Funny thing being that the republican portion of the politicians who are in favor of these FCC indecency rules are the very same ones who complain that Obama is turning the US into a nanny state.
To harp on the most disappointing game I've ever purchased: Transformers2 for the PS2 has movie-quality art on the front, and looks like utter crap when you play.
I agree!
Transformers2 the movie has movie-quality art on the posters outside of the theatures, but the movie was utter crap when you actually watched it.
Microsoft is selling SOFTWARE that runs on almost all Intel based PCs.
No they're not. Windows comes on hardware. You're nit picking and it doesn't make any difference because only an extremely small minority buy Windows as software to install on their home computers.
There is no Microsoft brand computer. Regardless if you purchased a computer with Windows pre-installed or buy a retail CD of Windows, Microsoft made money on the software.
Microsoft does not have to sell hardware to the consumer. They just have to keep the financial terms favorable for the multitude of hardware vendors. That huge market share that Microsoft enjoys is made up of many hardware vendors who do not necessarily have a majority share of the market. The US market seems to be dominated by Dell and HP.
Linux's opportunity to become mainstream is in computing appliances.
Which is exactly what I just said. Linux needs to be sold in brick stores like Windows and OSX are.
I don't think so. I meant that Linux's use will grow in computing appliances. I consider a computing appliance as a computing device dedicated to a single task or a single category of tasks. Appliances include routers, printers, Android smartphones, Android tablets, and the infamous Tivo.
Since Linux is being used as a component of these consumer devices, it doesn't count toward the consumer OS market share.
Linux used to be sold in a brick-and-mortar store. Broadband data service has all but eliminated the need to dedicate shelf space to Linux. Hard to justify dedicating valuable retail shelf for a product that most consumers interested in Linux are able to download for free.
For example:
Before Red Hat went to the subscription model, I was able to purchase a CD at the local "Office Depot" which is a brick-and-mortar office supply store. This did not improve Linux's market share.
Let's not forget the netbooks:
Linux was once sold pre-installed on netbooks, but the consumer didn't like it and as a result retailers in the US no longer carry any netbooks with Linux pre-installed.
I've been lobbying to get commercial trucks off of I-35 for 10 years now.
The irony being that the interstate highway system was designed for commercial traffic and for civil defense (moving military supplies easier across the country in the event of an invasion).
There are actually a few cases where it would be fairly accurate - gentlemen's club, Russian army barracks, Catholic monastery, and so forth. It would also have been spot-on for the engineering department where I studied, many years ago.
This is tongue-in-check of course:
Do your cases disqualify the "never" assertion?
Gentlemen's club = What no female strippers?
Russian army barracks = Russian women are tough. How do we truly know?
Catholic monastery = Nuns?
Engineering department = No administrative assistant?
It not that it is open sourced, it's wether or not Android applications can be considered Linux applications?
Since Linux is doing all of the low-level work for Dalvik and Dalvik does a pretty good job at abstracting the underlying OS from the applications, we are in a grey area. If the OS doesn't normally run Linux programs through its shell, do we still call it Linux?
I wouldn't consider Linux an intrinsic quality of Android.
This argument is similar to the ones made for Windows prior to NT (and XP at home). DOS was being used to execute the windows shell, yet would it be accurate to count Windows as DOS? We can use the metric derived for Windows to answer our conundrum about Android.
Can Android applications exist outside of Android OS? No, therefore Android is not equal to Linux. Admittedly simplistic, but pretty accurate. More so than the Windows argument since Dalvik is a virtual machine.
Consider this, Apple has their own branded stores worldwide, do TV ad campaigns and they only have a pathetic 5% on stat counter.
Apple is selling HARDWARE that runs OS X. Apple does not sell OS X for other PCs. The only thing that officially runs OS X is Apple branded computers.
Microsoft is selling SOFTWARE that runs on almost all Intel based PCs. It comes pre-installed on almost all of the PC compatibles sold on the market. This is why its the most popular OS.
Linux distributions are SOFTWARE and is available free for download unlike Windows and Mac OS X which costs over a hundred dollars.
The fact that Linux has 0.7% with absolutely no advertising is amazing in itself.
