Except this flies in the face of Microsoft's culture. 'Free' is not for countries that have consumers that can easily pay for a windows license.
Then drop your tiered pricing by a lot. If executives could handle that idea, shareholders would be mad as hell so it probably will never happen.
Sadly, summaries like this draw strong opinions and then the comments just follow in the same vein. This thread in particular is drawing the anti-Microsoft crowd. I'd like to know what happy Microsoft consumers are thinking.
For pessimists, this is the start of a slow-motion implosion similar to Nortel and GM. I have a hard time seeing how/where Microsoft is attracting new customers.
Why should Microsoft care if the Win7 prices are "competitive" or not? They've got a captive audience
Resellers!!! I'm waiting to see what the differentials are on the Dell/HP models to get a sense of how they are getting screwed by Microsoft. The smaller resellers are going to get the worst of it. Hopefully, that will be enough economic motivation for more resellers to promote/package a Linux distro.
Retailers extract a pound of flesh for every unit sold, so Microsoft can't bully retailers as easily.
is so that elections aren't about a 'controversy' like Obama's birthplace. A republic works reasonably well if the citizens participate in it. Few of you can comment with any authority on that last statement.
What's scarier though, is that Obama's birthplace is, at this point in his presidency *still* an issue. Getting those voters participating some other way is critical.
Last I checked, Linux desktops were loaded with exciting new innovative features but failing on extremely basic tasks.
WTF? I got email. I got chat. I got flash. I got browsers. I got media players. Done.
NYTimes article on Ubuntu Linux Last time I checked, Ubuntu uses everyone else's projects. None of which look to the NY Times for affirmation. That's a good thing and I hope it stays that way for a long, long time.
I suspect you are the only one who cares what the NY Times has to say. Here are some no-brainers, if you want to see linux improve:
Your list suggests you have some corner-case hardware or pipe dream you want someone else to write for you. Good luck with that.
* Write documentation sometimes. Format it well an ship it with your projects!
Uhhh. man pages? If the CLI is too frightening, then there's the gui-fied man pages that many desktops have. Most mainstream projects are well documented. I'm not sure what you are talking about here. Wait,do you mean that _one_ application that's not documented???
Making everything into desktop widgets (including social networking fads like facebook) isn't a bold new vision of the desktop environment... it's glitzy eye-candy.
I'm not sure where the criticism is with this statement. Widgets are bad? Are you suggesting that the goal of making it easier to add features to a desktop is not worth pursuing? Because as far as I can tell, that's what the project is after.
Maybe they don't have widgets you like, but I'm not sure where you get off dumping on a project that cost you nothing. You know, there's a bug list among other ways to communicate with the developers.
Seigo peppers every idea he has with colorful language like "new paradigms" but his ideas so far are hardly innovative.
Uh huh. I see. Get back to me after coding something as big and complicated as a desktop that _actually_ works and attracts users/contributors. I'll be sure to criticize your efforts.
Queue Dr. Evil '1 million phone numbers... MMUUUAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAH!'
It certainly sounds like a big number, but it isn't. What I am wondering is what the Telco execs are doing about it.
A little history for./ The telco's stuck it to Vonage two different ways. 1. whisper campaign in the equity markets claiming Vonage didn't own the value-drivers in their business. 100% bunk. Amazon doesn't own the 'tubes' that connect to their service, has fantastical valuations. With Vonage, it *is* a very big problem??? But equity manager ran with it and hammered Vonage. 2. Patent litigation. Especially bad and ridiculously obvious patents were used to extract the Telco's vig. (hint, look up the word vigorish)
Google's much more well-capitalized and swimming in the deep end of Telco waters if they attempt to unify POTS/wireless with VOIP. When will Telco exec's send the legal dogs after Google?
The great news is there are viable replacements for this reference to Microsoft's operating system. Debian, BSD's, maybe some other Linux distro are more than capable of serving and Opera runs on all of them.
Another Opera summary that's mostly flamebait. That's disappointing because it's a good idea whose time has been very long in coming.
