Not only KDE is sophisticated, but KDE people are always gentle. When did a KDE developer got angry responding to critics? They're the first to recognize problems, fixable or not, and they take their time to explain where they're going, too -- because there is a explainable plan.
That's not true. Bill Gates gives away all his money to children in developing countries. Every time you buy a copy of Windows 7 some cute African kid gets her malaria cured. If you use Linux that kid DIES.
Tying is not illegal in the US unless you are a monopoly from what I can tell. So it was OK for Microsoft to tie Dos and Windows until a court declared them to be a monopoly. After that it became illegal. Apple has ~5% of the PC market. They're in no danger of being declared a monopoly so anti trust won't come into it.
Of course, since they're not a monopoly you can just not buy their stuff. I've used Macs occasionally and they frankly irritate me so I wouldn't use OSX even if they gave it away with new PCs.
But that $300 Netbook with the $50 profit margin will
#1 Sell ten times more than the $1000 tablet with a $300 profit margin. Thus earning $500 in profits for every ten Netbooks sold at $300 for every one $1000 Tablet sold with a $300 margin. Net sum of $200 more in profits.
I think Apple is worried people will realise they don't need a $1000 machine with a $300 profit margin. The worst case for them would be that most Mac users buy $300 netbooks instead of the expensive machines and the number of Mac users doesn't increase.
In fact for your scheme to work they'd need to sell six netbooks to make up for the loss of one tablet. Now it's quite possible that there just aren't that many PC users who would switch but for price whereas most Mac users would buy a cheaper machine if it were available. And incidentally it's worse than this - the people who want a netbook would otherwise buy a $2000+ Mac Book Air. The profit margins on that are probably a lot more than $300. If it were $500 they need to "convert" 10 PC users to compensate for every Mac user that buys a cheaper machine. This to me seems to be very unlikely. Therefore a Mac netbook is a bad idea for them, as is allowing OSX to run on regular PCs legally and without hacks.
Actually I've talked to PC notebook ODMs who have said that the whole netbook trend is a mistake for the industry - basically there's a fixed number of people buying PCs. Before netbooks they'd buy a notebook and the margins were quite high for the PC vendor. Now they buy a netbook and the margins have been cut drastically. So the netbook trend has basically cut revenues. Of course in the PC world it's even worse to not make netbooks if your competitors do so. Then instead of the reduced margin you can get on a netbook you get nothing.
Still the whole point of Apple's business model is that they can say no to products which would cause them to lose money. That includes clones, retail OSX for PCs and netbooks. Don't get me wrong, Apple will eventually make a small machine, it's just it will cost a lot more than most netbooks. Of course it'll have some features they don't have too. What they won't do is sell a $300 identikit Atom netbook, because that would compete with their high end, high margin machines.
So far it seems that the US, China and Russia have all been deterred by MAD.
That's not to say it would work with Iran or North Korea should they have nuclear tipped ICBMs. Saddam acted irrationally in not withdrawing from to avoid a US led invasion Kuwait and even more irrationally in not disarming in a verifiable way to avoid another more serious US invasion aimed at removing him from power. There's not really much sign that having nukes would have given him a deterrent capability against the US. Actually the odds are that a nuclear armed NK or Iran would be at more risk of an attack than less because they lack the diplomatic subtlety to make deterrence work.
Still once again, what's the alternative to trying it?
You'd be better off with a spring loaded spike deployed by paramedics after the party at fault had been identified.
Incidentally I was always taught that in Sweden if you kill a pedestrian while driving you're automatically at fault - i.e. it's up to you as a driver to drive so slowly in areas with pedestrians that you can safely brake should one of them decide to run across the road.
It reminds me a bit of my Dad's comment about Defensive Driving - the idea is that you keep a box in front of your car clear, and that box is the breaking distance. Now often other drivers will whinge about this, but often you can get away with it.
What about a warning light on the dashboard? It would flash at random and you'd have a short time to tell it you were paying attention and press an "Acknowledge" button. If you pressed it all would be ok. If not an alarm would sound BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!. Then you'd have to enter a complex disarm sequence (up down left, enter pressed (factorial of the number of BEEP!s multiplied by pi^2 divided by (sqrt(2) multiplied by the number of retries)) times, press and hold down, quick press on left) sequence to stop it.
