He didn't say it failed open-source, he said it was a failure in that it lacked a much desired feature. Even the summary states:
"One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist."
Between that and mentioning Windows, he is urging the project to be less open. Frankly, I don't care if it can run Windows. I'm all about choice and competition.
And maybe (just maybe, but I doubt it) someone can spin this to Adobe as a PR move, and they will release an open-sourced Flash plugin, or more likely, a build of the Flash plugin for the next XO.
If XP can't run well on the ASUS EePC, then I doubt it runs well on the XO. This letter is all hype.
Frankly, I think the OLPC project did a great job with their first release, but realize it is only a first release. I think they should diverge and release two models next time.
Model A is closer to the $100 price tag, and will sell better in certain countries. Features should be comparable to the current XO model, but flash memory, processors, etc. keep getting cheaper.
Model B is slightly closer to the ASUS in processing power and storage. Shape, chassis, etc. can all stay the same. It won't match the ASUS model, since power usage is a major concern. But if it were slightly more powerful, you might see a KDE build optimized for it, or maybe even a toned-down version of Windows.
Being able to support a more robust Linux distro, AND the possibility of Windows will be a huge selling point. If they can get a Model B at $250 a pop, they'd sell a ton of these as well.
The MMORPG genre has many flaws, which is why I don't play them, but WoW is near universally hailed as the best of the bunch. Rumors have circulated about how they keep shelving Diablo 3 until it is near perfect, how they kept shelving Starcraft 2 until it was near perfect. They also canceled the Warcraft Adventure game that was supposedly finished because they didn't feel it was good enough for the Blizzard stamp of approval.
Most MMORPGs come down to PvP, loot acquisition and level grinding. I don't enjoy those mechanics, but it is hard to argue with how they've damn near mastered those mechanics.
I'm one of the few that doesn't play WoW, but I have a lot of respect for Blizzard's commitment to quality. They won't release a project they don't feel is up to their standards, and would rather take a huge loss than release a turd.
It seems everyone is missing the point. I doubt projects will be greatly improved more so in one day through this contest than they would be as opposed to normal contributions in a day. And sleep deprivation may lead to sloppy code. And the contest isn't inherently fair is people have internet access. But none of that is the point.
The prize is small, but the real reward here is PR for the OSS community, and these projects. OSS projects thrive on high visibility.
Gotta love Cox. I pay $45 for 9Mbps. They also offer 14Mbps for $60. Verizon is supposed to be rolling out their 20Mbps FIOS for $65 a month, and Qwest hopes to follow suit with their own fiber offering.
Microsoft always tries to keep an eye on what the open-source world is doing. Perhaps to steal ideas, perhaps to embrace, extend and extinguish new emerging standards and technology.
Maybe they actually intend to work on interoperability. However, I think it is too early to guess, let alone really know what they intend to do here.
By the way, every retail store I've gone to has had expensive BluRay movies. Yet, on Amazon I have found tons of BluRay moves (new and used) for $15 or less, which sure beats the $35 they want to charge in many stores.
I don't know if they're still doing it, but when I bought my PS3 I mailed in the proof of purchase, and got 5 free BluRay movies. Check online and they may still be doing that.
I had a top of the line upconverting DVD player (which now sits in my basement ignored). My wife and I both believe that the PS3's upconverting is better than the upconverting found in our $250 DVD player.
Buying the PS3 for $400 netted us:
- Home media server - BluRay player (with frequent firmware updates!) - The best upconverting DVD player I've seen - A next gen console.
I won't hate on the other consoles here, but people are quite willing to spend $450 on the XBox 360 Elite. You can argue that the $400 PS3 is a much better value all around.
Even at the horrendous launch, everyone just focused on the $600 price tag, which was a huge mistake. Sony should have just launched the $500 version alone. At $500, it compared to the $400 360 model (both had HDDs) and you could in theory justify the $100 difference in price due to BluRay and better processing power.
Sony is still playing catch-up because of the $600 snafu, but for those of us who did take the jump, I feel the investment was very worthwhile.
Yahoo's web-services run on Apache servers, and are often developed with open source software in mind.
I can't imagine that would continue if Microsoft bought them out. And most of the in-house developers would have to learn asp real quick, or be out of jobs.
Yahoo has been discussing possible partnerships with other companies they are less afraid of. Yahoo wants no part of Microsoft. Price isn't an issue here. The stock went up with Microsoft's offer initially, but has gone done since then, and will likely continue to drift back down to the pre-offer value.
A twelve-year old boy posted on his blog that he really wants an iPod for his birthday, but is considering holding out for Christmas, hoping that the next iteration of the iPod will be out by then. Apple assumes someone broke an NDA on the release date of the next iPod, and they are suing the poor boy, and everyone he has friended on MySpace. Tom was not available for comment.
