I feel like you fundamentally misunderstand the point of a terrorist watch list.
I feel that you, Mr. Tubesteak, fundamentally failed to read the post to which you are responding. The poster also indicated that they have not been members of any "suspect" political organizations nor have they committed any crimes. All of these things go into the decisions pertaining to who goes on the watch list.
The worst thing about the watch list is that, in many cases, there is not any explanation necessary regarding how a name got there. By accident? Perhaps someone with the same name and a similar description? Who knows.
The Soviet Union had similar lists. And in the same way, there was no mechanism to permit someone presumably wrongly placed on the list to have it reviewed. Those lists may have had political "enemies of the state" on them: people who identified the misbehavior of the government, or who protested against injustice. Certainly there was no way to confirm or deny such a possibility. If you were on the list you were, by definition, a criminal. You had no right to question the list, and in fact the very act of raising a ruckus about your name being on the list proved that you were an enemy of the state.
How, exactly, does the current U.S. watch list differ? One might hope that it is fair, accurate, and entirely just. But I'd personally suggest that such hope is rather thin.
Let's make a general rule: when there are already millions of (active) users of
something, it's not going to go away because of some new-fangled product
Quite true. But there is another effect at work here: I call it the "Echo Chamber Effect".
In essence: if you surround yourself with people who think and do things the same way you do, it will soon seem that the only "reasonable and logical" way to think and act is that way. So...if you hang out with people who do nothing by "MySpace", "Facebook", or IM each other all day, it will soon seem that is the only reasonable way to behave.
The reality is that a huge percentage of the world population has never even heard of MySpace or FaceBook. Only a few million at most are rabidly active users. But a few million, or even a few thousand, can seem like the entire world when those few million are the only people you ever interact with.
Frankly, I can not imagine exchanging any useful or valuable information via FaceBook or MySpace. And IMing someone to communicate anything more complex than "shall we meet for lunch?" likewise seems improbable. I suspect in a few years, when these teenagers actually have to deal with things like business reports, financial documents, and thoughts more complex than their next lunch partner, they'll probably adopt more complex tools.
Well, I'm not a waiter in Hollywood, but I do have a few firing neurons, so...
> MPEG-4 has no "content tax"
Really? How about that licensing fee that all MPEG-4 use requires? The folks who own the MPEG-4 patents fully intend to make you pay for their use. Personally, I'd call that a "content tax", since anyone who sells an encoder or any device that embeds an MPEG-4 decoder (E.G.: a BluRay player) has to pay it.
> there is a free open source MPEG-4 streaming server
Really? I'd love to know what it's called. And does it do live streaming from real-time encodes?
Digital Rights Management is in Windows, in BluRay, and in iTunes because the copyright owners (MPAA/RIAA, but more importantly the mega-studios) won't allow their content on a box that doesn't have it. Microsoft can be blamed for bowing to the pressure from these copyright holders more willingly than they should have. But don't blame Microsoft for DRM itself- that's all the fault of Hollywood and the lawyers that slither there.
Microsoft's decision to reverse releasing their updated virtualization licensing may or may not have anything to do with DRM. Saying that the decision was DRM related is, at least for the moment, pure speculation.
CaptDeuce, I suggest you read the original post a bit more carefully. The comparison is between total Apple hardware sales, and total Wintel PC hardware sales.
Now...you could argue that there are many different Wintel PC vendors (E.G.: Dell, Lenovo, HP...), and then pick one of *those* to compare with, but that would be missing the point (although any of the big three still outsell Apple by a factor of three or four at least). Apple is in a self-imposed niche- their operating system only runs on their hardware. One of several major reasons for Windows being popular is the fact that the user has *dozens* of choices for hardware vendor. One of Apple's main strengths is exactly the opposite: they can provide an OS that works more reliably than Windows more easily than Microsoft ever could by virtue of the fact that they control essentially every aspect of the platform the OS runs on.
If Apple openly released their OS to run on any Intel platform, then there would be a completely valid basis for comparison. We all know that Apple would never do that- no matter what the fan boys might say. Apple's OS would be buggy and unstable as hell (possibly even worse than Windows) on an "anything goes" PC hardware platform where whatever god-awful drivers and hardware components the user wants are slammed in the box. And since Apple makes most of their profit off their premium-priced hardware, they would be stupid to sell the OS for use on other platforms.
