Yeah but the gumstix are much slower than the TI's OMAP35x processors in the Beagleboard. Gumstix does seem to be coming out with some OMAP products in Q4, but currently their only advantage is that they are neatly packaged with a small case and they have a model with ethernet built in. Otherwise the Beagleboard has much more going for it.
Those two things would be nice to be able to get preconfigured for a beagleboard, and nothing I saw on their site hinted at it. Of course you can do it yoursself with an expansion board and soldering iron or usb ethernet, but that's bulkier. I'd buy a beagleboard now if I could get it with ethernet and a nice small case for cheap, but I can't find that anywhere so far. I'm sure someone will offer it soon enough.
So after you get sick of the city owners jacking up your taxes astronomically every year when your assessment renews, you have to move to a totally different city?
And if the city owners also run the police, the court system, etc., then what's your recourse when the refuses to fix the broken sewer system/roads/sidewalks/schools?
This doesn't sound like a very good idea at all.
Ok seriously it all comes down to good governance. The city you live in can screw you over and you will like it or move (and still pay before you go) and cities do it all the time, but ideally good governance reduces this as much as possible. This new arrangement is no different in that regard.
Difficult to do well, valuable for the customer... something people would pay for... sounds like a great business opportunity for someone that's able to do it. That's the real definition of value added before the marketing droids got their hands on the term.
All true, and excellent points, but an important addition has been a constant focus on the community. It's an easy community to be part of. Of course that's not something that Ubuntu has better than Debian, but it is what differentiates it from Redhat and SUSE. Not that those don't have a sort of community, it's just not the same.
The things you mentioned are indeed what catapulted Ubuntu ahead of Debian though. It's what most people wanted anyway, an easier to use Debian. A lot of people that if someone provided an easy to use Debian it would rock, and well, Ubuntu did.
Indeed. But what's also funny is that they are a Mac shop (at least 60/40 from another site I saw). I suppose their intent is to try to use that knowledge to try to know how to win people over. In the Fastcompany article about them they discuss it a bit.
That may explain why Keller and Reilly are today using their team as an early focus group for learning how to persuade Mac lovers to embrace Windows. "You've got a lot of passionate Mac people in here, and they've got to get their head around this thing -- why Windows is genius," says Keller. He and Reilly have outfitted their shared office (inherited from Bogusky) with an Xbox 360, which they've been using as a wireless hub. But their joint desk also holds two ultrathin MacBook Airs. When I ask if they're making their team get rid of their iPods and PowerBooks, Reilly responds, "It's not a matter of forcing people. It's getting them to want to use it. If you can't, you're not going to do great advertising."
So they may be able to give them up internally to keep the account/their jobs, but I'd be surprised if they are very successful at this campaign. Then again, since Vista isn't as bad as it was at it's launch and the real problems with it such as DRM/protected path most people don't understand or care about, maybe they have a chance to at least stem the tide.
Here's another article with some survey data on Vista adoption vs XP. It has a few interesting bits, one being The really bad news for Microsoft: the number of business PCs running Windows XP increased from 2007 to 2008â"three times the increase in the percentage of PCs running Vista. and the other the comparison of Vista to the high school slut. Pretty, but no substance.
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/vista/vista_doa_in_the_enterprise.html?kc=MWRSS02129TX1K0000535
Exactly. I've never actually figured out why people would spend so much money on a high end gaming pc when the consoles are equal or ahead anyway in performance and the savings can be put to better use or to more geeky things. Seriously for a gaming experience there isn't much better than playing on a huge screen (think 6, 8, 10 feet or more) using a projector, and the cost savings of not buying the ridiculous gaming rig would practically pay for that. A low end but still decent quality projector is under $1k and a ton of fun.
Other people have had some luck with these things too, but they never seem to be able to get out the scratches for me. That's why I went to the manual method I described above, and it was cheaper anyway.
Polishing is not that dire if you do it carefully. Though as you mentioned, if the data layer is scratched, you're screwed. I check out a lot of discs from the library and just to be able to read them I need to polish them. cdparanoia etc are rarely enough and I don't really want to have my drive chugging away like that for hours when I can spend a couple minutes polishing it and have it rip perfectly the first time.
