For a public company, their responsibility is to make their owners/investors happy, and those are the stockholders. If the stockholders determine they want a profit, that's what the board is obliged to do. If the stockholders only priority is to have all company assets painted light blue, the board will hire painters. The stockholders can force a stockholder meeting (or simply wait until the yearly regular one), and vote to kill off the company and divide up the assets. They could also vote away the board of directors, realign the company as a healing-crystal business or whatever.
If a majority of votes (where the needed majority is regulated in the company charter) decides it is better to just throw in the towel than to continue, that's what will happen.
/Janne
Re:This is the way it should be...
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Not even that. They don't use the Gnome graphics; instead they have designed their own icon set and themes that are sort of halfway in between the two projects. I don't really care for the look (it's a bit too bright and cartoony for my taste), but I have no doubt that the resulting consistency is a very good thing for most of Redhats userbase.
Don't forget that the current public versions of Evolution and Gnumeric are Gnome1 programs; they will follow the guidelines when they are updated for Gnome2.
It's getting interesting, but _not_ for overclocking or something like that, but rather for noise reduction.
Once, small computers were totally silent. Think of the CBM64, the Mac and others. Even when they got harddrives, it was just a faint whirr in the background. Today, a modern desktop sounds like a passenger plane taking off next to you. In my machine I have five fans and two drives, and that's nothing unusual. At work it's bad enough that I sometimes wear earplugs just to get away from the noise.
Watercooling can help in two ways. First, with a larger, efficient radiator, you don't need a high-rpm fan - and elliminating just one fan does a lot to reduce noise pollution. Second, and for the future, I can envision a water-cooling system that can collect heat from several heat sources in the machine, and cool them all using one radiator and one fan. And when you have that, you could enclose the machine far better than today, getting rid of the noise from the drives as well.
At least for Europe the explanation is doubtful. You have to make separate prints with subtitles for some countries, and prints with separate soundtracks for others anyway. The only european countries that you could release american prints for would be GB and Ireland./Janne
I'll add another reason: movies are frequently released quite a bit later in Europe than in the US. The reasons are somewhat obscure, but part of the explanation (as I've understood it) is because of the need to subtitle or dub them. Another reason could be different seasonal patterns for movie releases. On the other hand, it's more and more important to get the DVD version out in stores soon after the movie ends its run, so people will have the title fresh and will want to buy it. Having region encoding means people can't just buy a release before it's even appeared in local movie houses.
Yet another reason is that DVD:s are a lot cheaper in the US than in Europe. They also tend to have better picture quality. With the ease of buying stuff from overseas, they'll kill the ability to markup their product in these markets.
One final reason is to stop 'grey imports' of stuff from one market to another, which would erode the market dominance of the distributors.
In Europe (or at least in Sweden) this is moot; I don't think I've even seen a region-locked DVD player for sale in the last year./Janne
Nothing wrong with Haskell to my knowledge; I just picked it as an example of a perhaps unlikely scripting language. My point was rather that whatever you pick, it's not going to be popular for a lot of people.
Look up Metatheme - it's supposed to do that eventually.
And there _is_ work on improving compatibility; with KDE3, the clipboard now works the same in just about every desktop, there is a common menu description format, Gnome is moving towards using arts as the soundserver, they use the same XML lib, and so on. There's even a site for coordinating desktop-interoperability in Linux (though I don't have the link handy).
The most difficult problem is of course theming. It would be all but impossible to make a common theme format; you'd probably end up with a 'compatibility engine' that can take themes written for it - and that nobody will use, as the native themes will be cooler and faster anyway. Something like Metatheme will probably have a better chance, and even then, it greatly depends on multiple people working together to create a unified theme./Janne
And who will get to decide what components to use? What WM functionality to implement? What toolkit to base it on?
Me? Great! I say we go All XFCe, All the Way! We won't even implement the letters K or G in our brand new environment! Oh, and the WM functionality will be tiled, not overlapping, and will be sloppy focus only, and with themes implemented in an inbedded Haskell interpreter.
