4) Monetary cost: Solar is expensive. No question. But isn't it worth it?
Well, that depends entirely on what you're comparing it against, doesn't it? If you're comparing it against another relatively clean power source (e.g., nuclear), then it simply won't be worth it if it's more expensive. But see below.
5) Storage: Unlikely to be an issue. Aside from specialized case (read: nutcakes living off the grid or places where power isn't essential), solar is a peaking power resource that's used in conjunction with conventional generation technologies. At night? Pull your power from the grid. During the day? Send power back onto the grid (a.k.a. net metering). Much more efficient than trying to generate the power and store it.
If solar is less expensive than the available clean conventional sources then this might make sense. Otherwise, why bother? It's only in situations where you're already near existing daytime conventional capacity and the deployment of solar is much faster/cheaper in the short term than deployment of another clean conventional source that it might make sense. But if solar is expensive and/or time-consuming to deploy (relative to deploying another clean conventional source) then it simply doesn't make sense to use it even if it's only for dealing with peak load.
The bottom line is that solar, like any other power generating mechanism, has to be able to stand on its own against other clean power sources before it can succeed. I'm not convinced it's at that point yet. The closest thing would be cheap roof tile solar collectors that are tied into the grid. Make the solar panels about as cheap as current roof tiling and you'll go far. But that's not possible right now as far as I know.
Um no. In a free market, the alternatives look better. In a non-free market, the alternatives are outlawed.
And what makes you think the market in the U.S. is a "free market"?
The people who are pushing for DRM are precisely the people who have the greatest amount of control over the U.S. government, because they control what gets advertised about the candidates during election time. Frankly, I'm a little surprised DRM hardware of the kind I described hasn't already been mandated, but I suspect that's probably because the people in control know that fascism has to be implemented slowly for it to work. That's the lesson I think they learned from the early to mid 20th century.
Its sole purpose is to keep you from using the media you would otherwise have rightful access to in any way other than what the copyright holder explicitly wants.
In short, its sole purpose is, ultimately, to make you pay every time you make use of the media, and to control the flow of information.
DRM is how the media megacorporations intend to rein in the internet. For instance, you can't prove that the media broadcast a story when the story can't be recorded.
DRM is how the big corporations intend to remove your right to read.
This is just the first shot across the bow. It's going to get worse. A lot worse. Read all you can about "trusted computing" to see where this is going. All they have to do is to remove your ability to boot an unsigned bootloader, and the game is over (with you as the loser).
If you think this is paranoid ranting, well, so did people who thought habeus corpus would never be removed. That doesn't make what I say right, but since the same people are ultimately involved, you shouldn't dismiss the above as paranoid ranting on the basis of incredulity alone.
Nothing is "as simple as that". It's the TCO that matters, which takes into account the cost of staffing etc. I use Linux for my production and development platforms, exclusively, but I'm not under any illusions that it's "free". It's "free as in beer", as in I owe the community a round if I get mine.
The TCO is what matters to the customer. It's not what matters to the vendor. It's the decision of the vendor that we're talking about here. The costs to the vendor are what determine what products the vendor offers and, ultimately, the price at which the vendor offers them.
The vendor is concerned about the acquisition cost primarily, and any difference in support costs that he must bear. Anything else is the customer's problem, and only the customer's problem.
So the fact that the acquisition cost of Linux is free is highly relevant here, because the acquisition cost is, in this case, a significant portion of the total cost of the software to the vendor, and in the case of windows, it's also a very significant portion of the total cost of the entire product to the vendor. In fact, the cost of Windows in India may be so high as to exceed the cost of the computer itself. Otherwise the vendor's comment about the high price of Windows would be irrelevant.
The situation in the U.S. is different. The largest vendors get a very deep discount for selling windows, enough so that the cost of Windows to them is a tiny fraction of the cost of the overall product. That is apparently not the case for the Indian vendors, and that is why the relative acquisition costs of Windows versus Linux is so relevant to the Indian market.
Customers who make use of their ISPs email have a significant disincentive to switch ISPs: their email address will change. This is similar to the situation most cellphone customers used to be in before legislation required cellphone providers to implement number portability.
So the cost the ISP will have to consider isn't just the cost of Google mail versus the cost of hosting their own, they'll also have to consider the effect going with Google mail will have on their customer retention rates. ISPs that don't suck will have less of a problem with that.
The ISP can minimize that issue by insisting that the user's email address remain username@ispname.net (or whatever). In other words, Google becomes the MX for ispname.net, and users who use the email service would log in by using their email address as opposed to just their username.
I can see it going either way, but I expect ultimately that Google will offer the service tied to the ISP's domain name, and expect that most ISPs will select that in order to retain the lock-in effect that ISP-specific email has on the customer base. I don't see any advantage to Google of providing their standard Google mail service to ISPs at a lower price than the one tied to the ISP's domain name.