Linux has advertising. Canonical and Red Hat spends money on advertisement. It's on the web, in computer magazines, in IT trade magazines, etc.
The fact that the only free OS of the three can only manage 0.7% of statcounter is not that amazing. It shows that Linux still needs to overcome the momentum that Windows has in the PC compatible market. Unfortunately PC manufacturers have had a hard time selling PCs and Netbooks with Linux pre-installed in the US, and people are less likely to change from an OS that works well enough (some will say better - not me) for another one found on the internet.
Linux's opportunity to become mainstream is in computing appliances. With tablets and smart phones becoming popular, Linux has a chance to surpass Windows' market share. Unfortunately it looks like Linux is being relegated to boot loader, low level kernel and file layer for Android than being an outright OS option in those appliances. Meaning that while Android could be technically count towards Linux it would be more accurate to say that Dalvik is built on top of the linux kernel. No native linux applications are being made and nothing prevents Android from using another kernel since everything is abstracted anyway by the Dalvik VM, unless you use the Native DK of course.
There is still hope for "true" mobile Linux with distributions like MeeGo, but alas Google is better equipped to get hardware manufacturers to adopt their OS. MeeGo will be like Apple iOS since it will mostly exist on Nokia phones. Yet unlike iOS, Meego can be adopted by other manufacturers who don't want to use Android... oh... hope is only slight.
I think it's safe to infer that in the demographic that would download a high quality free multiplayer game available on all three platforms, Linux appears to be about 3x more viable a target platform than Mac OS X, and 1/4th as viable as Windows.
It's never safe to infer...
The only thing you can say with those statistics are:
558,285 people downloaded "Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory" from File Shack, of which 74% used Windows, 19% used Linux, and 7% used OS X.
The flaw in your logic is that you assume that File Shack is the only place to download that game.
Mac users may frequent "macgamefiles.com" more than "File Shack" as evident by the d/l count of 225,508.
Now I can combine the population of both "File Shack" and "Mac Game Files" and say that 783,793 people downloaded that game, of which 53% used Windows, 34% used Mac OS X, and 13% used Linux. Now you are not able to reach the conclusions that you made in your post.
You can probably find another download location that favors linux more and add it to the population and change the perception again. This still doesn't take into account the number of people who actually like to play Wolfenstein. For example, I used to play it when I used windows years ago but now I use another OS and I no longer play it. Yet, I still play multiplayer games like WoW and others. This is why I don't trust these popularity contests using web statistics.
Never guess the percentage of women in a building using the population of people in the men's restroom.
Congratulate Amazon for discovering the one thing that will kill the ebook!
Seriously though if they use this technology only for periodicals how would this be different from traditional magazines except that the ads would alway be up-to-date?
The real problem with my long comment is that you didn't read it.
Maybe because it was too long...;)
I did read it, but the assertions you made in the rest of your comment showed a lack of understanding of how this legal process works.
Patents are not copyrights and it doesn't matter if Google used Oracle's code directly. Except that ironically if Google did they would have a better case to defend themselves.
The absurdity of patents is the fact that you only have to make something that does something similar to be in violation of a patent. To use a slashdot car metaphor/story - Robert Kearns invented the intermittent wipers and was granted a patent. He went to the big three automakers and they refused his offer to sale them the right to use them. Ford motor company decided that they could make their own intermittent wipers, and eventually Robert Kearns sued Ford for patent infringement. Ford settled the case for $10 million. Kearn subsequently sued Chrysler and ultimately won in court a judgement of $30 million. This was even with the auto makers arguing that the patent needed to meet some standard of originality and novelty.
Sun was granted these patents as they relate to virtual machines. Google appears to have created a clean room implementation that mimics the behavior described in those patents. Oracle the purchaser of Sun feels like they have case for patent infringement against Google and sued. Google can not refer to Microsoft's ".net" as a counter example, since Microsoft and Sun entered into a cross licensing agreement in 2003 as part of the settlement of the long dispute over Microsoft's handling of Java. Both sides have sufficient money to make this a long and drawn out court battle. Google has more to lose than Oracle. Oracle understands this and upped the ante with the severe damage relief being demanded.
