The dot-com bubble days of "we'll do it just because we can" are over; these days, (most) companies will only do things if they reasonably expect to make money with it.
I wouldn't try pushing Google into a pedictable little corporate box. If they think they've got a reason to do it, they'll do it and the bean counters can go pound sand.
There is more danger that those potential violations will be litigated.
Anything that's a problem for Linux is a problem for proprietary software. Just because you can't see the code doesn't mean there isn't an issue there.
I've heard so many X is going to kill Linux bs stories it gets so lame after a while. This isn't going to kill Linux, nothing is going to kill it. You might as well be trying to stop the wind.
What I really want is a small plane I can program to take me anywhere. Self-piloted aircraft with ground monitoring and emergency manual override. If it got in a pinch the ground crew could take over and if it was something really major, then go manual.
Fit them with one of those parachute safety devices so you could land it safely if you ever had to push the big red button. A properly constructed composite craft should be able to float quite securely provided it doesn't auger in at 300 knots.
I figure they could fly higher than normal jet liners to keep them out of the traffic pattern and have their own airports to land and take off, also to keep them away from big cities and commercial traffic.
It would just be such a neat way to travel. Program your plane and flight path, snooze, watch movies, play video games and wake up where ever you wanted to go the next day. How cool would that be?
Raises an interesting question. I'm wondering if you could create a flight management system that could handle the roll out, flight to a destination and successfully land with either minimal help from a human pilot or possibly none at all?
Seems as if most of that technology already exists. Auto land has been around for quite a while, there are even model aircraft that can fly course, altitude and GPS waypoint profiles. What's keeping us from putting it all together?
Seems like the only time a modern aircraft needs help from a human is if there's a problem.
Right. Just because your winter insolation values are low doesn't mean you can't use solar, it just means you'll have to spend more on your array than someone in sunny New Mexico or Arizona. And you'll need more batteries to get you through the cloudy days.
So in northern climates or overcast areas then you look at either building a really BIG array that costs many thousands of $$$ or supplement with wind turbines (much cheaper cost/watt). Even then in the winter you may need the assistance of a gasoline or diesel generator (which is heresy to suggest in some circles). Unless you're one of those really lucky people with a spring, stream or falling water that produces enough head for microhydro, in which case you'll be selling power to the neighbors.
If that article is accurate and they can deliver production systems at a dollar a watt, then happy power days are here, my friends. For about...10-15 grand, depending on where you live, you could cut your power bill to zero or near zero. For a little more the average house could bid their local power company a fond farewell. Take your electrons and shovel them!
The real interesting question will be how will the local governments and power utilities react to the sudden loss of revenue when people start dumping them? I could see protectionist regulations (all your electrons belong to us), use taxes on solar systems or very large increases on those remaining tied to the grid. Sooner or later we would reach a new production equilibrium but the infrastructure transition is going to be ugly. Lot of utilities have come to believe they have a right to exist and local government would have to replace the revenue. If these new $1/watt systems landed suddenly, you would see a lot of people cutting the cord. The rest of the technology for the home power cycle is already there.
It's true. MSFT benefits from the patent system in its present form. They can afford to pay millions in these types of cases which gives them the ability to build walls around certain market segments. And with their massive patent portfolio they can set themselves up as the giant toll booth on the road to new business models.
A few million in a case like this is chump change.
...but would Intel really go to such lengths to create a "distraction"?
Probably not and I can see how you could read it that way. Another meaning might also be that Intel released a tiny fraction of what's really needed and left all the heavy lifting to the community. While AMD is taking a more cooperative approach. That's the way it came across to me. From Intel's perspective I really doubt it's any attempt to create a community distraction, it's more likely they think they have bigger fish to fry. IMHO they're just giving AMD another opportunity to kick their ass.
It'll be interesting to see if manufacturers ever team up to create lines of Linux-friendly hardware for the desktop and laptop market. When I build my boxes I'd certainly pick from that list. Apple has demonstrated the economic viability of a hardware nitch market.
