Would they have implemented a way to collect the energy of me tripping and stumbling as well? It seems that I would make a lot more energy tripping over the small rises created than the depression itself.
Miro happens to be the name of the company that started the Mambo Server open-source CMS project. Since I know they existed before today, they might have a good claim to stop the Miro player from using the Miro name. Software trademarks seem to go across many types of software - Firefox had to change its name to Firefox from Firebird because of the open-source relational database called Firebird. Seeing as though both Miro's Mambo and the Miro player deliver content to users, it would seem they are more related than a database and a web browser.
Not to rain on anyone's parade, but people really need to do good trademark searches.
Sprint Nextel is one of the worst offenders when it comes to spectrum violations. The Nextel network has been illegally causing interference with public-safety radios for years now - and they have missed every deadline that has been set to clean it up. It started off because they were too cheap to filter their signals so that they wouldn't cause interference. Then they convinced the FCC to swap their scattered spectrum for much more valuable contiguous spectrum.
Sprint is the worst when it comes to spectrum violations and those schools should press the FCC to relieve Sprint of all Nextel's spectrum that's causing interference - without any compensation. Sprint would shut up pretty fast if that happened because one's a silly paperwork mix-up and the other's a wanton disregard for responsibility.
In the world, there are many companies who like the idea of Linux and love its cost, but do worry about compatibility issues. Those companies get all warm and fuzzy inside when they hear news releases like this because they think "oh, someone is making sure that isn't a problem".
Whether it is a problem or not, IT people at companies often like the path of least resistance (don't we all) and so paying a little money for something they have to worry less about it a good thing to them.
I don't like Novell cozying up to M$ any more than anyone on/., but I understand why they're doing it - they're customers want compatibility guarantees and protection from IP disputes. The only real way to break ourselves of deals like this is with legislation for open-standards and IP-law reform. Those two would mean that companies using Linux would have no fear about using the OS - even if those fears today are simply in their heads.
I own tonnes of copyrights myself. In fact, any creative, original work is automatically copyrighted by the author. So, even this comment here could qualify as a copyright that I own. Never mind the many web sites that I've created for myself (personal, non-commercial stuff, but it's still a copyright).
The biggest problem with this proposed exemption (other than giving evil organizations an out) is that it is an exemption that EVERYONE can take advantage of. Any scammer who wanted to pretext could simply pen a short haiku and then be considered a copyright owner.
Frankly, Consumer Reports really doesn't know what they're talking about here. Since all national carriers require contracts, they have an aproximately equal lock-in on their subscribers. So, subscribers have an equal chance to leave any of the carriers. Who are they leaving? Well, they're leaving Cingular at 1.5% (post-pay) per month. They're leaving Sprint at 2.4% (post-pay) per month. They're leaving T-Mobile at 2.3% (post-pay) per month. And they're leaving Verizon at 0.95% (direct retail post-pay) per month. Verizon's numbers are better because they're not including indirect customers who tend to churn at a higher rate - but they're still somewhere between 1% and 1.24% (their total churn). Suffice it to say, it's easy to see who customers stay with. Is Consumer Reports talking out of their butt? Absolutely Yes! If you get results that are inconsistant with churn numbers, you either have to come up with an argument why churn isn't a good indicator of customer satisfaction or there's something wrong with your methodology. Frankly, the percentage of customers that leave each month is a really great way to see how many are dissatisfied.
Essentially, Consumer Reports methodology is inaccurate - almost to the point that random chance would have provided as good a result. For example, if I claim Cingular and Sprint are good and Verizon and T-Mobile are bad, I'm pretty much as accurate as their report saying that customers like Verizon and T-Mobile. Customers like Verizon, followed by Cingular, followed by T-Mobile, followed by Sprint. That's accurate and I have REAL data over a sample of MILLIONS to back that up.
As much as I hate Windows, I think it's unfair to imply that it requires so much more than Linux does. I've installed Fedora before and it isn't small - definitely not small enough to fit on a 512MB footprint. But RedHat altered it so that it would require less. Likewise, Microsoft could alter Windows to require less.
The big difference is that anyone has the right to alter Linux whereas Microsoft is the only one that can do that for Windows.
Part of the point of OSS is that anything that you can modify should be modifyable. From the FSF's perspective, a hardware vendor shouldn't be allowed to lock you into using their approved software. You should be able to run whatever software you'd like on the hardware that you paid for. I'm not from the heart of OSS evangalism, but by allowing a hardware vendor to lock you into a certain version of an OSS application, you've closed the source of that app. It can be modified, but not run - and, to me at least, running is the ultimate point of software.
"when you're talking about large file transfers going to very large numbers of people there frequently are significant costs involved"
While it would be terrible for an ISP to block Google or Amazon, it probably won't happen because neither service puts a strain on their resources. But there are internet uses which do put a strain on an ISPs resources. For example, while this isn't true today, it is quite possible that we will download DVDs which, even compressed using XVID or something, will still be a couple gigs a piece (maybe as low as 1GB). Imagine a Netflix/Napster-like subscription service for video downloads!
Currently, ISPs oversell their capacity because most of the time, we use very little of it. Like while I'm writing this comment, I'm using 0kbps and when I submit it, my connection will burst up to give me a fast experience. But if I was using a lot of this connection a lot of the time, my ISP would have a problem - and I don't think it's too hard for us to imagine IPTV or the like for the future which would present such a problem.
Personally, I would prefer usage charges (charges per GB levied against the user) than charges to the content provider. I'd rather pay for it myself than just get the content that a company will pay for, but it seems like Bram has realized that, with high-bandwidth services becoming more and more prevalent, there will be a point at which ISPs need to do something about that extra used capacity - whether that means charging the users sucking all that capacity or charging the content providers enabling the users to suck all that capacity.
There's a lot of talk about patents and I don't like much of it. It's very ideologically driven with little regard for the facts.