Not good? Haskell is a drag? You maybe wanted to work in Qt? You maybe wanted a different feature set? Well, golly, let's put all your wishes in as well, and those of everybody else. Once we put in the superset of all current (and future) desktop-type projects, I'm sure X will be a lot faster and smaller!
And once it's all in, I'm sure everyone with a hankering to try some new ideas regarding desktops or window management will be just thrilled at the prospect of having to demand their users to install a custom version of X to use it.
Serously, I really don't get this "One OS, One Desktop, One Community" kind of reasoning. That we can use different stuff for environments (or even just different tastes) is a _strength_ of the platform, not a weakness.
If you are _really_ desperate for more speed, why not start a project to make a desktop bypassing X altogether? If the speed difference is really that important, people will flock to it. And BTW, I'm really impressed with the precise percentages you have, especially since you've not even decided _what_ components should be integrated.../Janne
They quote New York Times as one source, so I assume there's been a piece ion this there as well. Interestingley, this proposal is apparently seen as a way to get around the congressional oversight and regulations over secret operations put into place after CIA overstepped its bounds in the sixties.
It is not about espionage; they talk bout using military personnel as strike teams to elliminate people - again, without accusing them of a crime, and without authorization from the local government. And yes, possible target nations include NATO allies and other western states.
To put the link into perspective, DN is Swedens largest daily newspaper, and would be comparable in tone and seriosity to New York Times - it's very much _not_ a sensationalist rag./Janne
My current beef is the authorization for US personnel to enter a different territory - out of uniform - and kill suspected (not charged, not convicted) terrrorists and people suspected of aiding terrorism. This without the consent or even knowledge of the local government.
From my perspective, this is no different from the acts justifiably condemned as state-supported terrorism by other countries.
You cannot stop atrocities by committing more of them yourself. All that will happen is that you'll lose the moral high ground and make people question whether your motives and actions are any purer than those of the (other) terrorists./Janne
When is destroying other's property legal vs. illegal?
When can you use a shotgun on another person and when is it illegal?
Unless you can show self-defense, never.
Are glass bullets ever legal?
No. Neither are plastic bullets. The reason they're outlawed in the vast majority of all countries (and by the Geneva convention) is that they make it extraordinarily difficult to treat a wound.
When is it "taking a prisoner" and when is it "kidnapping"?
When you are in your country's jurisdiction, and you have a legal right to take the person prisoner - otherwise it is kidnapping.
When is it a "military operation" and when is it "terrorism"?
When it's in the interest of the US it's the former, and if it isn't, it's the latter - according to the US anyway. Others' may sensibly disagree. The plan to send people to other countries to 'neutralize' suspected terrorists would certainly qualify as state-sponsored terrorism. Imagine for a moment that Iraq did the same to kill americans that have partaken in bombings in Baghdad - what would the reaction be (and no, I'm not equalizing last years attack in New York with the Iraqi conflict)?
Not really. You retain all rights as a copyright holder. What you really are doing is allowing people to use your property in any way they please, as long as they "pay" by extending the same courtecy in turn.
It does _not_ in any way remove ownership. Given that you have not accepted patches from anyone else, nothing prevents you from releasing another version under any license you want. Of course, you can not 'ungrant' a license (like GPL) from a version already released. What you are thinking of is perhaps the sometimes practice of granting FSF the copyright - in that case you do lose ownership, but it is a separate action that has nothing to do with GPL (and that most people would not want to do).
-discrete manufacturing partners could share parts, assemblies and full products via the internet. Ideally you'd search for a bolt via a google like search engine and it'd pull up a 3d representation of the bolts available. You could rotate it etc to see if it'll fit into your product.
Umm, I think I'd prefer to just check the M-number and length on a datasheet. And if you're talking about real CAD, then what they will want to share are data suitable for their CAD-system, not data for quick webdisplay.
Web sales could be a viable market. Maybe. I remember Boo.com (they were supposed to be selling sports clothes on the net); they had a 3d-view of their stuff. It was not helpful. For some people and/or some products I guess it would make sense, though.
One (unfortunate) application would be ever more intrusive advertisements. We can get banners that detach themselves from the page and float right in your face, covering the screen. I shudder to think what a creative ad-agency mind can come up with for this technology.