I will not be surprised in the end that this is settled without a court judgement with an establishment of cross licensing agreement and some money heading Oracle's way. It's not about "right" or "wrong"... it is all about the Benjamins...
The problem with your really long comment is that even though Sun released OpenJDK under GPL, Google did not use any of its code. Google has called Dalvik a clean room implementation of a register based VM. It's not even byte compatible with JVM.
Since Dalvik is not derived from OpenJDK it can not enjoy its GPL protections.
Playing devil's advocate, I can see a legitimate reason to require both parties to consent to record a conversation.
Sherrod at USDA was a victim of an edited recording being released to the public, eventually an unedited version was released by the NAACP which hired the camera man. Unfortunately for her the damage was already done.
Two-party consent allows the party without the recorder a chance to specify the terms of the recording (eg. I would like an immediate copy of the tape), the chance to make his/her own recording of the conversation, or refuse and leave.
Everyone in the conversation so far assumes that the tape will be used in its original condition to catch a liar, but nobody thought about an edited version of the recording portraying an honest person as a liar.
Why should everyone subsidize your choice to live in a rural area?
Why should everyone subsidize urban development?
Should rural residents be forced to pay a social engineering tax on gasoline to fund mass transportation in urban areas?
Don't get me wrong, I plan to move to a rural area as soon as economically feasible, but I don't think I should expect city-dwellers to pay for this luxury for me. I'll consider the increased costs of transportation as one of the downsides I have to deal with. Hopefully, telecommuting will reduce this as a factor, so I only need to drive when I have to get groceries.
Too bad the average rural resident is doing manual labor like farming, manufacturing, construction and service industries and need to drive to work.
You make rural areas sound like disney land... I think it may be wise for all the city slickers to stay in their cities.
Talking nonsense about rural folks won't make that high-speed rail service look less like government pork and a huge waste of people's taxes.
It's not his boss's property. It's public property. His boss doesn't get to be an idiot with public property.
Well... San Francisco gave his boss the authority to ask and receive those passwords. What the boss does with those passwords are between his boss and San Francisco.
If there is no government money involved in creating the infrastructure for these services, then government cannot force their own vision of contract between the service provider and a customer.
Wireless spectrum is public property, and FCC is charged with regulating that spectrum.
More importantly, if that's true, then it's probably because the barrier to entry in the market is a hell of a lot lower (unlike, say, laying cable, which requires easements, and tons of dough to lay the line). As such, the market is less of a natural monopoly, and so competition is more likely to thrive. Thus regulation may not be necessary.
Wireless spectrum (especially the portion that gives a large enough range at safe signal levels) is a limited resource. The other more pressing issue is where to place the towers? Current wireless providers complain about how difficult it is to construct new towers to expand their coverage due to local regulations. Do you expect a competitor to reach a similar level of availability with these obstacles. How's WiMax doing?
Slashdot Mirror
Funny thing being that the republican portion of the politicians who are in favor of these FCC indecency rules are the very same ones who complain that Obama is turning the US into a nanny state.
Can you get any more "nanny" than this?
It's called phasebook.com (joke... if it does exist it is by coincident).
I agree!
Transformers2 the movie has movie-quality art on the posters outside of the theatures, but the movie was utter crap when you actually watched it.
There is no Microsoft brand computer. Regardless if you purchased a computer with Windows pre-installed or buy a retail CD of Windows, Microsoft made money on the software.
Microsoft does not have to sell hardware to the consumer. They just have to keep the financial terms favorable for the multitude of hardware vendors. That huge market share that Microsoft enjoys is made up of many hardware vendors who do not necessarily have a majority share of the market. The US market seems to be dominated by Dell and HP.
I don't think so. I meant that Linux's use will grow in computing appliances. I consider a computing appliance as a computing device dedicated to a single task or a single category of tasks. Appliances include routers, printers, Android smartphones, Android tablets, and the infamous Tivo.
Since Linux is being used as a component of these consumer devices, it doesn't count toward the consumer OS market share.
Linux used to be sold in a brick-and-mortar store. Broadband data service has all but eliminated the need to dedicate shelf space to Linux. Hard to justify dedicating valuable retail shelf for a product that most consumers interested in Linux are able to download for free.
