Being mainly a linux user I don't understand your reference (something about "ultimate"?
Yeah, Windows Vista has something like 7 different versions (4 retail versions, not sure how many OEM or volume licensing versions there are, but at least a couple more), each with its own different set of limitations. The the least crippled version is "Windows Vista Ultimate" which costs about $400. And I say "least crippled" instead of "not crippled" because it has all the features included in any other version of Windows Vista, but it's still Windows Vista.
show me that they'll support linux equally on the software side *and* that they've stepped up their hardware support, and this will be a bit more interesting.
They've supported Linux on the server side for a very very long time. It's only specific distributions, but what do you expect?
And their hardware support is about as good as anyone's. It went down hill on the consumer side a couple years ago when they outsourced to Inda, but most people did the same thing. However, if you have a business account, you still get American support and they're great. If any of my hardware breaks, they have a new part (and a technician if I want one) on-site within 4 hours.
It sounds like you're still dealing with people of a similar background, with similar beliefs, and who probably have many common interests. I don't believe it would work with a group as large and diverse as an entire country. Especially if that country has a lot of ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity.
I'm in favor of the idea that a government action should be obstructed by requiring a greater consensus than can be easily achieved. However, requiring anything close to unanimity would basically mean that nothing gets done.
Well, part of the problem in the past few years is that we've gotten too much done. Having one party in control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress is bad.
You do understand that absolutely nothing would ever get done, right? I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, but if you want your government to ever do anything, your ideas won't really work. No matter how great an idea is, you'd probably find 10% who would be willing to vote "veto".
Of course, the traditional American theory of government is that deadlock is good, government "getting things done" was bad. (Don't believe me? Read the Federalist Papers.) Now that we have a two-party system, that idea has been subverted. You need a 50% vote to get something done, and usually one single political party controls at least 50%. The original Federalist idea was that there would be many different factions, so that reaching 50% would require getting people from different factions to agree. To that end, I think it might be worth considering that we could raise the percentage needed to pass legislation to something like 60%, making it difficult for a single party to force legislation through. But a 10% veto would happen all the time.
You are totally missing my point. The broken window fallacy applies to economic gain, and not gains in scientific knowledge. Forcing someone to replace a window only replaces the window. The new window is going to be essentially the same as the old. However, no one is claiming that forcing someone to abandon existing technology will be of economic benefit, and meanwhile forcing someone to replace a solution by solving it another way might lead to scientific progress.
It won't necessarily lead to a new discovery or method, but it's certainly a possibility. It won't just be a "replacement solution" but will be a new solution, and it will probably have it's own advantages and disadvantages compared with the first solution. That might present new applications for that new solution, and it's possible that humanity will learn something new in the process.
In short, unlike economics, science and engineering thrive on "replacing an existing solution" with one that has different advantages. Since no one is claiming an economic benefit, there is no broken window fallacy. The fallacy is explicitly the claim that the baker will benefit economically.
I didn't say that our patent system was good or that this instance is an example of why the patent system is good. I just said that the GGGP post is not an example of the "broken window" fallacy.
Your reasoning is an example of the fallacy of the broken window.
It isn't really. The "broken window" fallacy argues that there will be economic benefit in breaking a window because it will stimulate spending. It's a fallacy because breaking the window constitutes a loss in value, and replacing that window costs money from somewhere, so there is no economic benefit.
However, needing to solve problems, even "already solved" problems, can be of scientific benefit. There are often many ways to solve the same problem, and the discovery of a new solution adds to the total of scientific and engineering knowledge, even if it's economically inefficient.
Not necessarily. It depends on how you envision the "remake". Sequels are often very different games. Civ2 and Civ4 have different features and a different balance. Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World have very different levels and upgrades. Halo 1 and Halo 3 don't have the same levels or story lines.
Personally, I'd really like to see something done to preserve video game history. Gaming platforms go obsolete. Sometimes you can get emulators, but the games don't always run properly in emulation. The result is that you lose big chunks of gaming history, and people can't play the games even if they want to.
I don't know how you solve that. I'd love it if, for example, Bungie had made their game engines such that they could just dump Halo 1 levels into the Halo 3 engine, tell it to use the updated textures, and get a complete version of Halo 1 using the Halo 3 engine as an XBox 360 game. I won't hold my breath on that sort of thing. But I think there's cultural value in old games, and they should be preserved in some playable form.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the big deal is. If you don't like Linspire's approach, don't buy it. If you really want a Linux distro with all these things built-in and installed by default, then it's good for you that someone is providing that.
