The big deal here is the embedded space, as mentioned in the last article. Opera has been making a lot of deals in the embedded markets and that is primarily what is driving their growth. Opera spotted a niche that FOSS browsers were not filling and that IE was not filling well. They worked hard on their browser to make it a good fit for small platforms and now that hard work is paying off.
Whether Opera is popular on PCs is entirely beside the point. Opera's public mind share may be in PCs, but it's market share is in embedded devices and that is what is driving their performance. It's also what makes it a good IPO candidate.
Opera's browser has gained popularity mostly in one area -- cellphones and PDA's. Although there has been growth in it's PC product sales, most revenue has been from licensing deals in the embedded space. Plenty of room for growth there.
Frankly, I'll keep my money in safer places....
Oh, you betcha. But it's not as off-the-wall as it seems at first glance.
Yeah, uh-huh. So who is this lucky dick anyway? From the "About Me" page, he's a regular working stiff from NYC who you can reach by email at thepill3@lycos.com. No name, as far as I can tell.
So, yeah, if you want to beleive a bunch of absolutely unverifiable crap from "thepill3@lycos.com", then yeah, I suppose it might be interesting. At least he provides lots of links to suppliers.
To follow this up, the Internet --and computing in general-- is truly a global phenomenon. It's true the original networks (ARPANet, DARPANet) were created and based in the U.S., but there are many technologies that are critical to the overall Interent that were developed overseas. One notable example, as pointed out by the parent) is the original HTTP draft protocols and implementations (CERN) that we now know as the World Wide Web. Another obvious example is Linux (Finland), the OS of choice for many of the servers that exist on the Internet, and which is used in some fashion by nearly every government in existance.
The idea that computing resources, especially the internet, should be under the control of government entities is really laughable. Furthermore, it simply can't be done, no matter the intentions or abilities of said government. For examples, look to China and the Great Red Firewall. Then there is the U.S.'s attempt to restrict exports of 128 bit encryption technologies - we all know how well that worked.
That all may be true, but even if IBM did acquire all of SCO's assets, there would still be no guarantee that IBM would release UNIX under an open source license. In fact, I'm having a hard time thinking of even one open source product that IBM has released. (Yes, I know they are selling Linux boxen, but that's not the same thing.)
I know that IBM has become something of a Linux poster boy in recent years, but let's face it: IBM is in this business for the money, not the karma. They would only release code under an OS license if they thought the idea held substantial value for the company.
On the other hand, we can be relatively certain that IBM would not be behaving as SCO is now. They would stand too much to lose, especially in customer confidence terms.
It's also an interesting way for a company to get some high quality code very quickly for relatively little money. You get *all* of the code, but only have to pay one developer a moderate cash prize. A few weeks more of polishing in the code shop and you could have a nice program for practically nothing.
Um... no. Current forms of electronic debt payment are still nominally backed by cash and can be traced to such. True electronic currency would likely suffer from much more widespread abuse and counterfeiting (if that term is still appropriate). Furthermore, if you can make one copy of an electronic dollar, you can make a million or a trillion of them. Counterfeiting cash is at least limited to the amount you can create with paper, which is bound to be far less.
There doesn't have to be a real correlation. People that want to buy his books, will. It's as simple as that. Releasing it for free over the internet doesn't change anything. Getting tons of free advertising in the press because of it doesn't hurt either.
Your own home is the last place to expect online privacy because every request is logged somewhere as having your IP address, and your IP address is logged by your ISP every time you go online. Cyber cafes are among the only places one can find privacy online. (Or, like another poster said, a laptop and someone else's unsecured wireless access point.)
Of course, the other path is that the PC is removed from the entertainment picture and consoles take over that role completely (woe be that day).
As consoles get more powerful and adopt more networking features, and as more people get HDTVs, console gaming will more and more equal the performance offered by PCs, and eventually surpass that. I can forsee a day when you will say "Gaming on a PC, why would you do that? Consoles are the way to go."
