I think is a bad idea for any OS company to rely on a third party app to properly display help files.
Removing artificial barriers to reasonable competition is one thing. Forcing bad design decisions is another.
Microsoft should not be prevented from providing a complete set of software that meets what are basically essential customer needs.
A decade ago it was much more reasonable for the court to say that browsers were not an essential part of the OS, and the fact that it took hours to download a competing browser over the internet did create a barrier to competition.
Now it is hard to say that a browser is not something people expect to come with their system to provide basic services they expect form it, and it is no longer difficult for consumers to access competing browsers that may add value for consumers.
There's a number of things wrong with this argument.
First of all Canada had lower rates of gun deaths before they enacted their strict gun laws.
The rates of violent crime have been dropping faster in the US than in Canada since those laws were enacted.
Another problem with just focusing on gun deaths is that it scews the facts. Gun laws in Canada likely have made guns less available to criminals. That doesn't mean that those criminals stop commiting violent crimes, it just means they don't use guns to commit them.
A common statistic is that suicide rates with guns are greately reduce in countries that enact strict gun laws. What is ignored is that the overall suicide rates remained pretty consistent. Those committing suicide simply used other methods.
Canada does have less violent crime than the US. Part of that may be that the population is packed in less densly. Whatever, it is something Canadian's should be proud of. However, the facts don't link it to gun control laws.
One exception to the rule was Asheron's Call's launch, which went surprisingly smooth.
Of course their launch of their only expansion patch Dark Majesty, didn't go so smoothly, and the sequal AC2's launch was a mess and continues to be a mess.
They likey don't need to modify the kernel to have it run on their embedded CPU. They're going to pick an already supported CPU, and if they need to tweak the kernel, they'll just submit the changes back to the project. That way they don't need to make the source available themselves. They just point you to where you can get it.
If they have to actually make mods to the kernel thay can always submit those changes back to the people who developed the embedded linux distribution for them to make publicly available.
If they have to make more than simple changes, then there's a good chance that they'll just use a commercial embedded OS. It's in the best interest of the OS vendor to license the OS inexpensively enough that it's cheaper for them to use the commercial OS than to do significant customization to the kernel and make that source available.
Ford isn't going to develop their own custome kernel for embedded applications. They'lluse a trimmed down publicly available kernel, or a real time distribution. The source to those is already freely available and Ford isn't responsible to provide it to you themselves.
As long as Ford's code is developed as loadable modules, they don't have to provide the source to them. Just because someone writes an application that runs on Linux doesn't mean that they have to provide source.
They aren't being made homeless. It's a communist country. The government has built new, preplanned communities for the people to be relocated to at higher elevations.
The houses are a bit spartan, but in most cases provide better shelter than what they lived in before.
The people are being uprooted, and are losing a lot fo things of emotional improtants, but they won't be homeless.
Do you really think the floods that kill on average 3000 people a year are good for the animal populations either?
The building of this dam will likely be among the largest manmade environmental change to hapen over a relatively short time period. However, I don't think the earth is in danger of becomming overballanced because of it. It will cause some drastic changes in environment. Some animals will die in the process, others will move to new homes. The flooding process is somewhat slow, so the animals in the area aren't going to be suddenly drowned like they are in a flood.
However, this dam has a good chance of providing China with inexpensive power in a way that produces very little pollution. It can provide a nation which has a lot of poor and impoverished people with a much higher standard of living.
In the long term scheme of things, is the ecological upheaval this will cause really that significant? Will there be more or less polution in the area because of it? My guess is that there will be less because the Chineese will have a clean form of energy.
Will the environment in the area on the whole be better off in 200 years with or without the dam?
Will the people in the area be better off in 200 years with or without the dam?
I use Windows, Linux, Solaris, and several real time OSs as work. My Windows 2000 hasn't caused me any problems since I got rid of a bad Novel Client off of it, and I haven't rebooted it since my last vacation several months ago.
Windows isn't the unreliable piece of crap it used to be, just like Linux isn't the unfriendly piece of crap it used to be. If you're really having serious stability problems with your Windows systems, upgrade from Win95 or consider that you may have hardware or driver issues.
Use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that is Linux. Other times it's not.
For products with simple hardware interfaces, releasiing the register data is often a good solution in order to sell products to customers with very specific needs. At the company I work at we do release the register data for several of our products. It's in the hardware manual you get with the products, and our application engineers often have experience writing drivers for those products and can answer some questions to help customers write their own drivers.
However, we don't mark our products up enough to pay for us to provide the kind of support that some customers need while writing their own dirvers.
I just got a phone call while typing this and just spent the last hour trying to get information for a customer about a hardware feature that we don't use in our own drivers, so none of our software engineers could tell me how it works.
Supporting someone else's driver development is not a simple task when the hardware is not simple task, and the customers usually don't have the proper tools such as a PCI bus analyzer to debug problems when they occur. I've done a lot of ports to a lot of systems, and seen a lot of problems where the driver is written correctly, however the motherboard manufacturer of chipset designer didn't follow or implement the PCI spec properly and problems result. This could result in poor performance, or even data being dropped between the PCI Bus and the memory controller.
Supporting other people's developement can be very expensive.
Supporting Linux drivers also has it's own issues. We provide Linux drivers for our products on both X86 and PPC systems. I've seen drivers that work fine with one kernel revision break with the next minor revision. Linux customers also like to apply kernel patches which sometimes break our drivers. It's impossible to properly retest a complicated driver every time a new kernel revision comes out. We often ship customers a borad and a driver that was tested with a version of Linux other than what the customer is using. We warn the customers of this, however if they run into problems we end up having to load a system with that version of Linux and testing it to discover if there really is a problem, or if the customer has doen something strange with their configuration.