Since I do this a lot and I didn't feel like spending a fortune I made a little setup. A 3/8 inch thick flat board a little large than a CD/DVD and drilled a hole in it the size of a bolt. Then I use a wing nut and washer to secure the disc to the board so it doesn't bend during polishing. Then I put some mild rubbing compound (as you mentioned, toothpaste would work fine here too most likely) on a polishing wheel that fits in a drill chuck. Run it so it is polishing away from the center in roughly parallel lines until all the scratches are gone. It will look hazy unless you do another round with a finer polish, but it doesn't matter since it rips and plays perfectly. It's quick, cheap, and works. But since it does remove a fine layer of plastic, of course you can only do it so many times before the disc is gone.
UNIX fragmentation wasn't caused by anything other than all the proprietary, incompatible licenses.
Well, that's part of it of course, but not all of it. If it were, there would be no need for LSB and every application written for one distro would run without modification on another. The fact is there is more to is as already explained in this thread. Just having it be all GPL is an advantage in that a change can be coordinated accross distributions, but we've clearly seen that not all changes have been. You even said it in your last sentence. Package it as two separate formats and then it still has to be ported after that. As long as it's difficult to write one application and run it across all distributions that follow a standard without having to read up on several different idiosyncracies, Linux will always have a disadvantage it doesn't need to have.
(That must relate to his former experience at Delta Airlines... but I just honestly don't get what he's trying to say. What "value" do airlines "create" and not "extract"?)
Other businesses make tons of money because they have an easy way to move people around the world that is relatively cheap to the revenue they can earn. That's the value that airlines create (much of the revenue would be their without air travel). But since the airline biz is fairly competitive most of the time and actually cutthroat at others, and they have high capital costs, they don't have high profit margins. Thus they can't extract all the value they create. It's kind of of funny the way he phrases it in terms of "figured out". It's not like there's a way to figure it out unless the airlines were to fully collude and drive prices sky high while still having people fly. Of course video conferencing somewhat limits how much airlines can raise their margins, especially as it's quality and ease increases.
I agree he can't expect to get any trust while Ballmer is beating that drum. That is evidence that Ramji really is just a shill and he should know that's why he gets the reception he does. I think though that when the lawyers look at how broken the patent system is with respect to software, they realize that almost all software infringes on some patent in some way. I think Bruce Perens said this even, but don't malign him with that since I'm not sure. Of course, most of it is trivial and there's lots of prior art that the patent office misses and being open source the patented stuff can just be ripped out and coded around. For an example, look at what OpenBSD did with CARP.
The lovely quote from the article was this: "Last week, Ramji announced 100 protocols from its Communications Protocol Program would move under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise to ensure they could be used without fear of patent infringement."
I'm pretty sure that's the same promise that was analyzed and determined not to be worth the paper it was written on.
I think you missed the boat here, or at least you missed the very large opportunity for google. Imagine the extra traffic they would get if there were millions more desktops that didn't default to MSN/Live search/whatever they call it these days and instead defaulted to Google's search? Heck even if it were the case where a user had to make a choice the first time and not default to any single one, more people would choose Google than currently do. Because currently people have to actively choose not to use MS's default search or browser.
Google gets more profit per search than any of the others. So yes, I also don't think a flashy campaign is the way they would go, or even that they would do this. But your assertion that the chance is zero is ignoring the revenue they could get from it. Also why would they waste money on a flashy ad campaign when all they would have to do is release it and ride the wave of free press. If it's really good and polished, it wouldn't need an ad campaign. I doubt they'll do it, the chance that it will happen is just not zero.
I think you've hit it exactly on the head why they have so much trouble gaining open source cred. I just wanted to point out you don't actually have to install their download manager, they just make you think you do. If you look carefully, you can get the files you need without it. As for the personal information, you don't actually put in real info do you? While I do appreciate they are making the file available, I choose not to give them personal information they don't need. So it's John Doe notinterested@hotmail.com
Sure they'll do it in developed countries if they have to. I was just using the example of developing countries of one where they did it when they had to. Of course they can't maintain first world profit margins, but remember the marginal cost of the next software product sold is near 0 and that's not all they're after anyway. They are after market dominance and keeping Linux out, so yes, they will go to $10 a license if they have too in order to do that. It doesn't matter whether it's first world or not, they'll do what they have to.
