This supposed "battle" is a tempest in a teapot as far as technology is concerned. None of the vendors really has any big advantage in terms of usability, performance, quality, or features. OS X may be slightly more usable, Solaris may be slightly more stable, and.NET may have a little more market share, but those differences are miniscule compared to the commonalities between the systems: multiuser environments, process-based architectures, client/server window systems, a mix of C and HLLs for programming, an emphasis on OOP, and WIMP interfaces. None of these companies is really innovating.
The only battle here is a battle of marketing/PR departments, lawyers, and salespeople. Technically, the whole thing is downright depressing.
Sun doesn't seem to understand that "less is more" when it comes to kernels and features, in particular kernels for mainstream use: complicated features require documentation, support, and additional user space programs. If anything, Linux has become too complex and should shed some features; Solaris is the wrong direction to head into.
And who's to say that we all percieve the same wavelength identically? ie: Is everyone's favorite color really the same?
* "color" isn't the same as "wavelength".
* several percent of the population clearly don't perceive color the same way as "normal" people, they have some kind of "color blindness"; there is also some range of variation among normal individuals
* the labels we assign to color are arbitrary and culturally determined to some degree; so, what an English speaker calls "blue" isn't necessarily what a Japanese speaker calls what "blue" gets translated into
* all of this has been studied in great detail experimentally, so there isn't any need to guess
The first isn't quite correct, because "blue" isn't actually an accurate description of the sky's spectrum.
You're correct on the facts but wrong on the terminology. You seem to want to define "color" as what physicists would call "monochromatic light", and some physicists use the term "color" sloppily that way. But that's not what color is and it wouldn't make sense to define color that way (among other things, many colors cannot even be represented by monochromatic light). The sky really is blue, in the same sense that the blue color in a rainbow is, because each color corresponds to a large number of equivalent spectral distributions, none of them preferred over the others.
While I am 100% against video cameras in the PUBLIC space I am not against video cameras in a private space (i.e. dressing rooms of a store). My feelings for personal privacy have no weight in a privately owned store that is using video cameras as a theft prevention mechanism.
For the government to set rules on whether, where, and how video cameras may be used in stores is no more and no less arbitrary than for the government to set rules on how money may be exchanged, how contracts are enforced, and what kind of safety a store has to guarantee its customers.
As a matter of principle, we prefer to keep government regulations to a minimum and we demand some kind of cost/benefit justification for regulations, but there is no clear line between public/private as you seem to imagine. Government can legitimately set rules on the use of video cameras as they can on any other aspect of the operations of a business. The fact that most Americans want privacy in dressing rooms is an excellent justification for prohibiting stores from installing video cameras there. If stores don't like to operate under those conditions, their owners have the right to take their capital and investment and start operating in some other line of business.
"The thing about Linux is, you can talk about a free, open operating system all you want, but you can't take that idea of free and open and put it into a capitalist system and maintain it as though it is some kind of hippie commune or ashram, because if you can do it like that, at that point I'm like, 'Pass the hookah please!'"
In fact, you can take the idea of "free and open" and put it into a capitalist system, and it works. It works spectacularly well, because it's an efficient way of doing business when it comes to software. If it didn't work, so many companies wouldn't be using it.
DiDio's economic prescription for the software market is instead Stalinist government or military dictatorship, with a few companies like Microsoft making all the decisions. It's DiDio's belief in the idea that any single big organization can make efficient decisions that is mistaken.
There is nothing to "figure out": that stuff is pretty elementary system administration. VMware makes it particularly trivial, but it's not hard to do the same thing with user mode Linux and Xen.
It's more of a complete solution, versus a bunch of ideas that "anyone could have put together" but no one did.
It becomes a "solution" once it's a shipping product.
No matter what nutty theories you choose to believe or whatever false data you make up, the fact remains that in the 1980's, a new sexually transmitted disease spread through the population. If you like to live a long and healthy life, practice safer sex or remain abstinent. If you are HIV positive, it's your choice whether you want treatment, but it's not your choice whether you may expose others; if you do, you may have to face legal consequences.
The US Patent Office has ruled that Microsoft has the right to charge competitors a licence fee for each iPod sold.
The USPTO doesn't rule about whether companies have the right to charge, beyond allowing a patent.
