I agree. In San Diego, SBC offers DSL at only $19.99/month (with 1 year contract). It may not be as fast as cable but I never had trouble with the service and it costs less than many dial-ups. Do you think they'd be offering it that cheap if there weren't competition in the broadband arena?
If it's so much more profitable for cable companies to lock themselves into the ISP role for their networks, I wonder why Time-Warner allows Earthlink as an ISP on their network here in San Diego along with their own offering of Road Runner? Earthlink is even cheaper.
I'm having a bit of trouble with this analysis myself. Linus is talking as if it's all a foregone conclusion and we're just waiting for it to come to pass. He sites IBM as a big example of what will happen with Microsoft but it seems to me he's comparing apples and oranges.
IBM produce hardware that ran software. Other companies produced a clone of that hardware to be able to run the same software. Software being the key to what people wanted. They could care less who made the machine as long as they could buy the software they want.
Microsoft is a software company and specifically an OS company. There's no such thing as an OS clone. Sure there's emulators, but that's not the same thing. In the end people just want to run what software they want to and Microsoft is positioned to allow that to happen and I don't see an easy way for someone else to come in and take that away from them. Sure you can develop this office suite that does mostly the same things or that browser but unless you get the OS, it's only chinks in the armor.
The other problem is his view of the role of open source. He seems to think that OSS is going to take over much of the development and companies are going to handle support (at least that's the impression I got). Now, I'm not saying this won't happen, but never before have we had this kind of situation where masses of people are putting out a free commodity to replace a proprietary commodity. Linus has no history to back him up. It's truly extraordinary to think about it. What would happen if proprietary software went away in favor of OSS? What would all of these developers do to pay their bills while they're developing their pet OSS projects? I'm just wondering out loud whether OSS is capable of scaling to the size of the proprietary software industry without the that industry supporting its developers.
To make a short comment way too long, just take his "analysis" with a grain of salt.
I agree that this was a good PR move for them. I'm just exploring the question. Obviously if you lose money by selling it for $10 then sell if for $15 or whatever seems good. I wonder if the tendency of people wanting to be within the law instead of outside it would allow enough people to purchase it at a legal and lower price to make more of a profit than selling it for $200 and only having a handful of people purchase it. Just look at what Apple and the iTunes store has done to P2P. It's even more popular than most of the P2P sites.
Of course there's no way for any of us to know. It would take marketing and economic studies to try and forecast what would happen.
The restrictions I'm talking about would be within the licensing of the software. If Microsoft was to sell Windows XP Pro in Indonesia for a fraction of what it costs here in the US, they would naturally want to put restrictions on people in Indonesia from exporting it to the US or any other country where it would cost more.
This way people in Indonesia could purchase legal and legitimate copies of their software, Microsoft will receive more profits, and it would decrease the need for pirated copies. How would this be a problem?
You can put export restrictions on it, not to mention the language differences. I don't think many Americans will purchase a version of Windows that's in Indonesian (or whatever language they speak there) regardless of the price.
The guy from Indonesia has a point. They can't afford it. So why doesn't Microsoft charge different prices depending on the country? Wouldn't that maximize their profits?
Stompers were cool. I never souped them up, but I did take them apart and take the moter out. The contacts were the exact right distance to hit the contacts on a 9V battery!
Of course, you realise that forming software unions will only increase the speed of jobs going over to India. Why wouldn't a company outsource their software projects to non-union Indians instead of dealing with greedy high-priced unionized Americans?
There's also the potential to be able to "upgrade" your car. Say a software patch will give you an extra 5 or 10 miles/gallon. That could be pretty cool.
I appreciate your assumptions as to my mental capacity. Since you have such a low user number, I wouldn't dare dispute them.
My main point was that we have required a certain level of safety from terrorists from our Federal Government and then we complain when they take steps to help ensure that. Total safety == no rights. The more rights citizens have, the more we have to take responsibility for our own safety. We have driver's licenses because we require a certain amount of safety from other drivers on the roads. We give up the right to drive under cetain situations in exchange for that safety.