My general rule of thumb is that if it has a catchy acronym for a name, it should never become law. It seems to much like a political trojan. It's like some asshole was thinking "you know, we could ram this sucker right through all those hicks if we can just think up a cool enough name". So whenever I hear of a law or government program with a particularly clever acronym, I always cringe because even though I may not have heard the first thing about it, I'm already sure I don't want it.
BTW, using the x in a word like exchange as part of an acronym is standard practice going back a long time. It's part of what make good acronyms clever.
With all due respect, the U.S. has many, many more precincts than does Canada. Four hours is not a realistic time frame for hand counting ballots in the U.S. When you compare populations (US - 286 million, Canada - 31 million) [1] you see the difference in scale.
Good point about the error checking though, that is important.
Speed is the central issue. For right or wrong, a great many people want the voting results and they want them now. Computers can provide that. Counting ballots by hand cannot. Even counting paper ballots by computer can't provide the kind of speed these people want.
Personally, I'd be happy to wait a few days for ballot results but it looks to me the decision has been made. Better to fight for a proper implementation than to fight against any implementation at all. That fight is irrelevant at this point.
Voters are only accountable to themselves. It's the voting process that we want to be accountable, not the voters. That means no computerized voting without verifiable (eg: paper) records, and no online voting until the process can be perfected.
This issue has nothing to do with voter apathy, except as how voters' perception of security impacts that.
This the first time, unbelievably, that a state government has commissioned a thourough, independent security audit of electronic voting systems currently in use. They failed miserably. That fact will not be taken lightly, so perhaps this means that we may finally see some concrete steps taken to secure our voting process. That is news.
Just like it was with Mozilla, Firebird won't be ready for mass consumption untill it reaches 1.0. That's why there is a 1.0. I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't use it now, just that when you do you should take it's bugs and incompleteness with a grain of salt. Most of those problems will be fixed by 1.0. If it bothers you too badly, then maybe you should consider just using Mozilla for now.
Many companies will see a lot of value in having a private IM system that doesn't break the bank. It's not nice to know that your proprietary information is flowing in plain text through some other company's IM server. An open source client capable of secure connections with your IM server provides a lot of peace of mind.
indeed. I use ftp://username@domain.xxx for quick and easy file transfers inside my network. Works a treat in Windows Explorer, and I don't have to install an actual ftp program on my family's computers.
Spammers who use highjacked machines do have a vested interest in the whole OSS/Proprietary thing. (As opposed to the IBM/SCO debacle.) All of their zombies run Windows and they like it that way. It seem clear to me that spammers absolutely do not want Linux to succeed in the consumer market because that would directly challenge their ability to remain hidden behind compromised Windows machines.
We have motive, ability, and opportunity, and it points a clear path to the spammers.
Heh, semantics. I prefer to think that they weighed my advice and decided to go with it. True, my opinion does carry more weight with them than others might, but it's not as though I forced them into it. There was no ultimatum and I would not force it on them against their will simply to save me a few headaches. You know, respect for others and all that.
Of course, having me around to set it up with reasonable options like turning on pop-up blocking and enabling text resizing with the mouse wheel probably helped them to accept the idea.
Preferably, web standards should be free. The internet is all about exchanging information. Anything that presents a barrier to that should not be tolerated. IMHO, they should submit their format to the W3C for consideration as a published recommendation.
GPL'd or not, web standards should always be free.
What's going to happen if MS does create some new file format? I wouldn't put it past them.
They are. It's supposed to be an XML format, but whether it will be any easier to parse than the current binary format is anybody's guess. Personally, I'm guessing that it will be, if only because it will have to be in plain text. But hey, what do I know? I could be wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
The big deal here is the embedded space, as mentioned in the last article. Opera has been making a lot of deals in the embedded markets and that is primarily what is driving their growth. Opera spotted a niche that FOSS browsers were not filling and that IE was not filling well. They worked hard on their browser to make it a good fit for small platforms and now that hard work is paying off.