1. That was a horrible summary. Maybe the point is to generate some flamebait? 2. Every case you give to justify Opera's weakness are free-ish. As in something else (not the browser) is generating the revenue. Opera has to generate revenue through their browser and they have managed to stay in business despite other companies giving away different browsers. That suggests Opera is delivering way more value than the other free browsers. Good for them. 3. This idea will be copied because it is useful. It is a very long time in coming. It's a great feature that neither Apple or Microsoft can implement easily because they want their marriage to the media distributors to be a happy one. 4. To borrow from another post, hopefully consumers will latch onto this one to see the one of the grander purposes built into the Internet. Many powerful parties (ex. media distributors) would like nothing more than to maintain a one-way sh!t pipe of the current, common Internet experience. Consumers deserve to have all of the features of the Internet available to them.
No, I don't use Opera. I never particularly cared for it.
1. Thanks for the quality reply. 2. For example, electronics is a big growth segment I would argue it looks like one from the outside. People with money to spend on their own device make this mistake all of the time and end up with a storage space full of useless products when either no one has bought the device or others have copied their good idea. 3. Amazon has NOT provided any number breakdown to indicate exactly what part of revenue or earnings comes from Kindle. This is intentional (for whatever the reason is). I follow public companies and their great, new ideas. It's a hobby. Like most things, when there is some success, it shows up in lots of little ways in reporting. History and this thread suggest two things. The market is tiny. I got one reply from an actual user. The silence from Amazon about the Kindle is deafening. That's normally very bad news in public markets.
I would argue that formal training is not what it's cracked up to be for most of us, so going back to school might not work out as planned.
Okay, so your current position lacks a clear path to upward mobility. If the question is really about upward mobility in your career, then consider the following.
There are critically important political skills you can learn on help desk. As is often the case with the more technically inclined, their social skills are lacking. The social skills I'm referencing are more about the machinations of influence and business communication. In my experience, senior/executive IT have excellent social skills. They end up getting paid more for managing the technical experts because they look/act like a manager/exec and can communicate as an executive.
If that made no sense, then just look for valuable opportunities to strengthen your skill set on the job. Strengthen those weak areas and take them elsewhere if the employer does not value them. Universities probably don't teach what you want to get out of your career.
I have a hard time with the buzz on Amazon's device.
Right now, their stock is trading at an astronomical P/E ratio. Their balance sheet has an equally astronomical Goodwill valuation. Does someone follow the corporation's reporting enough to publish some facts regarding how much this device contributes to their bottom line?
If this were a big win for Amazon, it would show up in their numbers.
Now, how many of you *actually* stuff another device in your laptop bag to read books?
Or, maybe it will be like the days when Apple introduced the ipod and many on/. said it was doomed, only with Amazon the expectations are backwards.
The ability of a common person to influence governmental matters is, as it always has been, very limited.
This is a false statement that people who aren't actually interested in doing the work required to make changes in the organization of their Republic.
American history is full of examples of real changes made by determined groups.
Temperance. (Americans still have a bunch of crazy laws thanks to these folks.) Suffrage. (A constitutional amendment too! ) Civil rights. Abortion rights (This battle is still on. The ones that fought for them, and the ones dedicated to taking them away)
So, get off your ass and get to work. Oh wait, I forget where I'm posting this.
I have had the same experience with AV as many others. No matter the product, there's infected machines. None of this can be done without meaningful support from the entire executive staff because it will cause some disruptions.
The DIY solution goes something like this,
HTTP Antivirus Proxy: http://www.server-side.de/ Switching users to Firefox. (I know, I know, the IE users will cry like babies. So this one will probably not fly.) Tighten up your firewall rules. You can't allow any connection outbound. Allow specific ports. You are running snort right???? This is a very, very useful tool to track what's going outbound. Get your win32 users out of Admin mode if possible.
I test machines by running xubuntu in live CD mode, installing java, then finding an online AV scanner that uses java to do their scanning. Time consuming, but they chose the enormous hidden costs of adopting Windows.
Think about it as a subscription TV provider who knows *nothing* about the Internet tubes. The average American pay TV subscriber/mobile phone user is more than happy to pay for bundled services.
Now, the commodity ISP will sell, more or less, like the one-way sh!t pipe the media conglomerates want in a package that consumers can understand and most importantly, Disney gets to retain total control of the distribution of their media. The 'free' part of the Internet just dies away. See usenet's demise for an example.