This would wake up dozy drivers. The idea is partly based on studies of stress and attentiveness recently declassified from Camp Delta at Gitmo and also the time tested technique of putting the alarm clock out of arms reach when you press the snooze button.
I'm sure the ability to pass IQ tests can be taught. There isn't much variability in the IQ tests I've done - once you know the answers to a few of them you'll most likely ace the rest. In fact I went to a primary school that specialized in getting people into Grammar Schools in the UK. Grammar Schools had a test, the 11+ that was basically an IQ test. The school I went to made sure we all did a test a week, or more, for a couple of months before we were due to sit the 11+. The net result was that they had a pass rate that was much more than average.
So to some extent IQ tests are worthless for individuals.
On the other hand it could be argued that IQ tests are an excellent measure of culture. Some cultures are 'better' because they are able to convince their kids to study. There are huge differences in ability here. Taiwanese kids study incredibly hard at school and post school they go to a cram school to learn even more. Mainstream American/English kids study less hard, and ghetto US/UK kids don't study at all.
Now I'd expect the Taiwanese kids to do very well on IQ tests, the mainstream western ones to do less well and the ghetto kids to do very poorly indeed. Now my guess here is that this difference is almost completely explained by education. Mind you, a culture that can produce people who do better on IQ tests has a huge advantage - high scores on IQ tests are correlated with all sorts of good things. So you could say average IQ scores are an excellent measure of cultural merit.
I think if the Middle East was destroyed in a big war here's what would happen
1) The price of the remaining gasoline would be sky high. Evreryone would drastically reduce their car usage. 2) Cities would set up bus services, running on natural gas. People would telecommute. 3) The electricity supply would be fine since it is natural gas, coal or nuclear 4) The military have their own supplies of fuel
There would be a period of austerity, like the UK in WWII. Probably gasoline would be rationed.
This would last for a few months. During that time EU farmers would grow crops for biodiesel and bioethanol on formerly "set aside" land, garages would convert cars to run on those or on natural gas. Vast numbers of electric vehicles and bicyles would be made and sold. Huge fortunes would be spent on plants to extract oil from Canadian tar shales and all the other currently uneconomic sources of oil, and every single one would be tapped.
So there'd be a wobbly period for a few months, but after that things would be fine. Though I suspect that we'd never go back to using oil the way we do now. Basically there's a path away from oil. At the moment oils is cheap enough for that not to make sense economically. If oil suddenly became very expensive I think it would happen very quickly.
What's wrong with the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction? It seems pretty much self evident that two rival powers with the capability to destroy each other utterly would be deterred from striking first. And it worked well in practice.
Of course it would be nice if we'd sat down with the Stalin and sang kumbaya and eaten s'mores like at Summer Camp, but in the absence of that possibility a relatively peaceful stalemate based on Nash's Equilibrium seems like a better option than either an all out war or getting overrun by a totalitarian regime that had already starved millions of its own people to death and had already conquered Eastern Europe.
I don't have a Linux box to test on these days but it's always truck me you should be able to do something like this
global _start _start: xor eax,eax mov al,2 int 80h jmp short _start
This is a bit more compact than the version I gave, only 4 bytes to set eax to 0x02, and only 2 to loop. I think it's unsafe to leave junk in the high bytes of eax, so I'd avoid just a mov ax, 0x02
It turns into these 8 bytes of code
global _start
_start: 31C0 xor eax,eax B002 mov al,2 CD80 int 80h EBF8 jmp short _start
Now of course I could just write the bytes out as dd constants
dd 0x02b0c031, 0xf8eb80cd
The reason I don't use it is because that will probably end up in the data segment. I need something like SECTION.text to make it work. Then I'd have space on the end of the signature for;./a
Still I don't want to change it without testing since that might compromise end user experience.
How many of those claiming it did not work are agents of Microsoft opposed to Chairman Stallman's revolutionary 4 Freedom's of Software?