The field of economics believes that people respond to incentives. By giving someone a patent on something, you are ensuring that, for a limited time, they are able to secure most of the "social benefit" of that invention less the "social cost" of developing and producing it. For example, let's say that Tivo spent $100 million "inventing" their product - assuming they were truly innovative and that this is an actual invention. Then let's say that it costs $200 to build a Tivo - the cost of the hardware, marketing, labour used in assembly, shipping, the works. Clearly, Tivo can't sell units for $200 and turn a profit - in fact, they can't sell them for $201 and turn a profit unless they sell over 100 million units (which would cover the R&D).
Now, let's say that there aren't copyright laws for a second and that I can load Tivo software on a box I make (which costs me $200 to make) and start selling them. I can sell at a price a lot less than Tivo can because I don't have to recoup R&D costs of $100 million. This is why software patents are a little more tricky. In the real world, I would have to develop an alternative to the Tivo software which would cost me money, but probably less than the $100 million it cost Tivo since I would be duplicating an already existing piece of software which is substantially easier to do.
Looking at more mechanical things, one can easily see how they work and duplicate the design and the "inventing" company goes out of business - sort of.
There are a lot of people who argue that being first to market is enough of an advantage. An economist wouldn't. Yes, being first to market will provide one's company with a good amount of the social benefit of an invention, but not all of it (patents don't give you all either, but more) and so there is less incentive to invent and less invention than is socially beneficial happens.
I hate to use caps, but I must stress this: WITHOUT PATENTS, THERE IS LESS INVENTION THAN THERE SHOULD BE.
So patents do help correct for that market failure, but they also have detrimental effects. The one that bothers me the most is that patents give a monopoly. For the non-economists, monopolies charge higher prices and deliver fewer units because it is more profitable for them to sell fewer at a higher price. Basically, if I can make a pen that everyone wants and I have a patent on it, I might have a choice of selling 1 million units at $10 per pen or 5 million units at $1 per pen - by selling less units, I get double the money! This won't happen in a competitive market because with more firms selling, it becomes more profitable to sell more units because the more the firms, the fewer of those $10 buyers we each get.
Of course, the natural outgrowth of this monopoly pricing is questioning whether companies are able to capture more money than the social benefit through this system because of above market pricing. Maybe.
Then we get into the "standing on top of giants" problem. Patents mean that you can't stand on giants for a period of time (I actually don't know the exact amount of time, but I think it's about 20 years). So patents retard one's ability to build on the inventions of yesterday.
So, patents encourage and discourage innovation, but is that why the majority of people are in favor of them? No. People see them as fair. People have an "I created this, it's mine" mentality. If you invented something, would you want other people ripping it off? If you wrote a song, would you like others passing it off as theirs - or worse, that their version was better? Ideally, you probably would - it would encourage the type of amazing developments that we see with things like the Creative Commons, but you probably won't feel that way and I don't believe in trying to convert people to different philosophies.
There are logical reasons to reject a Linux/OpenOffice.org desktop.
1) OpenOffice.org doesn't use.doc as its native format. Yeah, it can open them and save to it, but people don't want to have the hassle of selecting.doc when saving (yes, people are that lazy), worrying about if it looks right saved, etc. They just want it to work and they don't know as much about computers as Slashdot readers. They don't want to have to think.
2) Linux is different. Anytime there is something different, there is a cost of switching (you have to learn something new which costs you time - time you could use doing something better). Now, if Linux ran 2 million times faster, it would be well worth the effort to learn it since it would greatly increase your productivity. But Linux isn't amazingly better than Windows - I use Linux as my primary OS, but the difference is marginal, not night and day. Plus, there are consumer things (streaming audio and video, flash. ..) that Windows just wins. Yeah, there is a flash plugin for Linux, but it isn't installed with many distros and it isn't as good as the Windows version. Yes, you can get gstreamer to play mp3s and such, but it isn't as good as the Windows equivalent and there are tons of proprietary codecs that it doesn't support and won't support anytime soon. Not to mention the games and other proprietary software that doesn't run on Linux. So, for consumers, Linux often doesn't look like an upgrade because it doesn't do many of the things they are used to computers doing.
People buy Windows with the expectation that "anything I want can run on Windows". There is a lot of great Linux software out there, but it just isn't the same as being able to head to BestBuy and grab the latest version of Civilization and be playing it that evening. And please don't say things like "Well, there's FreeCiv" or "They could use WINE" because we all know that it isn't the same. Also, please don't say, "they can replace iTunes with Rhythmbox" because they also are not the same.
The fact is that there are many logical reasons NOT to switch to Linux. Linux is great, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it beats Windows at every turn. There are many things that Windows does better (whether this is an outcome of market conditions or something inherent, consumers aren't going to care - telling the consumer that proprietary codecs and archaic market conditions are the things to blame for why they can't play their iTunes in Linux or watch a video online isn't going to make those files play any better and consumers don't care, we care but consumers don't).
Let's live in the real world where we can fight to get rid of the problems in both Linux and the market for operating systems so that we don't have to go around waving our arms saying "Linux Rules" - consumers will know it for themselves.
While I believe that open-source products have many long-term benefits for a company (better legacy support, the ability to patch and make alterations as needed, long-term cost savings, etc), companies aren't going to switch immiedately.
Why? Because switching costs a lot of money. Let's say I'm a business with 100 computers (desktops). I bought them from Dell and my employees use them. Let's say I want to switch them to Linux. Well, first, I've already paid for Windows (came with the Dells I bought) so I don't get that money back because I'm using Linux now. I also have to retrain workers to use the new systems (yes, those small problems like "Where's the My Documents folder" cost a lot of money for a large organization). So, switching is costing me money rather than saving it.
