Well, it must be mine of course, but yawn. Why are they going to so much trouble? Anyone who wants linux enough to buy swag for it doesn't need a bundled CD to get it. And anyone who cares enough to find custom keyboards doesn't need your buggy and probably non-GPL'ed software to remap keys...it's something already included in the kernel.
But, I could be wrong. It could be that the only thing holding my grandmother back from linux on the desktop is that her keyboard is only Windows compatible.
"I've got to give this particular move a thumbs-up. Proprietary file formats are never good for customers...Anything that opens up competition in the market can't help but be good, even if it comes from a P.O.S. developer like Real."
They're going about this so backwards. Drum up support, then make your move. Follow up doing something nasty with doing something nice, not by engaging in a silly PR war and a completely transparent price-war.
I think I speak for everyone when I say that I don't want smaller robots. I want bigger robots. It would take, like, 300,000 of these guys to form Voltron. It's fair to say that the coolness factor of any given robot can be measured by the number of them which would be required to form Voltron. And, as you can imagine, I'll form the head.
I think it's always going to be necessary, if for no other reason than that the centers for recognizing speech and written words are different and expect (require?) different input. Something I dictate to my computer is going to look weird to me if I give it in natural language when I read it, or it's going to require me to speak as if I'm writing, which is a skill that's a lot more difficult than learning to type.
I do think that we're going to continue to see more and more exotic, quick, and low stress keyboards, though. Things as simple as the "natural" keyboards with the broken apart, humped design would have been freakish even as short a time ago as my childhood. Ten years from now, everyone might own a datahand, or even something more exotic.
There are a lot of good quotes from Schwartz here. Also good for your daily dose of venom is his weblog. The message is clear: Solaris' binary only, standards based distribution is open and good, while linux's open source has and can be twisted into being proprietary and bad.
I love OpenOffice, but this is starting to smack of the Real thread. You can't coast on past goodness (or badness) forever.
I find myself wondering what Sun's strategy is. I mean, they go to battle with MS, enter a closed room, and come out best buds. Then they rail against FOSS in favor of open standards and threaten to do a hostile takeover on a leading Linux company. So then you think they've gotten a big check and become a patsy, right?
And throughout this blustering, they put forward the idea that through buying Novell they can somehow "own" the OS IBM is married to, which is kind of missing the point of Linux, but right in line with SCO's claims
Then they come out with news like this. As far as I can tell, their reasoning goes like this:
Microsoft's business practices are bad
But Microsoft is good
Open source is bad, you should run software implementing open standards instead
Especially since someone could buy your open source and yank it out from under you (but not your open standard)
But hey, if you want to run FOSS, we'll support your doing that.
We are all geeks here, so yeah it's ridiculous to us. But I see this as being an awesome book, and required reading for people getting into computers with the will to learn
See, if you go out looking for something obscure, you'll find it perfectly in 15 minutes or fewer. But I have friends who work as researchers for Harvard Univeristy and are considered the bomb and a bag of Fritos basically because of this ability. It's not second nature to most people to start using quoted phrases, alternative spellings, excluded matches, and cached pages with their handy highlights. Most folks have never clicked "I'm feeling lucky," or even know what it does. And good luck explaining to someone when you should use the directory, what pagerank is (and isn't) good for, how to find GIS results, or foreign language results. Yes the product is simple, but it is huge
Also, most people don't understand formal logic. Best Google-foo artist I know: a philosophy major. Try explaining even a concept so seemingly basic as implication to a random non math non geek. It's like the Mr. Wizard with the apple and pear slices. "So, if X implies Y, and I have Y, what can I infer?" They'll say "X" every time. Toss in a little logic, a little set theory, and I'm guessing that book could be even bigger than it is. And that's not counting Froogle or the toolbar or Gmail or anything.
I'd buy it. I probably will. And I'll make my LSAT students read it.
SCO is licensed to use the registered trademark UNIX "on and in connection" with their products that have been certified by The Open Group, as are all other licensees.
These are the ONLY circumstances in which a licensee may use the trademark UNIX on and in connection with it's products.
This seems like a pretty blatant abuse of a trademark owned by someone else. I'm guessing that if they ever made good on their "intent to use" this designation they would be served by TOG in about 15 minutes, backed by the $5 PayPal donations of every geek on the planet Earth.
So I'm going to be the first to say, hooray that other products can interact with the iPod. Now perhaps the fact that the aftmost media company in the world has gotten together a way to hack into the iPod (with their typical level of excellent programming and tasteful, functional, ad-free interface design) will motivate Apple to let the sacred cow die a little and license fairly to other, slightly less buffoonishly incompetent folks.
This is missing the point of why Real is evil, though. Real is evil because they are acting in horrible bad faith here. They came to Apple and asked to license their product. Apple, for whatever reasons, possibly that an alliance with Real would only make them look bad or possibly because The Great Steve was Feeling Peevish That Day, denied the request. Remember how it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission? Well, it only works if you don't ask permission first. Real then proceeded to take what they were denied. Even if they manage to get it by the courts, the fact is that that is still wrong.
But wait, let's take it one step further: they not only took the license they were denied, but they also are offering to sell, not give, it to anyone similarly downtrodden by the evil of Apple. They're not selling a product -- they're licensing the protocol that's not theirs. Again -- legal? Maybe. Ethical? Not so much.
Even so, I could be on their side, but then I decided to check out the licensing agreement for Harmony:
d) You may not use the Software in an attempt to, or in conjunction with, any device, program or service designed to circumvent technological measures employed to control access to, or the rights in, a content file or other work protected by the copyright laws of any jurisdiction.
Any direct use of Plug-Ins through a non-RN proprietary application, including a custom or user-written application is prohibited by this Agreement.