Also, talking about a "patenting the iPod" does make sense. Neither Apple nor Microsoft invented portable MP3 players or even disk-based MP3 players. The patent in question seems to be about a particular feature of iPods.
Finally, given Apple's and Microsoft's cross-licensing agreements and close business ties, I also find it unlikely that any money is going to flow. Apple and Microsoft aren't enemies anymore, if they have ever been, and Microsoft doesn't want to see Apple disappear.
What's the fun in that? Even assuming that the Windows kernel developers know what they are doing in terms of security (debatable), the Windows kernel just hasn't been designed to withstand these kinds of attack.
I should say that I use Firefox on Linux, Macintosh, and Windows and, despite its problems, it's my preferred browser, mostly because of the plug-ins and because it works the same on all platforms.
But I have to say, while it's better than the other browsers, it's not that good of a browser either. It's still far more bloated and slow than a browser should be. I find its GUI toolkit doesn't integrate well with the desktop and its redraw logic sucks, in particular under X11. I have a hard time finding my way through its mess of configuration files, many of them in inconsistent formats. And occasionally it crashes, and I have lost my bookmarks a few times.
Overall, I still recommend switching to Firefox, despite its problems. But I certainly can see why IE or Safari users wouldn't want to bother switching, in particular if they aren't aware of all the great plugins. And unless the Firefox team improves their quality, I think Firefox will increasingly face serious problems.
Well, if you see years of persistent growth and then you see a dip, that's not just statistical noise. While it doesn't necessarily mean marketshare has gone down, it means that growth rate has slowed enough that it is now possible to see a dip (at high growth rates, that just won't happen).
In any case, while sampling error is a problem with these kinds of surveys, that's probably far from the biggest problem; non-representative samples and observer bias are probably far more serious.
Why shouldn't they have the right to display what they want depending on the word you type in.
Nobody has the right to "display what they want". You or I can't use trademarked terms in arbitrary ways, and neither can Google.
A similiar thing happens when I go to fast food (KFC, Tacobell, Pepsi owned?) restaurants and ask for a Sprite - "No, sorry sir, we only carry Slice. Would you like that?" They don't simply say no and leave it at that.
What would be similar is if you order a Sprite and then find out when you take your first sip that it's a Slice. The court basically ruled that if you order a Sprite and they don't have it, they have to tell you about it before you take your first sip. And that seems pretty reasonable to me.
This is a reversal for Google based on an earlier story.
No, it's not a reversal. The court decided on one situation that had been left open by the earlier ruling.
Apparently, displaying competitors' ads in response to a query for a trademark is permissible; the court ruled, however, that the competitors' ads may not contain the trademarked query terms.
It seems to me that that strikes a pretty good balance. Allowing the trademarked query terms to appear in the ads carries too much risk for confusion, and it has little benefit for consumers.
So,
Cheap Car Insurance from Acme; click here for more info.
is OK in response to a query for GEICO, but
Acme is cheaper than GEICO; click here for more info.
is not.
However, even under the current ruling, the target of the ad link can still do price comparisons between Acme and GEICO. Consumers really don't lose anything through this ruling; the court just came up with a simple rule by which targeted ads can be made a little clearer and less confusing.
Misusing someone's trademark to link to other companies is not legal.
That's not true in general and it's not what the court says. The court allowed using someone's trademark to link to another company, but it limited what the text of that link could say.
A quick way of terraforming mars that has been suggested and that would supposedly work with current technology is to use nuclear explosions to spread dust over the polar ice caps. The result would be that they absorb more solar radiation and supposedly melt within a few years (you have to keep exploding devices). You can read more here. The nuclear approach strikes me as more practical than the synthesis of large amounts of octafluoropropane.
(Incidentally, it's hard to see why this particular person got cited; the idea of using greenhouse gases to terraform mars certainly didn't come from her.)
My family has 7 people in it. To travel semi-comfortably on vacation, we pretty much have to use a Suburban. A minivan, while it does have room for 7, doesn't have room for luggage. We're not anywhere near alone in this.
Easy: commute in a fuel-efficient small car, and rent the big car when you need to travel with the whole family. Works for me.
You could just use a laptop; they have everything you need, and you should be able to get something suitable for under $1000.
Archos also has a media player based on Linux with 802.11b built in (I believe it comes in 40G and 100G versions); if you want something really small, that's your best bet. But it's probably also a little more work to configure than a laptop, and not much cheaper.