Except Linux isn't free, when you include support costs and the reality of dealing with the leading distros.
Who's talking about support costs here? We're talking about the price the vendor can offer the product for. The cost of support will be (as it is for Windows vendors) borne by the vendor, and so it will be included in the cost of product. The price to the vendor of the product itself is an additional cost. Windows isn't free after you remove the support costs, while Linux is. It's as simple as that.
And because we're talking about vendors here, who determine what hardware they sell, the problem of drivers isn't an issue: the vendor can select hardware that is compatible with the Linux distribution they choose. The successful ones would do so anyway in order to minimize their support costs (and thus make them more competitive).
I'll give you a hint: it starts in m, and ends in onopoly. If they were to install Linux, they'd face the same compatibility issues as if they were in the US.
It all depends on who they need interoperability with.
In the U.S., most businesses that run Microsoft do so after having paid for it. Microsoft maintains its monopoly largely through inertia. The market is already well-established and isn't growing much, so compatibility with everyone else becomes the primary reason for choosing one piece of software over another. In the U.S., the compatibility requirements are already set and basically aren't going to change much. People run pirated copies in the U.S. in order to maintain that compatibility.
But India is more like an emerging market than an established one. That means there's a lot of room for growth, and thus a lot of room for choice. The compatibility requirements aren't as firmly set as they are in the U.S. market because the ratio of existing players to future players is much smaller.
The end result is that in India, if vendors like the one in the article really did sell Windows instead of giving it away and also offered Linux as the free alternative, the market would almost certainly choose Linux over Windows, and "compatibility" would wind up meaning compatibility with Linux, not with Windows, because as the vendor noted in the article, Windows is simply too expensive for most people to afford over there. In other words, the price of compatibility with the U.S. market would be too high for the Indian market to bear, and the Indian market would thus go its separate way.
And Microsoft would, as a result, lose an entire market. If the majority of people in India ran Linux because the price of Windows is too high, new players in the market would at that point have no particular reason to choose Windows at that point even if it were made free, because the primary compelling reason people run Windows is for compatibility with others in the market (which includes support and other benefits of compatibility). In this scenario, Linux would have the primary compatibility/support edge as well as the price edge, so Windows would be completely uncompetitive in the market.
That scenario is the one that Microsoft fears the most. Very few of Microsoft's products can win on their merits, so the dominance of Windows and the compatibility requirements of the market are really the only things keeping Microsoft in their dominant position. A market in which Windows isn't the dominant operating system is a market that Microsoft will probably do poorly in.
The bottom line is that for the Indian market, Linux is a much stronger contender than it is in the U.S. market, and it's only because of the ability (if not legality) of vendors such as the one in the article to give away Windows that Windows can do well in that market.
Free discussion of ideas is an anathema to both big business and governments. Big business can't tolerate it because it wants to create artificial scarcity in order to maximize profits. Governments can't tolerate it because it makes it easier for people to see through the distortions and lies that governments use to manipulate and control the people.
The internet is the biggest threat to both. When the internet was just a curiosity and required some technical skill to make use of, it posed no real threat to business and government. Now that the average person can easily get onto it, that situation has changed.
And so, governments are increasingly censoring the internet. This is no surprise. Most governments (including that of the "land of the free") have the interests of the people somewhere close to the bottom of the list.
Additionally, governments are figuring out that they can basically do whatever they want without any significant repercussions, as long as they control the military and the law enforcement agencies. The people can't do squat when the government controls all the guns. Control of the internet represents control of information, which ultimately means control over the opinions and actions of the people. And control of the people is very high on the list of the interests of government, because the people in control of government tend to be power-hungry sociopaths (who else has as much interest in acquiring power as they do, and thus as much interest in obtaining positions of power?).
The move towards oppressive, fascist government is a worldwide trend, one which seems to be unstoppable. That's what happens when power-hungry sociopaths who want total control over the population also happen to control all the guns. It's such a shame that a worldwide police state is a stable form of government that's capable of lasting thousands of years (since police states require outside pressure to topple them, and when all the world's a police state, there is no outside).
Yep. That's why the new spelling of "lose" in the dictionary should be "loose". Which, I guess, means the new spelling of "loose" in the dictionary should be "lose".
I guess I'll just have to remember that when I loose my keys. With any luck, the door lock will be lose and I'll be able to get in. Of course, only loosers don't have a spare set of keys somewhere.
Bah. I think I'll stick with the traditional spellings.
I refuse to use debit cards at all (as opposed to an ATM card or a credit card), because they draw directly from your account and they don't require an independent piece of verification (like a PIN) to use.