Even though we have Linux drivers there isn't a huge demand for them. This results in us spending a lot and time and money supporting an OS that isn't making us as much money. This is one of the main reasons a lot of hardware manufacturers don't bother with Linux support.
One other reason is that you often use third party ASICs in your products, and how to interface whith their registers is often provided under NDA, so that it's impossible to release to a customer without proper NDAs and licensing agreements.
Yet another reason is that often the hardware provides only a small portion of the functionality of the product. The rest of what makes the product valuable is done in the driver. If you have a product that uses commodity hardware and provides additional functionality though software, you can't simply give away the source code to that software and still pay for your development. People will take your software and buy the hardware from someone else, which can sell the hardware cheaper because they didn't invest in the software development.
Many of these issues depend on the hardware involved. Others depend on the skill and resources of the customer.
In the case of our Company we are willing to work with customers to provide reasonable solutions. However for customers that want to buy one hardware unit, and want us to help them develop a custome driver for their particular OS and platform, those solutions are usually very expensive.
If a driver on Windows with an interface writter in Visual Basic meets the technical needs of your project (including reliability) then it's often a pretty cost effective choice.
Your conclusion isn't exactly supported by the evidence either.
There are a lot of new MMOGs under development right now. All are getting considerable funding despite the current economic downturn. Many are being funded by the companies that have current popular games. Sony and Atari are funding several.
Look at the data again. While a few games are having population decreases, many are still seeing growth. The market is much more mature than when UO and EQ came out, but it hasn't capped yet, and there is still the viable possibility of a new game stealing market share from one of the current games. EQ is has been wildly profitable, so they are a huge target. If someone can develop a game that steals away 5% to 10% of EQ's players, they'd likely be able to make a lot of money.
Just because there is competition, doesn't mean there isn't a market for new products.
Have you ever worked on a technical committee for a standard? It's a committee formed by different people from the industry that all want the technology that suits them best put in the standard. They don't want the standard to require too much, because it increases their costs, so they don't want too much of the things other people want included. The prospective customers get included in the committee because without their interest, there's little point in doing the standard. In the end it's a long process by which you end up with a standard with way too much junk in it, most of which is optional. You end up with final implementations that are entirely non-compatable, but which often completely comply with the standard. After a few more itterations (often years) compatibility improves, but so does complexity. Eventually if the technology is reasonably good, and hasn't been surpassed by something that was developed by a small group then the volumes increas to the point where the cost of all the complexity doesn't limit it's cost effective implementation.
The standards process often stifles innovation of the technology that is being standardized.
However, when developing a new technology, it is usually very benificail to use other standardized technologies as the building blocks. It's hard to develop something when what you are working with is constantly evolving, so working with standardized technology, with slows down that evolution is most often the best bet.
However, when creating a new technology, I agree with the author that a small group with similar goals is most often the best course of action. They can develop the technology and work out some of the additional issues. They can then spread out to work with some strategic partners to test it more broadly. Then after they have a technology that is a little more mature, they can take it through the standards process with a standards body, where it will get proper public review, and hopefully the industry support that will make it a true standard, rather than a proprietary technology the's a standard only in name.
I've been a part of the standards process both with a technology that way developed within our company and standardized with the support of our partners, and even some of our competitors after the fact, and part of working with standards being developed by large committees of people from the industry.
The large committees are horribly inefficient and time consuming. If you want to get a technology standardized in a usable form quickly, it needs to be somewhat mature before it ever reaches the standards process.
Asheron's Call, Dark Majesty (which is the full game) costs $20 with a $20 mail in rebate. It includes one month of service. Basicly they need to charge something for it so the retailer can take a cut and will stock the game on the shelf. By the time you get the rebate, Microsoft/Turbine is actuall paying out money to get you to try the game.
Now that they're finally going to start banning combat macroers next month, it's even worth trying out.
The headline's not great, but it's not too bad. The article is about Microsoft being more fair to their rivals. The article also points out that not all the States have bought in on the settlement and are still sueing. It's a lot less misleading of a title than the ones that are often here at Slashdot. It's hard to sumarize an article in a half dozen words. They didn't do that bad.
The typical argument for "MS Killed Java" is not that Java died because it was not included in Windows, but rather because it was included in a crippled way that misrepresented the language.
The first versions Microsoft put out of IE were hardly the best examples of browsers. They didn't kill the browser market on Windows.
Microsoft's first attempts at a SQL server were pretty bad, but they didn't kill SQL.
Microsoft has had a habbit of adding their own implementations of new products into Windows that start our with a weak implementation and get better over time. Maybe this isn't what happened with Java, but this action didn't kill other technologies.
You could still download and use other JVMs. There wear also other technologies like flash that didn't seem to have trouble getting a foothold in the marketpalce. Maybe Java was just pushed out a little before it was ready by Sun.
I continually am amazed at firms that do this. Does not even the lowly geek admin at this place realize this will eventually kill mp3 as a used format, thus killing their source of revenue?
If they don't charge they have zero revenue. Charging $0.75 a decoder or $50k to $60 one time fee isn't that big of a deal for commercial companies making decoders. The only ones this hurt is the open source and free decoders, and they aren't making money from those anyway.
I agree that charging fees after the format is underhanded, and possibly grounds for anti-trust violations, but giving it away for free isn't exactly a great business decision either.
Name one such use -- one that does not derive from licensing restrictions placed by someone else on non-GPL'ed code.
Here is the GPL [gnu.org], point out where it discriminates against corporations, individuals, governments, or anyone else, in terms of their right to use the software, as source code or binaries.
The GPL has one major restrictions. It requires that all derivative works also be released under the GPL, and that source code for those derivative works be made freely available.