So in summary, I'm not saying there isn't a dark side to our industry (like every single other friggin industry in existence), I'm just saying that everybody seems to focus on the bad and ignore the good.
Most of the industry is "dark": it manipulates emotions and drives in order to increase consumption and profits. Often, you manipulate people into harming themselves. Whether you use viral advertising, pornography, music, comedy, or high art, it all amounts to the same thing.
It will take decades more until psychologists will have worked out what ought to be permissible and what ought not to be permissible, but I have no doubt that most of today's advertising will eventually be considered analogous to toxic waste and harmful drugs and will be banned under stiff penalties. And, yes, we will figure out how to do that without infringing on free speech rights, because psychological manipulation by advertisers is not the same as free speech rights for citizens.
Yes. I don't see the problem with that. We accept that in many other areas. Let's make it 20 years, then it's the same as for patents. If it's OK that some life-saving drug or new source of energy becomes public domain after 20 years, then it should be OK for any novel to become public domain after 20 years.
Furthermore, I doubt many people are motivated to write novels so that they can get turned into movies by Hollywood, and novels that are written with that goal in mind tend to suck.
Apple patents, Microsoft patents, IBM patents, Sun patents. They all claim they are only doing it for good, but then they all go around suing people.
And the patents themselves are pretty iffy. If you only allow Microsoft's narrow claims, than Apple probably doesn't infringe and could trivially work around them. If you allow Microsoft's broadest claims, then they just patented finding other songs you like based on a bunch of examples--a trivial and obvious idea implemented by many people.
Patents really only serve two purposes: they make money for lawyers, and they create barriers to entry for small, new companies. That's why all the big players love them so much. It's also why we really have to do something about them if we care about our high-tech economy, because innovation comes from the little startups.
If it's over 10 years old, the book is free knowledge for all.
The "knowledge" may be free, but the copyright will be in effect for at least another half century or so.
If you are saying that copyright should be 10-15 years after first publication, then I fully agree with you. But that's not what the law says right now.
Slashdot Mirror
This supposed "battle" is a tempest in a teapot as far as technology is concerned. None of the vendors really has any big advantage in terms of usability, performance, quality, or features. OS X may be slightly more usable, Solaris may be slightly more stable, and .NET may have a little more market share, but those differences are miniscule compared to the commonalities between the systems: multiuser environments, process-based architectures, client/server window systems, a mix of C and HLLs for programming, an emphasis on OOP, and WIMP interfaces. None of these companies is really innovating.
The only battle here is a battle of marketing/PR departments, lawyers, and salespeople. Technically, the whole thing is downright depressing.
Sun doesn't seem to understand that "less is more" when it comes to kernels and features, in particular kernels for mainstream use: complicated features require documentation, support, and additional user space programs. If anything, Linux has become too complex and should shed some features; Solaris is the wrong direction to head into.
And who's to say that we all percieve the same wavelength identically? ie: Is everyone's favorite color really the same?
* "color" isn't the same as "wavelength".
* several percent of the population clearly don't perceive color the same way as "normal" people, they have some kind of "color blindness"; there is also some range of variation among normal individuals
* the labels we assign to color are arbitrary and culturally determined to some degree; so, what an English speaker calls "blue" isn't necessarily what a Japanese speaker calls what "blue" gets translated into
* all of this has been studied in great detail experimentally, so there isn't any need to guess
The first isn't quite correct, because "blue" isn't actually an accurate description of the sky's spectrum.
You're correct on the facts but wrong on the terminology. You seem to want to define "color" as what physicists would call "monochromatic light", and some physicists use the term "color" sloppily that way. But that's not what color is and it wouldn't make sense to define color that way (among other things, many colors cannot even be represented by monochromatic light). The sky really is blue, in the same sense that the blue color in a rainbow is, because each color corresponds to a large number of equivalent spectral distributions, none of them preferred over the others.
A recent article points out that the sky is actually a range of wavelengths which we perceive as "blue" because of color mixing in the eye.
That's what it means for something to be "blue".
While I am 100% against video cameras in the PUBLIC space I am not against video cameras in a private space (i.e. dressing rooms of a store). My feelings for personal privacy have no weight in a privately owned store that is using video cameras as a theft prevention mechanism.