Oh, I see... Security means less privacy, according to some, uh?
I remember in the days after 9-11 around here they had this town hall meeting so people could talk about their fears. There was this lady, she had a couple kids, and she was blubbering about who was going to protect them? Another guy stood up and said he'd be happy to give up all his privacy if it would help and people appluaded that remark.
Those people make me sick. What made America great wasn't some sniveling pussy bawling about who was going to protect them. Absolutely disgusting. Instead of looking to the government to protect us in a free society you look to the government to provide the tools to protect yourself.
If we hadn't spent decades conditioning people to just cooperate with terrorists and criminals they wouldn't have had a snowballs chance in a sunny July day in downtown Dallas, Texas of taking over an airliner with just five people.
We're no longer the country we started out to be and we don't deserve the freedom that most college students today would trade for an iPod.
I ran MSFT anti-virus on one of my 2000 boxes with FireFox at the customer site. Zippo.
MSFT does enough for us to be honestly incensed about that there's no need to make stuff up. Although it's a testament to the character of the company that something like this would come as no surprise to anyone were it real.
Many in the tech world despise MSFT, their business practices and software. And for good reason. And MSFT has a peculiar talent for being near total jerkwads collectively. That's what happens when bean counters get ahold of a tech company.
If you don't like the price of a drug, don't buy it.
That's simplistic to the point of being retarded. If it's a life saving drug what happens to your mindless little Republican dogma then? The issue is many people, older people in particular, feel like they're being held hostage by drug costs. And their very reasonable question is how can the drug companies sell these drugs overseas at much lower prices and still make a profit?
The answer is because many foreign governments would not hesitiate to bust a drug company patent and make the drug themselves if the drug companies tried putting the screws to their people like we get it here. So they live with less money from overseas sales.
The American public is getting raped on drug prices. Protectionist behavior from an "open market" administration because a big chunk of of those business expenses are the dollars going right into the pockets your elected officials.
The people on these lists need to start filing class action lawsuits against these companies.
The great Republican defenders of the people just made it much more difficult to file a class action. It'll go to federal court and get dismissed quietly a few months down the road.
Now they have to make up stuff no one was really suggesting in the first place in order to come to MSFT's rescue. No one was suggesting they should update an emulator, merely allow people to continue to update legally purchased MSFT software running under an emulator. But it turns out MSFT is deliberately targeting Wine users, which will accomplish little except to inspire the Wine developers to even greater effort.
If MSFT defenders weren't so pathetic it would be funny. Actually, it's kinda funny anyway.
Good move, guys. Keep up the good work. Every time you squeeze people for more revenue more of them jump ship to Linux. The more leaving Windows, the more of a market for Linux software. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Moves like this only accelerate the vicious circle. Marvelous! Thank you, Redmond! Wow, when was the last time I said that?
And we have years and years of entertainment watching MSFT's fall from the peak market dominance. Like watching that one video of an extreme skier who lost it and rolled down the mountain...seemingly forever...unable to stop the fall and it was just one agonizing tumble after another. The only difference is you felt sorry for the skier, sort of. No pity for MSFT. Wo-ho!
This comes after studies revealing that massive amounts of TV shows are beign illegaly downloaded from the internet and the regulators want a way to stop these shows being pirated and copied.
Well, certainly don't start thinking about ways to co-op those technologies and make them work for you. No, don't do that! Try to regulate the technologies you don't like away, that way you don't have to think outside your comfortable little corporate box. You're obviously not donating enough to the US Chamber of Commerce. Get that check book out and solve this problem the old fashioned way: Go buy yourself some sympathetic legislators.
I'm always amazed when Bush supporters act like they're part of some noble cause, some grand struggle that takes them down the road less traveled.
Regardless of his motives you can let the results speak for themselves. We've spent 300 billion on a war they told us would cost 50 billion at the most, supposedly for WMD's but there weren't any. And we're still sinking 4 billion a month into that hole with no end in sight. The No Child Left Behind act was based on the Houston Miracle, which later turned out to be faked data. Since Bush took office we've seen our government go into massive debt, seen more American jobs shipped overseas than any other time in the history of the country, we've watched our personal liberties and freedoms disappear and watched our relationship with foreign allies and our position in the world deteriorate.