Personally, I think people who measure success based purely on market share are short sighted. If Apple makes a good product that works well, that turns a profit, and that people like, who really cares whether all the unwashed masses buy it?
> Yeah, cause when I was learning to do Fourier transforms in college, I really robbed myself by not doing the arithmatic bits by hand.
Exactly. My first thought upon reading his "no calculators in math class...ever" comment was: "this english literature major must have quit taking math in grade four". Add, subtract, multiply, divide- we should all learn these, and I'll agree with anyone who says that a calculator is inappropriate while learning the basics. But by the time a student is doing "serious" mathematics a calculator becomes a lever rather than a crutch- it permits the student to focus their mind on problem solving and complex concepts.
As for the core theme of the article, which I take to be that our literacy levels are collapsing in this modern era...personally, I don't see it. What is happening, in my opinion, is a reduction in the "cost of entry" for people to begin writing, and a tremendous expansion of the potential audience for anything that is written.
Fifteen years ago, a writer's audience was usually constrained by their ability to get published...thus the writing that was inflicted upon us had at least one layer of editorial review. To achieve a truly wide audience, a writer would have to be published by a large and respected publisher- whether the medium was a book or a column in a periodical.
These days, any moron with a computer and an Internet connection can easily aspire to achieve an audience of tens of thousands. With a little bit of luck, possibly hundreds of thousands. There are no editors perform even the most cursory of reviews. No costly paper, printing, binding, or distribution costs. Even "respected" electronic publications seem to relax their editorial review process signficantly for the content they put online. At least part of this likely stems from the fact that electronic content can be edited post-publication: something which is not terribly easy with traditional print.
And if someone starts nattering on about the golden age of writing in the 19th century, when everyone was a gloriously skilled poet with the calligraphy skills of a master...I can only suggest that such individuals adjust the tinting on their rose coloured glasses. The vast majority of the writing from 150 years ago ended up in the trash. Furthermore, only a comparatively small percentage of the population in the 1800's could claim more than a passing brush with literacy. Most of the people who wrote at all were the extraordinarily well educated, many of whom lived their lives without actually having to work. What was saved from that era was the best of the best, written by a rarified intelligesia. These days, 99% of the population can write, a large percentage of whom have no real talent or passion for the art.
We could, I suppose, refuse to educate anyone who lacked a passion for writing in the basic skills of literacy. The collected writings of those who are left would undoubtedly be of vastly higher quality on average than would be the case if the unskilled masses were allowed to vomit forth words from their benighted little minds. Something tells me, though, that this would be a step backwards...
Stock price has very little to do with a company's real "success". Look at Google's market capitalization: currently, Google shares in total are worth more than IBM shares (as an example). In 2005, Google's revenue was (very roughly) $6 billion dollars; on that $6 billion they made (again, very roughly) $1.2 billion in profit. In 2005, IBM's revenue was (very roughly) $90 billion dollars, on which they made (roughly) $8 billion in profit. Obviously, IBM is more 'successful' by any financial measure you might care to think of. But Google shares are worth more in total valuation than IBM, even though IBM's real value is at least 300% greater currently than Google.
So...what *is* stock valuation about? Its about how much the stock will be worth six to twelve months from now. Note that I don't say how much the *company* will be worth- I say how much the *stock* will be worth. IBM stock is stable- its value is flat, the company profits grow at a boring and steady rate. Google stock value, which has surprisingly little to do with the value of the *company*, is highly speculative, and is going up due to the speculation of over-stimulated investors.
Anyone who thinks that stock valuation is a good way to measure the performance of an executive is incredibly short sighted. Yet that's how most executives *are* measured. Any brain dead dick head CEO can take over a company and increase its stock value for a year or two. But then reality will catch up: by then, of course, most senior executives have already moved on to their next "growth" opportunity, leaving some poor SOB to take over the mess they've left behind.
To be clear: I am *not* saying that Google won't eventually fulfill its potential. Nor am I saying it's a "bad" investment, or poorly run (although I really do think they are quite totally lost about what their next growth engine will be). I *am* saying that Google is a good example of how the stock market and reality have, at best, very tenuous linkages.