It's not clear to me that any of this would be happening if Apple hadn't shown the viability of online music distribution. For those with a short memory, before the iPod, nobody really used portable MP3 players. Before iTunes, there were no examples of successful online music stores.
So all these companies are looking at Apple, seeing the success, trying to replicate it, and trying to beat it. Good for them. But let's not criticize Apple for allowing DRM this long. Apple accepting DRM for a couple years has loosened the stranglehold on music distribution held by the RIAA and Walmart. The whole time, Jobs has been complaining about DRM, and now people are getting the idea. Hopefully Apple will be able to remove all DRM from iTMS soon, but let's not forget that they still have to get the record labels to agree.
Or how about OSX? I've heard something about QT offering easy porting to OSX... any truth there?
Honestly, I think having good ports on Linux, OSX, and Windows is a big deal. I believe it's part of the reason Firefox has been successful. Users can use the same app on any platform and have the same features, same rendering, same behavior, and roughly the same interface. From an IT standpoint, it's ideal since it cuts down on support/training issues. OpenOffice seems to be the only office suite with that advantage.
It just sounds like it's implemented wrong on MacOS. For instance, you could have "file-folder aware" applications and "file-folder unaware" applications, distinguished by the API they use or a flag they pass to open or something like that, and if your web browser doesn't explicitly say "I want the folder view" it will automatically zip it during the read calls.
It kind of works that way within OSX and treats them as files unless you explicitly try to look at the contents. However, it's not smart enough to zip the files automatically when dealing with systems that aren't aware of the arrangement. For example, if you upload the "file" to a Windows file server, it gets uploaded as a directory (IIRC). Also, I think it will sometimes treat it as a folder unless you have to correct viewing application already installed.
Personally, I'm not sure why OSX doesn't use tar files or zip files (with or without out compression, depending on file type) to contain these "files" by default. You could still do some voodoo in the OS to allow users to browse these packages like folders, but at least their default state would still look like a file to all operating systems.
Admittedly, I'm no expert here, so forgive me if there's something naive about the idea.
With OS X, Apple rolled the resource fork into the "data fork" portion of the file, meaning the information was still there for legacy purposes.
That doesn't sound right to me-- or at least I'm not sure what you mean by that. OSX still has resource forks, but Apple basically told developers not to put important information in them anymore because they get lost so easily. They can't just push the resource fork into the data fork of the file, because in many formats there's essentially no space for that information. How do you store an icon, metadata tags, and a default application setting into a normal.txt file without making it into something that isn't really a normal text file?
So right now, developers are only really supposed to use resource forks for things that don't matter much. So if they're stripped, you lose a little metadata, but nothing catastrophic. It used to be that some files would carry all their data in the resource fork, and that was a bit of a nightmare. You'd lose important information all the time. In order to protect resource forks a little while transferring them to other file systems and such, Apple made those little files that you mentioned that begin with dot-underscore. So copy a file to another filesystem, and it'll often dump the resource forks into those dot-underscore files so that OSX can recombine them later.
I don't see how ZFS will change the situation greatly. Resource forks are just how HFS+ supports metadata. ZFS supports metadata too. I'm sure the technical implementation is different, but I bet you'll still risk losing your ZFS metadata if you move your file to a FAT partition. Or am I missing something?
Thanks for that. I was tempted to respond to that. "Vet" is correct, but AFAIK, "vett" is wrong. I think it only adds the extra "t" when you change tense, i.e. "vetted" or "vetting", unless there's some unconventional spelling that's become accepted.
Well, yes, there's a potential problem any time you put enough personal information into one place: sure, it's more convenient for the appropriate people to access, but it's also more convenient for someone to steal.
My bigger concern, however, is that this is Microsoft proposing this. It makes me want to vet the idea for possible abuses. Beyond the obvious privacy concerns, is Microsoft going to make it accessible only to Windows Vista machines, thereby forcing the entire medical system and any potential clients to upgrade, followed by years of lock-in?
Even if such a system is going to be set up, I'd rather someone with a good track record build something that makes use of open formats and protocols. I'd like to know that my family's medical records aren't going to go up in a puff of smoke because Windows Update decided my Office license wasn't "genuine", or something other bizarre thing.