Despite the best efforts of Microsoft, Linux is going to dominate the low end of laptop computing within three years. Microsoft will have to give away Windows in order to compete, and that ain't gonna happen.
They already nearly give Windows away in developing countries in order to try to sustain their market dominance in the face of competition from Linux. And they admit that piracy isn't a problem because it gets developing countries hooked on their products. Why wouldn't they give Windows away to keep from losing this market as well? They can see the writing on the wall as well as we can that this is a great opportunity for Linux to break out and will pretty much do anything to stop that.
How did you get an Atheros in your Santa Rosa? Lucky bastard. Most of them have the Broadcom 4328 which is wireless-n and apparently is far away from being reverse engineered. https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/bcm43xx-dev/2008-May/007517.html The broadcom linux wireless driver project doesn't have enough people willing and able to reverse engineer that card and the wireless n layer it seems.
Go to the Dell site and try to find a Linux laptop. It's quite hard to find.
It's not quite advertised now, but it is much easier to get to them than it was when they were launched. Before you had to search for them or know they were there. Now it's not far off the main page. On dell.com choose the 'Home and Home office' or the 'Small and Medium Business' link then when you run over the Laptops and Desktops menus at the top what do you see? "Open-source Laptops' and desktops. So it's not wildly out in the open, but that's not as hidden as it was. Those menus are on most of the shopping pages.
For all I know there's something in the mainpage menus but I can't see them, they go behind the large image in FF3.
And the argument that MS will stop them is losing ground when you consider the netbooks and so forth that have been shipping with Linux. As soon as there is a business case for it MS won't have much say in the matter.
Now I remember why I had never bothered to use their search. I expected tricks like that and there they are. It's funny to note they didn't buy/reserve that misleading "Linux" ad that points to Windows for the two word search term ubuntu linux but they did for the one word ubuntu which has more meanings.
It's also funny to note how much more the interface looks like google's than anything MS has done before. It's so obvious they are admitting they don't know how to innovate anything themselves.
Why is 10% "magic"? This number is significant because that's how many fingers we have?
I can't tell from the last part of that if you're intending to be facetious, but 10% market share is widely considered a tipping point where more vendors will start paying attention to the platform thus making the platform more attractive to more users, etc. At bit of the network effect idea.
So the biggest scandal ever to hit ISO and they recommend not to look into it any further. Of course no surprise there. But now the process is that it gets sent to the technical management board for review and luckily Brazil and South Africa are members. This is the TMB membership according to Groklaw. So who knows, perhaps with the added scrutiny people will have some integrity. Unfortunately, probably not.
The Vista-needs-uber-comp jokes are getting extremely old. Get some new material.
Yeah, because things never outdo their welcome around here. I'm sure I've never heard one to many times about Soviet hot grit covered overlords being welcomed to their new Beowulf cluster.
Shhh, don't burst his bubble. It's more fun for people to pretend they have backing for their viewpoints. The one journal article he cites is a simulation model study. Not that it's irrelevant, it's just not that it's the definitive answer the OP pretends it to be. The others don't even pretend to be high quality sources. But the OP can count on most people not worrying about facts like that and did in fact get modded up.
So, what if I have good genes.... and you have bad? If we are willing to open up the can of worms of risk assignment, then why should we ignore science and not surcharge those people who have doomed genetics? What, exactly, entitles people with weaker genes to a health discount at the expense of someone else?
Irrelevant. Ideal insurance balances social justice with the interests of the insurer. This is why none of us have problems charging smokers more for their insurance, but few agree with charging people based on their genes. It's a very simple difference. Choices. If you make unhealthy choices you should find it unsurprising that you should pay more. In fact people with unhealthy behaviors don't pay their fair share now and the cost differences should increase and should be a very clear part of any health insurance system. Obesity is a bit tougher since there are a small proportion of people that can't control it, but most people can and choose not to. For genetics differences with a large enough insurance pool those can be averaged out and that is half the point of insurance.