For those who claim the mantel of Christianity this administration certainly has no love of the truth. They lie because they're being true to their character when they do so.
Perhaps it's you who should think about re-examining your committment to the truth.
I've been toying with the idea of starting a Free To Air satellite TV channel. FTA is growing very quickly and there might be enough of a market out there to make it work.
I've got the connections to get the content but I have no idea how to go about getting the uplink equipment and the sat channel.
Now if a company like TIVO got behind that idea, I'm guessing they could develop a market for their product via the back door route of becoming a content provider. Sort of the opposite of what DirecTV did with their DVR's.
I think there's a lot of potential for FTA. Think about how ESPN got started. They started with off the wall sports no one else wanted to carry. Now that ESPN is main stream they don't carry the oddball sports anymore. But FTA could.
I don't know, seems like it's worth a shot. Any satellite wizards out there know anything about uplinking content and how to get a sat channel?
I think you could say that's the defacto situation now. We're only a few steps from having it officially sanctioned.
Unless you have millions of dollars your chances of influencing legislation are exactly zero. If you do have millions your chances of being able to purchase favorable legislation are extremely good.
When you're under the rule of the highest bidder, you live in a fascist state. We're there. I think we've about "protect shareholder interest" ourselves to death.
What happened to the old days when the customer was king and great customer service was the way to do business.
The same thing that happened to the days when politicians who sold out to big business would get thrown out in shame. And the days when people would be out rioting in the streets and staging labor walk outs over some bastard piece of legislation like the Patriot Act. And the days if an employer tried to tell people what they could and couldn't do on their own time it would be met with a giant sucking sound as employees headed out the door and customers left with them in support.
We've gone nutless. And the Republican administration which bubba seems to like so much is going to keep sticking it to us in defference to big business because we've collectively lost our nads and no one respects a chump, especially a stupid one.
One of the interesting facts largely lost to history is that George Washington was someone who had real stones. Some of it was luck, no doubt. But he wasn't just some puss in a powdered wig, he was the real deal. If the father of our country was alive today I'm sure he'd be asking himself who these gutless retards are who took over his country.
It's my opinion the extension of the file doesn't make a bit of difference. Virus writers could name it.xyz or even.vir. If they put instructions in the message that in order to see the topless pictures of Paris Hilton you first have to change the file extension, run the installation program, enter the secret password, hit okay > okay to install and ignore the firewall warning, there would still be a huge number of people who did it.
It just amazes me what works. If there really were topless pictures of Paris Hilton in the file you'd get hundreds of thousands of installs.
I just tried that URL but don't see any pop ups. I'm also running Firefox 1.0 on Xandros.
In the arms race between pop ups and browser, I'll put my money on the Firefox team. There's no way to win the pop up battle against open source. Against MSFT, certainly. They develop at the speed of glacier.
I'm guessing the first couple pop ups the Firefox developers see they'll be writing a fix.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't try pushing Google into a pedictable little corporate box. If they think they've got a reason to do it, they'll do it and the bean counters can go pound sand.
Anything that's a problem for Linux is a problem for proprietary software. Just because you can't see the code doesn't mean there isn't an issue there.
I've heard so many X is going to kill Linux bs stories it gets so lame after a while. This isn't going to kill Linux, nothing is going to kill it. You might as well be trying to stop the wind.
Fit them with one of those parachute safety devices so you could land it safely if you ever had to push the big red button. A properly constructed composite craft should be able to float quite securely provided it doesn't auger in at 300 knots.
I figure they could fly higher than normal jet liners to keep them out of the traffic pattern and have their own airports to land and take off, also to keep them away from big cities and commercial traffic.
It would just be such a neat way to travel. Program your plane and flight path, snooze, watch movies, play video games and wake up where ever you wanted to go the next day. How cool would that be?