I don't particularly respect executives who forsake an annual salary in favour of grossly inflated stock offers. I *would* respect them if they took a salary and a stock offer based on performance over a five or ten year span, with the stock offering becoming available only upon conclusion of at least that period of time. That would show real commitment to the company's long term viability, instead of short term focus on the day to day one armed bandit that is the stock market.
I could be wrong, but I believe what we are talking about here is "companies that have at least one Linux box", not "companies that are deploying Linux exclusively".
I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that 50% or more of North American companies are using Linux in some capacity, and plan to continue to add Linux servers in the future. Medium and large companies especially have lots of smallish projects where a LAMP solution (for example) is a perfect fit: setting aside for the moment companies that find good fits for Linux in support of large applications.
As for Australia not following this trend...hey, every company or individual has that choice. I'm not an evangelist: I'm of the mind that you use the right tool for the job- Linux, Windows, OS X, VM, OS/390: whatever. And sometimes, due to skillset, previous investments, or what have you, some companies make a good case for using some platforms that might not make complete sense to me.
Another way of looking at it: its an untapped market for future growth!
As was mentioned earlier in this thread, plagiarism does not directly relate to copyright. Any time you use someone else's words or thinking with the intent to imply that *you* were the author of those words or thoughts, you are a plagiarist. This differs from copyright, which has very specific legal meaning.
To be more specific: copyright can be proven or disproven in court. Plagiarism might not be provable in court. But if you are a professional writer (scientist, newspaper columnist, etc), and are caught obviously using someone else's material, even if not in a legal sense, your career is likely to be in jeopardy.
> The main problem to solving "true AI" remains _defining true AI_. You can't solve a problem if nobody can say what the actual problem is.
Well said. Most attempts to achieve true machine intelligence boil down to "we don't know how this works, but if we throw enough processing power/memory/neural net nodes at it, maybe it'll start to think". These brute force attempts are not particularly elegant, but in some cases they do teach us some things (much like particle accellerators do) to better define the problem, and in that regard they are useful.
That said, I think we *will* continue to develop systems that can react to humans in a sufficiently human like way to improve the human/machine interface. That is, systems that can interpret "natural language" requests reliably, and respond in a way that seems "human".
I don't think we'll develop a self-aware machine intelligence capable of independent action and thought anywhere in the near future unless we do so by accident. This could happen either totally by surprise ("Wow, the global phone network just phoned me up and asked me what I am") or one of the "brute force" experiments might (surprisingly) work. We simply lack any detailed understanding of how the human mind actually does its work, and getting that understanding is (barring a big "Eureka" moment) at least decades away.
No single post can explain the circumstances of the early 1980 computer market, and you raise some good points. To be clear, I was (and am) not saying Microsoft was responsible for all that is good- I'm saying that the perspective that Microsoft set the industry/technology back "ten years" is patently false. I neither love nor hate Microsoft: I attempt to keep a balanced perspective.
I don't completely agree with your perspective, but both of us have data that is worth sharing. But I do take particular issue with one point you made
>> Every vendor back in the '80s was desperately trying to steal their piece of market share, and the concept of open common standards was effectively non-existent.
> Complete, utter hogwash! How many vendors were supporting CP/M at the time? How many were supporting Unix?
A handful were supporting each, and the UNIX vendors each had their own non-compatible implementation. Neither CP/M nor UNIX were "open, common" standards. Both were commercial products: CP/M being the product of DEC, UNIX being the product of AT&T / Bell Labs. BSD Unix was neither "free" nor non commercial (unless you were an educational institution), nor was it a standard. A little later on in the process, when it reached the point that there were so many **IX's that even the vendors like Data General, HP and Sun were starting to see it was a problem, there *was* an effort to try to develop a UNIX standard. But the commercial vendors couldn't agree there, either, and the effort to develop a "standard" UNIX split into two main streams: The Archer group (eventually Unix International) and the OSF (Open Software Foundation). Several years later, and neither group had really established a standard: even in the face of competition with companies like Microsoft and Apple.
How can this comment possibly be considered "insightful"?
I actually was around before Microsoft seriously entered the computing market. I remember computers costing $10k (the Apple Lisa). I recall small Unix boxes costing $15k, with the OS adding another couple thousand to that (Sun). I remember dozens of machines with no interoperability (TI 99/4, Atari, TRS 80, Exidy Sorcerer, Apple...)