I've been considering this for a while, and I really can find only a few niche applications for it (building or site walkthroughs and the like). If the main use for it is to sell stuff to me, I think I can do without.
No reason, I guess. I just pointed out that his diary in fact has dealt extensively with his attempts to build a Windows gaming machine - something that was rather topical to the post I responded to.
This is interesting, but remember that this affects weather (short-term variations over a restricted area), not climate (long-term trends on a large scale). As another poster pointed out, cities and other urban development does the same thing.
More worriesome is that jet exhaust probably contributes proportionally more to the greenhouse effect than the amount of pollutants realeased would indicate, as it tends to be dumped high up, resulting in more greenhous gases ending up in the ozone layer than it would have had it been burned close to the ground.
Normally, yes. For 'legacy' systems, however, the floppy may still be the only option. Older machines frequently have no CD-rom, or it is broken. Buying and installing a new CD-rom on an old machine may simply not be cost-effective. In other cases (such as my beloved laptop) there simply is no CD-rom available to get.
In the end, of course, the floppy is doomed./Janne
What I'd like to put together is Linux for Technophobes. The machine that Joe Schmoe, who has never used a computer, can walk in to Wal-mart, take home his new box, and be able to use it for email, web browsing, and word processing with zero assistance from anyone else.
The basic problem is that a computer is wrong for technophobes. It is a do-it-all machine, not an appliance. Trying to limit the thing to those common functions have been tried repeatedly without success; people still know they got a computer and expects it to be as versatile as one. Look at the expensive failures of Audrey and other such machines.
On the other hand, devices like mobile phones, Palms and so on have been successes. At heart, they too are specialized computers, but they do not look like or act like computers, and the buyers do not expect them to. There is where Linux for non-technical users has a future.
And, if you click on the Advanced mode button in the corner, you get switched to KDE or GNOME.
"My thingy is broken! I did something and now it's all wrong!"
And who gets to decide what that 'IT' is? Linus? Alan Cox? Raster? And how would you be able to forbid developers to work on something else?
Say someone stated that 'OK. We Shall All do Our Work on Redhat and Gnome' - or Madrake and KDE or Debian and XFCe or whatever. Do you really, well and truly, expect the other distributions to throw up their hands in defeat and quietly disappear or just rebrand The Chosen Distribution? And whichever desktop environment you choose, would you fully expect all the developers on all other environments and window managers to show up, hat in hand, and ask to please join The Chosen Effort?
What would happen is that all people not involved in The Chosen Endeavour would shrug and get back to working on their stuff, concluding that those responsible for The Choice are morons.
If you want united, focused development, you need to write your own OS, complete with a license forbidding people from deviating from your ideas. Of course, I don't imagine too many other people will join you...
Slashdot Mirror
If a majority of votes (where the needed majority is regulated in the company charter) decides it is better to just throw in the towel than to continue, that's what will happen.
/Janne
/Janne
/Janne
Sigma Designs did not publish their source in accordance with the GPL, that's what they did wrong. /Janne
/Janne
Once, small computers were totally silent. Think of the CBM64, the Mac and others. Even when they got harddrives, it was just a faint whirr in the background. Today, a modern desktop sounds like a passenger plane taking off next to you. In my machine I have five fans and two drives, and that's nothing unusual. At work it's bad enough that I sometimes wear earplugs just to get away from the noise.
Watercooling can help in two ways. First, with a larger, efficient radiator, you don't need a high-rpm fan - and elliminating just one fan does a lot to reduce noise pollution. Second, and for the future, I can envision a water-cooling system that can collect heat from several heat sources in the machine, and cool them all using one radiator and one fan. And when you have that, you could enclose the machine far better than today, getting rid of the noise from the drives as well.
/Janne
At least for Europe the explanation is doubtful. You have to make separate prints with subtitles for some countries, and prints with separate soundtracks for others anyway. The only european countries that you could release american prints for would be GB and Ireland. /Janne
I'll add another reason: movies are frequently released quite a bit later in Europe than in the US. The reasons are somewhat obscure, but part of the explanation (as I've understood it) is because of the need to subtitle or dub them. Another reason could be different seasonal patterns for movie releases. On the other hand, it's more and more important to get the DVD version out in stores soon after the movie ends its run, so people will have the title fresh and will want to buy it. Having region encoding means people can't just buy a release before it's even appeared in local movie houses.