Seems as if most of that technology already exists. Auto land has been around for quite a while, there are even model aircraft that can fly course, altitude and GPS waypoint profiles. What's keeping us from putting it all together?
Seems like the only time a modern aircraft needs help from a human is if there's a problem.
What you gotta decide is did I fire four RFID tags or five? See in all the excitement I kinda lost count.
So, do ya feel lucky...punk? Well, do ya?
So in northern climates or overcast areas then you look at either building a really BIG array that costs many thousands of $$$ or supplement with wind turbines (much cheaper cost/watt). Even then in the winter you may need the assistance of a gasoline or diesel generator (which is heresy to suggest in some circles). Unless you're one of those really lucky people with a spring, stream or falling water that produces enough head for microhydro, in which case you'll be selling power to the neighbors. If that article is accurate and they can deliver production systems at a dollar a watt, then happy power days are here, my friends. For about...10-15 grand, depending on where you live, you could cut your power bill to zero or near zero. For a little more the average house could bid their local power company a fond farewell. Take your electrons and shovel them!
The real interesting question will be how will the local governments and power utilities react to the sudden loss of revenue when people start dumping them? I could see protectionist regulations (all your electrons belong to us), use taxes on solar systems or very large increases on those remaining tied to the grid. Sooner or later we would reach a new production equilibrium but the infrastructure transition is going to be ugly. Lot of utilities have come to believe they have a right to exist and local government would have to replace the revenue. If these new $1/watt systems landed suddenly, you would see a lot of people cutting the cord. The rest of the technology for the home power cycle is already there.
Yee-ha.
A few million in a case like this is chump change.
Probably not and I can see how you could read it that way. Another meaning might also be that Intel released a tiny fraction of what's really needed and left all the heavy lifting to the community. While AMD is taking a more cooperative approach. That's the way it came across to me. From Intel's perspective I really doubt it's any attempt to create a community distraction, it's more likely they think they have bigger fish to fry. IMHO they're just giving AMD another opportunity to kick their ass.
It'll be interesting to see if manufacturers ever team up to create lines of Linux-friendly hardware for the desktop and laptop market. When I build my boxes I'd certainly pick from that list. Apple has demonstrated the economic viability of a hardware nitch market.
I remember in the days after 9-11 around here they had this town hall meeting so people could talk about their fears. There was this lady, she had a couple kids, and she was blubbering about who was going to protect them? Another guy stood up and said he'd be happy to give up all his privacy if it would help and people appluaded that remark.
Those people make me sick. What made America great wasn't some sniveling pussy bawling about who was going to protect them. Absolutely disgusting. Instead of looking to the government to protect us in a free society you look to the government to provide the tools to protect yourself.
If we hadn't spent decades conditioning people to just cooperate with terrorists and criminals they wouldn't have had a snowballs chance in a sunny July day in downtown Dallas, Texas of taking over an airliner with just five people.
We're no longer the country we started out to be and we don't deserve the freedom that most college students today would trade for an iPod.
Not sure I'd be tossing around the word "obsolete" too much if I were you.
MSFT does enough for us to be honestly incensed about that there's no need to make stuff up. Although it's a testament to the character of the company that something like this would come as no surprise to anyone were it real.
Many in the tech world despise MSFT, their business practices and software. And for good reason. And MSFT has a peculiar talent for being near total jerkwads collectively. That's what happens when bean counters get ahold of a tech company.
That's simplistic to the point of being retarded. If it's a life saving drug what happens to your mindless little Republican dogma then? The issue is many people, older people in particular, feel like they're being held hostage by drug costs. And their very reasonable question is how can the drug companies sell these drugs overseas at much lower prices and still make a profit?
The answer is because many foreign governments would not hesitiate to bust a drug company patent and make the drug themselves if the drug companies tried putting the screws to their people like we get it here. So they live with less money from overseas sales.
The American public is getting raped on drug prices. Protectionist behavior from an "open market" administration because a big chunk of of those business expenses are the dollars going right into the pockets your elected officials.