But this? This is even worse. At least a debit card can be cancelled in the event it's stolen, even though by then it may be too late. How are you going to cancel your driver's license when the DMV is only open Monday through Friday 8-5?
It's even worse if it makes use of the RFID chip that's embedded in some driver's licenses these days.
No way in hell will I ever opt in for something like this.
And that's a disadvantage of plugins: they're complex bits of code that run in the same memory space as firefox and have the ability to screw it up arbitrarily badly, but that aren't part of the main code base, so aren't usually reviewable or fixable by Firefox developers.
And this leads me to my biggest pet peeve about the Gecko-based browsers: the plugin API provides no separation at all between the browser and the plugin. I'm sorry, but that's crap.
The plugin API should provide a nice, thick wall between plugins and the browser. A plugin should never be able to take down the browser (extensions are an entirely different thing, of course). On a Unix system, the plugin should be running in a completely separate process, and talk to the browser via a socket or something.
But the current architecture is a real piece of shit, and is the most annoying thing about Gecko-based browsers.
Unfortuneately in the post 11/9/2001 world, our leaders seem to have forgotten that lesson, and instead are placing ever more draconaian and stupid "security meausures" in place to protect us from a vague threat that's extremely unlikely to affect 99% of the population even if the worst occoured. This is all the more puzzling as the provos (and now the dissidents) made Al Quiada look like amaturs.
Why is it puzzling? They're not implementing all those draconian measures to protect you, they're doing it to secure and exercise their power.
The bottom line is that governments are now figuring out that they can basically do whatever the hell they want and there isn't a damned thing the population at large can do to stop them as long as they control the military and the law enforcement agencies. And they do.
To them, terrorists are both a nuisance and an opportunity. But they are most definitely not a threat.
What makes you think doing that will have any effect at all? Here's a hint: unless your letter to your congressman includes a check for several tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum, your message will be tossed into the trash like all the rest.
That said, it probably doesn't hurt to at least try it, since it's relatively simple and inexpensive. All I'm saying is you shouldn't expect it to actually have any effect.
If you don't want to repeat the years after the dot-com bust, you need to fax or write (preferrably not email) your representatives in Congress RIGHT NOW. That means this week. Otherwise, there's a very good chance that this limit will change upwards, as there's a lot of money driving the issue.
What makes you think doing that will have any effect at all? Here's a hint: unless your letter to your congressman includes a check for several tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum, your message will be tossed into the trash like all the rest.
Your congressman doesn't listen to you. He listens to the people who made his election possible: the people who run the big corporations. You don't matter because it's highly likely (meaning: this applies to the average voter) that your opinions are heavily dependent on the message the mass media broadcasts about the candidates, and that message is determined solely by corporate bribes and under the table dealings that you can't possibly have any influence over.
Go on and continue to live in your fantasy world where The People have power over their elected "representatives". Just don't be surprised when you wake up to find that everything you believe in has been a lie.
Why should highly paid tech workers feel they should have protection yet are willing to let factory workers get screwed so that they can enjoy low-cost products?
Why should extremely highly paid CEOs feel they and upper management should have "protection" and yet are willing to let the lower ranks get screwed just so they can enjoy millions in bonuses?
I say if the highest-paid members of the corporation are so fucking gung-ho about "saving money" by hiring overseas talent, then they should also be replaced by cheap overseas talent.
If you don't agree with that, then you're nothing but a pathetic hypocrite.
That's great, except that their new cash cow is trucks. I don't think Tundras are included in that prediction.
If the price of gas keeps going up the way it has been, that'll quickly change. Yeah, there are some times when nothing but a truck will do the job, but there's a difference between actually needing a truck for a particular job and using one in your commute to work every day in order to follow the herd. Eventually practicality will win out over herd mentality once the price of being a lemming gets too high.
Right now most trucks are sold to people for reasons having nothing to do with what they need. That won't be the case once it becomes too expensive to own such vehicles.
While the card dazzles with 320 stream processors, a 512-bit memory bus, and oodles of memory bandwidth, its performance and power consumption seem disappointing in the face of Nvidia's six-month-old GeForce 8800 graphics cards.
The hardware probably screams. But ATI has a reputation for really shitty drivers. Without solid, fast, high-quality drivers, fast hardware doesn't matter as much.
NVidia has typically produced fast drivers. They're not open-source, but they're at least good.
If ATI can't get its shit together and write some decent drivers, the only reasonable option for them would be to open-source their 3D drivers so that the community can fix them properly. And I expect the community would do just that, because a lot of developers are also avid PC gamers, so they have a personal stake in it.
It'll be interesting to see where this heads, given the statements made by ATI about open-sourcing their drivers, but I'm not going to hold my breath over it. For now, it's NVidia for my gaming rigs. That'll change as soon as ATI actually open-sources their full 3D drivers.