The Federal Government needs to know the identities of people that get on planes. They can't know that for sure when there are many states that have loose identification requirements in order to get a drivers license. When I got my license in California, I brought a copy of my birth certificate and my passport. They didn't even want to look at the passport and used the easily forged copy of a birth certificate as primary identification. California even wants to give licenses to illegal aliens! I think the measures in the bill make sense.
You say that it would be economic suicide for a state not to meet the standards. If the citizens of a state felt strongly enough about it, they could intentionally not comply. A state could even have a seperate ID card that complies with the federal guidelines and keep the driver's licenses seperate if they so chose so that people would have more of a choice.
I, for one, have no problem with a national ID card. Most every other country in the world has them. Maybe if they did, people wouldn't use our Social Security Numbers so much for identification which utilizes no anti-theft or identification measures. This is merely the Federal government attempting to do the job that is required of them without getting too many people up in arms about the maligned national ID card.
Has anyone noticed from the article that this is in fact NOT a national ID card? It's merely standards for state ID cards so that they qualify to be used on the federal level. This ensures a basic amount of certainty that the person is in fact the person identified on the state ID. If we're going to hold the federal government responsible for our safety while flying (which we obviously do) than we have to allow them to provide that safety.
A state can still issue a driver's license that doesn't qualify, you just can't use it to get on a plane, among other things. Nobody has to get it, you'll just be walking or riding the bus everywhere you go.
So before we go off about the mark of the devil and other tin-foil hat absurdities, let's read the article and really get a handle on what we're talking about here.
They used to advertise 9-1-1 as 9-11 (2 numbers instead of 3) but in emergency situations people couldn't find the 11 key on their phones, thus changing the ad campaign.
Baird invented the first mechanical television. Farnsworth invented the first electronic television, the design of which was invented in 1922. So in essence, you're both right.
That "It doesn't matter what you graduated in" thing is only true to a certain degree. You can graduate in Math or Chemistry, just expect to get hired at sub-entry level when you get out of college. Businesses are more than willing to trade years in CS with years experience, but you still have to have the experience. If you know what you like, graduate in it and you'll be in a better spot to get hired later.
FYI on the child molesting. That comes from 3 facts:
1. Nearly all child molesters are men (98%-99%).
2. 1/3 of all children molested are boys.
3. Homosexuals make up just under 3% of the population.
If you put it all together, it says that 2/3 of all child molesters are heterosexual and 1/3 are homosexual yet that 1/3 comes from a mere 3% of the population.
How about a law that says that I can hire or fire whomever I want for whatever reason I want? Or does that fall under the Freedom of Association ammendment in the Bill of Rights?
That WiFi card will be more complicated than you think - unnecessarily so, but that's mostly because WiFi card manufacturers like to change chipsets without changing model numbers! I've just been through Linux-WiFi hell recently.
While this may be true in some cases, this article is emphasizing a case where the journalists are supporting the bloggers against a common enemy.
Any journalist, blogger or MSM, gets a little nervous when sources have to be divulged. They know that they depend on sources for much of their information. Anytime anyone has to divulge their source, they're afraid that it could lead to more sources being revealed. They support against the extreme case to protect the more common cases.
Well thats fine then we can throw thier asses in prison where we put law breakers. Freeze thier assets for cleanup of the "lab".
That's great until you start reading in the news that South Korea, or some other country that doesn't have the regulations, is making the breakthroughs and the money, meanwhile the more regulated countries get further and further from the cutting edge.
Wouldn't it stand to reason that you get brand new hardware from all of the companies that you review? So if all the competitors are giving you free hardware, what's the incentive to give one a better review than another?
Of course they do. We actually have her use the regular one that everyone else uses. It was a hygiene decision. That is beside the point. I was posting an anecdotal story along the lines of the thread that I thought would be funny. It was odious and completely off-topic to take the 2 sentences and use them to imply that my kid would be better off being adopted by someone else. What in the world could have made you think that that would be a good idea?
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I agree. In San Diego, SBC offers DSL at only $19.99/month (with 1 year contract). It may not be as fast as cable but I never had trouble with the service and it costs less than many dial-ups. Do you think they'd be offering it that cheap if there weren't competition in the broadband arena?