Whether Opera is popular on PCs is entirely beside the point. Opera's public mind share may be in PCs, but it's market share is in embedded devices and that is what is driving their performance. It's also what makes it a good IPO candidate.
Opera's browser has gained popularity mostly in one area -- cellphones and PDA's. Although there has been growth in it's PC product sales, most revenue has been from licensing deals in the embedded space. Plenty of room for growth there.
Frankly, I'll keep my money in safer places....
Oh, you betcha. But it's not as off-the-wall as it seems at first glance.
Yes but, who cares?
yeah, ok, but who cares about them?
Color me corrected. I guess I forgot my memory cap yesterday.
Yeah, uh-huh. So who is this lucky dick anyway? From the "About Me" page, he's a regular working stiff from NYC who you can reach by email at thepill3@lycos.com. No name, as far as I can tell.
So, yeah, if you want to beleive a bunch of absolutely unverifiable crap from "thepill3@lycos.com", then yeah, I suppose it might be interesting. At least he provides lots of links to suppliers.
To follow this up, the Internet --and computing in general-- is truly a global phenomenon. It's true the original networks (ARPANet, DARPANet) were created and based in the U.S., but there are many technologies that are critical to the overall Interent that were developed overseas. One notable example, as pointed out by the parent) is the original HTTP draft protocols and implementations (CERN) that we now know as the World Wide Web. Another obvious example is Linux (Finland), the OS of choice for many of the servers that exist on the Internet, and which is used in some fashion by nearly every government in existance.
The idea that computing resources, especially the internet, should be under the control of government entities is really laughable. Furthermore, it simply can't be done, no matter the intentions or abilities of said government. For examples, look to China and the Great Red Firewall. Then there is the U.S.'s attempt to restrict exports of 128 bit encryption technologies - we all know how well that worked.
That all may be true, but even if IBM did acquire all of SCO's assets, there would still be no guarantee that IBM would release UNIX under an open source license. In fact, I'm having a hard time thinking of even one open source product that IBM has released. (Yes, I know they are selling Linux boxen, but that's not the same thing.)
I know that IBM has become something of a Linux poster boy in recent years, but let's face it: IBM is in this business for the money, not the karma. They would only release code under an OS license if they thought the idea held substantial value for the company.
On the other hand, we can be relatively certain that IBM would not be behaving as SCO is now. They would stand too much to lose, especially in customer confidence terms.
It's also an interesting way for a company to get some high quality code very quickly for relatively little money. You get *all* of the code, but only have to pay one developer a moderate cash prize. A few weeks more of polishing in the code shop and you could have a nice program for practically nothing.
Um... no. Current forms of electronic debt payment are still nominally backed by cash and can be traced to such. True electronic currency would likely suffer from much more widespread abuse and counterfeiting (if that term is still appropriate). Furthermore, if you can make one copy of an electronic dollar, you can make a million or a trillion of them. Counterfeiting cash is at least limited to the amount you can create with paper, which is bound to be far less.
There doesn't have to be a real correlation. People that want to buy his books, will. It's as simple as that. Releasing it for free over the internet doesn't change anything. Getting tons of free advertising in the press because of it doesn't hurt either.
Your own home is the last place to expect online privacy because every request is logged somewhere as having your IP address, and your IP address is logged by your ISP every time you go online. Cyber cafes are among the only places one can find privacy online. (Or, like another poster said, a laptop and someone else's unsecured wireless access point.)
Of course, the other path is that the PC is removed from the entertainment picture and consoles take over that role completely (woe be that day).
As consoles get more powerful and adopt more networking features, and as more people get HDTVs, console gaming will more and more equal the performance offered by PCs, and eventually surpass that. I can forsee a day when you will say "Gaming on a PC, why would you do that? Consoles are the way to go."