In the long term, I could value the flexibility, free upgrades, etc. that Linux offers and believe that would be more profitable for me in the long run. Of course, on the server side, the situation is easier since if I'm going to be paying a server admin anyway I can hire a UNIX admin and you can buy UNIX servers without paying a Windows tax, but if I'm currently using Windows Server, it can be hard to justify switching.
It's always hard to surplant an installed base. Open source will get there, but there is no panacia of cost savings or ease in the short term. I believe that those benefits will be there in the long term, but it can often be hard for companies to look past the end of their nose.
One of the things that most people don't understand is that there are many times that when you sell more, your profits go down.
To explain it in economics terms: demand for a product rises as the price falls. So, if you lower the price, you will sell more units. Let's say that you can sell 1,000 units at $100 profit per unit. Let's say that you can sell 10,000 units at $50 profit per unit. It is better to sell 10,000 units at $50 profit per unit ($500,000) than 1,000 units at $100 profit per unit ($100,000). Of course, the reverse can happen. Let's say that you can sell 1,000 units for $100 profit per unit ($100,000) or 1,500 units for $50 profit per unit ($75,000). Selling those additional units looses you money. It is desireable for the business to produce and sell fewer units.
So, if Apple allows other devices to be more iPod-like and therefore gets revenue from more unit sales (both iPod and FairPlay units), it wouldn't necesserally increase their profits since they might have to lower the price of the iPod or loose iPod sales to sales of FairPlay devices which people are more likely to substitute and give Apple lower profit.
It might be good for Apple. It might not. Only a very through economic analysis of Apple and the market (as well as a ton of speculation) could tell us whether it is actually a good move. Being biggest doesn't mean being most profitable.
Miro started Mambo. They did the original work, they got the ball rolling and so they believed that they were entitled to be in charge.
Some of the Mambo community developers did a lot of work on Mambo and, arguably, Mambo wouldn't be here today without them. While they didn't start it, they saw their contributions are paramount and they thought they were entitled to be in charge.
Mostly, it's a battle of ego. Anyone who reads the Joomla! website can see that it's a battle of ego. They tried to claim that it was a renaming, that they were the real Mambo, that they were better than Mambo, etc. Frankly, which one is the "real" Mambo is a philosophical question that I think is stupid, but it's easy to see that this is an ego fight between two camps who both have legitimate claims to leadership of the project.
While I agree largely with what you've said, it does raise some issues.
First, it's not just Europeans that need Galileo. Everyone in the world will reap the benefits of a civil-run positioning system that isn't controlled by the Pentagon.
Second, I think it is well within the bounds of sanity to question if it is needed. Yes, the reason you quoted is quite valid: the US government could mess with the GPS in the future and it's always nice to have an alternative system to balance it. But how much are we willing to pay for said alternative system? I believe the article said that it was going to cost $3-4bn. That's a lot of money. For my money, I would rather accept that when the US gets all flustered about a possible terrorist attack (or G-d forbid, another happens), my GPS gets bad accuracy or is turned off for a little while.
Think of it like you think of a computer purchase (since this is Slashdot). With Dell, you have two notebook options: the Inspiron which is cheaper and less reliable, and the Latitude which is more expensive and more reliable. Which do you buy?
For my use of GPS (which is limited to car navigation), it's not a big deal if the accuracy degrades and it really isn't even that big a deal if it is turned off - so, I'd have to go back to Mapquest like most of the world (or is it Google Maps that everyone's using today). I, as well as most people I would suspect, would choose price over the small possibility of degraded accuracy or a system lockout.
While Galileo is free, nothing is free. It's being paid for with government money and the government money comes from people.
Oh, and the article does mention that Galileo might be degraded or shut off in the most extreme circumstances and, to my knowledge, the United States hasn't been messing with GPS much if any.
I hate a US hegemony as much as anyone, but Galileo is expensive (I think those billions could be better spent on thins like, say, treating Aids) and the US hasn't done anything (to my knowledge) with the GPS yet to make me too worried and even if the US does mess with it for non-mission critical things (like my car's nav system) temporarally, it isn't a big deal (not a big enough deal for me to want to spend $3-4bn on it). Yeah, using the GPS puts us all at the will of the Pentagon for our navigation needs, but creating an alternative is expensive and in my opinion more expensive than the freedom from the Pentagon's management is worth.
First, as many have pointed out, Microsoft doesn't have the right to open up all the code.
Second, the code isn't really worth anything at this point. The rendering engine in Mac IE has nothing to do with the rendering engine in Win IE and it's easily the slowest rendering engine out there (well, it's definitely a ton slower than Moz, IE Win, KHTML. ..).
Third, the author says that his reason for wanting Mac IE is for some random website that will require it in the future. Unfortunately, while a website may require IE, it won't work with IE Mac. IE Mac has nothing to do with IE Win. It can't run ActiveX. It doesn't render things similarly. If a website requires IE, Mac IE users are out of luck.
Fourth, I don't think anyone would be impressed by releasing the source for an application that is so dead. Releasing the source for Win IE would be amazing - the community could clean up security holes, improve standards compliance, etc. and make IE a better browser. Mac IE, on the other hand, is long gone. It's just too hopeless to salvage anything useful. It would be like Microsoft open-sourcing Internet Explorer 1.0 - just too old to make anyone care at this point.
Mac IE is dead. It's old. There's nothing useful there and open-sourcing it wouldn't help the Mac community or the open-source community. It wouldn't give any insight into the things that make websites IE-only since IE-only websites don't work with Mac IE. This article is just bad.
Frankly, I can go either way on this one. In the obvious sense, it limits freedom insofar as one cannot choose to greatly exceed the speed limit.
On the other hand, it would mean eliminating the need for traffic officers in police forces. It would mean no more speeding tickets since the system would automatically enforce it - in fact, I've always wondered why cars weren't required to install a governer that prevented them from going above 90MPH (25MPH greater than the highest speed limit I've seen in the United States).