Microsoft, love it or hate it, established a defacto standard. No one was forced to buy Microsoft products- even counting the "Microsoft Tax", anyone could have easily purchased a Macintosh or a small Unix box. But they didn't, because they were generally over priced and provided little or no advantage for all their extra cost. Every vendor back in the '80s was desperately trying to steal their piece of market share, and the concept of open common standards was effectively non-existent. If anything, Microsoft's dominance encouraged sufficient standardization to make it necessary for company's to actually compete on features and price: if this hadn't happened, I imagine we'd be buying $1200 operating systems for our $8,000 computers today.
I'm truly sick and tired of the people who can't unscrew their heads from their rectums long enough to realize that Microsoft and Bill Gates are no more "evil" than any other company out there. Don't like Microsoft products? Great, use what you want, but shut the hell up about it already.
As far as Gates' generosity being a "new" thing...no, its not. A decade ago, he said he intended to give away 95% of his wealth by the time he retired. This is nothing new. And he sure as heck isn't doing this to impress any of the people here on Slashdot.
I wouldn't say that the guys compiling the stats had an agenda or something- but how do you count bugs/flaws? If you said Linux was one "thing" and didn't account for the various distros, is that realistic? And if you account for the various distros, you will undoubtedly end up with duplicates. Its very much like the problem faced when trying to figure out popularity of a website- do you count hits, page impressions, stickiness...and if you count things differently than I do, which of us is right?
One thing I can say with certainty: Linux does not have fewer flaws that Windows. I have as many (or more) patches to apply to my Linux servers at work each month as I do to my Windows servers. I think its reasonable, however, to say that the flaws that show up in Linux are more transparent. Knowledgable people can look at the code for certain coding practices and find flaws *before* they are reported in the wild- the availability of source code definitely gives Linux an edge in that regard.
According to the article, Michael Pachter believes that people play games to escape. Yes, that's true. But he has the other part of his statement totally wrong, and it shows his deep ignorance of the entire modern gaming world. He says that we don't play games for social interaction...I guess the 10 million or so players of subscription Massively Multi-player Games out there don't exist?
A lot of people who play socially-based games play them to escape a world in which they, perhaps, have difficulty socializing. They can be a radically different "person" in the virtual world, and can interact in ways that might not be comfortable for them in real life.
Is Microsoft making the right bet by investing in on line games? I think so, especially when you realize that you can completely discount the social aspect of gaming and *still* have a solid business model via electronic distribution, player rankings, and other interactive elements.
Will Microsoft make the right choices to capitalize on this on line opportunity? I think they will lose a ton of money, but eventually find the right combination of features to grab a significant share of the market and achieve some profit. But really, time will tell.
One thing I can say for sure: any financial analyst focussing on the computer and console game market who thinks online gaming is pointless and misguided is incredibly ignorant.
I think a bigger issue is our society's overwhelming and ultimately hypocritical concern with "safety". We send men and women off to die in war ever year. Yet the expansion of human horizons through the exploration of space by willing people is "too dangerous".
The men and women of the space program know the risks, and for the most part they embrace them. Yes, its sad when lives are lost. But human kind needs risk takers. And I'd rather see people "spending" their lives willingly on something the truly believe in for the betterment of all mankind, than for any squabble over territory or natural resources.
A couple of things...firstly, the Real Helix 10 player is not as adware-intensive as the old RealOne player. In fact, I'd say its pretty clean.
Secondly, there is a big difference between a simple MP3 or Ogg Vorbis capable client and an actual stream player. Playing your MP3s and movies off your hard drive is not the end all of streaming...in fact, its not really streaming at all, but rather decoding and/or progressive downloading. How about live streaming from an actual broadcast? For that, you need an actual stream client: Windows Media Player, Real Player, Quick Time, and Flash with its content server.
Besides Real Helix, what other live network stream clients with actual stream servers are there for Linux? Unless we can name a couple of decent live streaming alternatives, perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to slam everything Real does?
But when people point out (and they probably are as I write this) that Microsoft is in some way culpable, even if not equally so, you can't just say they're defending wrongdoing out of spite towards big business
Oh, my goodness. Not that specious argument again. I left my door unlocked, so I'm guilty of allowing the criminal who enters my house to commit their crime. Even more so, I'm guilty of causing his injury when he falls from my second story window while trying to escape with his stolen goods.