I doubt the authors claims regarding the state of the NSA. It's fun to take a poke at big agencies like the NSA because they fit into that 'big bad government' mythology that is so prevalent today. He's presuming the NSA is somehow more effective than any other large organization. (public OR private)
What I doubt is the possibility that a new agency would, in fact, respect the personal freedoms as spelled out in the constitution and probably codified with laws and court precedence. The steady corrosion of discipline and 8 years of Executive Office supremacy has worn away the last of the ideals spelled out in the Constitution.
The last new agency I can recall is the Homeland Security Agency. They were gifted all kinds of previously independent agencies. The benefits are equally unclear on all sides of that monolith.
But "fun" can't be captured in a spreadsheet for quarterly reports.
More than just quarterly profits my insightful friend! A Wii shifts the model for success from making last year's game louder/faster/brighter to creativity.
Along with the pressure of trying to stay relevant with consumers, the average studio probably doesn't want to 'get creative' and take new risks with the Wii. If I were anywhere near the top of the executive food chain at a Sony/Microsoft game studio, I certainly wouldn't be rushing to do Wii titles.
Very often the technically 'best' implementation doesn't win and I'd like to see those stories from inside Unix. For me, that's a more interesting angle than just version/feature stories.
He is now a junior in high school and gets mainly Fs, except in music which he enjoys so he gets an A, usually. He consistently scores at or above the 97th percentile in the numerous standardized tests that kids take these days, including the PSAT. He will soon start taking the SAT and will presumably do well enough.
Your child may be better off being home schooled. The slow pace and innanity of the environment he is in is supremely demotivating. College is almost exactly the same thing, so he won't do well there either. Unless, maybe he goes to a music college. This is pretty typical of gifted kids who don't fit into the square peg definition of excellence offered by most schools.
It's your job as a parent to keep trying different things.. If he's that interested in music, he needs real teachers, real discipline to become a competent musician. In exchange for him doing some homework, get him a good music teacher.
In the U.S. good education does not equal higher pay. Maybe it did at one time, but certainly it is no longer true.
I would argue that the getting a degree from the right combination of institutions is the gateway to higher pay. Two examples to prove my point.
4.0 from public schools ==> transfer into 2nd tier State University==>Enter workforce with 3.8 GPA and some lesser-known interships. This combination is not likely to end in higher pay. Rather, the student will probably make average wages in the first 5 years. What she does from there is up to her, but there are meaningful limits to the probability she would end up the most rewarded.
4.0 from private school attended by elites ==> transfer into 1st tier University==>Enter workforce with 3.8 GPA and some well-known interships. This combination is most likely to end in higher pay because they are most likely to be hired by companies that pay more in the first 5 years.
More importantly the 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' dream so often told in the U.S. has vanished due to the enormous costs of attempting the latter. This is part of the enormous class disparities that have grown in the last 20 years.
So, pay your kid to earn good grades at the end of each year. It's very far into **their** sense of the future.
Do you see how that would empower the telcos who own most of the network needed to do what you describe?
Remember that the telcos are trying to extend their monopoly into entertainment while POTS service slowly dies. The entertainment conglomerates would rather maintain their own monopoly over the distribution of entertainment at the expense of the telcos.
Do you see how a-la-carte media distribution will probably never come to pass in the U.S.?
Most of you gladly pay for your cable/satellite services. You watch maybe 10% of the stuff in a given package as sold by the providers. If, in some fairy tale, this service were actually to be bundled for the vast majority of you, it's hardly free.
Is this what 'free' has come to mean? It is a dumb question, but I just don't see how it can be rationalized as free to the point that editors will just let it go. OTOH, it could be a slashvertisement.
Still, I want to know. Is this what 'free' means to most people when they think about entertainment media?
This is a perfect example of salesmanship, optimism and double-speak. Excerpts from TFA:
we do plan to open source pretty much our entire eco-system, Pretty much eh? That sounds interesting. Where can I sign up for your newsletter?
if the business warrants it If eh? That's a pretty important article leading that phrase. I could get really excited without that "if."
and right now it looks like does Ohhh the winds are blowing your way eh? Well, lets wait and see. Your investors might have another opinion on the matter. Still kind of exciting. I'm feeling a little wobbly in the knees and all!