For example:
Before Red Hat went to the subscription model, I was able to purchase a CD at the local "Office Depot" which is a brick-and-mortar office supply store. This did not improve Linux's market share.
Let's not forget the netbooks:
Linux was once sold pre-installed on netbooks, but the consumer didn't like it and as a result retailers in the US no longer carry any netbooks with Linux pre-installed.
The irony being that the interstate highway system was designed for commercial traffic and for civil defense (moving military supplies easier across the country in the event of an invasion).
We will miss you.
Damn you spell checker!
This is tongue-in-check of course:
Do your cases disqualify the "never" assertion?
Gentlemen's club = What no female strippers?
Russian army barracks = Russian women are tough. How do we truly know?
Catholic monastery = Nuns?
Engineering department = No administrative assistant?
It not that it is open sourced, it's wether or not Android applications can be considered Linux applications?
Since Linux is doing all of the low-level work for Dalvik and Dalvik does a pretty good job at abstracting the underlying OS from the applications, we are in a grey area. If the OS doesn't normally run Linux programs through its shell, do we still call it Linux?
I wouldn't consider Linux an intrinsic quality of Android.
This argument is similar to the ones made for Windows prior to NT (and XP at home). DOS was being used to execute the windows shell, yet would it be accurate to count Windows as DOS? We can use the metric derived for Windows to answer our conundrum about Android.
Can Android applications exist outside of Android OS? No, therefore Android is not equal to Linux. Admittedly simplistic, but pretty accurate. More so than the Windows argument since Dalvik is a virtual machine.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
Apple is selling HARDWARE that runs OS X. Apple does not sell OS X for other PCs. The only thing that officially runs OS X is Apple branded computers.
Microsoft is selling SOFTWARE that runs on almost all Intel based PCs. It comes pre-installed on almost all of the PC compatibles sold on the market. This is why its the most popular OS.
Linux distributions are SOFTWARE and is available free for download unlike Windows and Mac OS X which costs over a hundred dollars.
Linux has advertising. Canonical and Red Hat spends money on advertisement. It's on the web, in computer magazines, in IT trade magazines, etc.
The fact that the only free OS of the three can only manage 0.7% of statcounter is not that amazing. It shows that Linux still needs to overcome the momentum that Windows has in the PC compatible market. Unfortunately PC manufacturers have had a hard time selling PCs and Netbooks with Linux pre-installed in the US, and people are less likely to change from an OS that works well enough (some will say better - not me) for another one found on the internet.
Linux's opportunity to become mainstream is in computing appliances. With tablets and smart phones becoming popular, Linux has a chance to surpass Windows' market share. Unfortunately it looks like Linux is being relegated to boot loader, low level kernel and file layer for Android than being an outright OS option in those appliances. Meaning that while Android could be technically count towards Linux it would be more accurate to say that Dalvik is built on top of the linux kernel. No native linux applications are being made and nothing prevents Android from using another kernel since everything is abstracted anyway by the Dalvik VM, unless you use the Native DK of course.
There is still hope for "true" mobile Linux with distributions like MeeGo, but alas Google is better equipped to get hardware manufacturers to adopt their OS. MeeGo will be like Apple iOS since it will mostly exist on Nokia phones. Yet unlike iOS, Meego can be adopted by other manufacturers who don't want to use Android... oh... hope is only slight.
It's never safe to infer...
The only thing you can say with those statistics are:
558,285 people downloaded "Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory" from File Shack, of which 74% used Windows, 19% used Linux, and 7% used OS X.
The flaw in your logic is that you assume that File Shack is the only place to download that game.
Mac users may frequent "macgamefiles.com" more than "File Shack" as evident by the d/l count of 225,508.
Now I can combine the population of both "File Shack" and "Mac Game Files" and say that 783,793 people downloaded that game, of which 53% used Windows, 34% used Mac OS X, and 13% used Linux. Now you are not able to reach the conclusions that you made in your post.
You can probably find another download location that favors linux more and add it to the population and change the perception again. This still doesn't take into account the number of people who actually like to play Wolfenstein. For example, I used to play it when I used windows years ago but now I use another OS and I no longer play it. Yet, I still play multiplayer games like WoW and others. This is why I don't trust these popularity contests using web statistics.