Hawking is a wild mage who creates branching realities with each roll, in some of which he fails or succeeds. Each possible outcome on the die roll exists simultaneously.
Cheap credit isn't always bad, because it can create economic stimulus. Deceptive loaning practices and idiot purchasers signing off on ridiculous loans they have zero chance of repaying lead to the housing situation.
I didn't. The salesman insisted we needed 4 gigs, and that we had to buy an Intel system. I had picked up a cheap AMD system, since my dad didn't need much. The salesmen kept insisting that AMD was terrible, but could find no actual reasoning for his claims. He just kept trying to push for up-selling. Then after we said "no" quite clearly on the extended warranty three times, he still insisted on explaining how necessary it was. He'd be very remiss if he didn't fully explain how very much we really needed it, and how we'd regret not getting it.
I wanted to punch him in the throat.
And 9 times out of ten, I'd just talk my father into letting me build him a rig, but he didn't want to wait a few days for me to order parts from NewEgg. Plus, all my father knows are brand names. If it doesn't say Dell or HP, then he can't trust it. If I built a rig, and he didn't see a brand name, he'd go nuts.
I assume you have Aero disabled? It is quite easy to go over 1 gig of memory in Vista with just Firefox.
DX10 doesn't really offer you much in visuals. Most games that offer DX10 also offer a DX9 mode that runs faster. I really don't get gaming on Vista, since every benchmark on the planet shows you get worse performance.
I've used Vista personally. I support it all the time. And I'd never once suggest that Vista is "smooth" with 1 gig of ram. It hiccups at even small tasks.
I have 4 gigs of ram in my box. I dual-boot Gentoo and Windows x64, and I have no trouble using up 4 gigs of ram without video editting. Given that Vista at start-up takes up double the resources of XP, you're asking for massive pagefile issues with 1 gig.
Now we turn to RMS for his response...
He didn't say it failed open-source, he said it was a failure in that it lacked a much desired feature. Even the summary states:
"One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist."
Between that and mentioning Windows, he is urging the project to be less open. Frankly, I don't care if it can run Windows. I'm all about choice and competition.
And maybe (just maybe, but I doubt it) someone can spin this to Adobe as a PR move, and they will release an open-sourced Flash plugin, or more likely, a build of the Flash plugin for the next XO.
If XP can't run well on the ASUS EePC, then I doubt it runs well on the XO. This letter is all hype.
Frankly, I think the OLPC project did a great job with their first release, but realize it is only a first release. I think they should diverge and release two models next time.
Model A is closer to the $100 price tag, and will sell better in certain countries. Features should be comparable to the current XO model, but flash memory, processors, etc. keep getting cheaper.
Model B is slightly closer to the ASUS in processing power and storage. Shape, chassis, etc. can all stay the same. It won't match the ASUS model, since power usage is a major concern. But if it were slightly more powerful, you might see a KDE build optimized for it, or maybe even a toned-down version of Windows.
Being able to support a more robust Linux distro, AND the possibility of Windows will be a huge selling point. If they can get a Model B at $250 a pop, they'd sell a ton of these as well.
The MMORPG genre has many flaws, which is why I don't play them, but WoW is near universally hailed as the best of the bunch. Rumors have circulated about how they keep shelving Diablo 3 until it is near perfect, how they kept shelving Starcraft 2 until it was near perfect. They also canceled the Warcraft Adventure game that was supposedly finished because they didn't feel it was good enough for the Blizzard stamp of approval.
Most MMORPGs come down to PvP, loot acquisition and level grinding. I don't enjoy those mechanics, but it is hard to argue with how they've damn near mastered those mechanics.
I'm one of the few that doesn't play WoW, but I have a lot of respect for Blizzard's commitment to quality. They won't release a project they don't feel is up to their standards, and would rather take a huge loss than release a turd.
Technical details mean absolutely nothing in this discussion. I thought we established this.
It seems everyone is missing the point. I doubt projects will be greatly improved more so in one day through this contest than they would be as opposed to normal contributions in a day. And sleep deprivation may lead to sloppy code. And the contest isn't inherently fair is people have internet access. But none of that is the point.
The prize is small, but the real reward here is PR for the OSS community, and these projects. OSS projects thrive on high visibility.
Only if you print it. If you just say it, then it is slander. However, I say don't do anything half-way! Go the full monty, and go for libel!
In all fairness, 32-bit Vista can use 3.5 gigs of ram.
I agree. The math is *way* off, not to mention what we consider to be acceptable storage changes all the time.
One BluRay movie would take up more storage than he allots for a year, yet that is merely two hours of my day.