/Janne
Yet another reason is that DVD:s are a lot cheaper in the US than in Europe. They also tend to have better picture quality. With the ease of buying stuff from overseas, they'll kill the ability to markup their product in these markets.
One final reason is to stop 'grey imports' of stuff from one market to another, which would erode the market dominance of the distributors.
In Europe (or at least in Sweden) this is moot; I don't think I've even seen a region-locked DVD player for sale in the last year.
/Janne
Look up Metatheme - it's supposed to do that eventually.
/Janne
And there _is_ work on improving compatibility; with KDE3, the clipboard now works the same in just about every desktop, there is a common menu description format, Gnome is moving towards using arts as the soundserver, they use the same XML lib, and so on. There's even a site for coordinating desktop-interoperability in Linux (though I don't have the link handy).
The most difficult problem is of course theming. It would be all but impossible to make a common theme format; you'd probably end up with a 'compatibility engine' that can take themes written for it - and that nobody will use, as the native themes will be cooler and faster anyway. Something like Metatheme will probably have a better chance, and even then, it greatly depends on multiple people working together to create a unified theme.
And who will get to decide what components to use? What WM functionality to implement? What toolkit to base it on?
/Janne
Me? Great! I say we go All XFCe, All the Way! We won't even implement the letters K or G in our brand new environment! Oh, and the WM functionality will be tiled, not overlapping, and will be sloppy focus only, and with themes implemented in an inbedded Haskell interpreter.
Not good? Haskell is a drag? You maybe wanted to work in Qt? You maybe wanted a different feature set? Well, golly, let's put all your wishes in as well, and those of everybody else. Once we put in the superset of all current (and future) desktop-type projects, I'm sure X will be a lot faster and smaller!
And once it's all in, I'm sure everyone with a hankering to try some new ideas regarding desktops or window management will be just thrilled at the prospect of having to demand their users to install a custom version of X to use it.
Serously, I really don't get this "One OS, One Desktop, One Community" kind of reasoning. That we can use different stuff for environments (or even just different tastes) is a _strength_ of the platform, not a weakness.
If you are _really_ desperate for more speed, why not start a project to make a desktop bypassing X altogether? If the speed difference is really that important, people will flock to it. And BTW, I'm really impressed with the precise percentages you have, especially since you've not even decided _what_ components should be integrated...
Well, yes I do - those I have are from Swedish newspapers, though:
4 44 01&previousRenderType=1
/Janne
http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=148&a=
They quote New York Times as one source, so I assume there's been a piece ion this there as well. Interestingley, this proposal is apparently seen as a way to get around the congressional oversight and regulations over secret operations put into place after CIA overstepped its bounds in the sixties.
It is not about espionage; they talk bout using military personnel as strike teams to elliminate people - again, without accusing them of a crime, and without authorization from the local government. And yes, possible target nations include NATO allies and other western states.
To put the link into perspective, DN is Swedens largest daily newspaper, and would be comparable in tone and seriosity to New York Times - it's very much _not_ a sensationalist rag.
My current beef is the authorization for US personnel to enter a different territory - out of uniform - and kill suspected (not charged, not convicted) terrrorists and people suspected of aiding terrorism. This without the consent or even knowledge of the local government.
/Janne
From my perspective, this is no different from the acts justifiably condemned as state-supported terrorism by other countries.
You cannot stop atrocities by committing more of them yourself. All that will happen is that you'll lose the moral high ground and make people question whether your motives and actions are any purer than those of the (other) terrorists.
In a different country than your agency, never.
When is wiretapping someone legal vs. illegal?
In a different country than your agency, never.
When is killing someone legal vs illegal?
When is destroying other's property legal vs. illegal?
When can you use a shotgun on another person and when is it illegal?
Unless you can show self-defense, never.
Are glass bullets ever legal?
No. Neither are plastic bullets. The reason they're outlawed in the vast majority of all countries (and by the Geneva convention) is that they make it extraordinarily difficult to treat a wound.