We can still open source it and monetize it and also release our encoder as well, You mean like how Sun tried to make Java free-ish? History is working against you on this one. But, you know, crazy things have happened before, so I'm even more excited. Not only are my knees wobbly, but my stomach's got a few butterflies in it!
but at the same time weâ(TM)re very cautious about what we do. Ohh there's the double-speak. You were getting me all fired up imagining relatively simple playback on a plurality of devices until that line. Was I supposed to ignore that one?
Like Matroska, the Haali media splitter may not be open source, but it is free Coitus interuptus Mr. Streaming Codec dude. Coitus interuptus..... Ohhh you mean like those other binary blobs that work *so* well? Is this free like so many 'free' applications I download off the internet that are supposed to speed up my windows machine? I get all these adverts popping up everywhere and that's just the beginning.
People want to be able to walk into a shop and buy something.
This is completely different than 'commercial application and driver support.' There is no value to be had in aggressively promoting Linux compatibility at the average retailer. There simply aren't enough customers/money to be made yet.
commercial application and driver support I am dog tired of hearing this bit of disinformation. Many distros provide excellent support. And I don't mean forums. I mean talking to a warm body on the phone that can actually help.
Singling out Linux as having weak driver support is another red herring. Perhaps you are wise and wait many years before switching to a new Microsoft OS. I promise you, those early Microsoft adopters go through a world of hurt with buggy drivers. Mac users do too, only to a lesser extent.
This is human nature in action. Most people are quite happy to follow and do so with all the limitations and abuse that are sure to happen.
It never ceases to amaze me that everyone has access to many viable alternative operating systems, applications and platforms why they don't just drop Microsoft products and remember them as things they used when they were a whole lot less savvy.
Slashdot Mirror
MS should give the crippled version away free
Except this flies in the face of Microsoft's culture. 'Free' is not for countries that have consumers that can easily pay for a windows license.
Then drop your tiered pricing by a lot.
If executives could handle that idea, shareholders would be mad as hell so it probably will never happen.
Sadly, summaries like this draw strong opinions and then the comments just follow in the same vein. This thread in particular is drawing the anti-Microsoft crowd. I'd like to know what happy Microsoft consumers are thinking.
For pessimists, this is the start of a slow-motion implosion similar to Nortel and GM. I have a hard time seeing how/where Microsoft is attracting new customers.
Why should Microsoft care if the Win7 prices are "competitive" or not? They've got a captive audience
Resellers!!! I'm waiting to see what the differentials are on the Dell/HP models to get a sense of how they are getting screwed by Microsoft. The smaller resellers are going to get the worst of it. Hopefully, that will be enough economic motivation for more resellers to promote/package a Linux distro.
Retailers extract a pound of flesh for every unit sold, so Microsoft can't bully retailers as easily.
is so that elections aren't about a 'controversy' like Obama's birthplace. A republic works reasonably well if the citizens participate in it. Few of you can comment with any authority on that last statement.
What's scarier though, is that Obama's birthplace is, at this point in his presidency *still* an issue. Getting those voters participating some other way is critical.
Last I checked, Linux desktops were loaded with exciting new innovative features but failing on extremely basic tasks.
WTF? I got email. I got chat. I got flash. I got browsers. I got media players. Done.
NYTimes article on Ubuntu Linux Last time I checked, Ubuntu uses everyone else's projects. None of which look to the NY Times for affirmation. That's a good thing and I hope it stays that way for a long, long time.
I suspect you are the only one who cares what the NY Times has to say.
Here are some no-brainers, if you want to see linux improve:
Your list suggests you have some corner-case hardware or pipe dream you want someone else to write for you. Good luck with that.
* Write documentation sometimes. Format it well an ship it with your projects!
Uhhh. man pages? If the CLI is too frightening, then there's the gui-fied man pages that many desktops have. Most mainstream projects are well documented. I'm not sure what you are talking about here. Wait,do you mean that _one_ application that's not documented???