Notice how it's taken 5 years for the SCO case to get where it is?
Now take that and increase it manyfold. Unlike SCO, Microsoft has lawyers who really do know what they're doing, on top of the financial ability to initiate many independent suits and literally them going for centuries if that were possible.
Worse, unlike SCO, Microsoft has a direct line to the government itself. In essence, as one of the biggest megacorps, Microsoft exerts a great deal of direct control over the government.
So if you think SCO's been making trouble for us, you haven't seen anything.
I fear we won't live long enough to see the end of this.:-(
But the opportunity is unparalleled -- total immersion into Silicon Valley start-up culture, advice from Graham and a fast track to the top angel investors and venture-capital funds.
Make no mistake: if you take VC funds, they, not you, get into the driver's seat. And it means that their priorities, not yours, are what will drive the company.
Back in the dotcom days, before the crash, it generally meant the VCs would attempt to groom the company for a quick IPO. That meant growing the company quickly and sacrificing the long-term viability of the company in order to do it.
It was common for the original founders of the company to be booted from the company or otherwise sidelined. The VCs would bring in their own executive management teams, all the way up to the CEO, which would answer only to the VCs, of course.
The end result is that the startups were unable to maintain their focus on their original mission and were vastly over-committed compared with their needs. And predictably, most of them tanked shortly after their IPO. The VCs usually made a nice profit when the companies IPO'd, but once stock investors finally realized what was going on, IPOs suddenly became worthless. And thus the dot-bomb ensued.
If I were the founder of a startup, the last thing I would do is take the money of a VC. That money is heavily tainted. Taking it would be akin to committing suicide. The only way I would take it is if it came with a contract that clearly stated that I would remain in complete control of the company as if I had not taken the funds at all. And I doubt any VC would ever sign such an agreement.
A: No. The petition proposes CALEA coverage of only broadband Internet access service and broadband telephony service. Other Internet-based services, including those classified as "information services" such as email and visits to websites, would not be covered.
"Nevermind the fact that monitoring all broadband internet access is sufficient to include any services that might be accessed over that broadband service (like email, visits to websites, etc). Oh, and you should conveniently forget that web sites and email services also make use of broadband internet connections to provide their services, so monitoring can/will happen at either end."
A: No. The petition contends that CALEA should apply to certain broadband services but does not address the issue of what technical capabilities those broadband providers should deliver to law enforcement. CALEA already permits those service providers to fashion their own technical standards as they see fit. If law enforcement considers an industry technical standard deficient, it can seek to change the standard only by filing a special "deficiency" petition before the Commission. It is the FCC, not law enforcement, that decides whether any capabilities should be added to the standard. The FCC may refuse to order a change in a standard on many different grounds. For example, a capability may be rejected because it is too costly. Therefore CALEA already contains protections for industry against paying undue compliance costs.
"Law enforcement (that would be us) can and will install whatever monitoring hardware and software is necessary to perform the monitoring in question, and if it can't it will get the standards changed to force the ISP into making it easy for us. And since we and the FCC are both part of the executive branch, such changes will be easy and fast."
A: No. Law enforcement asked the FCC to give the proposed rulemaking expedited treatment. Such treatment is often requested and granted when urgent matters are brought to the FCC's attention. Some FCC rulemaking proceedings can take years to complete. Law enforcement believes expedited treatment is warranted in this case based on evidence that terrorists, criminals, and/or spies are already exploiting the networks of broadband communication providers to evade lawful electronic surveillance.
"We'll get the FCC to rubberstamp our requests. Sort of like the FISA court, only better."
A: No. Law enforcement does not seek the power to dictate how the Internet should be engineered or even to decide how broadband communications networks should be engineered. As explained above, CALEA already allocates those decisions to industry and any resulting capability disputes between industry and law enforcement are decided by the FCC. Moreover, the level of surveillance is not an issue raised in the petition, is not within the scope of CALEA, and is not decided by law enforcement. Based on a statute known as "Title III," before a law enforcement agent or officer is permitted to engage in lawful electronic surveillance, he or she must seek an appropriate court order from a judge or magistrate. Only if a judicial order is issued can the lawful surveillance take place, and the level of surveillance is prescribed by the order.
"Well, we don't seek the power to dictate how the Internet should be engineered just yet. Not unless we need it or if it'll make our lives easier (and yours harder). And as you know, we in law enforcement would never engage in 'unlawful' surveillance. No sir! Not us. We are the law, so how could we?"
A: No. The petition notes that CALEA contains a definition of "telecommunications carrier" that is different from and broader than the definition of that term in the Communications Act, which governs most FCC actions. The petit
I had a lot of fun racing, and I met a lot of cool people and got to do a lot of cool stuff, but I also spent a metric assload of money with little to show for it save a website, a bunch of trophies, a Speed TV clip, and a bruised credit card.