When is it "taking a prisoner" and when is it "kidnapping"?
When you are in your country's jurisdiction, and you have a legal right to take the person prisoner - otherwise it is kidnapping.
When is it a "military operation" and when is it "terrorism"?
When it's in the interest of the US it's the former, and if it isn't, it's the latter - according to the US anyway. Others' may sensibly disagree. The plan to send people to other countries to 'neutralize' suspected terrorists would certainly qualify as state-sponsored terrorism. Imagine for a moment that Iraq did the same to kill americans that have partaken in bombings in Baghdad - what would the reaction be (and no, I'm not equalizing last years attack in New York with the Iraqi conflict)?
/Janne
Of course, he can make it to 20,000AD, 5,000AD and 2004AD as well. Nothing wrong with the mathematics. /Janne
It does _not_ in any way remove ownership. Given that you have not accepted patches from anyone else, nothing prevents you from releasing another version under any license you want. Of course, you can not 'ungrant' a license (like GPL) from a version already released. What you are thinking of is perhaps the sometimes practice of granting FSF the copyright - in that case you do lose ownership, but it is a separate action that has nothing to do with GPL (and that most people would not want to do).
/Janne
Umm, I think I'd prefer to just check the M-number and length on a datasheet. And if you're talking about real CAD, then what they will want to share are data suitable for their CAD-system, not data for quick webdisplay.
Web sales could be a viable market. Maybe. I remember Boo.com (they were supposed to be selling sports clothes on the net); they had a 3d-view of their stuff. It was not helpful. For some people and/or some products I guess it would make sense, though.
One (unfortunate) application would be ever more intrusive advertisements. We can get banners that detach themselves from the page and float right in your face, covering the screen. I shudder to think what a creative ad-agency mind can come up with for this technology.
I've been considering this for a while, and I really can find only a few niche applications for it (building or site walkthroughs and the like). If the main use for it is to sell stuff to me, I think I can do without.
/Janne
/Janne
You should check his diary. Hes _is_ trying to put together a gaming machine - to no avail as of yet, alas. /Janne
I realize I wasn't too clear; what I was thinking about was the particulate matter (soot etc.) that does react with the ozone.
More worriesome is that jet exhaust probably contributes proportionally more to the greenhouse effect than the amount of pollutants realeased would indicate, as it tends to be dumped high up, resulting in more greenhous gases ending up in the ozone layer than it would have had it been burned close to the ground.
/Janne
/Janne
Normally, yes. For 'legacy' systems, however, the floppy may still be the only option. Older machines frequently have no CD-rom, or it is broken. Buying and installing a new CD-rom on an old machine may simply not be cost-effective. In other cases (such as my beloved laptop) there simply is no CD-rom available to get.
/Janne
In the end, of course, the floppy is doomed.
The basic problem is that a computer is wrong for technophobes. It is a do-it-all machine, not an appliance. Trying to limit the thing to those common functions have been tried repeatedly without success; people still know they got a computer and expects it to be as versatile as one. Look at the expensive failures of Audrey and other such machines.
On the other hand, devices like mobile phones, Palms and so on have been successes. At heart, they too are specialized computers, but they do not look like or act like computers, and the buyers do not expect them to. There is where Linux for non-technical users has a future.
And, if you click on the Advanced mode button in the corner, you get switched to KDE or GNOME.
"My thingy is broken! I did something and now it's all wrong!"
Say someone stated that 'OK. We Shall All do Our Work on Redhat and Gnome' - or Madrake and KDE or Debian and XFCe or whatever. Do you really, well and truly, expect the other distributions to throw up their hands in defeat and quietly disappear or just rebrand The Chosen Distribution? And whichever desktop environment you choose, would you fully expect all the developers on all other environments and window managers to show up, hat in hand, and ask to please join The Chosen Effort?
What would happen is that all people not involved in The Chosen Endeavour would shrug and get back to working on their stuff, concluding that those responsible for The Choice are morons.
If you want united, focused development, you need to write your own OS, complete with a license forbidding people from deviating from your ideas. Of course, I don't imagine too many other people will join you...