No, I'm sorry. I don't buy that argument. A crime can not be excused by circumstance. The punishment for the crime can, in some cases, be lessened based on circumstance, but I think that's overused. The psychopathic killer who was beaten as a child shouldn't be given a lessened sentence just because of their sad past. Likewise the virus writer shouldn't be excused because the software their virus infected "allowed" the infection
Nice try, though: and apparently some people agree with you that a crime is less of a crime when there are extenuating circumstances...like a hungry stomach, an unlocked door, or a piece of imperfect software. I agree that the world tends to target the "weak", but that's not a reason to feel sorry for the criminal.
The statement "why are smaller companies like IBM feeling danger..." expresses an incorrect piece of data as fact. IBM is significantly larger than Microsoft ($80 billion in revenue versus $36 billion; 330,000 employees versus 55,000) and significantly older (100 years versus 20).
And as for why IBM would feel danger...I'm an employee and actually *read* the internal release. I didn't sense fear, just common sense. SP2 will break some stuff for users: not by being "bad", but just by being more strict. That alone is reason to hold off a bit so that appropriate changes can be applied to insure that key business apps aren't unintentionally firewalled (for example). I really don't consider this newsworthy.
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I feel that you, Mr. Tubesteak, fundamentally failed to read the post to which you are responding. The poster also indicated that they have not been members of any "suspect" political organizations nor have they committed any crimes. All of these things go into the decisions pertaining to who goes on the watch list.
The worst thing about the watch list is that, in many cases, there is not any explanation necessary regarding how a name got there. By accident? Perhaps someone with the same name and a similar description? Who knows.
The Soviet Union had similar lists. And in the same way, there was no mechanism to permit someone presumably wrongly placed on the list to have it reviewed. Those lists may have had political "enemies of the state" on them: people who identified the misbehavior of the government, or who protested against injustice. Certainly there was no way to confirm or deny such a possibility. If you were on the list you were, by definition, a criminal. You had no right to question the list, and in fact the very act of raising a ruckus about your name being on the list proved that you were an enemy of the state.
How, exactly, does the current U.S. watch list differ? One might hope that it is fair, accurate, and entirely just. But I'd personally suggest that such hope is rather thin.
Quite true. But there is another effect at work here: I call it the "Echo Chamber Effect".
In essence: if you surround yourself with people who think and do things the same way you do, it will soon seem that the only "reasonable and logical" way to think and act is that way. So...if you hang out with people who do nothing by "MySpace", "Facebook", or IM each other all day, it will soon seem that is the only reasonable way to behave.The reality is that a huge percentage of the world population has never even heard of MySpace or FaceBook. Only a few million at most are rabidly active users. But a few million, or even a few thousand, can seem like the entire world when those few million are the only people you ever interact with.
Frankly, I can not imagine exchanging any useful or valuable information via FaceBook or MySpace. And IMing someone to communicate anything more complex than "shall we meet for lunch?" likewise seems improbable. I suspect in a few years, when these teenagers actually have to deal with things like business reports, financial documents, and thoughts more complex than their next lunch partner, they'll probably adopt more complex tools.
Well, I'm not a waiter in Hollywood, but I do have a few firing neurons, so...
> MPEG-4 has no "content tax"
Really? How about that licensing fee that all MPEG-4 use requires? The folks who own the MPEG-4 patents fully intend to make you pay for their use. Personally, I'd call that a "content tax", since anyone who sells an encoder or any device that embeds an MPEG-4 decoder (E.G.: a BluRay player) has to pay it.
> there is a free open source MPEG-4 streaming server
Really? I'd love to know what it's called. And does it do live streaming from real-time encodes?
Digital Rights Management is in Windows, in BluRay, and in iTunes because the copyright owners (MPAA/RIAA, but more importantly the mega-studios) won't allow their content on a box that doesn't have it. Microsoft can be blamed for bowing to the pressure from these copyright holders more willingly than they should have. But don't blame Microsoft for DRM itself- that's all the fault of Hollywood and the lawyers that slither there.
Microsoft's decision to reverse releasing their updated virtualization licensing may or may not have anything to do with DRM. Saying that the decision was DRM related is, at least for the moment, pure speculation.
>Super elite hax0r Rutkowska is worried that by default, installers usually need to be run as admin. Super elite hax0rs are, apparently, morons...