In short, EVERYBODY PANIC and give us grant monies!Too late for me. As soon as I read, "Antarctic Ozone Hole Shrinks 30 Percent," I celebrated by emptying 20 cans of old hair spray that were filled with cloro-fluoro-carbons.
Whoo-hooo! The environment is fixed! Time to buy that Hummer!
What if someone wants to embed a graph, table, illustration, or something else in an e-mail? You and I probably don't think that way. I know I want plain-text email; if you want to send me something more, that's what attachments are for. But some people don't agree.
Also, rich-text and HTML email composition is similar enough to other word processing that Outlook, for example, uses a word processor for e-mail composition. In case you didn't know, the default setting with Outlook (last I checked) was to use Word for e-mail composition.
In addition to that, many people use Outlook for project management (through calendars and task lists) and document collaboration. Again, not really my cup of tea, but it's big in a lot of companies.
So it's certainly justifiable. I just get annoyed at the idea that everyone has to have this thing called an "office suite". Almost everyone needs a word processor, and many need a spreadsheet. You should need a license to use presentation software for as badly as it's misused.
An email client is a must for corporate users, too. My question is, why is there a concept of an "office suite"? A word processor, spreadsheet app, presentation app, an e-mail app are each different apps doing different things. Why must we treat them as all part of the same app?
Cue the whole Ayn Rand thing about how people in power want us to be "criminals".
Yes, it's pompous and annoying, but it's pretty much true. If people are honest non-criminals on the right side of the law, you have no leverage to force them into things. Once you're able to establish that the people are criminal and therefore indebted by their crime, you can demand anything from them.
The rich and powerful don't want "the people" to be empowered. Is this a surprise?
Remember, there is a difference between Sony's hardware division that makes stuff that plays music, and Sony's music division that signs artists, and distributes music.
I think people do remember that. They just like to point out how hypocritical it is to have one company where one division tries to make money by complaining about people copying music, while the other division tries to make money selling hardware that makes it easy to copy music.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe some people want to get corn holed. Are you judging people for making alternative lifestyle choices?
Being mainly a linux user I don't understand your reference (something about "ultimate"?
Yeah, Windows Vista has something like 7 different versions (4 retail versions, not sure how many OEM or volume licensing versions there are, but at least a couple more), each with its own different set of limitations. The the least crippled version is "Windows Vista Ultimate" which costs about $400. And I say "least crippled" instead of "not crippled" because it has all the features included in any other version of Windows Vista, but it's still Windows Vista.
show me that they'll support linux equally on the software side *and* that they've stepped up their hardware support, and this will be a bit more interesting.
They've supported Linux on the server side for a very very long time. It's only specific distributions, but what do you expect?
And their hardware support is about as good as anyone's. It went down hill on the consumer side a couple years ago when they outsourced to Inda, but most people did the same thing. However, if you have a business account, you still get American support and they're great. If any of my hardware breaks, they have a new part (and a technician if I want one) on-site within 4 hours.
It sounds like you're still dealing with people of a similar background, with similar beliefs, and who probably have many common interests. I don't believe it would work with a group as large and diverse as an entire country. Especially if that country has a lot of ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity.
I'm in favor of the idea that a government action should be obstructed by requiring a greater consensus than can be easily achieved. However, requiring anything close to unanimity would basically mean that nothing gets done.
Well, part of the problem in the past few years is that we've gotten too much done. Having one party in control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress is bad.
You do understand that absolutely nothing would ever get done, right? I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, but if you want your government to ever do anything, your ideas won't really work. No matter how great an idea is, you'd probably find 10% who would be willing to vote "veto".
Of course, the traditional American theory of government is that deadlock is good, government "getting things done" was bad. (Don't believe me? Read the Federalist Papers.) Now that we have a two-party system, that idea has been subverted. You need a 50% vote to get something done, and usually one single political party controls at least 50%. The original Federalist idea was that there would be many different factions, so that reaching 50% would require getting people from different factions to agree. To that end, I think it might be worth considering that we could raise the percentage needed to pass legislation to something like 60%, making it difficult for a single party to force legislation through. But a 10% veto would happen all the time.
You are totally missing my point. The broken window fallacy applies to economic gain, and not gains in scientific knowledge. Forcing someone to replace a window only replaces the window. The new window is going to be essentially the same as the old. However, no one is claiming that forcing someone to abandon existing technology will be of economic benefit, and meanwhile forcing someone to replace a solution by solving it another way might lead to scientific progress.