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Agreed, the BeagleBoard is really intriguing but something with more memory and ethernet in a case would be very compelling.
Yeah but the gumstix are much slower than the TI's OMAP35x processors in the Beagleboard. Gumstix does seem to be coming out with some OMAP products in Q4, but currently their only advantage is that they are neatly packaged with a small case and they have a model with ethernet built in. Otherwise the Beagleboard has much more going for it.
Those two things would be nice to be able to get preconfigured for a beagleboard, and nothing I saw on their site hinted at it. Of course you can do it yoursself with an expansion board and soldering iron or usb ethernet, but that's bulkier. I'd buy a beagleboard now if I could get it with ethernet and a nice small case for cheap, but I can't find that anywhere so far. I'm sure someone will offer it soon enough.
So after you get sick of the city owners jacking up your taxes astronomically every year when your assessment renews, you have to move to a totally different city?
And if the city owners also run the police, the court system, etc., then what's your recourse when the refuses to fix the broken sewer system/roads/sidewalks/schools?
This doesn't sound like a very good idea at all.
Ok seriously it all comes down to good governance. The city you live in can screw you over and you will like it or move (and still pay before you go) and cities do it all the time, but ideally good governance reduces this as much as possible. This new arrangement is no different in that regard.
Difficult to do well, valuable for the customer... something people would pay for... sounds like a great business opportunity for someone that's able to do it. That's the real definition of value added before the marketing droids got their hands on the term.
All true, and excellent points, but an important addition has been a constant focus on the community. It's an easy community to be part of. Of course that's not something that Ubuntu has better than Debian, but it is what differentiates it from Redhat and SUSE. Not that those don't have a sort of community, it's just not the same. The things you mentioned are indeed what catapulted Ubuntu ahead of Debian though. It's what most people wanted anyway, an easier to use Debian. A lot of people that if someone provided an easy to use Debian it would rock, and well, Ubuntu did.
Indeed. But what's also funny is that they are a Mac shop (at least 60/40 from another site I saw). I suppose their intent is to try to use that knowledge to try to know how to win people over. In the Fastcompany article about them they discuss it a bit.
That may explain why Keller and Reilly are today using their team as an early focus group for learning how to persuade Mac lovers to embrace Windows. "You've got a lot of passionate Mac people in here, and they've got to get their head around this thing -- why Windows is genius," says Keller. He and Reilly have outfitted their shared office (inherited from Bogusky) with an Xbox 360, which they've been using as a wireless hub. But their joint desk also holds two ultrathin MacBook Airs. When I ask if they're making their team get rid of their iPods and PowerBooks, Reilly responds, "It's not a matter of forcing people. It's getting them to want to use it. If you can't, you're not going to do great advertising."
So they may be able to give them up internally to keep the account/their jobs, but I'd be surprised if they are very successful at this campaign. Then again, since Vista isn't as bad as it was at it's launch and the real problems with it such as DRM/protected path most people don't understand or care about, maybe they have a chance to at least stem the tide.
Here's another article with some survey data on Vista adoption vs XP. It has a few interesting bits, one being The really bad news for Microsoft: the number of business PCs running Windows XP increased from 2007 to 2008â"three times the increase in the percentage of PCs running Vista. and the other the comparison of Vista to the high school slut. Pretty, but no substance. http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/vista/vista_doa_in_the_enterprise.html?kc=MWRSS02129TX1K0000535
Exactly. I've never actually figured out why people would spend so much money on a high end gaming pc when the consoles are equal or ahead anyway in performance and the savings can be put to better use or to more geeky things. Seriously for a gaming experience there isn't much better than playing on a huge screen (think 6, 8, 10 feet or more) using a projector, and the cost savings of not buying the ridiculous gaming rig would practically pay for that. A low end but still decent quality projector is under $1k and a ton of fun.
Other people have had some luck with these things too, but they never seem to be able to get out the scratches for me. That's why I went to the manual method I described above, and it was cheaper anyway.
Polishing is not that dire if you do it carefully. Though as you mentioned, if the data layer is scratched, you're screwed. I check out a lot of discs from the library and just to be able to read them I need to polish them. cdparanoia etc are rarely enough and I don't really want to have my drive chugging away like that for hours when I can spend a couple minutes polishing it and have it rip perfectly the first time.