Many people complained about Comrade Stalin's reforms too. New research by the Stalin Memorial Foundation found that most of them were class enemies, Kulaks or agents of Foreign Imperialist powers.
You're ignoring the development costs. At the moment Apple makes hundreds of dollars selling a bundle of hardware and software. They can reinvest all of that in development. If they sold OSX as just software they'd make less than this. OEM Windows goes for about $50 and OEM XP on a netbook goes for about $15.
Apple employs thousands of people. It's absurd to claim that switching from hundreds of dollars revenue per OSX user to $15-$50 is not going to affect their ability to do that. Especially if making OSX available on commodity hardware causes people to use that hardware instead of the more expensive Apple branded stuff.
What "need" is this? I don't need to follow OSX's license unless I think I'm going to get in trouble. I certainly have no moral obligation to follow any Apple license; I believe in First Sale law, and that it should trump a EULA any time they conflict, and I will behave accordingly so long as I can get away with it.
Legally you need to follow EULAs and copyright licenses because the odds are a court would find them enforceable.
Morally I believe you do to - if someone releases software under a license of any kind, I believe your choices are to follow the license or not use it.
Finally there are deep economic justifications for allowing people to release software with some rights reserved if you want people to release software at all. The alternative seems that any release is essentially putting things into the public domain, which is what happened before copyright and patent law was enforced in the US. That means that the people that actually create things don't get paid a penny, but the people that are able to replicate it and sell it do. E.g. if you're rich enough to buy a printing press you can keep 100% of the profits of selling books and leave the author of those books with nothing. This seems to me to be inherently unjust.
US and other courts have tended to uphold EULAs in the past. Saying they are unenforceable because you don't want to abide by their terms is wishful thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
They were too busy giving it to people who bomb third world countries less
Fixed that for you.
Not only KDE is sophisticated, but KDE people are always gentle. When did a KDE developer got angry responding to critics? They're the first to recognize problems, fixable or not, and they take their time to explain where they're going, too -- because there is a explainable plan.
Don't know the guy, but from his very early post ( http://www.kde.org/announcements/announcement.php ), one may think his frank, open tone somehow attracted the same kind of "dreamer" folks.
Open Source projects need a strong leader like Ulrich Drepper or Hans Reiser.
That's not true. Bill Gates gives away all his money to children in developing countries. Every time you buy a copy of Windows 7 some cute African kid gets her malaria cured. If you use Linux that kid DIES.
Mod parent down, Anonymous Coward is a know troll.
People eating cheap, bad food off trays.
Tying is not illegal in the US unless you are a monopoly from what I can tell. So it was OK for Microsoft to tie Dos and Windows until a court declared them to be a monopoly. After that it became illegal. Apple has ~5% of the PC market. They're in no danger of being declared a monopoly so anti trust won't come into it.
Of course, since they're not a monopoly you can just not buy their stuff. I've used Macs occasionally and they frankly irritate me so I wouldn't use OSX even if they gave it away with new PCs.
But that $300 Netbook with the $50 profit margin will
#1 Sell ten times more than the $1000 tablet with a $300 profit margin. Thus earning $500 in profits for every ten Netbooks sold at $300 for every one $1000 Tablet sold with a $300 margin. Net sum of $200 more in profits.
I think Apple is worried people will realise they don't need a $1000 machine with a $300 profit margin. The worst case for them would be that most Mac users buy $300 netbooks instead of the expensive machines and the number of Mac users doesn't increase.
In fact for your scheme to work they'd need to sell six netbooks to make up for the loss of one tablet. Now it's quite possible that there just aren't that many PC users who would switch but for price whereas most Mac users would buy a cheaper machine if it were available. And incidentally it's worse than this - the people who want a netbook would otherwise buy a $2000+ Mac Book Air. The profit margins on that are probably a lot more than $300. If it were $500 they need to "convert" 10 PC users to compensate for every Mac user that buys a cheaper machine. This to me seems to be very unlikely. Therefore a Mac netbook is a bad idea for them, as is allowing OSX to run on regular PCs legally and without hacks.