And a lot of fond memories.
I'd've done better to stay in the Army.
Only if you either (a) enjoyed being in the Army or (b) value money more than happy experiences. Frankly, I think someone for whom the latter is true is somewhat insane. There are some people for whom accumulation of wealth for its own sake is more enjoyable than anything else, but those people are relatively rare.
Now, that said, I do realize that there are tradeoffs. Unhappiness later on as a result of doing fun things now is something that has to be accounted for. But there's one further caveat: you generally don't get a second chance to do many (perhaps even most) things, and unhappiness later on can often be reduced or eliminated (and isn't guaranteed in any case).
So in general, you'll be happier doing what you want to do when you have the opportunity to do so. If you don't, there's a high probability that you'll regret it later, and it's unlikely you'll get the chance again.
"Rumors have been floating around saying IBM will cut 150,000 U.S. jobs, but a Network World story attempts to set the record straight by quoting analysts who say this news, if true, would wipe out the company's entire U.S. operations and would make no sense since IBM is actually doing pretty well."
It's all about short-term stock price manipulation (which I call the "dark side" since it ultimately winds up being a loss but brings instant gratification).
If the CEO is retiring soon, then he has little incentive to do right by the company in the long run, and plenty of incentive to play games to increase the stock price in the short term (so he can sell off his shares after the price goes up). A massive layoff like this would be entirely consistent with that scenario. And it's not like the company's "investors" would give a damn about the long-term outlook of the company anyway. After all, it's all about the growth rate of the stock, and fast growth for a short time is still fast growth that "investors" can take advantage of. They just have to dump the stock before it crashes.
So not only is a massive layoff of this scale plausible, I think it's highly likely. It's just the ultimate manifestation of the short-term thinking that American "businessmen" are so infatuated with.
About the only thing that might prevent it is a huge backlash against IBM by "investors", which is possible but doubtful IMO.
...unless the defendant turns around and sues the RIAA to recover court costs, attorney's fees, the value of the time he lost defending himself, and a hefty sum on top of that to make them think real hard about doing something like that again.
The only way the RIAA is going to stop harassing people through the courts is when it costs them so much that they can't sustain it anymore. That won't happen simply by suing for court costs and attorney's fees -- the RIAA (through its members) is much too wealthy for that.
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Well, that depends entirely on what you're comparing it against, doesn't it? If you're comparing it against another relatively clean power source (e.g., nuclear), then it simply won't be worth it if it's more expensive. But see below.
If solar is less expensive than the available clean conventional sources then this might make sense. Otherwise, why bother? It's only in situations where you're already near existing daytime conventional capacity and the deployment of solar is much faster/cheaper in the short term than deployment of another clean conventional source that it might make sense. But if solar is expensive and/or time-consuming to deploy (relative to deploying another clean conventional source) then it simply doesn't make sense to use it even if it's only for dealing with peak load.
The bottom line is that solar, like any other power generating mechanism, has to be able to stand on its own against other clean power sources before it can succeed. I'm not convinced it's at that point yet. The closest thing would be cheap roof tile solar collectors that are tied into the grid. Make the solar panels about as cheap as current roof tiling and you'll go far. But that's not possible right now as far as I know.
To all you people who are wondering who Zaphod Beeblebrox is:
Zaphod's just this guy, you know?
And what makes you think the market in the U.S. is a "free market"?
The people who are pushing for DRM are precisely the people who have the greatest amount of control over the U.S. government, because they control what gets advertised about the candidates during election time. Frankly, I'm a little surprised DRM hardware of the kind I described hasn't already been mandated, but I suspect that's probably because the people in control know that fascism has to be implemented slowly for it to work. That's the lesson I think they learned from the early to mid 20th century.
Its sole purpose is to keep you from using the media you would otherwise have rightful access to in any way other than what the copyright holder explicitly wants.
In short, its sole purpose is, ultimately, to make you pay every time you make use of the media, and to control the flow of information.
DRM is how the media megacorporations intend to rein in the internet. For instance, you can't prove that the media broadcast a story when the story can't be recorded.
DRM is how the big corporations intend to remove your right to read.
This is just the first shot across the bow. It's going to get worse. A lot worse. Read all you can about "trusted computing" to see where this is going. All they have to do is to remove your ability to boot an unsigned bootloader, and the game is over (with you as the loser).
If you think this is paranoid ranting, well, so did people who thought habeus corpus would never be removed. That doesn't make what I say right, but since the same people are ultimately involved, you shouldn't dismiss the above as paranoid ranting on the basis of incredulity alone.
The TCO is what matters to the customer. It's not what matters to the vendor. It's the decision of the vendor that we're talking about here. The costs to the vendor are what determine what products the vendor offers and, ultimately, the price at which the vendor offers them.