If it's so much more profitable for cable companies to lock themselves into the ISP role for their networks, I wonder why Time-Warner allows Earthlink as an ISP on their network here in San Diego along with their own offering of Road Runner? Earthlink is even cheaper.
They had made those announcements before Moscow had announced that it had crashed back down to earth, though it is confusing how it is worded.
I'm having a bit of trouble with this analysis myself. Linus is talking as if it's all a foregone conclusion and we're just waiting for it to come to pass. He sites IBM as a big example of what will happen with Microsoft but it seems to me he's comparing apples and oranges.
IBM produce hardware that ran software. Other companies produced a clone of that hardware to be able to run the same software. Software being the key to what people wanted. They could care less who made the machine as long as they could buy the software they want.
Microsoft is a software company and specifically an OS company. There's no such thing as an OS clone. Sure there's emulators, but that's not the same thing. In the end people just want to run what software they want to and Microsoft is positioned to allow that to happen and I don't see an easy way for someone else to come in and take that away from them. Sure you can develop this office suite that does mostly the same things or that browser but unless you get the OS, it's only chinks in the armor.
The other problem is his view of the role of open source. He seems to think that OSS is going to take over much of the development and companies are going to handle support (at least that's the impression I got). Now, I'm not saying this won't happen, but never before have we had this kind of situation where masses of people are putting out a free commodity to replace a proprietary commodity. Linus has no history to back him up. It's truly extraordinary to think about it. What would happen if proprietary software went away in favor of OSS? What would all of these developers do to pay their bills while they're developing their pet OSS projects? I'm just wondering out loud whether OSS is capable of scaling to the size of the proprietary software industry without the that industry supporting its developers.
To make a short comment way too long, just take his "analysis" with a grain of salt.
I agree that this was a good PR move for them. I'm just exploring the question. Obviously if you lose money by selling it for $10 then sell if for $15 or whatever seems good. I wonder if the tendency of people wanting to be within the law instead of outside it would allow enough people to purchase it at a legal and lower price to make more of a profit than selling it for $200 and only having a handful of people purchase it. Just look at what Apple and the iTunes store has done to P2P. It's even more popular than most of the P2P sites.
Of course there's no way for any of us to know. It would take marketing and economic studies to try and forecast what would happen.
The restrictions I'm talking about would be within the licensing of the software. If Microsoft was to sell Windows XP Pro in Indonesia for a fraction of what it costs here in the US, they would naturally want to put restrictions on people in Indonesia from exporting it to the US or any other country where it would cost more.
This way people in Indonesia could purchase legal and legitimate copies of their software, Microsoft will receive more profits, and it would decrease the need for pirated copies. How would this be a problem?
You can put export restrictions on it, not to mention the language differences. I don't think many Americans will purchase a version of Windows that's in Indonesian (or whatever language they speak there) regardless of the price.
The guy from Indonesia has a point. They can't afford it. So why doesn't Microsoft charge different prices depending on the country? Wouldn't that maximize their profits?
That's why Photoshop has a batch function.
Check it out here about a quarter of the page down.
Stompers were cool. I never souped them up, but I did take them apart and take the moter out. The contacts were the exact right distance to hit the contacts on a 9V battery!
Of course, you realise that forming software unions will only increase the speed of jobs going over to India. Why wouldn't a company outsource their software projects to non-union Indians instead of dealing with greedy high-priced unionized Americans?
There's also the potential to be able to "upgrade" your car. Say a software patch will give you an extra 5 or 10 miles/gallon. That could be pretty cool.
I appreciate your assumptions as to my mental capacity. Since you have such a low user number, I wouldn't dare dispute them.
My main point was that we have required a certain level of safety from terrorists from our Federal Government and then we complain when they take steps to help ensure that. Total safety == no rights. The more rights citizens have, the more we have to take responsibility for our own safety. We have driver's licenses because we require a certain amount of safety from other drivers on the roads. We give up the right to drive under cetain situations in exchange for that safety.