That discriminates against against anyone who wants to take a public resource, which has been developed at the taxpayer expense, and add value to it through their own efforts, and then sell the finished product in order to support themselves and their development efforts. If their additions to the software have no value, then no one would have any reason to buy thier software, because the baseline work that the government developed would be freely available to everyone if released in the public domain.
The government and public could see benefits from the use of such proprietary software. If the benefits are greater than the price the developer is charging for their software, then people will buy it, if not, then people won't. The proprietary software isn't getting anything for free that anyone else didn't get.
What part of "Linux is not an individual or corporation" do you not understand?
What does it matter? GPLed software doesn't produce direct profits for it's developers. Some comrporations do contribute to GPLed products so that they can make indirect proffits. Individuals and corporations both can benefit from GPLed software. Individuals and corporations can also benefit from proprietary software. Developers can benetfit from getting direct compensation for developing the software. Corporations that develop software can benefit from getting a return on their investment of the development costs of developing the software. Users of proprietary can benefit from proprietary software if it's benefits out weigh the price they are paying for it. Both models have benefits. Both models have projects for which they are better suited. Their are also many applications for which either model will work and they can compete against each other. I don't see any need for the govenment to step in and support one over the other. The government should make ther results of it's efforts equally available to both.
They aren't giving Linux preferential treatment -- they're giving the public preferential treatment! (Or, they were.)
If Linux happens to be, for whatever combination of reasons, the best public product for the job they have at hand, then there's nothing wrong with them enhancing it instead of, say, OpenBSD -- and vice versa, should they wish to enhance that.
Those proprietary developers and corporations are also part of the "public". The users of proprietary software that have no problem paying for the software products they need are part of the "public". If the government should be doing things that can't be effectively done by private individuals. When the govenment developes software as part of it's efforts. It should be released into the public domain so that everyone has equal access to it. GPL is not in the best interest of all members of the public in all cases. If the governemnt allows equall access to everyone, the public can then decide what it wants.
Again, Linux is a free public product, like the C language, or the Ada language, or the FORTRAN language -- in some cases, products that, via trademark especially, have some "onerous restrictions" beyond those of the GPL (like, you can't call something X unless your implementation passes a rigorous test suite).
C, Ada, and FORTRAN are industry standards created by standards organizations with input from members of the public. THese languages do not put restrictions on how they can be used or how products that are created with them may be distributed. Linux is also created with input from the public, but the GPL places serious restrictions on derivative works.
It's obviously throwing your brain a curve because, unlike standards, it's an actual free implementation, which post-1980s software kiddies generally can't conceive of in a "Free As In GNU" sense.
I'll agree that it's different than a standard, because you can simply fork off a version and still call it Linux. I'm not sure what you mean by standards not being free? They don't cost you anything to implement or use. There may be a cost involved with conformance testing, but in most cases that's to prove to others that you conform to the standard. With Linux there's nothing to conform to. They are different, and free in different ways.
But the government has long been in the "business" of freely enhancing free public implementations of software as well -- implementations that have almost always been competitive with proprietary offerings in their day.
Linux is just another case of this.
The govenment has often funded development of software for the public good. However, they have a responsibility to make sure that the public has resonably equal access to that software. The GPL drasticly limits the use of software by commercial developers, and limits the availability of those benefits to the users of commercial software. The GPL does make sure the source code and source to derivative works remains public in a sense. But if prevents people from freely using that code however they choose.
And if it wasn't for Microsoft wetting its pants over Linux as a competitor, we wouldn't be having this discussion -- it'd be assumed a reasonable thing for government to do. (There might be some mumbling resentment over not picking a *BSD, of course, which gets into technical issues I'm not prepared to address.)
If Linux wasn't a competitor this would probably be ignored. Support for government funding of the development of GPLed software has long been justified as an excellent educational tool. GPLed software still is an excellent educational tool, and the GPL gaurentees that extensions to that software will continue to be available for that use. There are situations where there is a distinct public need where supporting the development of GPLed software is in the public's best interest. The development of secure OSs is in the public's best interest. But there are many different OSs, and the govenment shouldn't be supporting one type of OS or License over another. If there is a particular project the government is funding where the development of a secure version of Linux meets the project's needs and is cost effective, then I fully support the government funding it. Linux is a valuble tool in many projects. That's very different than the NSA developing a secure Linux and releasing it under the GPL.
So, the question is this: why are you working as a shill for Microsoft's business interests?
I'm looking after my own best interests, and what I beleive to be the public's best interests. I like having choices. I Like being able to choose Windows for my home computer I play games on. It does that pretty well, and is easily worth the $100 to $150 I payed for the OS, it would have been less if I'd have bought a computer rather than built it myself.
I like being able to choose VXWorks or LynxOS for an embedded real-time project. They both have benefits. VxWorks in particular is very expensive and least for the development tools. However, it's simple, stable, and protable between different processor types. This often makes up for it's high cost. We've also embedded Linux in some of our products where I work. It took longer to get some of the bugs worked out of it, but the $0 licensing fees are definately attractive. For products that are going to sell in high volumes it's great. If you're only going to make a couple, I'd rather use VxWorks. For our hardware development we support drivers for Linux, Windows, VxWorks, and Solaris as our standard OSs. We will also port our software to other OSs if there's significant demand for it or the customer is willing to pay for the development costs. Linux tends to be significantly harder than the other four to support. THe OS just changes too much. Each release fixes some bugs, creates a few others, and the bug fixes often require us to remove our workaround to those bugs and thouroughly retest everything. Changing the software and properly retesting everything takes weeks if everything goes well. Different OSs and different development methods have different benefits. The governemnt isn't in a position to be able to evaluate the benefit of one type over another. They should try to make it so their efforts benefit all of them as equally as possible and let the market decide.