The vendor is concerned about the acquisition cost primarily, and any difference in support costs that he must bear. Anything else is the customer's problem, and only the customer's problem.
So the fact that the acquisition cost of Linux is free is highly relevant here, because the acquisition cost is, in this case, a significant portion of the total cost of the software to the vendor, and in the case of windows, it's also a very significant portion of the total cost of the entire product to the vendor. In fact, the cost of Windows in India may be so high as to exceed the cost of the computer itself. Otherwise the vendor's comment about the high price of Windows would be irrelevant.
The situation in the U.S. is different. The largest vendors get a very deep discount for selling windows, enough so that the cost of Windows to them is a tiny fraction of the cost of the overall product. That is apparently not the case for the Indian vendors, and that is why the relative acquisition costs of Windows versus Linux is so relevant to the Indian market.
Customers who make use of their ISPs email have a significant disincentive to switch ISPs: their email address will change. This is similar to the situation most cellphone customers used to be in before legislation required cellphone providers to implement number portability.
So the cost the ISP will have to consider isn't just the cost of Google mail versus the cost of hosting their own, they'll also have to consider the effect going with Google mail will have on their customer retention rates. ISPs that don't suck will have less of a problem with that.
The ISP can minimize that issue by insisting that the user's email address remain username@ispname.net (or whatever). In other words, Google becomes the MX for ispname.net, and users who use the email service would log in by using their email address as opposed to just their username.
I can see it going either way, but I expect ultimately that Google will offer the service tied to the ISP's domain name, and expect that most ISPs will select that in order to retain the lock-in effect that ISP-specific email has on the customer base. I don't see any advantage to Google of providing their standard Google mail service to ISPs at a lower price than the one tied to the ISP's domain name.
Who's talking about support costs here? We're talking about the price the vendor can offer the product for. The cost of support will be (as it is for Windows vendors) borne by the vendor, and so it will be included in the cost of product. The price to the vendor of the product itself is an additional cost. Windows isn't free after you remove the support costs, while Linux is. It's as simple as that.
And because we're talking about vendors here, who determine what hardware they sell, the problem of drivers isn't an issue: the vendor can select hardware that is compatible with the Linux distribution they choose. The successful ones would do so anyway in order to minimize their support costs (and thus make them more competitive).
It all depends on who they need interoperability with.
In the U.S., most businesses that run Microsoft do so after having paid for it. Microsoft maintains its monopoly largely through inertia. The market is already well-established and isn't growing much, so compatibility with everyone else becomes the primary reason for choosing one piece of software over another. In the U.S., the compatibility requirements are already set and basically aren't going to change much. People run pirated copies in the U.S. in order to maintain that compatibility.
But India is more like an emerging market than an established one. That means there's a lot of room for growth, and thus a lot of room for choice. The compatibility requirements aren't as firmly set as they are in the U.S. market because the ratio of existing players to future players is much smaller.
The end result is that in India, if vendors like the one in the article really did sell Windows instead of giving it away and also offered Linux as the free alternative, the market would almost certainly choose Linux over Windows, and "compatibility" would wind up meaning compatibility with Linux, not with Windows, because as the vendor noted in the article, Windows is simply too expensive for most people to afford over there. In other words, the price of compatibility with the U.S. market would be too high for the Indian market to bear, and the Indian market would thus go its separate way.
And Microsoft would, as a result, lose an entire market. If the majority of people in India ran Linux because the price of Windows is too high, new players in the market would at that point have no particular reason to choose Windows at that point even if it were made free, because the primary compelling reason people run Windows is for compatibility with others in the market (which includes support and other benefits of compatibility). In this scenario, Linux would have the primary compatibility/support edge as well as the price edge, so Windows would be completely uncompetitive in the market.
That scenario is the one that Microsoft fears the most. Very few of Microsoft's products can win on their merits, so the dominance of Windows and the compatibility requirements of the market are really the only things keeping Microsoft in their dominant position. A market in which Windows isn't the dominant operating system is a market that Microsoft will probably do poorly in.
The bottom line is that for the Indian market, Linux is a much stronger contender than it is in the U.S. market, and it's only because of the ability (if not legality) of vendors such as the one in the article to give away Windows that Windows can do well in that market.
Free discussion of ideas is an anathema to both big business and governments. Big business can't tolerate it because it wants to create artificial scarcity in order to maximize profits. Governments can't tolerate it because it makes it easier for people to see through the distortions and lies that governments use to manipulate and control the people.
The internet is the biggest threat to both. When the internet was just a curiosity and required some technical skill to make use of, it posed no real threat to business and government. Now that the average person can easily get onto it, that situation has changed.