Since I do this a lot and I didn't feel like spending a fortune I made a little setup. A 3/8 inch thick flat board a little large than a CD/DVD and drilled a hole in it the size of a bolt. Then I use a wing nut and washer to secure the disc to the board so it doesn't bend during polishing. Then I put some mild rubbing compound (as you mentioned, toothpaste would work fine here too most likely) on a polishing wheel that fits in a drill chuck. Run it so it is polishing away from the center in roughly parallel lines until all the scratches are gone. It will look hazy unless you do another round with a finer polish, but it doesn't matter since it rips and plays perfectly. It's quick, cheap, and works. But since it does remove a fine layer of plastic, of course you can only do it so many times before the disc is gone.
UNIX fragmentation wasn't caused by anything other than all the proprietary, incompatible licenses.
Well, that's part of it of course, but not all of it. If it were, there would be no need for LSB and every application written for one distro would run without modification on another. The fact is there is more to is as already explained in this thread. Just having it be all GPL is an advantage in that a change can be coordinated accross distributions, but we've clearly seen that not all changes have been. You even said it in your last sentence. Package it as two separate formats and then it still has to be ported after that. As long as it's difficult to write one application and run it across all distributions that follow a standard without having to read up on several different idiosyncracies, Linux will always have a disadvantage it doesn't need to have.
(That must relate to his former experience at Delta Airlines... but I just honestly don't get what he's trying to say. What "value" do airlines "create" and not "extract"?)
Other businesses make tons of money because they have an easy way to move people around the world that is relatively cheap to the revenue they can earn. That's the value that airlines create (much of the revenue would be their without air travel). But since the airline biz is fairly competitive most of the time and actually cutthroat at others, and they have high capital costs, they don't have high profit margins. Thus they can't extract all the value they create. It's kind of of funny the way he phrases it in terms of "figured out". It's not like there's a way to figure it out unless the airlines were to fully collude and drive prices sky high while still having people fly. Of course video conferencing somewhat limits how much airlines can raise their margins, especially as it's quality and ease increases.
I agree he can't expect to get any trust while Ballmer is beating that drum. That is evidence that Ramji really is just a shill and he should know that's why he gets the reception he does. I think though that when the lawyers look at how broken the patent system is with respect to software, they realize that almost all software infringes on some patent in some way. I think Bruce Perens said this even, but don't malign him with that since I'm not sure. Of course, most of it is trivial and there's lots of prior art that the patent office misses and being open source the patented stuff can just be ripped out and coded around. For an example, look at what OpenBSD did with CARP.
The lovely quote from the article was this: "Last week, Ramji announced 100 protocols from its Communications Protocol Program would move under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise to ensure they could be used without fear of patent infringement."
I'm pretty sure that's the same promise that was analyzed and determined not to be worth the paper it was written on.
I think you missed the boat here, or at least you missed the very large opportunity for google. Imagine the extra traffic they would get if there were millions more desktops that didn't default to MSN/Live search/whatever they call it these days and instead defaulted to Google's search? Heck even if it were the case where a user had to make a choice the first time and not default to any single one, more people would choose Google than currently do. Because currently people have to actively choose not to use MS's default search or browser.
Google gets more profit per search than any of the others. So yes, I also don't think a flashy campaign is the way they would go, or even that they would do this. But your assertion that the chance is zero is ignoring the revenue they could get from it. Also why would they waste money on a flashy ad campaign when all they would have to do is release it and ride the wave of free press. If it's really good and polished, it wouldn't need an ad campaign. I doubt they'll do it, the chance that it will happen is just not zero.
I think you've hit it exactly on the head why they have so much trouble gaining open source cred. I just wanted to point out you don't actually have to install their download manager, they just make you think you do. If you look carefully, you can get the files you need without it. As for the personal information, you don't actually put in real info do you? While I do appreciate they are making the file available, I choose not to give them personal information they don't need. So it's John Doe notinterested@hotmail.com
Sure they'll do it in developed countries if they have to. I was just using the example of developing countries of one where they did it when they had to. Of course they can't maintain first world profit margins, but remember the marginal cost of the next software product sold is near 0 and that's not all they're after anyway. They are after market dominance and keeping Linux out, so yes, they will go to $10 a license if they have too in order to do that. It doesn't matter whether it's first world or not, they'll do what they have to.