Do people really believe in speed limits? If so, I think this device could be a good way of limiting the number and severity of accidents. Would you be willing to give up your freedom (as well as fellow drivers) to speed to be a lot safer? What about to never have to worry about speeding tickets ever again? What if it allowed you to exceed the speed limit by 25% (81.25MPH in a 65 area and 43.75 in a 35 area)?
Frankly, this device could lead to liberalization of speed zones since enforcement would be 100%. Like, there's an unspoken rule that you have to be going at least 5-10MPH over to get a speeding ticket, but this device could automatically give you that leway and then enforce when you go above that.
I tend to go a little more toward regulation, so I'd like to hear if anyone else thinks this is too big brother.
Frankly, it depends on the market structures. For example:
If you have a natural monopoly (like the local telephone service in the United States is - like, you can only get service from one company be it Bell South, SBC, Verizon, etc.), you need to regulate the crap out of it. Most economists would agree with this. If you don't regulate them, you'll be paying monopoly prices for the product which is bad for consumers and bad for the economy overall (since less customers will purchase services creating what is know as a dead-weight loss).
Wireless, on the other hand, is both an oligopoly and monopolistically competitive. Now, oligopolies will not give you as cheap a price as perfect competition. In a perfectly competitive industry, you pay the equilibrium price which is as close to a real, fair price as one can claim for a product - it is the price where demand and supply meet and it treats sellers and buyers exactly equal. In oligopoly, you will pay more than the equilibrium price - which favours sellers. In fact, you will be paying the price at the Cournot/Nash equilibrium. The more sellers in the oligopoly, the closer you will get to the equilibrium under perfect competition (when you have 100 firms, you will come within 1% of the perfectly competitive equilibrium).
But wireless is also monopolistically competitive. Monopolistic competition is where you have many firms selling different varients that are close relatives. For example, Verizon Wireless has a different coverage area from Cingular and Cingular has different phones from VZW, etc. They are close, but some people will prefer one to the other. Monopolistic competition is inefficient by economic standards. Why? Because Cingular could serve many more people than the 50 million customers they currently have and they desire to serve more customers. The same can be said for each of the other wireless providers - they all have the capacity and desire to serve more customers. But their prices are also higher than equilibrium prices because they have a product that is different from their competition - and therefore likely to attract less people. If VZW and Cingular had the exact same network with the exact same phones, and exact same everything else, people would choose their carrier on price alone. But because they offer different services, people won't choose based on price and will often take other considerations before price and therefore, all the wireless carriers can charge more than equilibrium.
As such, we can use regulation. We can't use regulation just to force companies to be nice to us, but there are things we can do that are better for consumers and better for society as a whole. For example, if monopolistically competitive firms charge prices higher than equilibrium, we can reduce the differences between firms. By mandating a single technology, GSM or CDMA or anything else, we can eliminate one standard that people choose a carrier by. By mandating that every carrier carry the same lineup of phones, we eliminate another. The more differences we eliminate, the more likely people are going to choose a wireless provider based on price rather than the carrier's own attributes.
Of course, you might see a problem with this. For example, if we mandated that all carriers sell both the Nokia 6010 and 3120 and only those two phones, consumers would have less choice. You would loose the ability to choose something that you liked better - that suited you better. There is no way to quantify the benefits of choice. Think of restaurants. We pay higher prices at restaurants because of the choices we get when we are deciding where to dine, but I don't think any of us would want all restaurants to become Taco Bells just to save a little money.
As an example of this in wireless, before the Cingular ATT merger, Verizon had a far superior national network to any of its competitors. As Cingular got traction, VZW lowered prices because network wasn't going to serve as quite as big a differentiation between
To an extent, one could see this coming. SUSE 10 was the first edition of SUSE to treat both desktops equally. Rather than having YaST default to KDE, it now prompts users to select either GNOME or KDE with no indication of prejudice. They've also been adding GNOME-centric things like Beagle. Novell's own NLD chose GNOME over SUSE's KDE for NLD 9. SUSE 10 was one of the first distributions to support GNOME 2.12 (beating Ubuntu while Mandriva which came out significantly later still uses GNOME 2.10).
While I'm still a bit surprised to see Novell give such a slight to KDE this soon, there were signs that they were becoming a GNOME operation.
It seems it would be more cost effective simply to buy a cheaper processor and upgrade your system more often than it would be to spend on the more expensive processors.
You have been sued in US Federal Court for violating GiantAssMunch's patent on the gene for red hair. As you were born with this gene, we are willing to settle your case for merely your life savings. We would prefer this not go to trial, but if you leave us with no alternative we will ask a court to provide us with a perliminary injunction against your life.
We look forward to hearing from you.
*You can't patent discoveries! They aren't inventions if they naturally occur!
As I post this from an installation of Suse 10 RC1, I know that GNU/Linux is an operating system that can be used in place of Windows or Mac OS X. It does something better. It does somethings worse.
Articles like this might be important to show some people, but I feel like the Slashdot crowd should be beyond this. Slashdot readers should know that GNU/Linux is a great operating system. They should also know that it isn't the be all and end all of software (I'm DEFINITELY not saying that Windows is).
For me, this article says stupid things like "abstraction is bad". Abstraction is good most of the time, but it criticizes Windows for it. Really, it should have said that Windows doesn't offer you an alternative to their abstraction and we wanted to hack some code that would communicate right with the BIOS and Linux allowed us to do that because with free software the attitude isn't 'my way or the highway'. I really wish that the article talked about how, because GNU/Linux is a loose association of tools rather than a monolithic package, one can pick and choose which tools to include for an application like a cash register without all the crap you don't need. That's especially important for the embedded space (and something that isn't important for most/all desktop users) and something that GNU/Linux allows that Windows doesn't. That's something to point out.
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Would they have implemented a way to collect the energy of me tripping and stumbling as well? It seems that I would make a lot more energy tripping over the small rises created than the depression itself.