Actually I've talked to PC notebook ODMs who have said that the whole netbook trend is a mistake for the industry - basically there's a fixed number of people buying PCs. Before netbooks they'd buy a notebook and the margins were quite high for the PC vendor. Now they buy a netbook and the margins have been cut drastically. So the netbook trend has basically cut revenues. Of course in the PC world it's even worse to not make netbooks if your competitors do so. Then instead of the reduced margin you can get on a netbook you get nothing.
Still the whole point of Apple's business model is that they can say no to products which would cause them to lose money. That includes clones, retail OSX for PCs and netbooks. Don't get me wrong, Apple will eventually make a small machine, it's just it will cost a lot more than most netbooks. Of course it'll have some features they don't have too. What they won't do is sell a $300 identikit Atom netbook, because that would compete with their high end, high margin machines.
Jobs did 9/11.
HKs will listen to METAL.
So far it seems that the US, China and Russia have all been deterred by MAD.
That's not to say it would work with Iran or North Korea should they have nuclear tipped ICBMs. Saddam acted irrationally in not withdrawing from to avoid a US led invasion Kuwait and even more irrationally in not disarming in a verifiable way to avoid another more serious US invasion aimed at removing him from power. There's not really much sign that having nukes would have given him a deterrent capability against the US. Actually the odds are that a nuclear armed NK or Iran would be at more risk of an attack than less because they lack the diplomatic subtlety to make deterrence work.
Still once again, what's the alternative to trying it?
You'd be better off with a spring loaded spike deployed by paramedics after the party at fault had been identified.
Incidentally I was always taught that in Sweden if you kill a pedestrian while driving you're automatically at fault - i.e. it's up to you as a driver to drive so slowly in areas with pedestrians that you can safely brake should one of them decide to run across the road.
It reminds me a bit of my Dad's comment about Defensive Driving - the idea is that you keep a box in front of your car clear, and that box is the breaking distance. Now often other drivers will whinge about this, but often you can get away with it.
These two posts together show why socialism doesn't work - people object to paying for other people to do things they disapprove of.
What about a warning light on the dashboard? It would flash at random and you'd have a short time to tell it you were paying attention and press an "Acknowledge" button. If you pressed it all would be ok. If not an alarm would sound BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!. Then you'd have to enter a complex disarm sequence (up down left, enter pressed (factorial of the number of BEEP!s multiplied by pi^2 divided by (sqrt(2) multiplied by the number of retries)) times, press and hold down, quick press on left) sequence to stop it.
This would wake up dozy drivers. The idea is partly based on studies of stress and attentiveness recently declassified from Camp Delta at Gitmo and also the time tested technique of putting the alarm clock out of arms reach when you press the snooze button.
I'm sure the ability to pass IQ tests can be taught. There isn't much variability in the IQ tests I've done - once you know the answers to a few of them you'll most likely ace the rest. In fact I went to a primary school that specialized in getting people into Grammar Schools in the UK. Grammar Schools had a test, the 11+ that was basically an IQ test. The school I went to made sure we all did a test a week, or more, for a couple of months before we were due to sit the 11+. The net result was that they had a pass rate that was much more than average.
So to some extent IQ tests are worthless for individuals.
On the other hand it could be argued that IQ tests are an excellent measure of culture. Some cultures are 'better' because they are able to convince their kids to study. There are huge differences in ability here. Taiwanese kids study incredibly hard at school and post school they go to a cram school to learn even more. Mainstream American/English kids study less hard, and ghetto US/UK kids don't study at all.
Now I'd expect the Taiwanese kids to do very well on IQ tests, the mainstream western ones to do less well and the ghetto kids to do very poorly indeed. Now my guess here is that this difference is almost completely explained by education. Mind you, a culture that can produce people who do better on IQ tests has a huge advantage - high scores on IQ tests are correlated with all sorts of good things. So you could say average IQ scores are an excellent measure of cultural merit.
I think if the Middle East was destroyed in a big war here's what would happen
1) The price of the remaining gasoline would be sky high. Evreryone would drastically reduce their car usage.
2) Cities would set up bus services, running on natural gas. People would telecommute.