My general rule of thumb is that if it has a catchy acronym for a name, it should never become law. It seems to much like a political trojan. It's like some asshole was thinking "you know, we could ram this sucker right through all those hicks if we can just think up a cool enough name". So whenever I hear of a law or government program with a particularly clever acronym, I always cringe because even though I may not have heard the first thing about it, I'm already sure I don't want it.
BTW, using the x in a word like exchange as part of an acronym is standard practice going back a long time. It's part of what make good acronyms clever.
With all due respect, the U.S. has many, many more precincts than does Canada. Four hours is not a realistic time frame for hand counting ballots in the U.S. When you compare populations (US - 286 million, Canada - 31 million) [1] you see the difference in scale.
0 303e.htm
Good point about the error checking though, that is important.
[1] http://www.gov.on.ca/FIN/english/demographics/dtr
yeah.
Of course one wonders why they would install WinXP on an ATM machine without a firewall in the first place.
Sig. Nuff said.
Speed is the central issue. For right or wrong, a great many people want the voting results and they want them now. Computers can provide that. Counting ballots by hand cannot. Even counting paper ballots by computer can't provide the kind of speed these people want.
Personally, I'd be happy to wait a few days for ballot results but it looks to me the decision has been made. Better to fight for a proper implementation than to fight against any implementation at all. That fight is irrelevant at this point.
Voters are only accountable to themselves. It's the voting process that we want to be accountable, not the voters. That means no computerized voting without verifiable (eg: paper) records, and no online voting until the process can be perfected.
This issue has nothing to do with voter apathy, except as how voters' perception of security impacts that.
This the first time, unbelievably, that a state government has commissioned a thourough, independent security audit of electronic voting systems currently in use. They failed miserably. That fact will not be taken lightly, so perhaps this means that we may finally see some concrete steps taken to secure our voting process. That is news.
Just like it was with Mozilla, Firebird won't be ready for mass consumption untill it reaches 1.0. That's why there is a 1.0. I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't use it now, just that when you do you should take it's bugs and incompleteness with a grain of salt. Most of those problems will be fixed by 1.0. If it bothers you too badly, then maybe you should consider just using Mozilla for now.
Many companies will see a lot of value in having a private IM system that doesn't break the bank. It's not nice to know that your proprietary information is flowing in plain text through some other company's IM server. An open source client capable of secure connections with your IM server provides a lot of peace of mind.
indeed. I use ftp://username@domain.xxx for quick and easy file transfers inside my network. Works a treat in Windows Explorer, and I don't have to install an actual ftp program on my family's computers.
Spammers who use highjacked machines do have a vested interest in the whole OSS/Proprietary thing. (As opposed to the IBM/SCO debacle.) All of their zombies run Windows and they like it that way. It seem clear to me that spammers absolutely do not want Linux to succeed in the consumer market because that would directly challenge their ability to remain hidden behind compromised Windows machines.
We have motive, ability, and opportunity, and it points a clear path to the spammers.
Heh, semantics. I prefer to think that they weighed my advice and decided to go with it. True, my opinion does carry more weight with them than others might, but it's not as though I forced them into it. There was no ultimatum and I would not force it on them against their will simply to save me a few headaches. You know, respect for others and all that.
Of course, having me around to set it up with reasonable options like turning on pop-up blocking and enabling text resizing with the mouse wheel probably helped them to accept the idea.
Preferably, web standards should be free. The internet is all about exchanging information. Anything that presents a barrier to that should not be tolerated. IMHO, they should submit their format to the W3C for consideration as a published recommendation.
GPL'd or not, web standards should always be free.
What's going to happen if MS does create some new file format? I wouldn't put it past them.
They are. It's supposed to be an XML format, but whether it will be any easier to parse than the current binary format is anybody's guess. Personally, I'm guessing that it will be, if only because it will have to be in plain text. But hey, what do I know? I could be wrong.