Your use of "Linux", on the other hand, suggests you cannot distinguish a free, public operating system from a single-sourced, proprietary operating system (or, more precisely, from the company that produces it).
Until Linux is released into the public domain without the GPL I will never consider it a free, public OS. It is free in that there are no direct costs, and it is public in that you can get the source for free and compile it yourself, but it's not completely free or completely public.
It's a different way of releasing software, but it still has very strong and significant restrictions on it's use. It definatley provides some advantages to both the general puplic and the govenrment. I don't think the NSA should ignore Linux, but I don't think they should give it significant pereferential treatment either. There are numerous commercial companies that gain significant benefit from using Linux in secure applications. Let those companies put forth the effort and the money to get a certified, secure version of Linux. Let Linux compete on equal terms on it's merits. Commercial companies do receive help form the NSA to get their OSs secure, but the efforts of the NSA are very small compared to the efforts from the companies. The companies also pay the NSA to be certified, which offsets the costs of the NSA working of issues with the OS.
If a secure Linux requires tax payer money to be developed, then it's hardly free. The costs are just being shifted. If Linux requires significantly more help than commercial OSs to be certified, then those companies have every right to complain because their tax money is being used to subsidise the development of their competition.
If SELinux fills a necessary need then the covernment contractors and vendors who are selling systems using it to meet the goverment's needs should pay for it's development and certification. The NSA should not be subsidizing the development of a secure version of Linux. It should be able to compete on it's own merits.
If the NSA is working with others to improve Linux and get it certified to the extent that they do with other OSs, then I think the NSA is doing their job.
If they are putting in a significant effort beyond what they would do for other OSs, and actually releasing code they developed under a license that restricts it's use by other american companies for reasons other than security, then they are out of line.
Vendors for other OSs spend millions of dollars developing secure versions of their OS and getting them certified. Linux shouldn't get a free ride.
Obviously there's a difference between gross and profit, but it just shows that Blizzard will up their prices, and this is important when their MMORPG starts up.
They can't up their prices on their games. Most People just won't pay much more than $60 to purchase a computer game. With MMORPGs customers are paying monthly fees for updates, and maintence on a persistent world.
Blizzard can likely charge people to play their games online. It would lose them a lot of loyal fans because they are used to geting that service for free. What people are really paying for with the monthly fees is a persistent, evolving world in which their characters can interact with others.
Traditional games don't give developers an ongoing cashflow to continue to develop and evolve the game. After the game is released, they provide patches to fix bugs so that they can keep selling more coppies to more players. But after a while, the game goes on the bargain shelf, revenues drop, and it no longer makes much sense to keep developing that game. They may still do some bug fixes to maintain customer brand loyalty, but the money just isn't there to maintain the game. With a MMORPG, the money is there as long as the customers are there. As long as they can keep customers happy, the game will continue, and continue to be profitable.
I very much prefer the monthly subscription. With the monthly subscription you pay as you go for the services they provide. You pay extra the first month to get the account set up, and get the disk, but after that you're paying for them to continue to work on the game. In Asheron's Call, new content is added pretty much every month. Some months there are more bug fixes while others have more content, but the company has a constant cash flow they can use to continue develop the game.
If you pay $200 up front, then as the game matures, there's less of a reason for the company to continue developing the game. Income is based strictly on attracting new players, not maintaining the world for current loyal customres. That's a business model that's bound to eventually fail. For many people spending $200 or more is a much bigger decision than paying the $20 to $60 for the box and seeing how they like the game. They just won't be able to attract the player base at that price.
As for the people who thing the monthly fees are too high. I strongly suggest you don't play. There are many thousands of people who think the monthly fees are very reasonably priced, and the games really don't need more whiners. I used to buy about a game a month. Now I've bought 1 game in the last 18 months. Asheron's Call has definately been a very good entertainment investment for me. If you don't like monthly fees, there are other choices you can make. Maybe try Neverwinter Nights, or Warcraft 3.
It's all about bandwidth. The FCC regulates the frequencies people are allowed to transmit on. Analog TV frequencies are taking up a huge block of bandwidth that can be used for other emerging wireless technologies. In order to free up that bandwidth, broadcast television stations need to move over to digital broadcasts which use a smaller chunk of frequencies to transmit. Until the broadcasters are switched over they are using both the analog and digital frequencies, which is a waste of this very limited resource.
Once consumers switch over to digital TVs, or at least digital tuners, the FCC can take back the analog TV frequencies. Right now the plan is for this to happen in 2006. TV manufacturers are dragging their feet because they can charge a nice premium on digital TVs right now, and moving them into the mainstream means lower profit margins and lower overall profits for them.
Once digital TVs become mainstream the price to make them will be very small. Consumers get better quality pictures and sound for this small additional cost. They also get access to the new emerging technologies that will be possible because of the frequencies freed up by the analog broadcasts going away. Older TVs will need a digital tuner/converter in order to work.
The government will also reap billions from auctioning off the current analog TV frequencies. Consumers will in turn pay for those billions when they buy the new products. This makes legislators happy because they get to collect billions of dollars without it being obvious that people are being taxed.
I personally think it needs to be done. Those frequencies need to be made available, and unlike much of the legislation, the people who are paying for it, actually get a benefit from it in the form of better quality pictures and sound.
The DTVs are expensive because of the low volumes. Right now manufacturers are charging premiums for the DTVs. High end TVs are where they make the best profit margins, so they aren't real interested in making DTVs into a commodity product.
I suspect that the $100 higher price at first and the $15 in 2006 is reasonably accurate. That's how much they will have to mark up the TVs to get their usuall profit margin on those mainstream models. The actual cost to the manufacturers will be much smaller.
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I think is a bad idea for any OS company to rely on a third party app to properly display help files.
Removing artificial barriers to reasonable competition is one thing. Forcing bad design decisions is another.