The great Republican defenders of the people just made it much more difficult to file a class action. It'll go to federal court and get dismissed quietly a few months down the road.
If MSFT defenders weren't so pathetic it would be funny. Actually, it's kinda funny anyway.
Moves like this only accelerate the vicious circle. Marvelous! Thank you, Redmond! Wow, when was the last time I said that?
And we have years and years of entertainment watching MSFT's fall from the peak market dominance. Like watching that one video of an extreme skier who lost it and rolled down the mountain...seemingly forever...unable to stop the fall and it was just one agonizing tumble after another. The only difference is you felt sorry for the skier, sort of. No pity for MSFT. Wo-ho!
Well, certainly don't start thinking about ways to co-op those technologies and make them work for you. No, don't do that! Try to regulate the technologies you don't like away, that way you don't have to think outside your comfortable little corporate box. You're obviously not donating enough to the US Chamber of Commerce. Get that check book out and solve this problem the old fashioned way: Go buy yourself some sympathetic legislators.
Regardless of his motives you can let the results speak for themselves. We've spent 300 billion on a war they told us would cost 50 billion at the most, supposedly for WMD's but there weren't any. And we're still sinking 4 billion a month into that hole with no end in sight. The No Child Left Behind act was based on the Houston Miracle, which later turned out to be faked data. Since Bush took office we've seen our government go into massive debt, seen more American jobs shipped overseas than any other time in the history of the country, we've watched our personal liberties and freedoms disappear and watched our relationship with foreign allies and our position in the world deteriorate.
For those who claim the mantel of Christianity this administration certainly has no love of the truth. They lie because they're being true to their character when they do so.
Perhaps it's you who should think about re-examining your committment to the truth.
HAHAHAHAHA!!!
Ah, darn. I guess that makes these futures I bought in turkey guts pretty useless.
I've got the connections to get the content but I have no idea how to go about getting the uplink equipment and the sat channel.
Now if a company like TIVO got behind that idea, I'm guessing they could develop a market for their product via the back door route of becoming a content provider. Sort of the opposite of what DirecTV did with their DVR's.
I think there's a lot of potential for FTA. Think about how ESPN got started. They started with off the wall sports no one else wanted to carry. Now that ESPN is main stream they don't carry the oddball sports anymore. But FTA could.
I don't know, seems like it's worth a shot. Any satellite wizards out there know anything about uplinking content and how to get a sat channel?
Pretty soon we're going to be pledging allegiance to our profit margin and shareholder interest instead of the flag.
I think you could say that's the defacto situation now. We're only a few steps from having it officially sanctioned.
Unless you have millions of dollars your chances of influencing legislation are exactly zero. If you do have millions your chances of being able to purchase favorable legislation are extremely good.
When you're under the rule of the highest bidder, you live in a fascist state. We're there. I think we've about "protect shareholder interest" ourselves to death.
The same thing that happened to the days when politicians who sold out to big business would get thrown out in shame. And the days when people would be out rioting in the streets and staging labor walk outs over some bastard piece of legislation like the Patriot Act. And the days if an employer tried to tell people what they could and couldn't do on their own time it would be met with a giant sucking sound as employees headed out the door and customers left with them in support.
We've gone nutless. And the Republican administration which bubba seems to like so much is going to keep sticking it to us in defference to big business because we've collectively lost our nads and no one respects a chump, especially a stupid one.
One of the interesting facts largely lost to history is that George Washington was someone who had real stones. Some of it was luck, no doubt. But he wasn't just some puss in a powdered wig, he was the real deal. If the father of our country was alive today I'm sure he'd be asking himself who these gutless retards are who took over his country.
It just amazes me what works. If there really were topless pictures of Paris Hilton in the file you'd get hundreds of thousands of installs.
In the arms race between pop ups and browser, I'll put my money on the Firefox team. There's no way to win the pop up battle against open source. Against MSFT, certainly. They develop at the speed of glacier.
I'm guessing the first couple pop ups the Firefox developers see they'll be writing a fix.