Gotta love Cox. I pay $45 for 9Mbps. They also offer 14Mbps for $60. Verizon is supposed to be rolling out their 20Mbps FIOS for $65 a month, and Qwest hopes to follow suit with their own fiber offering.
Microsoft always tries to keep an eye on what the open-source world is doing. Perhaps to steal ideas, perhaps to embrace, extend and extinguish new emerging standards and technology.
Maybe they actually intend to work on interoperability. However, I think it is too early to guess, let alone really know what they intend to do here.
By the way, every retail store I've gone to has had expensive BluRay movies. Yet, on Amazon I have found tons of BluRay moves (new and used) for $15 or less, which sure beats the $35 they want to charge in many stores.
I don't know if they're still doing it, but when I bought my PS3 I mailed in the proof of purchase, and got 5 free BluRay movies. Check online and they may still be doing that.
I had a top of the line upconverting DVD player (which now sits in my basement ignored). My wife and I both believe that the PS3's upconverting is better than the upconverting found in our $250 DVD player.
Buying the PS3 for $400 netted us:
- Home media server
- BluRay player (with frequent firmware updates!)
- The best upconverting DVD player I've seen
- A next gen console.
I won't hate on the other consoles here, but people are quite willing to spend $450 on the XBox 360 Elite. You can argue that the $400 PS3 is a much better value all around.
Even at the horrendous launch, everyone just focused on the $600 price tag, which was a huge mistake. Sony should have just launched the $500 version alone. At $500, it compared to the $400 360 model (both had HDDs) and you could in theory justify the $100 difference in price due to BluRay and better processing power.
Sony is still playing catch-up because of the $600 snafu, but for those of us who did take the jump, I feel the investment was very worthwhile.
You'll note I said "and are often developed with open source software in mind" and not always.
Yahoo's web-services run on Apache servers, and are often developed with open source software in mind.
I can't imagine that would continue if Microsoft bought them out. And most of the in-house developers would have to learn asp real quick, or be out of jobs.
Yahoo has been discussing possible partnerships with other companies they are less afraid of. Yahoo wants no part of Microsoft. Price isn't an issue here. The stock went up with Microsoft's offer initially, but has gone done since then, and will likely continue to drift back down to the pre-offer value.
Absolute statements always fail to be true all of the time!
A twelve-year old boy posted on his blog that he really wants an iPod for his birthday, but is considering holding out for Christmas, hoping that the next iteration of the iPod will be out by then. Apple assumes someone broke an NDA on the release date of the next iPod, and they are suing the poor boy, and everyone he has friended on MySpace. Tom was not available for comment.
Hawking is a wild mage who creates branching realities with each roll, in some of which he fails or succeeds. Each possible outcome on the die roll exists simultaneously.
I have zero clue what chain now owns that domain, and frankly I don't care.
If I want Papa John's, I type in papajohns.com and if I want Pizza Hut, I type in pizzahut.com
I don't let an arbitrary domain name decide what type of pizza I want.
Cheap credit isn't always bad, because it can create economic stimulus. Deceptive loaning practices and idiot purchasers signing off on ridiculous loans they have zero chance of repaying lead to the housing situation.
You never know when you might get caught, so the actual lesson is "don't be evil".
I didn't. The salesman insisted we needed 4 gigs, and that we had to buy an Intel system. I had picked up a cheap AMD system, since my dad didn't need much. The salesmen kept insisting that AMD was terrible, but could find no actual reasoning for his claims. He just kept trying to push for up-selling. Then after we said "no" quite clearly on the extended warranty three times, he still insisted on explaining how necessary it was. He'd be very remiss if he didn't fully explain how very much we really needed it, and how we'd regret not getting it.
I wanted to punch him in the throat.
And 9 times out of ten, I'd just talk my father into letting me build him a rig, but he didn't want to wait a few days for me to order parts from NewEgg. Plus, all my father knows are brand names. If it doesn't say Dell or HP, then he can't trust it. If I built a rig, and he didn't see a brand name, he'd go nuts.
I assume you have Aero disabled? It is quite easy to go over 1 gig of memory in Vista with just Firefox.
DX10 doesn't really offer you much in visuals. Most games that offer DX10 also offer a DX9 mode that runs faster. I really don't get gaming on Vista, since every benchmark on the planet shows you get worse performance.
I've used Vista personally. I support it all the time. And I'd never once suggest that Vista is "smooth" with 1 gig of ram. It hiccups at even small tasks.
I have 4 gigs of ram in my box. I dual-boot Gentoo and Windows x64, and I have no trouble using up 4 gigs of ram without video editting. Given that Vista at start-up takes up double the resources of XP, you're asking for massive pagefile issues with 1 gig.