Making everything into desktop widgets (including social networking fads like facebook) isn't a bold new vision of the desktop environment... it's glitzy eye-candy.
I'm not sure where the criticism is with this statement. Widgets are bad? Are you suggesting that the goal of making it easier to add features to a desktop is not worth pursuing? Because as far as I can tell, that's what the project is after.
Maybe they don't have widgets you like, but I'm not sure where you get off dumping on a project that cost you nothing. You know, there's a bug list among other ways to communicate with the developers.
Seigo peppers every idea he has with colorful language like "new paradigms" but his ideas so far are hardly innovative.
Uh huh. I see. Get back to me after coding something as big and complicated as a desktop that _actually_ works and attracts users/contributors. I'll be sure to criticize your efforts.
This is a good reply to a poorly reasoned response.
Queue Dr. Evil '1 million phone numbers... MMUUUAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAH!'
It certainly sounds like a big number, but it isn't. What I am wondering is what the Telco execs are doing about it.
A little history for ./ The telco's stuck it to Vonage two different ways.
1. whisper campaign in the equity markets claiming Vonage didn't own the value-drivers in their business. 100% bunk. Amazon doesn't own the 'tubes' that connect to their service, has fantastical valuations. With Vonage, it *is* a very big problem??? But equity manager ran with it and hammered Vonage.
2. Patent litigation. Especially bad and ridiculously obvious patents were used to extract the Telco's vig. (hint, look up the word vigorish)
Google's much more well-capitalized and swimming in the deep end of Telco waters if they attempt to unify POTS/wireless with VOIP. When will Telco exec's send the legal dogs after Google?
Can you say "huge honking security hole"?
The great news is there are viable replacements for this reference to Microsoft's operating system. Debian, BSD's, maybe some other Linux distro are more than capable of serving and Opera runs on all of them.
Another Opera summary that's mostly flamebait. That's disappointing because it's a good idea whose time has been very long in coming.
1. That was a horrible summary. Maybe the point is to generate some flamebait?
2. Every case you give to justify Opera's weakness are free-ish. As in something else (not the browser) is generating the revenue. Opera has to generate revenue through their browser and they have managed to stay in business despite other companies giving away different browsers. That suggests Opera is delivering way more value than the other free browsers. Good for them.
3. This idea will be copied because it is useful. It is a very long time in coming. It's a great feature that neither Apple or Microsoft can implement easily because they want their marriage to the media distributors to be a happy one.
4. To borrow from another post, hopefully consumers will latch onto this one to see the one of the grander purposes built into the Internet. Many powerful parties (ex. media distributors) would like nothing more than to maintain a one-way sh!t pipe of the current, common Internet experience. Consumers deserve to have all of the features of the Internet available to them.
No, I don't use Opera. I never particularly cared for it.
1. Thanks for the quality reply.
2. For example, electronics is a big growth segment
I would argue it looks like one from the outside. People with money to spend on their own device make this mistake all of the time and end up with a storage space full of useless products when either no one has bought the device or others have copied their good idea.
3. Amazon has NOT provided any number breakdown to indicate exactly what part of revenue or earnings comes from Kindle. This is intentional (for whatever the reason is).
I follow public companies and their great, new ideas. It's a hobby. Like most things, when there is some success, it shows up in lots of little ways in reporting. History and this thread suggest two things. The market is tiny. I got one reply from an actual user. The silence from Amazon about the Kindle is deafening. That's normally very bad news in public markets.
I would argue that formal training is not what it's cracked up to be for most of us, so going back to school might not work out as planned.
Okay, so your current position lacks a clear path to upward mobility. If the question is really about upward mobility in your career, then consider the following.
There are critically important political skills you can learn on help desk. As is often the case with the more technically inclined, their social skills are lacking. The social skills I'm referencing are more about the machinations of influence and business communication. In my experience, senior/executive IT have excellent social skills. They end up getting paid more for managing the technical experts because they look/act like a manager/exec and can communicate as an executive.
If that made no sense, then just look for valuable opportunities to strengthen your skill set on the job. Strengthen those weak areas and take them elsewhere if the employer does not value them. Universities probably don't teach what you want to get out of your career.