It won't necessarily lead to a new discovery or method, but it's certainly a possibility. It won't just be a "replacement solution" but will be a new solution, and it will probably have it's own advantages and disadvantages compared with the first solution. That might present new applications for that new solution, and it's possible that humanity will learn something new in the process.
In short, unlike economics, science and engineering thrive on "replacing an existing solution" with one that has different advantages. Since no one is claiming an economic benefit, there is no broken window fallacy. The fallacy is explicitly the claim that the baker will benefit economically.
I didn't say that our patent system was good or that this instance is an example of why the patent system is good. I just said that the GGGP post is not an example of the "broken window" fallacy.
Your reasoning is an example of the fallacy of the broken window.
It isn't really. The "broken window" fallacy argues that there will be economic benefit in breaking a window because it will stimulate spending. It's a fallacy because breaking the window constitutes a loss in value, and replacing that window costs money from somewhere, so there is no economic benefit.
However, needing to solve problems, even "already solved" problems, can be of scientific benefit. There are often many ways to solve the same problem, and the discovery of a new solution adds to the total of scientific and engineering knowledge, even if it's economically inefficient.
Not necessarily. It depends on how you envision the "remake". Sequels are often very different games. Civ2 and Civ4 have different features and a different balance. Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World have very different levels and upgrades. Halo 1 and Halo 3 don't have the same levels or story lines.
Personally, I'd really like to see something done to preserve video game history. Gaming platforms go obsolete. Sometimes you can get emulators, but the games don't always run properly in emulation. The result is that you lose big chunks of gaming history, and people can't play the games even if they want to.
I don't know how you solve that. I'd love it if, for example, Bungie had made their game engines such that they could just dump Halo 1 levels into the Halo 3 engine, tell it to use the updated textures, and get a complete version of Halo 1 using the Halo 3 engine as an XBox 360 game. I won't hold my breath on that sort of thing. But I think there's cultural value in old games, and they should be preserved in some playable form.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the big deal is. If you don't like Linspire's approach, don't buy it. If you really want a Linux distro with all these things built-in and installed by default, then it's good for you that someone is providing that.
Does there need to be conflict and controversy?
It's not clear to me that any of this would be happening if Apple hadn't shown the viability of online music distribution. For those with a short memory, before the iPod, nobody really used portable MP3 players. Before iTunes, there were no examples of successful online music stores.
So all these companies are looking at Apple, seeing the success, trying to replicate it, and trying to beat it. Good for them. But let's not criticize Apple for allowing DRM this long. Apple accepting DRM for a couple years has loosened the stranglehold on music distribution held by the RIAA and Walmart. The whole time, Jobs has been complaining about DRM, and now people are getting the idea. Hopefully Apple will be able to remove all DRM from iTMS soon, but let's not forget that they still have to get the record labels to agree.
Or how about OSX? I've heard something about QT offering easy porting to OSX... any truth there?
Honestly, I think having good ports on Linux, OSX, and Windows is a big deal. I believe it's part of the reason Firefox has been successful. Users can use the same app on any platform and have the same features, same rendering, same behavior, and roughly the same interface. From an IT standpoint, it's ideal since it cuts down on support/training issues. OpenOffice seems to be the only office suite with that advantage.
Why no love of Kerberos!
Especially since it already starts with a "K"!
Perhaps just as good a question would be, were "real journalists" of the past actually as upright, unbiased, and accurate as you imply.
Cheaper? Foxit Reader for Windows is listed as $39.00.
Adobe Acrobat Reader is free. How is that cheaper? Am I missing something?
It just sounds like it's implemented wrong on MacOS. For instance, you could have "file-folder aware" applications and "file-folder unaware" applications, distinguished by the API they use or a flag they pass to open or something like that, and if your web browser doesn't explicitly say "I want the folder view" it will automatically zip it during the read calls.
It kind of works that way within OSX and treats them as files unless you explicitly try to look at the contents. However, it's not smart enough to zip the files automatically when dealing with systems that aren't aware of the arrangement. For example, if you upload the "file" to a Windows file server, it gets uploaded as a directory (IIRC). Also, I think it will sometimes treat it as a folder unless you have to correct viewing application already installed.
