.S. circa 1994-1996.

  10. Gaining Momentum on Scientists Say People Aren't Smart Enough For Democracy To Flourish · · Score: 1

    Didn't Plato come to the same conclusion 2500 years ago?

    Don't we all come to the same conclusion every election cycle?

    Yet somehow representative democracy keeps on gaining momentum.

  11. Re:Japan and Europe is where the industry is on Chevy Volt Meets High Resistance, GM Suspends Sales · · Score: 2

    How many engines have you gone through to get to that point?

    I can't say for AC, but I've got 225k on my 1996 Ford F150 on its original engine -> 4.9L straight six. Most reliable gasoline engine ever built, IMHO. Of course, Ford stopped building it after 1996...

  12. Re:Hello, context here on Cook County Judge Says Law Banning Recording Police Is Unconstitutional · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Good idea. That way Officer Stuart can wait to beat me up after his shift is over and then arrest me for taping the incident without his consent.

  13. Re:uhhh. on Open Letter By Eric S. Raymond To Chris Dodd · · Score: 1

    No, he was being paid not-so-secretly by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That's why they were left out of his reform bill.

  14. Re:Doesn't believe in patents on MIT Lecturer Defends His Standing As Email Inventor · · Score: 1

    He could have copyrighted his source code (in fact it was automatically copyrighted as soon as he wrote it).

    In 1978 in the U.S. his code was NOT automatically copyrighted unless he placed a copyright notice on each source file.

  15. Re:FUD on Microsoft's Anti-Google Video Campaign · · Score: 1

    Google would not abandon a money-maker. They might sell it, though. Who, I wonder, would be first in line to bid for it?

  16. Re:Sounds legit on SSD Latency, Error Rates May Spell Bleak Future · · Score: 1

    Except that is exactly what the researchers are saying WON'T happen.

  17. Re:Did AdBlock kill the free internet? on Will "Do Not Track" Kill the Free Internet? · · Score: 1

    I know all about ad blocking and I don't bother with it. When the ads are blocked, I don't see them. When the aren't blocked, I don't really see them either. Slashdot gave me the option to turn off advertisementing years ago as a reward for my contribution, I guess, but I haven't bothered to do it because I hardly notice them.

  18. Re:Sony: on Sony's New CEO To Look Beyond Hardware · · Score: 1

    This.

    As long a the tail of Sony's content business continues to wag the dog of their hardware business, they will find it difficult to deliver products people want.

  19. Re:Theory on Study: Online Dating Makes People "Picky" and "Unrealistic" · · Score: 1

    I thought he meant that his wife and soulmate met eachother on OkCupid.

  20. Re:omg on New Technique Promises Much Faster Hard Drive Write Speeds · · Score: 1

    No, the data is not stored in a magnetic domain on an optical disk.

  21. Re:thanks.. dont have to get it now on Book Review: The Windup Girl · · Score: 1

    Every generation of scholars from the ancient Greeks to the present day has complained about people like you: children of privilege and promise whose intellectual laziness signals their parents' failure and their culture's fall. Happily, those old geezers have all been full of shit... at least up until the last 10-15 years or so. Now, their lamentations ring loudly in our ears.

    Nothing's changed except you have become one of the geezers.

  22. Re:The ocean frontier - not on Remembering Sealab · · Score: 1

    The problem with Apollo 1 was that they simulated 3psi of pure oxygen overpressure in space by using 18psi of pure oxygen in the capsule while it was at sea-level. At 18psi of pure oxygen almost guaranteed an uncontrolled, exothermic oxidation reaction (i.e. fire). If the engineers involved had spent more time with the engineers working on Sealab, they wouldn't have made such an elementary mistake.

  23. Re:haha on Google In Battle With Its Own Lawyers · · Score: 2

    If only they knew of a quick and easy way to do a search like that.

  24. Re:D-Wave sold a commercial Quantum computer in 20 on $100,000 Prize: Prove Quantum Computers Impossible · · Score: 3, Interesting

    People were already working on solid-state transistors in 1946. The main difficulty was growing pure enough crystals.

    Even without solid state transistors, computers would have continued to get more powerful and require less maintenance per tube as vacuum tubes improved (nothing like what was possible with solid-state transistors, of course). Remember, vacuum tubes themselves were only about 35 years old at that time--lots of improvement in size, power and reliabililty was possible, but work on them stopped when it became clear that transistors were so much better.

    In the case of quantum computers, there are lots of ideas floating around, but no one actually has any clear idea of what will be needed to maintain quantum coherence across a large number of bits. In fact, it is not yet clear that it is possible.

    The D-Wave computer uses quantum annealing which does not require coherence across a large number of bits, but which is also a LOT less useful than one that does.

  25. Re:Sorry, what? on $100,000 Prize: Prove Quantum Computers Impossible · · Score: 2

    Unless a theoretical and fundamental proof can be made that quantum computing is impossible, there's no reason to say that it is, and I have serious doubts such a proof can be made considering what has been accomplished thus far. Current limitations are engineering issues, but nothing fundamental is stopping a useful and practical quantum computer from existing.

    I think the whole area of what causes quantum behavior to disappear as systems scale up to macroscopic size is not well understood at all. A fundamental proof that large-scale quantum computing is not possible would be monumental in improving our understanding this area.