And so, governments are increasingly censoring the internet. This is no surprise. Most governments (including that of the "land of the free") have the interests of the people somewhere close to the bottom of the list.
Additionally, governments are figuring out that they can basically do whatever they want without any significant repercussions, as long as they control the military and the law enforcement agencies. The people can't do squat when the government controls all the guns. Control of the internet represents control of information, which ultimately means control over the opinions and actions of the people. And control of the people is very high on the list of the interests of government, because the people in control of government tend to be power-hungry sociopaths (who else has as much interest in acquiring power as they do, and thus as much interest in obtaining positions of power?).
The move towards oppressive, fascist government is a worldwide trend, one which seems to be unstoppable. That's what happens when power-hungry sociopaths who want total control over the population also happen to control all the guns. It's such a shame that a worldwide police state is a stable form of government that's capable of lasting thousands of years (since police states require outside pressure to topple them, and when all the world's a police state, there is no outside).
Enjoy what freedom you have left. It won't last.
Yep. That's why the new spelling of "lose" in the dictionary should be "loose". Which, I guess, means the new spelling of "loose" in the dictionary should be "lose".
I guess I'll just have to remember that when I loose my keys. With any luck, the door lock will be lose and I'll be able to get in. Of course, only loosers don't have a spare set of keys somewhere.
Bah. I think I'll stick with the traditional spellings.
I refuse to use debit cards at all (as opposed to an ATM card or a credit card), because they draw directly from your account and they don't require an independent piece of verification (like a PIN) to use.
But this? This is even worse. At least a debit card can be cancelled in the event it's stolen, even though by then it may be too late. How are you going to cancel your driver's license when the DMV is only open Monday through Friday 8-5?
It's even worse if it makes use of the RFID chip that's embedded in some driver's licenses these days.
No way in hell will I ever opt in for something like this.
And this leads me to my biggest pet peeve about the Gecko-based browsers: the plugin API provides no separation at all between the browser and the plugin. I'm sorry, but that's crap.
The plugin API should provide a nice, thick wall between plugins and the browser. A plugin should never be able to take down the browser (extensions are an entirely different thing, of course). On a Unix system, the plugin should be running in a completely separate process, and talk to the browser via a socket or something.
But the current architecture is a real piece of shit, and is the most annoying thing about Gecko-based browsers.
Why is it puzzling? They're not implementing all those draconian measures to protect you, they're doing it to secure and exercise their power.
The bottom line is that governments are now figuring out that they can basically do whatever the hell they want and there isn't a damned thing the population at large can do to stop them as long as they control the military and the law enforcement agencies. And they do.
To them, terrorists are both a nuisance and an opportunity. But they are most definitely not a threat.
That said, it probably doesn't hurt to at least try it, since it's relatively simple and inexpensive. All I'm saying is you shouldn't expect it to actually have any effect.
What makes you think doing that will have any effect at all? Here's a hint: unless your letter to your congressman includes a check for several tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum, your message will be tossed into the trash like all the rest.
Your congressman doesn't listen to you. He listens to the people who made his election possible: the people who run the big corporations. You don't matter because it's highly likely (meaning: this applies to the average voter) that your opinions are heavily dependent on the message the mass media broadcasts about the candidates, and that message is determined solely by corporate bribes and under the table dealings that you can't possibly have any influence over.
Go on and continue to live in your fantasy world where The People have power over their elected "representatives". Just don't be surprised when you wake up to find that everything you believe in has been a lie.
Why should extremely highly paid CEOs feel they and upper management should have "protection" and yet are willing to let the lower ranks get screwed just so they can enjoy millions in bonuses?
I say if the highest-paid members of the corporation are so fucking gung-ho about "saving money" by hiring overseas talent, then they should also be replaced by cheap overseas talent.
If you don't agree with that, then you're nothing but a pathetic hypocrite.
If the price of gas keeps going up the way it has been, that'll quickly change. Yeah, there are some times when nothing but a truck will do the job, but there's a difference between actually needing a truck for a particular job and using one in your commute to work every day in order to follow the herd. Eventually practicality will win out over herd mentality once the price of being a lemming gets too high.
Right now most trucks are sold to people for reasons having nothing to do with what they need. That won't be the case once it becomes too expensive to own such vehicles.
The hardware probably screams. But ATI has a reputation for really shitty drivers. Without solid, fast, high-quality drivers, fast hardware doesn't matter as much.
NVidia has typically produced fast drivers. They're not open-source, but they're at least good.
If ATI can't get its shit together and write some decent drivers, the only reasonable option for them would be to open-source their 3D drivers so that the community can fix them properly. And I expect the community would do just that, because a lot of developers are also avid PC gamers, so they have a personal stake in it.