Now...you could argue that there are many different Wintel PC vendors (E.G.: Dell, Lenovo, HP...), and then pick one of *those* to compare with, but that would be missing the point (although any of the big three still outsell Apple by a factor of three or four at least). Apple is in a self-imposed niche- their operating system only runs on their hardware. One of several major reasons for Windows being popular is the fact that the user has *dozens* of choices for hardware vendor. One of Apple's main strengths is exactly the opposite: they can provide an OS that works more reliably than Windows more easily than Microsoft ever could by virtue of the fact that they control essentially every aspect of the platform the OS runs on.
If Apple openly released their OS to run on any Intel platform, then there would be a completely valid basis for comparison. We all know that Apple would never do that- no matter what the fan boys might say. Apple's OS would be buggy and unstable as hell (possibly even worse than Windows) on an "anything goes" PC hardware platform where whatever god-awful drivers and hardware components the user wants are slammed in the box. And since Apple makes most of their profit off their premium-priced hardware, they would be stupid to sell the OS for use on other platforms.
Personally, I think people who measure success based purely on market share are short sighted. If Apple makes a good product that works well, that turns a profit, and that people like, who really cares whether all the unwashed masses buy it?
> Yeah, cause when I was learning to do Fourier transforms in college, I really robbed myself by not doing the arithmatic bits by hand.
Exactly. My first thought upon reading his "no calculators in math class...ever" comment was: "this english literature major must have quit taking math in grade four". Add, subtract, multiply, divide- we should all learn these, and I'll agree with anyone who says that a calculator is inappropriate while learning the basics. But by the time a student is doing "serious" mathematics a calculator becomes a lever rather than a crutch- it permits the student to focus their mind on problem solving and complex concepts.As for the core theme of the article, which I take to be that our literacy levels are collapsing in this modern era...personally, I don't see it. What is happening, in my opinion, is a reduction in the "cost of entry" for people to begin writing, and a tremendous expansion of the potential audience for anything that is written.
Fifteen years ago, a writer's audience was usually constrained by their ability to get published...thus the writing that was inflicted upon us had at least one layer of editorial review. To achieve a truly wide audience, a writer would have to be published by a large and respected publisher- whether the medium was a book or a column in a periodical.
These days, any moron with a computer and an Internet connection can easily aspire to achieve an audience of tens of thousands. With a little bit of luck, possibly hundreds of thousands. There are no editors perform even the most cursory of reviews. No costly paper, printing, binding, or distribution costs. Even "respected" electronic publications seem to relax their editorial review process signficantly for the content they put online. At least part of this likely stems from the fact that electronic content can be edited post-publication: something which is not terribly easy with traditional print.
And if someone starts nattering on about the golden age of writing in the 19th century, when everyone was a gloriously skilled poet with the calligraphy skills of a master...I can only suggest that such individuals adjust the tinting on their rose coloured glasses. The vast majority of the writing from 150 years ago ended up in the trash. Furthermore, only a comparatively small percentage of the population in the 1800's could claim more than a passing brush with literacy. Most of the people who wrote at all were the extraordinarily well educated, many of whom lived their lives without actually having to work. What was saved from that era was the best of the best, written by a rarified intelligesia. These days, 99% of the population can write, a large percentage of whom have no real talent or passion for the art.
We could, I suppose, refuse to educate anyone who lacked a passion for writing in the basic skills of literacy. The collected writings of those who are left would undoubtedly be of vastly higher quality on average than would be the case if the unskilled masses were allowed to vomit forth words from their benighted little minds. Something tells me, though, that this would be a step backwards...
So...what *is* stock valuation about? Its about how much the stock will be worth six to twelve months from now. Note that I don't say how much the *company* will be worth- I say how much the *stock* will be worth. IBM stock is stable- its value is flat, the company profits grow at a boring and steady rate. Google stock value, which has surprisingly little to do with the value of the *company*, is highly speculative, and is going up due to the speculation of over-stimulated investors.
Anyone who thinks that stock valuation is a good way to measure the performance of an executive is incredibly short sighted. Yet that's how most executives *are* measured. Any brain dead dick head CEO can take over a company and increase its stock value for a year or two. But then reality will catch up: by then, of course, most senior executives have already moved on to their next "growth" opportunity, leaving some poor SOB to take over the mess they've left behind.