I have a hard time with the buzz on Amazon's device.
Right now, their stock is trading at an astronomical P/E ratio.
Their balance sheet has an equally astronomical Goodwill valuation.
Does someone follow the corporation's reporting enough to publish some facts regarding how much this device contributes to their bottom line?
If this were a big win for Amazon, it would show up in their numbers.
Now, how many of you *actually* stuff another device in your laptop bag to read books?
Or, maybe it will be like the days when Apple introduced the ipod and many on /. said it was doomed, only with Amazon the expectations are backwards.
The ability of a common person to influence governmental matters is, as it always has been, very limited.
This is a false statement that people who aren't actually interested in doing the work required to make changes in the organization of their Republic.
American history is full of examples of real changes made by determined groups.
Temperance. (Americans still have a bunch of crazy laws thanks to these folks.)
Suffrage. (A constitutional amendment too! )
Civil rights.
Abortion rights (This battle is still on. The ones that fought for them, and the ones dedicated to taking them away)
So, get off your ass and get to work. Oh wait, I forget where I'm posting this.
I have had the same experience with AV as many others. No matter the product, there's infected machines.
None of this can be done without meaningful support from the entire executive staff because it will cause some disruptions.
The DIY solution goes something like this,
HTTP Antivirus Proxy: http://www.server-side.de/
Switching users to Firefox. (I know, I know, the IE users will cry like babies. So this one will probably not fly.)
Tighten up your firewall rules. You can't allow any connection outbound. Allow specific ports.
You are running snort right???? This is a very, very useful tool to track what's going outbound.
Get your win32 users out of Admin mode if possible.
I test machines by running xubuntu in live CD mode, installing java, then finding an online AV scanner that uses java to do their scanning. Time consuming, but they chose the enormous hidden costs of adopting Windows.
Yeah, I'm going against the grain, again.
Think about it as a subscription TV provider who knows *nothing* about the Internet tubes. The average American pay TV subscriber/mobile phone user is more than happy to pay for bundled services.
Now, the commodity ISP will sell, more or less, like the one-way sh!t pipe the media conglomerates want in a package that consumers can understand and most importantly, Disney gets to retain total control of the distribution of their media. The 'free' part of the Internet just dies away. See usenet's demise for an example.
Mission accomplished!
I doubt the authors claims regarding the state of the NSA. It's fun to take a poke at big agencies like the NSA because they fit into that 'big bad government' mythology that is so prevalent today. He's presuming the NSA is somehow more effective than any other large organization. (public OR private)
What I doubt is the possibility that a new agency would, in fact, respect the personal freedoms as spelled out in the constitution and probably codified with laws and court precedence. The steady corrosion of discipline and 8 years of Executive Office supremacy has worn away the last of the ideals spelled out in the Constitution.
The last new agency I can recall is the Homeland Security Agency. They were gifted all kinds of previously independent agencies. The benefits are equally unclear on all sides of that monolith.
But "fun" can't be captured in a spreadsheet for quarterly reports.
More than just quarterly profits my insightful friend! A Wii shifts the model for success from making last year's game louder/faster/brighter to creativity.
Along with the pressure of trying to stay relevant with consumers, the average studio probably doesn't want to 'get creative' and take new risks with the Wii. If I were anywhere near the top of the executive food chain at a Sony/Microsoft game studio, I certainly wouldn't be rushing to do Wii titles.
Very often the technically 'best' implementation doesn't win and I'd like to see those stories from inside Unix. For me, that's a more interesting angle than just version/feature stories.
He is now a junior in high school and gets mainly Fs, except in music which he enjoys so he gets an A, usually. He consistently scores at or above the 97th percentile in the numerous standardized tests that kids take these days, including the PSAT. He will soon start taking the SAT and will presumably do well enough.
Your child may be better off being home schooled. The slow pace and innanity of the environment he is in is supremely demotivating. College is almost exactly the same thing, so he won't do well there either. Unless, maybe he goes to a music college. This is pretty typical of gifted kids who don't fit into the square peg definition of excellence offered by most schools.
It's your job as a parent to keep trying different things.. If he's that interested in music, he needs real teachers, real discipline to become a competent musician. In exchange for him doing some homework, get him a good music teacher.