Microsoft should not be prevented from providing a complete set of software that meets what are basically essential customer needs.
A decade ago it was much more reasonable for the court to say that browsers were not an essential part of the OS, and the fact that it took hours to download a competing browser over the internet did create a barrier to competition.
Now it is hard to say that a browser is not something people expect to come with their system to provide basic services they expect form it, and it is no longer difficult for consumers to access competing browsers that may add value for consumers.
There's a number of things wrong with this argument.
First of all Canada had lower rates of gun deaths before they enacted their strict gun laws.
The rates of violent crime have been dropping faster in the US than in Canada since those laws were enacted.
Another problem with just focusing on gun deaths is that it scews the facts. Gun laws in Canada likely have made guns less available to criminals. That doesn't mean that those criminals stop commiting violent crimes, it just means they don't use guns to commit them.
A common statistic is that suicide rates with guns are greately reduce in countries that enact strict gun laws. What is ignored is that the overall suicide rates remained pretty consistent. Those committing suicide simply used other methods.
Canada does have less violent crime than the US. Part of that may be that the population is packed in less densly. Whatever, it is something Canadian's should be proud of. However, the facts don't link it to gun control laws.
My first question when I saw this was how does it effect birds.
However, birds are smart enough to not fly around in a thunderstorm that's strong enough to produce hail, so I'm not sure it would impact them.
I didn't play AC1 at launch, but I heard it actually went pretty smoothly. Was that your experience?
One exception to the rule was Asheron's Call's launch, which went surprisingly smooth.
Of course their launch of their only expansion patch Dark Majesty, didn't go so smoothly, and the sequal AC2's launch was a mess and continues to be a mess.
They likey don't need to modify the kernel to have it run on their embedded CPU. They're going to pick an already supported CPU, and if they need to tweak the kernel, they'll just submit the changes back to the project. That way they don't need to make the source available themselves. They just point you to where you can get it.
If they have to actually make mods to the kernel thay can always submit those changes back to the people who developed the embedded linux distribution for them to make publicly available.
If they have to make more than simple changes, then there's a good chance that they'll just use a commercial embedded OS. It's in the best interest of the OS vendor to license the OS inexpensively enough that it's cheaper for them to use the commercial OS than to do significant customization to the kernel and make that source available.
Ford isn't going to develop their own custome kernel for embedded applications. They'lluse a trimmed down publicly available kernel, or a real time distribution. The source to those is already freely available and Ford isn't responsible to provide it to you themselves.
As long as Ford's code is developed as loadable modules, they don't have to provide the source to them. Just because someone writes an application that runs on Linux doesn't mean that they have to provide source.
They aren't being made homeless. It's a communist country. The government has built new, preplanned communities for the people to be relocated to at higher elevations.
The houses are a bit spartan, but in most cases provide better shelter than what they lived in before.
The people are being uprooted, and are losing a lot fo things of emotional improtants, but they won't be homeless.
Do you really think the floods that kill on average 3000 people a year are good for the animal populations either?
The building of this dam will likely be among the largest manmade environmental change to hapen over a relatively short time period. However, I don't think the earth is in danger of becomming overballanced because of it. It will cause some drastic changes in environment. Some animals will die in the process, others will move to new homes. The flooding process is somewhat slow, so the animals in the area aren't going to be suddenly drowned like they are in a flood.
However, this dam has a good chance of providing China with inexpensive power in a way that produces very little pollution. It can provide a nation which has a lot of poor and impoverished people with a much higher standard of living.
In the long term scheme of things, is the ecological upheaval this will cause really that significant? Will there be more or less polution in the area because of it? My guess is that there will be less because the Chineese will have a clean form of energy.
Will the environment in the area on the whole be better off in 200 years with or without the dam?
Will the people in the area be better off in 200 years with or without the dam?
I use Windows, Linux, Solaris, and several real time OSs as work. My Windows 2000 hasn't caused me any problems since I got rid of a bad Novel Client off of it, and I haven't rebooted it since my last vacation several months ago.
Windows isn't the unreliable piece of crap it used to be, just like Linux isn't the unfriendly piece of crap it used to be. If you're really having serious stability problems with your Windows systems, upgrade from Win95 or consider that you may have hardware or driver issues.
Use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that is Linux. Other times it's not.
For products with simple hardware interfaces, releasiing the register data is often a good solution in order to sell products to customers with very specific needs. At the company I work at we do release the register data for several of our products. It's in the hardware manual you get with the products, and our application engineers often have experience writing drivers for those products and can answer some questions to help customers write their own drivers.
However, we don't mark our products up enough to pay for us to provide the kind of support that some customers need while writing their own dirvers.
I just got a phone call while typing this and just spent the last hour trying to get information for a customer about a hardware feature that we don't use in our own drivers, so none of our software engineers could tell me how it works.
Supporting someone else's driver development is not a simple task when the hardware is not simple task, and the customers usually don't have the proper tools such as a PCI bus analyzer to debug problems when they occur. I've done a lot of ports to a lot of systems, and seen a lot of problems where the driver is written correctly, however the motherboard manufacturer of chipset designer didn't follow or implement the PCI spec properly and problems result. This could result in poor performance, or even data being dropped between the PCI Bus and the memory controller.
Supporting other people's developement can be very expensive.
Supporting Linux drivers also has it's own issues. We provide Linux drivers for our products on both X86 and PPC systems. I've seen drivers that work fine with one kernel revision break with the next minor revision. Linux customers also like to apply kernel patches which sometimes break our drivers. It's impossible to properly retest a complicated driver every time a new kernel revision comes out. We often ship customers a borad and a driver that was tested with a version of Linux other than what the customer is using. We warn the customers of this, however if they run into problems we end up having to load a system with that version of Linux and testing it to discover if there really is a problem, or if the customer has doen something strange with their configuration.