;)~
Too bad I travel from North Station in Boston
Miro happens to be the name of the company that started the Mambo Server open-source CMS project. Since I know they existed before today, they might have a good claim to stop the Miro player from using the Miro name. Software trademarks seem to go across many types of software - Firefox had to change its name to Firefox from Firebird because of the open-source relational database called Firebird. Seeing as though both Miro's Mambo and the Miro player deliver content to users, it would seem they are more related than a database and a web browser.
Not to rain on anyone's parade, but people really need to do good trademark searches.
Sprint Nextel is one of the worst offenders when it comes to spectrum violations. The Nextel network has been illegally causing interference with public-safety radios for years now - and they have missed every deadline that has been set to clean it up. It started off because they were too cheap to filter their signals so that they wouldn't cause interference. Then they convinced the FCC to swap their scattered spectrum for much more valuable contiguous spectrum.
Sprint is the worst when it comes to spectrum violations and those schools should press the FCC to relieve Sprint of all Nextel's spectrum that's causing interference - without any compensation. Sprint would shut up pretty fast if that happened because one's a silly paperwork mix-up and the other's a wanton disregard for responsibility.
In the world, there are many companies who like the idea of Linux and love its cost, but do worry about compatibility issues. Those companies get all warm and fuzzy inside when they hear news releases like this because they think "oh, someone is making sure that isn't a problem".
/., but I understand why they're doing it - they're customers want compatibility guarantees and protection from IP disputes. The only real way to break ourselves of deals like this is with legislation for open-standards and IP-law reform. Those two would mean that companies using Linux would have no fear about using the OS - even if those fears today are simply in their heads.
Whether it is a problem or not, IT people at companies often like the path of least resistance (don't we all) and so paying a little money for something they have to worry less about it a good thing to them.
I don't like Novell cozying up to M$ any more than anyone on
I own tonnes of copyrights myself. In fact, any creative, original work is automatically copyrighted by the author. So, even this comment here could qualify as a copyright that I own. Never mind the many web sites that I've created for myself (personal, non-commercial stuff, but it's still a copyright).
The biggest problem with this proposed exemption (other than giving evil organizations an out) is that it is an exemption that EVERYONE can take advantage of. Any scammer who wanted to pretext could simply pen a short haiku and then be considered a copyright owner.
Frankly, Consumer Reports really doesn't know what they're talking about here. Since all national carriers require contracts, they have an aproximately equal lock-in on their subscribers. So, subscribers have an equal chance to leave any of the carriers. Who are they leaving? Well, they're leaving Cingular at 1.5% (post-pay) per month. They're leaving Sprint at 2.4% (post-pay) per month. They're leaving T-Mobile at 2.3% (post-pay) per month. And they're leaving Verizon at 0.95% (direct retail post-pay) per month. Verizon's numbers are better because they're not including indirect customers who tend to churn at a higher rate - but they're still somewhere between 1% and 1.24% (their total churn). Suffice it to say, it's easy to see who customers stay with. Is Consumer Reports talking out of their butt? Absolutely Yes! If you get results that are inconsistant with churn numbers, you either have to come up with an argument why churn isn't a good indicator of customer satisfaction or there's something wrong with your methodology. Frankly, the percentage of customers that leave each month is a really great way to see how many are dissatisfied.
Essentially, Consumer Reports methodology is inaccurate - almost to the point that random chance would have provided as good a result. For example, if I claim Cingular and Sprint are good and Verizon and T-Mobile are bad, I'm pretty much as accurate as their report saying that customers like Verizon and T-Mobile. Customers like Verizon, followed by Cingular, followed by T-Mobile, followed by Sprint. That's accurate and I have REAL data over a sample of MILLIONS to back that up.
As much as I hate Windows, I think it's unfair to imply that it requires so much more than Linux does. I've installed Fedora before and it isn't small - definitely not small enough to fit on a 512MB footprint. But RedHat altered it so that it would require less. Likewise, Microsoft could alter Windows to require less. The big difference is that anyone has the right to alter Linux whereas Microsoft is the only one that can do that for Windows.
This project is nothing! Linux on a soda machine? I've had NetBSD running on my toaster for years ;)
Part of the point of OSS is that anything that you can modify should be modifyable. From the FSF's perspective, a hardware vendor shouldn't be allowed to lock you into using their approved software. You should be able to run whatever software you'd like on the hardware that you paid for. I'm not from the heart of OSS evangalism, but by allowing a hardware vendor to lock you into a certain version of an OSS application, you've closed the source of that app. It can be modified, but not run - and, to me at least, running is the ultimate point of software.
"when you're talking about large file transfers going to very large numbers of people there frequently are significant costs involved"
While it would be terrible for an ISP to block Google or Amazon, it probably won't happen because neither service puts a strain on their resources. But there are internet uses which do put a strain on an ISPs resources. For example, while this isn't true today, it is quite possible that we will download DVDs which, even compressed using XVID or something, will still be a couple gigs a piece (maybe as low as 1GB). Imagine a Netflix/Napster-like subscription service for video downloads!
Currently, ISPs oversell their capacity because most of the time, we use very little of it. Like while I'm writing this comment, I'm using 0kbps and when I submit it, my connection will burst up to give me a fast experience. But if I was using a lot of this connection a lot of the time, my ISP would have a problem - and I don't think it's too hard for us to imagine IPTV or the like for the future which would present such a problem.
Personally, I would prefer usage charges (charges per GB levied against the user) than charges to the content provider. I'd rather pay for it myself than just get the content that a company will pay for, but it seems like Bram has realized that, with high-bandwidth services becoming more and more prevalent, there will be a point at which ISPs need to do something about that extra used capacity - whether that means charging the users sucking all that capacity or charging the content providers enabling the users to suck all that capacity.
There's a lot of talk about patents and I don't like much of it. It's very ideologically driven with little regard for the facts.