3) The electricity supply would be fine since it is natural gas, coal or nuclear
4) The military have their own supplies of fuel
There would be a period of austerity, like the UK in WWII. Probably gasoline would be rationed.
This would last for a few months. During that time EU farmers would grow crops for biodiesel and bioethanol on formerly "set aside" land, garages would convert cars to run on those or on natural gas. Vast numbers of electric vehicles and bicyles would be made and sold. Huge fortunes would be spent on plants to extract oil from Canadian tar shales and all the other currently uneconomic sources of oil, and every single one would be tapped.
So there'd be a wobbly period for a few months, but after that things would be fine. Though I suspect that we'd never go back to using oil the way we do now. Basically there's a path away from oil. At the moment oils is cheap enough for that not to make sense economically. If oil suddenly became very expensive I think it would happen very quickly.
What's wrong with the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction? It seems pretty much self evident that two rival powers with the capability to destroy each other utterly would be deterred from striking first. And it worked well in practice.
Of course it would be nice if we'd sat down with the Stalin and sang kumbaya and eaten s'mores like at Summer Camp, but in the absence of that possibility a relatively peaceful stalemate based on Nash's Equilibrium seems like a better option than either an all out war or getting overrun by a totalitarian regime that had already starved millions of its own people to death and had already conquered Eastern Europe.
How would you have handled the Cold War?
del MidEast\Ira*
I don't have a Linux box to test on these days but it's always truck me you should be able to do something like this
This is a bit more compact than the version I gave, only 4 bytes to set eax to 0x02, and only 2 to loop. I think it's unsafe to leave junk in the high bytes of eax, so I'd avoid just a mov ax, 0x02
It turns into these 8 bytes of code
Now of course I could just write the bytes out as dd constants
The reason I don't use it is because that will probably end up in the data segment. I need something like SECTION .text to make it work. Then I'd have space on the end of the signature for ;./a
Still I don't want to change it without testing since that might compromise end user experience.
whiny wanker.
I think we're just found the name for the next Ubuntu.
How many of those claiming it did not work are agents of Microsoft opposed to Chairman Stallman's revolutionary 4 Freedom's of Software?
Many people complained about Comrade Stalin's reforms too. New research by the Stalin Memorial Foundation found that most of them were class enemies, Kulaks or agents of Foreign Imperialist powers.
You're ignoring the development costs. At the moment Apple makes hundreds of dollars selling a bundle of hardware and software. They can reinvest all of that in development. If they sold OSX as just software they'd make less than this. OEM Windows goes for about $50 and OEM XP on a netbook goes for about $15.
Apple employs thousands of people. It's absurd to claim that switching from hundreds of dollars revenue per OSX user to $15-$50 is not going to affect their ability to do that. Especially if making OSX available on commodity hardware causes people to use that hardware instead of the more expensive Apple branded stuff.
What "need" is this? I don't need to follow OSX's license unless I think I'm going to get in trouble. I certainly have no moral obligation to follow any Apple license; I believe in First Sale law, and that it should trump a EULA any time they conflict, and I will behave accordingly so long as I can get away with it.
Legally you need to follow EULAs and copyright licenses because the odds are a court would find them enforceable.
Morally I believe you do to - if someone releases software under a license of any kind, I believe your choices are to follow the license or not use it.
Finally there are deep economic justifications for allowing people to release software with some rights reserved if you want people to release software at all. The alternative seems that any release is essentially putting things into the public domain, which is what happened before copyright and patent law was enforced in the US. That means that the people that actually create things don't get paid a penny, but the people that are able to replicate it and sell it do. E.g. if you're rich enough to buy a printing press you can keep 100% of the profits of selling books and leave the author of those books with nothing. This seems to me to be inherently unjust.
That's not true, my Windows 98 machine TYPHOIDMARY has been serving malware and viruses from the DMZ of my network for years now.
US and other courts have tended to uphold EULAs in the past. Saying they are unenforceable because you don't want to abide by their terms is wishful thinking.
Mostly because Pystar sell a paid-for license with their hackintoshes so why the hell get a torrent?
The guides telling you how to install it on regular PCs usually say you can either get a torrent or buy the software.