Even though we have Linux drivers there isn't a huge demand for them. This results in us spending a lot and time and money supporting an OS that isn't making us as much money. This is one of the main reasons a lot of hardware manufacturers don't bother with Linux support.
One other reason is that you often use third party ASICs in your products, and how to interface whith their registers is often provided under NDA, so that it's impossible to release to a customer without proper NDAs and licensing agreements.
Yet another reason is that often the hardware provides only a small portion of the functionality of the product. The rest of what makes the product valuable is done in the driver. If you have a product that uses commodity hardware and provides additional functionality though software, you can't simply give away the source code to that software and still pay for your development. People will take your software and buy the hardware from someone else, which can sell the hardware cheaper because they didn't invest in the software development.
Many of these issues depend on the hardware involved. Others depend on the skill and resources of the customer.
In the case of our Company we are willing to work with customers to provide reasonable solutions. However for customers that want to buy one hardware unit, and want us to help them develop a custome driver for their particular OS and platform, those solutions are usually very expensive.
If a driver on Windows with an interface writter in Visual Basic meets the technical needs of your project (including reliability) then it's often a pretty cost effective choice.
Your conclusion isn't exactly supported by the evidence either.
There are a lot of new MMOGs under development right now. All are getting considerable funding despite the current economic downturn. Many are being funded by the companies that have current popular games. Sony and Atari are funding several.
Look at the data again. While a few games are having population decreases, many are still seeing growth. The market is much more mature than when UO and EQ came out, but it hasn't capped yet, and there is still the viable possibility of a new game stealing market share from one of the current games. EQ is has been wildly profitable, so they are a huge target. If someone can develop a game that steals away 5% to 10% of EQ's players, they'd likely be able to make a lot of money.
Just because there is competition, doesn't mean there isn't a market for new products.
I think you entirely missed his point.
Have you ever worked on a technical committee for a standard? It's a committee formed by different people from the industry that all want the technology that suits them best put in the standard. They don't want the standard to require too much, because it increases their costs, so they don't want too much of the things other people want included. The prospective customers get included in the committee because without their interest, there's little point in doing the standard. In the end it's a long process by which you end up with a standard with way too much junk in it, most of which is optional. You end up with final implementations that are entirely non-compatable, but which often completely comply with the standard. After a few more itterations (often years) compatibility improves, but so does complexity. Eventually if the technology is reasonably good, and hasn't been surpassed by something that was developed by a small group then the volumes increas to the point where the cost of all the complexity doesn't limit it's cost effective implementation.
The standards process often stifles innovation of the technology that is being standardized.
However, when developing a new technology, it is usually very benificail to use other standardized technologies as the building blocks. It's hard to develop something when what you are working with is constantly evolving, so working with standardized technology, with slows down that evolution is most often the best bet.
However, when creating a new technology, I agree with the author that a small group with similar goals is most often the best course of action. They can develop the technology and work out some of the additional issues. They can then spread out to work with some strategic partners to test it more broadly. Then after they have a technology that is a little more mature, they can take it through the standards process with a standards body, where it will get proper public review, and hopefully the industry support that will make it a true standard, rather than a proprietary technology the's a standard only in name.
I've been a part of the standards process both with a technology that way developed within our company and standardized with the support of our partners, and even some of our competitors after the fact, and part of working with standards being developed by large committees of people from the industry.
The large committees are horribly inefficient and time consuming. If you want to get a technology standardized in a usable form quickly, it needs to be somewhat mature before it ever reaches the standards process.
Asheron's Call, Dark Majesty (which is the full game) costs $20 with a $20 mail in rebate. It includes one month of service. Basicly they need to charge something for it so the retailer can take a cut and will stock the game on the shelf. By the time you get the rebate, Microsoft/Turbine is actuall paying out money to get you to try the game.
Now that they're finally going to start banning combat macroers next month, it's even worth trying out.
The headline's not great, but it's not too bad. The article is about Microsoft being more fair to their rivals. The article also points out that not all the States have bought in on the settlement and are still sueing. It's a lot less misleading of a title than the ones that are often here at Slashdot. It's hard to sumarize an article in a half dozen words. They didn't do that bad.
The typical argument for "MS Killed Java" is not that Java died because it was not included in Windows, but rather because it was included in a crippled way that misrepresented the language.
The first versions Microsoft put out of IE were hardly the best examples of browsers. They didn't kill the browser market on Windows.
Microsoft's first attempts at a SQL server were pretty bad, but they didn't kill SQL.
Microsoft has had a habbit of adding their own implementations of new products into Windows that start our with a weak implementation and get better over time. Maybe this isn't what happened with Java, but this action didn't kill other technologies.
You could still download and use other JVMs. There wear also other technologies like flash that didn't seem to have trouble getting a foothold in the marketpalce. Maybe Java was just pushed out a little before it was ready by Sun.
I continually am amazed at firms that do this. Does not even the lowly geek admin at this place realize this will eventually kill mp3 as a used format, thus killing their source of revenue?
If they don't charge they have zero revenue. Charging $0.75 a decoder or $50k to $60 one time fee isn't that big of a deal for commercial companies making decoders. The only ones this hurt is the open source and free decoders, and they aren't making money from those anyway.
I agree that charging fees after the format is underhanded, and possibly grounds for anti-trust violations, but giving it away for free isn't exactly a great business decision either.
Name one such use -- one that does not derive from licensing restrictions placed by someone else on non-GPL'ed code.
Here is the GPL [gnu.org], point out where it discriminates against corporations, individuals, governments, or anyone else, in terms of their right to use the software, as source code or binaries.
The GPL has one major restrictions. It requires that all derivative works also be released under the GPL, and that source code for those derivative works be made freely available.