The field of economics believes that people respond to incentives. By giving someone a patent on something, you are ensuring that, for a limited time, they are able to secure most of the "social benefit" of that invention less the "social cost" of developing and producing it. For example, let's say that Tivo spent $100 million "inventing" their product - assuming they were truly innovative and that this is an actual invention. Then let's say that it costs $200 to build a Tivo - the cost of the hardware, marketing, labour used in assembly, shipping, the works. Clearly, Tivo can't sell units for $200 and turn a profit - in fact, they can't sell them for $201 and turn a profit unless they sell over 100 million units (which would cover the R&D).
Now, let's say that there aren't copyright laws for a second and that I can load Tivo software on a box I make (which costs me $200 to make) and start selling them. I can sell at a price a lot less than Tivo can because I don't have to recoup R&D costs of $100 million. This is why software patents are a little more tricky. In the real world, I would have to develop an alternative to the Tivo software which would cost me money, but probably less than the $100 million it cost Tivo since I would be duplicating an already existing piece of software which is substantially easier to do.
Looking at more mechanical things, one can easily see how they work and duplicate the design and the "inventing" company goes out of business - sort of.
There are a lot of people who argue that being first to market is enough of an advantage. An economist wouldn't. Yes, being first to market will provide one's company with a good amount of the social benefit of an invention, but not all of it (patents don't give you all either, but more) and so there is less incentive to invent and less invention than is socially beneficial happens.
I hate to use caps, but I must stress this: WITHOUT PATENTS, THERE IS LESS INVENTION THAN THERE SHOULD BE.
So patents do help correct for that market failure, but they also have detrimental effects. The one that bothers me the most is that patents give a monopoly. For the non-economists, monopolies charge higher prices and deliver fewer units because it is more profitable for them to sell fewer at a higher price. Basically, if I can make a pen that everyone wants and I have a patent on it, I might have a choice of selling 1 million units at $10 per pen or 5 million units at $1 per pen - by selling less units, I get double the money! This won't happen in a competitive market because with more firms selling, it becomes more profitable to sell more units because the more the firms, the fewer of those $10 buyers we each get.
Of course, the natural outgrowth of this monopoly pricing is questioning whether companies are able to capture more money than the social benefit through this system because of above market pricing. Maybe.
Then we get into the "standing on top of giants" problem. Patents mean that you can't stand on giants for a period of time (I actually don't know the exact amount of time, but I think it's about 20 years). So patents retard one's ability to build on the inventions of yesterday.
So, patents encourage and discourage innovation, but is that why the majority of people are in favor of them? No. People see them as fair. People have an "I created this, it's mine" mentality. If you invented something, would you want other people ripping it off? If you wrote a song, would you like others passing it off as theirs - or worse, that their version was better? Ideally, you probably would - it would encourage the type of amazing developments that we see with things like the Creative Commons, but you probably won't feel that way and I don't believe in trying to convert people to different philosophies.
In the end, we mig
There are logical reasons to reject a Linux/OpenOffice.org desktop.
.doc as its native format. Yeah, it can open them and save to it, but people don't want to have the hassle of selecting .doc when saving (yes, people are that lazy), worrying about if it looks right saved, etc. They just want it to work and they don't know as much about computers as Slashdot readers. They don't want to have to think.
.) that Windows just wins. Yeah, there is a flash plugin for Linux, but it isn't installed with many distros and it isn't as good as the Windows version. Yes, you can get gstreamer to play mp3s and such, but it isn't as good as the Windows equivalent and there are tons of proprietary codecs that it doesn't support and won't support anytime soon. Not to mention the games and other proprietary software that doesn't run on Linux. So, for consumers, Linux often doesn't look like an upgrade because it doesn't do many of the things they are used to computers doing.
1) OpenOffice.org doesn't use
2) Linux is different. Anytime there is something different, there is a cost of switching (you have to learn something new which costs you time - time you could use doing something better). Now, if Linux ran 2 million times faster, it would be well worth the effort to learn it since it would greatly increase your productivity. But Linux isn't amazingly better than Windows - I use Linux as my primary OS, but the difference is marginal, not night and day. Plus, there are consumer things (streaming audio and video, flash. .
People buy Windows with the expectation that "anything I want can run on Windows". There is a lot of great Linux software out there, but it just isn't the same as being able to head to BestBuy and grab the latest version of Civilization and be playing it that evening. And please don't say things like "Well, there's FreeCiv" or "They could use WINE" because we all know that it isn't the same. Also, please don't say, "they can replace iTunes with Rhythmbox" because they also are not the same.
The fact is that there are many logical reasons NOT to switch to Linux. Linux is great, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it beats Windows at every turn. There are many things that Windows does better (whether this is an outcome of market conditions or something inherent, consumers aren't going to care - telling the consumer that proprietary codecs and archaic market conditions are the things to blame for why they can't play their iTunes in Linux or watch a video online isn't going to make those files play any better and consumers don't care, we care but consumers don't).
Let's live in the real world where we can fight to get rid of the problems in both Linux and the market for operating systems so that we don't have to go around waving our arms saying "Linux Rules" - consumers will know it for themselves.
While I believe that open-source products have many long-term benefits for a company (better legacy support, the ability to patch and make alterations as needed, long-term cost savings, etc), companies aren't going to switch immiedately. Why? Because switching costs a lot of money. Let's say I'm a business with 100 computers (desktops). I bought them from Dell and my employees use them. Let's say I want to switch them to Linux. Well, first, I've already paid for Windows (came with the Dells I bought) so I don't get that money back because I'm using Linux now. I also have to retrain workers to use the new systems (yes, those small problems like "Where's the My Documents folder" cost a lot of money for a large organization). So, switching is costing me money rather than saving it. In the long term, I could value the flexibility, free upgrades, etc. that Linux offers and believe that would be more profitable for me in the long run. Of course, on the server side, the situation is easier since if I'm going to be paying a server admin anyway I can hire a UNIX admin and you can buy UNIX servers without paying a Windows tax, but if I'm currently using Windows Server, it can be hard to justify switching. It's always hard to surplant an installed base. Open source will get there, but there is no panacia of cost savings or ease in the short term. I believe that those benefits will be there in the long term, but it can often be hard for companies to look past the end of their nose.