Don't give up now
In the U.S. good education does not equal higher pay. Maybe it did at one time, but certainly it is no longer true.
I would argue that the getting a degree from the right combination of institutions is the gateway to higher pay. Two examples to prove my point.
4.0 from public schools ==> transfer into 2nd tier State University==>Enter workforce with 3.8 GPA and some lesser-known interships. This combination is not likely to end in higher pay. Rather, the student will probably make average wages in the first 5 years. What she does from there is up to her, but there are meaningful limits to the probability she would end up the most rewarded.
4.0 from private school attended by elites ==> transfer into 1st tier University==>Enter workforce with 3.8 GPA and some well-known interships. This combination is most likely to end in higher pay because they are most likely to be hired by companies that pay more in the first 5 years.
More importantly the 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' dream so often told in the U.S. has vanished due to the enormous costs of attempting the latter. This is part of the enormous class disparities that have grown in the last 20 years.
So, pay your kid to earn good grades at the end of each year. It's very far into **their** sense of the future.
Do you see how that would empower the telcos who own most of the network needed to do what you describe?
Remember that the telcos are trying to extend their monopoly into entertainment while POTS service slowly dies. The entertainment conglomerates would rather maintain their own monopoly over the distribution of entertainment at the expense of the telcos.
Do you see how a-la-carte media distribution will probably never come to pass in the U.S.?
No, this isn't a RMS-style rant.
Most of you gladly pay for your cable/satellite services. You watch maybe 10% of the stuff in a given package as sold by the providers. If, in some fairy tale, this service were actually to be bundled for the vast majority of you, it's hardly free.
Is this what 'free' has come to mean? It is a dumb question, but I just don't see how it can be rationalized as free to the point that editors will just let it go. OTOH, it could be a slashvertisement.
Still, I want to know. Is this what 'free' means to most people when they think about entertainment media?
This is a perfect example of salesmanship, optimism and double-speak. Excerpts from TFA:
we do plan to open source pretty much our entire eco-system,
Pretty much eh? That sounds interesting. Where can I sign up for your newsletter?
if the business warrants it
If eh? That's a pretty important article leading that phrase. I could get really excited without that "if."
and right now it looks like does
Ohhh the winds are blowing your way eh? Well, lets wait and see. Your investors might have another opinion on the matter. Still kind of exciting. I'm feeling a little wobbly in the knees and all!
We can still open source it and monetize it and also release our encoder as well,
You mean like how Sun tried to make Java free-ish? History is working against you on this one. But, you know, crazy things have happened before, so I'm even more excited. Not only are my knees wobbly, but my stomach's got a few butterflies in it!
but at the same time weâ(TM)re very cautious about what we do.
Ohh there's the double-speak. You were getting me all fired up imagining relatively simple playback on a plurality of devices until that line. Was I supposed to ignore that one?
Like Matroska, the Haali media splitter may not be open source, but it is free
Coitus interuptus Mr. Streaming Codec dude. Coitus interuptus.....
Ohhh you mean like those other binary blobs that work *so* well? Is this free like so many 'free' applications I download off the internet that are supposed to speed up my windows machine? I get all these adverts popping up everywhere and that's just the beginning.
People want to be able to walk into a shop and buy something.
This is completely different than 'commercial application and driver support.' There is no value to be had in aggressively promoting Linux compatibility at the average retailer. There simply aren't enough customers/money to be made yet.
commercial application and driver support
I am dog tired of hearing this bit of disinformation. Many distros provide excellent support. And I don't mean forums. I mean talking to a warm body on the phone that can actually help.
Singling out Linux as having weak driver support is another red herring. Perhaps you are wise and wait many years before switching to a new Microsoft OS. I promise you, those early Microsoft adopters go through a world of hurt with buggy drivers. Mac users do too, only to a lesser extent.
I want Google to maintain control over it,
This is human nature in action. Most people are quite happy to follow and do so with all the limitations and abuse that are sure to happen.
It never ceases to amaze me that everyone has access to many viable alternative operating systems, applications and platforms why they don't just drop Microsoft products and remember them as things they used when they were a whole lot less savvy.