That discriminates against against anyone who wants to take a public resource, which has been developed at the taxpayer expense, and add value to it through their own efforts, and then sell the finished product in order to support themselves and their development efforts. If their additions to the software have no value, then no one would have any reason to buy thier software, because the baseline work that the government developed would be freely available to everyone if released in the public domain.
The government and public could see benefits from the use of such proprietary software. If the benefits are greater than the price the developer is charging for their software, then people will buy it, if not, then people won't. The proprietary software isn't getting anything for free that anyone else didn't get.
What part of "Linux is not an individual or corporation" do you not understand?
What does it matter? GPLed software doesn't produce direct profits for it's developers. Some comrporations do contribute to GPLed products so that they can make indirect proffits. Individuals and corporations both can benefit from GPLed software. Individuals and corporations can also benefit from proprietary software. Developers can benetfit from getting direct compensation for developing the software. Corporations that develop software can benefit from getting a return on their investment of the development costs of developing the software. Users of proprietary can benefit from proprietary software if it's benefits out weigh the price they are paying for it.
Both models have benefits. Both models have projects for which they are better suited. Their are also many applications for which either model will work and they can compete against each other. I don't see any need for the govenment to step in and support one over the other. The government should make ther results of it's efforts equally available to both.
They aren't giving Linux preferential treatment -- they're giving the public preferential treatment! (Or, they were.)
If Linux happens to be, for whatever combination of reasons, the best public product for the job they have at hand, then there's nothing wrong with them enhancing it instead of, say, OpenBSD -- and vice versa, should they wish to enhance that.
Those proprietary developers and corporations are also part of the "public". The users of proprietary software that have no problem paying for the software products they need are part of the "public". If the government should be doing things that can't be effectively done by private individuals. When the govenment developes software as part of it's efforts. It should be released into the public domain so that everyone has equal access to it. GPL is not in the best interest of all members of the public in all cases. If the governemnt allows equall access to everyone, the public can then decide what it wants.
Again, Linux is a free public product, like the C language, or the Ada language, or the FORTRAN language -- in some cases, products that, via trademark especially, have some "onerous restrictions" beyond those of the GPL (like, you can't call something X unless your implementation passes a rigorous test suite).
C, Ada, and FORTRAN are industry standards created by standards organizations with input from members of the public. THese languages do not put restrictions on how they can be used or how products that are created with them may be distributed. Linux is also created with input from the public, but the GPL places serious restrictions on derivative works.
It's obviously throwing your brain a curve because, unlike standards, it's an actual free implementation, which post-1980s software kiddies generally can't conceive of in a "Free As In GNU" sense.
I'll agree that it's different than a standard, because you can simply fork off a version and still call it Linux. I'm not sure what you mean by standards not being free? They don't cost you anything to implement or use. There may be a cost involved with conformance testing, but in most cases that's to prove to others that you conform to the standard. With Linux there's nothing to conform to. They are different, and free in different ways.
But the government has long been in the "business" of freely enhancing free public implementations of software as well -- implementations that have almost always been competitive with proprietary offerings in their day.
Linux is just another case of this.
The govenment has often funded development of software for the public good. However, they have a responsibility to make sure that the public has resonably equal access to that software. The GPL drasticly limits the use of software by commercial developers, and limits the availability of those benefits to the users of commercial software. The GPL does make sure the source code and source to derivative works remains public in a sense. But if prevents people from freely using that code however they choose.
And if it wasn't for Microsoft wetting its pants over Linux as a competitor, we wouldn't be having this discussion -- it'd be assumed a reasonable thing for government to do. (There might be some mumbling resentment over not picking a *BSD, of course, which gets into technical issues I'm not prepared to address.)
If Linux wasn't a competitor this would probably be ignored. Support for government funding of the development of GPLed software has long been justified as an excellent educational tool. GPLed software still is an excellent educational tool, and the GPL gaurentees that extensions to that software will continue to be available for that use. There are situations where there is a distinct public need where supporting the development of GPLed software is in the public's best interest. The development of secure OSs is in the public's best interest. But there are many different OSs, and the govenment shouldn't be supporting one type of OS or License over another. If there is a particular project the government is funding where the development of a secure version of Linux meets the project's needs and is cost effective, then I fully support the government funding it. Linux is a valuble tool in many projects. That's very different than the NSA developing a secure Linux and releasing it under the GPL.
So, the question is this: why are you working as a shill for Microsoft's business interests?
I'm looking after my own best interests, and what I beleive to be the public's best interests. I like having choices. I Like being able to choose Windows for my home computer I play games on. It does that pretty well, and is easily worth the $100 to $150 I payed for the OS, it would have been less if I'd have bought a computer rather than built it myself.
I like being able to choose VXWorks or LynxOS for an embedded real-time project. They both have benefits. VxWorks in particular is very expensive and least for the development tools. However, it's simple, stable, and protable between different processor types. This often makes up for it's high cost. We've also embedded Linux in some of our products where I work. It took longer to get some of the bugs worked out of it, but the $0 licensing fees are definately attractive. For products that are going to sell in high volumes it's great. If you're only going to make a couple, I'd rather use VxWorks. For our hardware development we support drivers for Linux, Windows, VxWorks, and Solaris as our standard OSs. We will also port our software to other OSs if there's significant demand for it or the customer is willing to pay for the development costs. Linux tends to be significantly harder than the other four to support. THe OS just changes too much. Each release fixes some bugs, creates a few others, and the bug fixes often require us to remove our workaround to those bugs and thouroughly retest everything. Changing the software and properly retesting everything takes weeks if everything goes well. Different OSs and different development methods have different benefits. The governemnt isn't in a position to be able to evaluate the benefit of one type over another. They should try to make it so their efforts benefit all of them as equally as possible and let the market decide.