Personally, I'm not sure why OSX doesn't use tar files or zip files (with or without out compression, depending on file type) to contain these "files" by default. You could still do some voodoo in the OS to allow users to browse these packages like folders, but at least their default state would still look like a file to all operating systems.
Admittedly, I'm no expert here, so forgive me if there's something naive about the idea.
With OS X, Apple rolled the resource fork into the "data fork" portion of the file, meaning the information was still there for legacy purposes.
That doesn't sound right to me-- or at least I'm not sure what you mean by that. OSX still has resource forks, but Apple basically told developers not to put important information in them anymore because they get lost so easily. They can't just push the resource fork into the data fork of the file, because in many formats there's essentially no space for that information. How do you store an icon, metadata tags, and a default application setting into a normal .txt file without making it into something that isn't really a normal text file?
So right now, developers are only really supposed to use resource forks for things that don't matter much. So if they're stripped, you lose a little metadata, but nothing catastrophic. It used to be that some files would carry all their data in the resource fork, and that was a bit of a nightmare. You'd lose important information all the time. In order to protect resource forks a little while transferring them to other file systems and such, Apple made those little files that you mentioned that begin with dot-underscore. So copy a file to another filesystem, and it'll often dump the resource forks into those dot-underscore files so that OSX can recombine them later.
I don't see how ZFS will change the situation greatly. Resource forks are just how HFS+ supports metadata. ZFS supports metadata too. I'm sure the technical implementation is different, but I bet you'll still risk losing your ZFS metadata if you move your file to a FAT partition. Or am I missing something?
Thanks for that. I was tempted to respond to that. "Vet" is correct, but AFAIK, "vett" is wrong. I think it only adds the extra "t" when you change tense, i.e. "vetted" or "vetting", unless there's some unconventional spelling that's become accepted.
Well, yes, there's a potential problem any time you put enough personal information into one place: sure, it's more convenient for the appropriate people to access, but it's also more convenient for someone to steal.
My bigger concern, however, is that this is Microsoft proposing this. It makes me want to vet the idea for possible abuses. Beyond the obvious privacy concerns, is Microsoft going to make it accessible only to Windows Vista machines, thereby forcing the entire medical system and any potential clients to upgrade, followed by years of lock-in?
Even if such a system is going to be set up, I'd rather someone with a good track record build something that makes use of open formats and protocols. I'd like to know that my family's medical records aren't going to go up in a puff of smoke because Windows Update decided my Office license wasn't "genuine", or something other bizarre thing.
In short, EVERYBODY PANIC and give us grant monies!Too late for me. As soon as I read, "Antarctic Ozone Hole Shrinks 30 Percent," I celebrated by emptying 20 cans of old hair spray that were filled with cloro-fluoro-carbons.
Whoo-hooo! The environment is fixed! Time to buy that Hummer!
What if someone wants to embed a graph, table, illustration, or something else in an e-mail? You and I probably don't think that way. I know I want plain-text email; if you want to send me something more, that's what attachments are for. But some people don't agree.
Also, rich-text and HTML email composition is similar enough to other word processing that Outlook, for example, uses a word processor for e-mail composition. In case you didn't know, the default setting with Outlook (last I checked) was to use Word for e-mail composition.
In addition to that, many people use Outlook for project management (through calendars and task lists) and document collaboration. Again, not really my cup of tea, but it's big in a lot of companies.
So it's certainly justifiable. I just get annoyed at the idea that everyone has to have this thing called an "office suite". Almost everyone needs a word processor, and many need a spreadsheet. You should need a license to use presentation software for as badly as it's misused.
An email client is a must for corporate users, too. My question is, why is there a concept of an "office suite"? A word processor, spreadsheet app, presentation app, an e-mail app are each different apps doing different things. Why must we treat them as all part of the same app?
Cue the whole Ayn Rand thing about how people in power want us to be "criminals".
Yes, it's pompous and annoying, but it's pretty much true. If people are honest non-criminals on the right side of the law, you have no leverage to force them into things. Once you're able to establish that the people are criminal and therefore indebted by their crime, you can demand anything from them.
The rich and powerful don't want "the people" to be empowered. Is this a surprise?
Remember, there is a difference between Sony's hardware division that makes stuff that plays music, and Sony's music division that signs artists, and distributes music.
I think people do remember that. They just like to point out how hypocritical it is to have one company where one division tries to make money by complaining about people copying music, while the other division tries to make money selling hardware that makes it easy to copy music.