It'll be interesting to see where this heads, given the statements made by ATI about open-sourcing their drivers, but I'm not going to hold my breath over it. For now, it's NVidia for my gaming rigs. That'll change as soon as ATI actually open-sources their full 3D drivers.
Notice how it's taken 5 years for the SCO case to get where it is?
Now take that and increase it manyfold. Unlike SCO, Microsoft has lawyers who really do know what they're doing, on top of the financial ability to initiate many independent suits and literally them going for centuries if that were possible.
Worse, unlike SCO, Microsoft has a direct line to the government itself. In essence, as one of the biggest megacorps, Microsoft exerts a great deal of direct control over the government.
So if you think SCO's been making trouble for us, you haven't seen anything.
I fear we won't live long enough to see the end of this. :-(
Make no mistake: if you take VC funds, they, not you, get into the driver's seat. And it means that their priorities, not yours, are what will drive the company.
Back in the dotcom days, before the crash, it generally meant the VCs would attempt to groom the company for a quick IPO. That meant growing the company quickly and sacrificing the long-term viability of the company in order to do it.
It was common for the original founders of the company to be booted from the company or otherwise sidelined. The VCs would bring in their own executive management teams, all the way up to the CEO, which would answer only to the VCs, of course.
The end result is that the startups were unable to maintain their focus on their original mission and were vastly over-committed compared with their needs. And predictably, most of them tanked shortly after their IPO. The VCs usually made a nice profit when the companies IPO'd, but once stock investors finally realized what was going on, IPOs suddenly became worthless. And thus the dot-bomb ensued.
If I were the founder of a startup, the last thing I would do is take the money of a VC. That money is heavily tainted. Taking it would be akin to committing suicide. The only way I would take it is if it came with a contract that clearly stated that I would remain in complete control of the company as if I had not taken the funds at all. And I doubt any VC would ever sign such an agreement.
"Nevermind the fact that monitoring all broadband internet access is sufficient to include any services that might be accessed over that broadband service (like email, visits to websites, etc). Oh, and you should conveniently forget that web sites and email services also make use of broadband internet connections to provide their services, so monitoring can/will happen at either end."
"Law enforcement (that would be us) can and will install whatever monitoring hardware and software is necessary to perform the monitoring in question, and if it can't it will get the standards changed to force the ISP into making it easy for us. And since we and the FCC are both part of the executive branch, such changes will be easy and fast."
"We'll get the FCC to rubberstamp our requests. Sort of like the FISA court, only better."
"Well, we don't seek the power to dictate how the Internet should be engineered just yet. Not unless we need it or if it'll make our lives easier (and yours harder). And as you know, we in law enforcement would never engage in 'unlawful' surveillance. No sir! Not us. We are the law, so how could we?"
And a lot of fond memories.
Only if you either (a) enjoyed being in the Army or (b) value money more than happy experiences. Frankly, I think someone for whom the latter is true is somewhat insane. There are some people for whom accumulation of wealth for its own sake is more enjoyable than anything else, but those people are relatively rare.
Now, that said, I do realize that there are tradeoffs. Unhappiness later on as a result of doing fun things now is something that has to be accounted for. But there's one further caveat: you generally don't get a second chance to do many (perhaps even most) things, and unhappiness later on can often be reduced or eliminated (and isn't guaranteed in any case).
So in general, you'll be happier doing what you want to do when you have the opportunity to do so. If you don't, there's a high probability that you'll regret it later, and it's unlikely you'll get the chance again.
It's all about short-term stock price manipulation (which I call the "dark side" since it ultimately winds up being a loss but brings instant gratification).
If the CEO is retiring soon, then he has little incentive to do right by the company in the long run, and plenty of incentive to play games to increase the stock price in the short term (so he can sell off his shares after the price goes up). A massive layoff like this would be entirely consistent with that scenario. And it's not like the company's "investors" would give a damn about the long-term outlook of the company anyway. After all, it's all about the growth rate of the stock, and fast growth for a short time is still fast growth that "investors" can take advantage of. They just have to dump the stock before it crashes.
So not only is a massive layoff of this scale plausible, I think it's highly likely. It's just the ultimate manifestation of the short-term thinking that American "businessmen" are so infatuated with.
About the only thing that might prevent it is a huge backlash against IBM by "investors", which is possible but doubtful IMO.
Nope. You definitely don't get fired for that. I mean, Jobs seems to be competent at managing Apple and all, but he's not God's gift to...
Hold on a sec, my manager wants to talk to me...
Huh? What do you mean I'm fired?!? I haven't even finished typing up this important memo yet! Well, can I at least take my coffee mug with me?
Umm...I have to go.
The only way the RIAA is going to stop harassing people through the courts is when it costs them so much that they can't sustain it anymore. That won't happen simply by suing for court costs and attorney's fees -- the RIAA (through its members) is much too wealthy for that.