To be clear: I am *not* saying that Google won't eventually fulfill its potential. Nor am I saying it's a "bad" investment, or poorly run (although I really do think they are quite totally lost about what their next growth engine will be). I *am* saying that Google is a good example of how the stock market and reality have, at best, very tenuous linkages.
I don't particularly respect executives who forsake an annual salary in favour of grossly inflated stock offers. I *would* respect them if they took a salary and a stock offer based on performance over a five or ten year span, with the stock offering becoming available only upon conclusion of at least that period of time. That would show real commitment to the company's long term viability, instead of short term focus on the day to day one armed bandit that is the stock market.
I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that 50% or more of North American companies are using Linux in some capacity, and plan to continue to add Linux servers in the future. Medium and large companies especially have lots of smallish projects where a LAMP solution (for example) is a perfect fit: setting aside for the moment companies that find good fits for Linux in support of large applications.
As for Australia not following this trend...hey, every company or individual has that choice. I'm not an evangelist: I'm of the mind that you use the right tool for the job- Linux, Windows, OS X, VM, OS/390: whatever. And sometimes, due to skillset, previous investments, or what have you, some companies make a good case for using some platforms that might not make complete sense to me.
Another way of looking at it: its an untapped market for future growth!
As was mentioned earlier in this thread, plagiarism does not directly relate to copyright. Any time you use someone else's words or thinking with the intent to imply that *you* were the author of those words or thoughts, you are a plagiarist. This differs from copyright, which has very specific legal meaning.
To be more specific: copyright can be proven or disproven in court. Plagiarism might not be provable in court. But if you are a professional writer (scientist, newspaper columnist, etc), and are caught obviously using someone else's material, even if not in a legal sense, your career is likely to be in jeopardy.
Well said. Most attempts to achieve true machine intelligence boil down to "we don't know how this works, but if we throw enough processing power/memory/neural net nodes at it, maybe it'll start to think". These brute force attempts are not particularly elegant, but in some cases they do teach us some things (much like particle accellerators do) to better define the problem, and in that regard they are useful.
That said, I think we *will* continue to develop systems that can react to humans in a sufficiently human like way to improve the human/machine interface. That is, systems that can interpret "natural language" requests reliably, and respond in a way that seems "human".
I don't think we'll develop a self-aware machine intelligence capable of independent action and thought anywhere in the near future unless we do so by accident. This could happen either totally by surprise ("Wow, the global phone network just phoned me up and asked me what I am") or one of the "brute force" experiments might (surprisingly) work. We simply lack any detailed understanding of how the human mind actually does its work, and getting that understanding is (barring a big "Eureka" moment) at least decades away.
>> Every vendor back in the '80s was desperately trying to steal their piece of market share, and the concept of open common standards was effectively non-existent.
> Complete, utter hogwash! How many vendors were supporting CP/M at the time? How many were supporting Unix?
A handful were supporting each, and the UNIX vendors each had their own non-compatible implementation. Neither CP/M nor UNIX were "open, common" standards. Both were commercial products: CP/M being the product of DEC, UNIX being the product of AT&T / Bell Labs. BSD Unix was neither "free" nor non commercial (unless you were an educational institution), nor was it a standard. A little later on in the process, when it reached the point that there were so many **IX's that even the vendors like Data General, HP and Sun were starting to see it was a problem, there *was* an effort to try to develop a UNIX standard. But the commercial vendors couldn't agree there, either, and the effort to develop a "standard" UNIX split into two main streams: The Archer group (eventually Unix International) and the OSF (Open Software Foundation). Several years later, and neither group had really established a standard: even in the face of competition with companies like Microsoft and Apple.
I actually was around before Microsoft seriously entered the computing market. I remember computers costing $10k (the Apple Lisa). I recall small Unix boxes costing $15k, with the OS adding another couple thousand to that (Sun). I remember dozens of machines with no interoperability (TI 99/4, Atari, TRS 80, Exidy Sorcerer, Apple...)
Microsoft, love it or hate it, established a defacto standard. No one was forced to buy Microsoft products- even counting the "Microsoft Tax", anyone could have easily purchased a Macintosh or a small Unix box. But they didn't, because they were generally over priced and provided little or no advantage for all their extra cost. Every vendor back in the '80s was desperately trying to steal their piece of market share, and the concept of open common standards was effectively non-existent. If anything, Microsoft's dominance encouraged sufficient standardization to make it necessary for company's to actually compete on features and price: if this hadn't happened, I imagine we'd be buying $1200 operating systems for our $8,000 computers today.