So, hypocritical, shoddy, unethical, and possibly illegal. That's great. You don't have to be a fanboy to dislike this. My bottom line: I've been hoping for the iPod to get hacked for a while, but I feel like I've been granted a twisted, evil version of my wish.
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Well, it must be mine of course, but yawn. Why are they going to so much trouble? Anyone who wants linux enough to buy swag for it doesn't need a bundled CD to get it. And anyone who cares enough to find custom keyboards doesn't need your buggy and probably non-GPL'ed software to remap keys...it's something already included in the kernel.
But, I could be wrong. It could be that the only thing holding my grandmother back from linux on the desktop is that her keyboard is only Windows compatible.
They're going about this so backwards. Drum up support, then make your move. Follow up doing something nasty with doing something nice, not by engaging in a silly PR war and a completely transparent price-war.
I think I speak for everyone when I say that I don't want smaller robots. I want bigger robots. It would take, like, 300,000 of these guys to form Voltron. It's fair to say that the coolness factor of any given robot can be measured by the number of them which would be required to form Voltron. And, as you can imagine, I'll form the head.
I think it's always going to be necessary, if for no other reason than that the centers for recognizing speech and written words are different and expect (require?) different input. Something I dictate to my computer is going to look weird to me if I give it in natural language when I read it, or it's going to require me to speak as if I'm writing, which is a skill that's a lot more difficult than learning to type.
I do think that we're going to continue to see more and more exotic, quick, and low stress keyboards, though. Things as simple as the "natural" keyboards with the broken apart, humped design would have been freakish even as short a time ago as my childhood. Ten years from now, everyone might own a datahand, or even something more exotic.
Hmmm...I was not aware of that. Amazing.
There are a lot of good quotes from Schwartz here. Also good for your daily dose of venom is his weblog. The message is clear: Solaris' binary only, standards based distribution is open and good, while linux's open source has and can be twisted into being proprietary and bad.
I love OpenOffice, but this is starting to smack of the Real thread. You can't coast on past goodness (or badness) forever.
I find myself wondering what Sun's strategy is. I mean, they go to battle with MS, enter a closed room, and come out best buds. Then they rail against FOSS in favor of open standards and threaten to do a hostile takeover on a leading Linux company. So then you think they've gotten a big check and become a patsy, right?
And throughout this blustering, they put forward the idea that through buying Novell they can somehow "own" the OS IBM is married to, which is kind of missing the point of Linux, but right in line with SCO's claims
Then they come out with news like this. As far as I can tell, their reasoning goes like this:
Has anyone checked for schizophrenia?
We are all geeks here, so yeah it's ridiculous to us. But I see this as being an awesome book, and required reading for people getting into computers with the will to learn
See, if you go out looking for something obscure, you'll find it perfectly in 15 minutes or fewer. But I have friends who work as researchers for Harvard Univeristy and are considered the bomb and a bag of Fritos basically because of this ability. It's not second nature to most people to start using quoted phrases, alternative spellings, excluded matches, and cached pages with their handy highlights. Most folks have never clicked "I'm feeling lucky," or even know what it does. And good luck explaining to someone when you should use the directory, what pagerank is (and isn't) good for, how to find GIS results, or foreign language results. Yes the product is simple, but it is huge
Also, most people don't understand formal logic. Best Google-foo artist I know: a philosophy major. Try explaining even a concept so seemingly basic as implication to a random non math non geek. It's like the Mr. Wizard with the apple and pear slices. "So, if X implies Y, and I have Y, what can I infer?" They'll say "X" every time. Toss in a little logic, a little set theory, and I'm guessing that book could be even bigger than it is. And that's not counting Froogle or the toolbar or Gmail or anything.
I'd buy it. I probably will. And I'll make my LSAT students read it.
Wow, cleverly restating what has been posted about a million times by now it's....adam b.! Give him a hand, folks!
Jeez.
Don't you mean hybrid source?
And why the older versions of all these things? Can I get a hey for Apache 2? Mozilla 1.7? Bind 9?
It's like the PA strip: "Power of...shit!" "Form of...Obsolescence!" "Combine to form...a bunch of crap nobody cares about!"
Oh wait, I see what they're hybridizing now...
From The Open Group's Website:
This seems like a pretty blatant abuse of a trademark owned by someone else. I'm guessing that if they ever made good on their "intent to use" this designation they would be served by TOG in about 15 minutes, backed by the $5 PayPal donations of every geek on the planet Earth.
So I'm going to be the first to say, hooray that other products can interact with the iPod. Now perhaps the fact that the aftmost media company in the world has gotten together a way to hack into the iPod (with their typical level of excellent programming and tasteful, functional, ad-free interface design) will motivate Apple to let the sacred cow die a little and license fairly to other, slightly less buffoonishly incompetent folks.
This is missing the point of why Real is evil, though. Real is evil because they are acting in horrible bad faith here. They came to Apple and asked to license their product. Apple, for whatever reasons, possibly that an alliance with Real would only make them look bad or possibly because The Great Steve was Feeling Peevish That Day, denied the request. Remember how it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission? Well, it only works if you don't ask permission first. Real then proceeded to take what they were denied. Even if they manage to get it by the courts, the fact is that that is still wrong.
But wait, let's take it one step further: they not only took the license they were denied, but they also are offering to sell, not give, it to anyone similarly downtrodden by the evil of Apple. They're not selling a product -- they're licensing the protocol that's not theirs. Again -- legal? Maybe. Ethical? Not so much.
Even so, I could be on their side, but then I decided to check out the licensing agreement for Harmony:
So, hypocritical, shoddy, unethical, and possibly illegal. That's great. You don't have to be a fanboy to dislike this. My bottom line: I've been hoping for the iPod to get hacked for a while, but I feel like I've been granted a twisted, evil version of my wish.