The Federal Government needs to know the identities of people that get on planes. They can't know that for sure when there are many states that have loose identification requirements in order to get a drivers license. When I got my license in California, I brought a copy of my birth certificate and my passport. They didn't even want to look at the passport and used the easily forged copy of a birth certificate as primary identification. California even wants to give licenses to illegal aliens! I think the measures in the bill make sense.
You say that it would be economic suicide for a state not to meet the standards. If the citizens of a state felt strongly enough about it, they could intentionally not comply. A state could even have a seperate ID card that complies with the federal guidelines and keep the driver's licenses seperate if they so chose so that people would have more of a choice.
I, for one, have no problem with a national ID card. Most every other country in the world has them. Maybe if they did, people wouldn't use our Social Security Numbers so much for identification which utilizes no anti-theft or identification measures. This is merely the Federal government attempting to do the job that is required of them without getting too many people up in arms about the maligned national ID card.
Has anyone noticed from the article that this is in fact NOT a national ID card? It's merely standards for state ID cards so that they qualify to be used on the federal level. This ensures a basic amount of certainty that the person is in fact the person identified on the state ID. If we're going to hold the federal government responsible for our safety while flying (which we obviously do) than we have to allow them to provide that safety.
A state can still issue a driver's license that doesn't qualify, you just can't use it to get on a plane, among other things. Nobody has to get it, you'll just be walking or riding the bus everywhere you go.
So before we go off about the mark of the devil and other tin-foil hat absurdities, let's read the article and really get a handle on what we're talking about here.
They used to advertise 9-1-1 as 9-11 (2 numbers instead of 3) but in emergency situations people couldn't find the 11 key on their phones, thus changing the ad campaign.
Perhaps they had to determine damage. The longer they wait, the more damage they can claim.
Baird invented the first mechanical television. Farnsworth invented the first electronic television, the design of which was invented in 1922. So in essence, you're both right.
That "It doesn't matter what you graduated in" thing is only true to a certain degree. You can graduate in Math or Chemistry, just expect to get hired at sub-entry level when you get out of college. Businesses are more than willing to trade years in CS with years experience, but you still have to have the experience. If you know what you like, graduate in it and you'll be in a better spot to get hired later.
FYI on the child molesting. That comes from 3 facts:
1. Nearly all child molesters are men (98%-99%).
2. 1/3 of all children molested are boys.
3. Homosexuals make up just under 3% of the population.
If you put it all together, it says that 2/3 of all child molesters are heterosexual and 1/3 are homosexual yet that 1/3 comes from a mere 3% of the population.
For what it's worth.
How about a law that says that I can hire or fire whomever I want for whatever reason I want? Or does that fall under the Freedom of Association ammendment in the Bill of Rights?
That WiFi card will be more complicated than you think - unnecessarily so, but that's mostly because WiFi card manufacturers like to change chipsets without changing model numbers! I've just been through Linux-WiFi hell recently.
While this may be true in some cases, this article is emphasizing a case where the journalists are supporting the bloggers against a common enemy.
Any journalist, blogger or MSM, gets a little nervous when sources have to be divulged. They know that they depend on sources for much of their information. Anytime anyone has to divulge their source, they're afraid that it could lead to more sources being revealed. They support against the extreme case to protect the more common cases.
Well thats fine then we can throw thier asses in prison where we put law breakers. Freeze thier assets for cleanup of the "lab".
That's great until you start reading in the news that South Korea, or some other country that doesn't have the regulations, is making the breakthroughs and the money, meanwhile the more regulated countries get further and further from the cutting edge.
Wouldn't it stand to reason that you get brand new hardware from all of the companies that you review? So if all the competitors are giving you free hardware, what's the incentive to give one a better review than another?
Of course they do. We actually have her use the regular one that everyone else uses. It was a hygiene decision. That is beside the point. I was posting an anecdotal story along the lines of the thread that I thought would be funny. It was odious and completely off-topic to take the 2 sentences and use them to imply that my kid would be better off being adopted by someone else. What in the world could have made you think that that would be a good idea?