I'm truly sick and tired of the people who can't unscrew their heads from their rectums long enough to realize that Microsoft and Bill Gates are no more "evil" than any other company out there. Don't like Microsoft products? Great, use what you want, but shut the hell up about it already.
As far as Gates' generosity being a "new" thing...no, its not. A decade ago, he said he intended to give away 95% of his wealth by the time he retired. This is nothing new. And he sure as heck isn't doing this to impress any of the people here on Slashdot.
I wouldn't say that the guys compiling the stats had an agenda or something- but how do you count bugs/flaws? If you said Linux was one "thing" and didn't account for the various distros, is that realistic? And if you account for the various distros, you will undoubtedly end up with duplicates. Its very much like the problem faced when trying to figure out popularity of a website- do you count hits, page impressions, stickiness...and if you count things differently than I do, which of us is right?
One thing I can say with certainty: Linux does not have fewer flaws that Windows. I have as many (or more) patches to apply to my Linux servers at work each month as I do to my Windows servers. I think its reasonable, however, to say that the flaws that show up in Linux are more transparent. Knowledgable people can look at the code for certain coding practices and find flaws *before* they are reported in the wild- the availability of source code definitely gives Linux an edge in that regard.
A lot of people who play socially-based games play them to escape a world in which they, perhaps, have difficulty socializing. They can be a radically different "person" in the virtual world, and can interact in ways that might not be comfortable for them in real life.
Is Microsoft making the right bet by investing in on line games? I think so, especially when you realize that you can completely discount the social aspect of gaming and *still* have a solid business model via electronic distribution, player rankings, and other interactive elements.
Will Microsoft make the right choices to capitalize on this on line opportunity? I think they will lose a ton of money, but eventually find the right combination of features to grab a significant share of the market and achieve some profit. But really, time will tell.
One thing I can say for sure: any financial analyst focussing on the computer and console game market who thinks online gaming is pointless and misguided is incredibly ignorant.
I think a bigger issue is our society's overwhelming and ultimately hypocritical concern with "safety". We send men and women off to die in war ever year. Yet the expansion of human horizons through the exploration of space by willing people is "too dangerous". The men and women of the space program know the risks, and for the most part they embrace them. Yes, its sad when lives are lost. But human kind needs risk takers. And I'd rather see people "spending" their lives willingly on something the truly believe in for the betterment of all mankind, than for any squabble over territory or natural resources.
Secondly, there is a big difference between a simple MP3 or Ogg Vorbis capable client and an actual stream player. Playing your MP3s and movies off your hard drive is not the end all of streaming...in fact, its not really streaming at all, but rather decoding and/or progressive downloading. How about live streaming from an actual broadcast? For that, you need an actual stream client: Windows Media Player, Real Player, Quick Time, and Flash with its content server.
Besides Real Helix, what other live network stream clients with actual stream servers are there for Linux? Unless we can name a couple of decent live streaming alternatives, perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to slam everything Real does?
Oh, my goodness. Not that specious argument again. I left my door unlocked, so I'm guilty of allowing the criminal who enters my house to commit their crime. Even more so, I'm guilty of causing his injury when he falls from my second story window while trying to escape with his stolen goods.
No, I'm sorry. I don't buy that argument. A crime can not be excused by circumstance. The punishment for the crime can, in some cases, be lessened based on circumstance, but I think that's overused. The psychopathic killer who was beaten as a child shouldn't be given a lessened sentence just because of their sad past. Likewise the virus writer shouldn't be excused because the software their virus infected "allowed" the infection
Nice try, though: and apparently some people agree with you that a crime is less of a crime when there are extenuating circumstances...like a hungry stomach, an unlocked door, or a piece of imperfect software. I agree that the world tends to target the "weak", but that's not a reason to feel sorry for the criminal.
And as for why IBM would feel danger...I'm an employee and actually *read* the internal release. I didn't sense fear, just common sense. SP2 will break some stuff for users: not by being "bad", but just by being more strict. That alone is reason to hold off a bit so that appropriate changes can be applied to insure that key business apps aren't unintentionally firewalled (for example). I really don't consider this newsworthy.