One of the things that most people don't understand is that there are many times that when you sell more, your profits go down.
To explain it in economics terms: demand for a product rises as the price falls. So, if you lower the price, you will sell more units. Let's say that you can sell 1,000 units at $100 profit per unit. Let's say that you can sell 10,000 units at $50 profit per unit. It is better to sell 10,000 units at $50 profit per unit ($500,000) than 1,000 units at $100 profit per unit ($100,000). Of course, the reverse can happen. Let's say that you can sell 1,000 units for $100 profit per unit ($100,000) or 1,500 units for $50 profit per unit ($75,000). Selling those additional units looses you money. It is desireable for the business to produce and sell fewer units.
So, if Apple allows other devices to be more iPod-like and therefore gets revenue from more unit sales (both iPod and FairPlay units), it wouldn't necesserally increase their profits since they might have to lower the price of the iPod or loose iPod sales to sales of FairPlay devices which people are more likely to substitute and give Apple lower profit.
It might be good for Apple. It might not. Only a very through economic analysis of Apple and the market (as well as a ton of speculation) could tell us whether it is actually a good move. Being biggest doesn't mean being most profitable.
The whole situation can be sumarized as:
Miro started Mambo. They did the original work, they got the ball rolling and so they believed that they were entitled to be in charge.
Some of the Mambo community developers did a lot of work on Mambo and, arguably, Mambo wouldn't be here today without them. While they didn't start it, they saw their contributions are paramount and they thought they were entitled to be in charge.
Mostly, it's a battle of ego. Anyone who reads the Joomla! website can see that it's a battle of ego. They tried to claim that it was a renaming, that they were the real Mambo, that they were better than Mambo, etc. Frankly, which one is the "real" Mambo is a philosophical question that I think is stupid, but it's easy to see that this is an ego fight between two camps who both have legitimate claims to leadership of the project.
While I agree largely with what you've said, it does raise some issues. First, it's not just Europeans that need Galileo. Everyone in the world will reap the benefits of a civil-run positioning system that isn't controlled by the Pentagon. Second, I think it is well within the bounds of sanity to question if it is needed. Yes, the reason you quoted is quite valid: the US government could mess with the GPS in the future and it's always nice to have an alternative system to balance it. But how much are we willing to pay for said alternative system? I believe the article said that it was going to cost $3-4bn. That's a lot of money. For my money, I would rather accept that when the US gets all flustered about a possible terrorist attack (or G-d forbid, another happens), my GPS gets bad accuracy or is turned off for a little while. Think of it like you think of a computer purchase (since this is Slashdot). With Dell, you have two notebook options: the Inspiron which is cheaper and less reliable, and the Latitude which is more expensive and more reliable. Which do you buy? For my use of GPS (which is limited to car navigation), it's not a big deal if the accuracy degrades and it really isn't even that big a deal if it is turned off - so, I'd have to go back to Mapquest like most of the world (or is it Google Maps that everyone's using today). I, as well as most people I would suspect, would choose price over the small possibility of degraded accuracy or a system lockout. While Galileo is free, nothing is free. It's being paid for with government money and the government money comes from people. Oh, and the article does mention that Galileo might be degraded or shut off in the most extreme circumstances and, to my knowledge, the United States hasn't been messing with GPS much if any. I hate a US hegemony as much as anyone, but Galileo is expensive (I think those billions could be better spent on thins like, say, treating Aids) and the US hasn't done anything (to my knowledge) with the GPS yet to make me too worried and even if the US does mess with it for non-mission critical things (like my car's nav system) temporarally, it isn't a big deal (not a big enough deal for me to want to spend $3-4bn on it). Yeah, using the GPS puts us all at the will of the Pentagon for our navigation needs, but creating an alternative is expensive and in my opinion more expensive than the freedom from the Pentagon's management is worth.
First, as many have pointed out, Microsoft doesn't have the right to open up all the code.
.).
Second, the code isn't really worth anything at this point. The rendering engine in Mac IE has nothing to do with the rendering engine in Win IE and it's easily the slowest rendering engine out there (well, it's definitely a ton slower than Moz, IE Win, KHTML. .
Third, the author says that his reason for wanting Mac IE is for some random website that will require it in the future. Unfortunately, while a website may require IE, it won't work with IE Mac. IE Mac has nothing to do with IE Win. It can't run ActiveX. It doesn't render things similarly. If a website requires IE, Mac IE users are out of luck.
Fourth, I don't think anyone would be impressed by releasing the source for an application that is so dead. Releasing the source for Win IE would be amazing - the community could clean up security holes, improve standards compliance, etc. and make IE a better browser. Mac IE, on the other hand, is long gone. It's just too hopeless to salvage anything useful. It would be like Microsoft open-sourcing Internet Explorer 1.0 - just too old to make anyone care at this point.
Mac IE is dead. It's old. There's nothing useful there and open-sourcing it wouldn't help the Mac community or the open-source community. It wouldn't give any insight into the things that make websites IE-only since IE-only websites don't work with Mac IE. This article is just bad.
Is there a reason why the only binary packages are for Windows? I'd love to try the beta, but I don't want to spend all my time compiling from source.
Frankly, I can go either way on this one. In the obvious sense, it limits freedom insofar as one cannot choose to greatly exceed the speed limit.
On the other hand, it would mean eliminating the need for traffic officers in police forces. It would mean no more speeding tickets since the system would automatically enforce it - in fact, I've always wondered why cars weren't required to install a governer that prevented them from going above 90MPH (25MPH greater than the highest speed limit I've seen in the United States).