Your use of "Linux", on the other hand, suggests you cannot distinguish a free, public operating system from a single-sourced, proprietary operating system (or, more precisely, from the company that produces it).
Until Linux is released into the public domain without the GPL I will never consider it a free, public OS. It is free in that there are no direct costs, and it is public in that you can get the source for free and compile it yourself, but it's not completely free or completely public.
It's a different way of releasing software, but it still has very strong and significant restrictions on it's use. It definatley provides some advantages to both the general puplic and the govenrment. I don't think the NSA should ignore Linux, but I don't think they should give it significant pereferential treatment either. There are numerous commercial companies that gain significant benefit from using Linux in secure applications. Let those companies put forth the effort and the money to get a certified, secure version of Linux. Let Linux compete on equal terms on it's merits. Commercial companies do receive help form the NSA to get their OSs secure, but the efforts of the NSA are very small compared to the efforts from the companies. The companies also pay the NSA to be certified, which offsets the costs of the NSA working of issues with the OS.
If a secure Linux requires tax payer money to be developed, then it's hardly free. The costs are just being shifted. If Linux requires significantly more help than commercial OSs to be certified, then those companies have every right to complain because their tax money is being used to subsidise the development of their competition.
If SELinux fills a necessary need then the covernment contractors and vendors who are selling systems using it to meet the goverment's needs should pay for it's development and certification. The NSA should not be subsidizing the development of a secure version of Linux. It should be able to compete on it's own merits.
If the NSA is working with others to improve Linux and get it certified to the extent that they do with other OSs, then I think the NSA is doing their job.
If they are putting in a significant effort beyond what they would do for other OSs, and actually releasing code they developed under a license that restricts it's use by other american companies for reasons other than security, then they are out of line.
Vendors for other OSs spend millions of dollars developing secure versions of their OS and getting them certified. Linux shouldn't get a free ride.
Obviously there's a difference between gross and profit, but it just shows that Blizzard will up their prices, and this is important when their MMORPG starts up.
They can't up their prices on their games. Most People just won't pay much more than $60 to purchase a computer game. With MMORPGs customers are paying monthly fees for updates, and maintence on a persistent world.
Blizzard can likely charge people to play their games online. It would lose them a lot of loyal fans because they are used to geting that service for free. What people are really paying for with the monthly fees is a persistent, evolving world in which their characters can interact with others.
Traditional games don't give developers an ongoing cashflow to continue to develop and evolve the game. After the game is released, they provide patches to fix bugs so that they can keep selling more coppies to more players. But after a while, the game goes on the bargain shelf, revenues drop, and it no longer makes much sense to keep developing that game. They may still do some bug fixes to maintain customer brand loyalty, but the money just isn't there to maintain the game. With a MMORPG, the money is there as long as the customers are there. As long as they can keep customers happy, the game will continue, and continue to be profitable.
I very much prefer the monthly subscription. With the monthly subscription you pay as you go for the services they provide. You pay extra the first month to get the account set up, and get the disk, but after that you're paying for them to continue to work on the game. In Asheron's Call, new content is added pretty much every month. Some months there are more bug fixes while others have more content, but the company has a constant cash flow they can use to continue develop the game.
If you pay $200 up front, then as the game matures, there's less of a reason for the company to continue developing the game. Income is based strictly on attracting new players, not maintaining the world for current loyal customres. That's a business model that's bound to eventually fail. For many people spending $200 or more is a much bigger decision than paying the $20 to $60 for the box and seeing how they like the game. They just won't be able to attract the player base at that price.
As for the people who thing the monthly fees are too high. I strongly suggest you don't play. There are many thousands of people who think the monthly fees are very reasonably priced, and the games really don't need more whiners. I used to buy about a game a month. Now I've bought 1 game in the last 18 months. Asheron's Call has definately been a very good entertainment investment for me. If you don't like monthly fees, there are other choices you can make. Maybe try Neverwinter Nights, or Warcraft 3.
It's all about bandwidth. The FCC regulates the frequencies people are allowed to transmit on. Analog TV frequencies are taking up a huge block of bandwidth that can be used for other emerging wireless technologies. In order to free up that bandwidth, broadcast television stations need to move over to digital broadcasts which use a smaller chunk of frequencies to transmit. Until the broadcasters are switched over they are using both the analog and digital frequencies, which is a waste of this very limited resource.
Once consumers switch over to digital TVs, or at least digital tuners, the FCC can take back the analog TV frequencies. Right now the plan is for this to happen in 2006. TV manufacturers are dragging their feet because they can charge a nice premium on digital TVs right now, and moving them into the mainstream means lower profit margins and lower overall profits for them.
Once digital TVs become mainstream the price to make them will be very small. Consumers get better quality pictures and sound for this small additional cost. They also get access to the new emerging technologies that will be possible because of the frequencies freed up by the analog broadcasts going away. Older TVs will need a digital tuner/converter in order to work.
The government will also reap billions from auctioning off the current analog TV frequencies. Consumers will in turn pay for those billions when they buy the new products. This makes legislators happy because they get to collect billions of dollars without it being obvious that people are being taxed.
I personally think it needs to be done. Those frequencies need to be made available, and unlike much of the legislation, the people who are paying for it, actually get a benefit from it in the form of better quality pictures and sound.
The DTVs are expensive because of the low volumes. Right now manufacturers are charging premiums for the DTVs. High end TVs are where they make the best profit margins, so they aren't real interested in making DTVs into a commodity product.
I suspect that the $100 higher price at first and the $15 in 2006 is reasonably accurate. That's how much they will have to mark up the TVs to get their usuall profit margin on those mainstream models. The actual cost to the manufacturers will be much smaller.