Despite the best efforts of Microsoft, Linux is going to dominate the low end of laptop computing within three years. Microsoft will have to give away Windows in order to compete, and that ain't gonna happen.
They already nearly give Windows away in developing countries in order to try to sustain their market dominance in the face of competition from Linux. And they admit that piracy isn't a problem because it gets developing countries hooked on their products. Why wouldn't they give Windows away to keep from losing this market as well? They can see the writing on the wall as well as we can that this is a great opportunity for Linux to break out and will pretty much do anything to stop that.
How did you get an Atheros in your Santa Rosa? Lucky bastard. Most of them have the Broadcom 4328 which is wireless-n and apparently is far away from being reverse engineered. https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/bcm43xx-dev/2008-May/007517.html The broadcom linux wireless driver project doesn't have enough people willing and able to reverse engineer that card and the wireless n layer it seems.
Go to the Dell site and try to find a Linux laptop. It's quite hard to find.
It's not quite advertised now, but it is much easier to get to them than it was when they were launched. Before you had to search for them or know they were there. Now it's not far off the main page. On dell.com choose the 'Home and Home office' or the 'Small and Medium Business' link then when you run over the Laptops and Desktops menus at the top what do you see? "Open-source Laptops' and desktops. So it's not wildly out in the open, but that's not as hidden as it was. Those menus are on most of the shopping pages.
For all I know there's something in the mainpage menus but I can't see them, they go behind the large image in FF3.
And the argument that MS will stop them is losing ground when you consider the netbooks and so forth that have been shipping with Linux. As soon as there is a business case for it MS won't have much say in the matter.
Now I remember why I had never bothered to use their search. I expected tricks like that and there they are. It's funny to note they didn't buy/reserve that misleading "Linux" ad that points to Windows for the two word search term ubuntu linux but they did for the one word ubuntu which has more meanings.
It's also funny to note how much more the interface looks like google's than anything MS has done before. It's so obvious they are admitting they don't know how to innovate anything themselves.
Why is 10% "magic"? This number is significant because that's how many fingers we have?
I can't tell from the last part of that if you're intending to be facetious, but 10% market share is widely considered a tipping point where more vendors will start paying attention to the platform thus making the platform more attractive to more users, etc. At bit of the network effect idea.
So the biggest scandal ever to hit ISO and they recommend not to look into it any further. Of course no surprise there. But now the process is that it gets sent to the technical management board for review and luckily Brazil and South Africa are members.
This is the TMB membership according to Groklaw. So who knows, perhaps with the added scrutiny people will have some integrity. Unfortunately, probably not.
Yeah, because things never outdo their welcome around here. I'm sure I've never heard one to many times about Soviet hot grit covered overlords being welcomed to their new Beowulf cluster.
Shhh, don't burst his bubble. It's more fun for people to pretend they have backing for their viewpoints. The one journal article he cites is a simulation model study. Not that it's irrelevant, it's just not that it's the definitive answer the OP pretends it to be. The others don't even pretend to be high quality sources. But the OP can count on most people not worrying about facts like that and did in fact get modded up.
So, what if I have good genes.... and you have bad? If we are willing to open up the can of worms of risk assignment, then why should we ignore science and not surcharge those people who have doomed genetics? What, exactly, entitles people with weaker genes to a health discount at the expense of someone else?
Irrelevant. Ideal insurance balances social justice with the interests of the insurer. This is why none of us have problems charging smokers more for their insurance, but few agree with charging people based on their genes. It's a very simple difference. Choices. If you make unhealthy choices you should find it unsurprising that you should pay more. In fact people with unhealthy behaviors don't pay their fair share now and the cost differences should increase and should be a very clear part of any health insurance system. Obesity is a bit tougher since there are a small proportion of people that can't control it, but most people can and choose not to. For genetics differences with a large enough insurance pool those can be averaged out and that is half the point of insurance.