Never guess the percentage of women in a building using the population of people in the men's restroom.
You made the incorrect assumption that politicians care. They also don't mind passing the expenses to the tax payers.
Coffee-coffee..
LOL!
Congratulate Amazon for discovering the one thing that will kill the ebook!
Seriously though if they use this technology only for periodicals how would this be different from traditional magazines except that the ads would alway be up-to-date?
Maybe because it was too long... ;)
I did read it, but the assertions you made in the rest of your comment showed a lack of understanding of how this legal process works.
Patents are not copyrights and it doesn't matter if Google used Oracle's code directly. Except that ironically if Google did they would have a better case to defend themselves.
The absurdity of patents is the fact that you only have to make something that does something similar to be in violation of a patent. To use a slashdot car metaphor/story - Robert Kearns invented the intermittent wipers and was granted a patent. He went to the big three automakers and they refused his offer to sale them the right to use them. Ford motor company decided that they could make their own intermittent wipers, and eventually Robert Kearns sued Ford for patent infringement. Ford settled the case for $10 million. Kearn subsequently sued Chrysler and ultimately won in court a judgement of $30 million. This was even with the auto makers arguing that the patent needed to meet some standard of originality and novelty.
Sun was granted these patents as they relate to virtual machines. Google appears to have created a clean room implementation that mimics the behavior described in those patents. Oracle the purchaser of Sun feels like they have case for patent infringement against Google and sued. Google can not refer to Microsoft's ".net" as a counter example, since Microsoft and Sun entered into a cross licensing agreement in 2003 as part of the settlement of the long dispute over Microsoft's handling of Java. Both sides have sufficient money to make this a long and drawn out court battle. Google has more to lose than Oracle. Oracle understands this and upped the ante with the severe damage relief being demanded.
I will not be surprised in the end that this is settled without a court judgement with an establishment of cross licensing agreement and some money heading Oracle's way. It's not about "right" or "wrong"... it is all about the Benjamins...
The problem with your really long comment is that even though Sun released OpenJDK under GPL, Google did not use any of its code. Google has called Dalvik a clean room implementation of a register based VM. It's not even byte compatible with JVM.
Since Dalvik is not derived from OpenJDK it can not enjoy its GPL protections.
Playing devil's advocate, I can see a legitimate reason to require both parties to consent to record a conversation.
Sherrod at USDA was a victim of an edited recording being released to the public, eventually an unedited version was released by the NAACP which hired the camera man. Unfortunately for her the damage was already done.
Two-party consent allows the party without the recorder a chance to specify the terms of the recording (eg. I would like an immediate copy of the tape), the chance to make his/her own recording of the conversation, or refuse and leave.
Everyone in the conversation so far assumes that the tape will be used in its original condition to catch a liar, but nobody thought about an edited version of the recording portraying an honest person as a liar.
Or maybe tell drivers they are just like auto-ferries.
Why should everyone subsidize urban development?
Should rural residents be forced to pay a social engineering tax on gasoline to fund mass transportation in urban areas?
Too bad the average rural resident is doing manual labor like farming, manufacturing, construction and service industries and need to drive to work.
You make rural areas sound like disney land... I think it may be wise for all the city slickers to stay in their cities.
Talking nonsense about rural folks won't make that high-speed rail service look less like government pork and a huge waste of people's taxes.
Well... San Francisco gave his boss the authority to ask and receive those passwords. What the boss does with those passwords are between his boss and San Francisco.
I meant to say "both can agree". I didn't mean to "put words in your mouth".
True, and I think we reached a point in this thread where we both agree that it doesn't appear that Oracle v. Google makes JVM less viable.
Wireless spectrum is public property, and FCC is charged with regulating that spectrum.
Wireless spectrum (especially the portion that gives a large enough range at safe signal levels) is a limited resource. The other more pressing issue is where to place the towers? Current wireless providers complain about how difficult it is to construct new towers to expand their coverage due to local regulations. Do you expect a competitor to reach a similar level of availability with these obstacles. How's WiMax doing?
Another obstacle is money...
Because despite how much clout Google may have, they are very dependent on the ISPs that allow Google's customers to connect.