Do people really believe in speed limits? If so, I think this device could be a good way of limiting the number and severity of accidents. Would you be willing to give up your freedom (as well as fellow drivers) to speed to be a lot safer? What about to never have to worry about speeding tickets ever again? What if it allowed you to exceed the speed limit by 25% (81.25MPH in a 65 area and 43.75 in a 35 area)?
Frankly, this device could lead to liberalization of speed zones since enforcement would be 100%. Like, there's an unspoken rule that you have to be going at least 5-10MPH over to get a speeding ticket, but this device could automatically give you that leway and then enforce when you go above that.
I tend to go a little more toward regulation, so I'd like to hear if anyone else thinks this is too big brother.
Frankly, it depends on the market structures. For example:
If you have a natural monopoly (like the local telephone service in the United States is - like, you can only get service from one company be it Bell South, SBC, Verizon, etc.), you need to regulate the crap out of it. Most economists would agree with this. If you don't regulate them, you'll be paying monopoly prices for the product which is bad for consumers and bad for the economy overall (since less customers will purchase services creating what is know as a dead-weight loss).
Wireless, on the other hand, is both an oligopoly and monopolistically competitive. Now, oligopolies will not give you as cheap a price as perfect competition. In a perfectly competitive industry, you pay the equilibrium price which is as close to a real, fair price as one can claim for a product - it is the price where demand and supply meet and it treats sellers and buyers exactly equal. In oligopoly, you will pay more than the equilibrium price - which favours sellers. In fact, you will be paying the price at the Cournot/Nash equilibrium. The more sellers in the oligopoly, the closer you will get to the equilibrium under perfect competition (when you have 100 firms, you will come within 1% of the perfectly competitive equilibrium).
But wireless is also monopolistically competitive. Monopolistic competition is where you have many firms selling different varients that are close relatives. For example, Verizon Wireless has a different coverage area from Cingular and Cingular has different phones from VZW, etc. They are close, but some people will prefer one to the other. Monopolistic competition is inefficient by economic standards. Why? Because Cingular could serve many more people than the 50 million customers they currently have and they desire to serve more customers. The same can be said for each of the other wireless providers - they all have the capacity and desire to serve more customers. But their prices are also higher than equilibrium prices because they have a product that is different from their competition - and therefore likely to attract less people. If VZW and Cingular had the exact same network with the exact same phones, and exact same everything else, people would choose their carrier on price alone. But because they offer different services, people won't choose based on price and will often take other considerations before price and therefore, all the wireless carriers can charge more than equilibrium.
As such, we can use regulation. We can't use regulation just to force companies to be nice to us, but there are things we can do that are better for consumers and better for society as a whole. For example, if monopolistically competitive firms charge prices higher than equilibrium, we can reduce the differences between firms. By mandating a single technology, GSM or CDMA or anything else, we can eliminate one standard that people choose a carrier by. By mandating that every carrier carry the same lineup of phones, we eliminate another. The more differences we eliminate, the more likely people are going to choose a wireless provider based on price rather than the carrier's own attributes.
Of course, you might see a problem with this. For example, if we mandated that all carriers sell both the Nokia 6010 and 3120 and only those two phones, consumers would have less choice. You would loose the ability to choose something that you liked better - that suited you better. There is no way to quantify the benefits of choice. Think of restaurants. We pay higher prices at restaurants because of the choices we get when we are deciding where to dine, but I don't think any of us would want all restaurants to become Taco Bells just to save a little money.
As an example of this in wireless, before the Cingular ATT merger, Verizon had a far superior national network to any of its competitors. As Cingular got traction, VZW lowered prices because network wasn't going to serve as quite as big a differentiation between
Mandriva is still firmly standardized on KDE.
To an extent, one could see this coming. SUSE 10 was the first edition of SUSE to treat both desktops equally. Rather than having YaST default to KDE, it now prompts users to select either GNOME or KDE with no indication of prejudice. They've also been adding GNOME-centric things like Beagle. Novell's own NLD chose GNOME over SUSE's KDE for NLD 9. SUSE 10 was one of the first distributions to support GNOME 2.12 (beating Ubuntu while Mandriva which came out significantly later still uses GNOME 2.10).
While I'm still a bit surprised to see Novell give such a slight to KDE this soon, there were signs that they were becoming a GNOME operation.
It seems it would be more cost effective simply to buy a cheaper processor and upgrade your system more often than it would be to spend on the more expensive processors.
Dear Sir or Madame,
You have been sued in US Federal Court for violating GiantAssMunch's patent on the gene for red hair. As you were born with this gene, we are willing to settle your case for merely your life savings. We would prefer this not go to trial, but if you leave us with no alternative we will ask a court to provide us with a perliminary injunction against your life.
We look forward to hearing from you.
*You can't patent discoveries! They aren't inventions if they naturally occur!
As I post this from an installation of Suse 10 RC1, I know that GNU/Linux is an operating system that can be used in place of Windows or Mac OS X. It does something better. It does somethings worse.
Articles like this might be important to show some people, but I feel like the Slashdot crowd should be beyond this. Slashdot readers should know that GNU/Linux is a great operating system. They should also know that it isn't the be all and end all of software (I'm DEFINITELY not saying that Windows is).
For me, this article says stupid things like "abstraction is bad". Abstraction is good most of the time, but it criticizes Windows for it. Really, it should have said that Windows doesn't offer you an alternative to their abstraction and we wanted to hack some code that would communicate right with the BIOS and Linux allowed us to do that because with free software the attitude isn't 'my way or the highway'. I really wish that the article talked about how, because GNU/Linux is a loose association of tools rather than a monolithic package, one can pick and choose which tools to include for an application like a cash register without all the crap you don't need. That's especially important for the embedded space (and something that isn't important for most/all desktop users) and something that GNU/Linux allows that Windows doesn't. That's something to point out.