For the government to set rules on whether, where, and how video cameras may be used in stores is no more and no less arbitrary than for the government to set rules on how money may be exchanged, how contracts are enforced, and what kind of safety a store has to guarantee its customers.
As a matter of principle, we prefer to keep government regulations to a minimum and we demand some kind of cost/benefit justification for regulations, but there is no clear line between public/private as you seem to imagine. Government can legitimately set rules on the use of video cameras as they can on any other aspect of the operations of a business. The fact that most Americans want privacy in dressing rooms is an excellent justification for prohibiting stores from installing video cameras there. If stores don't like to operate under those conditions, their owners have the right to take their capital and investment and start operating in some other line of business.
"The thing about Linux is, you can talk about a free, open operating system all you want, but you can't take that idea of free and open and put it into a capitalist system and maintain it as though it is some kind of hippie commune or ashram, because if you can do it like that, at that point I'm like, 'Pass the hookah please!'"
In fact, you can take the idea of "free and open" and put it into a capitalist system, and it works. It works spectacularly well, because it's an efficient way of doing business when it comes to software. If it didn't work, so many companies wouldn't be using it.
DiDio's economic prescription for the software market is instead Stalinist government or military dictatorship, with a few companies like Microsoft making all the decisions. It's DiDio's belief in the idea that any single big organization can make efficient decisions that is mistaken.
to actually figure out all the random issues
There is nothing to "figure out": that stuff is pretty elementary system
administration. VMware makes it particularly trivial, but it's not hard to do the same thing with user mode Linux and Xen.
It's more of a complete solution, versus a bunch of ideas that "anyone could have put together" but no one did.
It becomes a "solution" once it's a shipping product.
No matter what nutty theories you choose to believe or whatever false data you make up, the fact remains that in the 1980's, a new sexually transmitted disease spread through the population. If you like to live a long and healthy life, practice safer sex or remain abstinent. If you are HIV positive, it's your choice whether you want treatment, but it's not your choice whether you may expose others; if you do, you may have to face legal consequences.
They better also ban because otherwise, there will be lots of obvious comparisons...
The US Patent Office has ruled that Microsoft has the right to charge competitors a licence fee for each iPod sold.
The USPTO doesn't rule about whether companies have the right to charge, beyond allowing a patent.
Also, talking about a "patenting the iPod" does make sense. Neither Apple nor Microsoft invented portable MP3 players or even disk-based MP3 players. The patent in question seems to be about a particular feature of iPods.
Finally, given Apple's and Microsoft's cross-licensing agreements and close business ties, I also find it unlikely that any money is going to flow. Apple and Microsoft aren't enemies anymore, if they have ever been, and Microsoft doesn't want to see Apple disappear.
What's the fun in that? Even assuming that the Windows kernel developers know what they are doing in terms of security (debatable), the Windows kernel just hasn't been designed to withstand these kinds of attack.
I should say that I use Firefox on Linux, Macintosh, and Windows and, despite its problems, it's my preferred browser, mostly because of the plug-ins and because it works the same on all platforms.
But I have to say, while it's better than the other browsers, it's not that good of a browser either. It's still far more bloated and slow than a browser should be. I find its GUI toolkit doesn't integrate well with the desktop and its redraw logic sucks, in particular under X11. I have a hard time finding my way through its mess of configuration files, many of them in inconsistent formats. And occasionally it crashes, and I have lost my bookmarks a few times.
Overall, I still recommend switching to Firefox, despite its problems. But I certainly can see why IE or Safari users wouldn't want to bother switching, in particular if they aren't aware of all the great plugins. And unless the Firefox team improves their quality, I think Firefox will increasingly face serious problems.
Well, if you see years of persistent growth and then you see a dip, that's not just statistical noise. While it doesn't necessarily mean marketshare has gone down, it means that growth rate has slowed enough that it is now possible to see a dip (at high growth rates, that just won't happen).
In any case, while sampling error is a problem with these kinds of surveys, that's probably far from the biggest problem; non-representative samples and observer bias are probably far more serious.
Why shouldn't they have the right to display what they want depending on the word you type in.
Nobody has the right to "display what they want". You or I can't use trademarked terms in arbitrary ways, and neither can Google.
A similiar thing happens when I go to fast food (KFC, Tacobell, Pepsi owned?) restaurants and ask for a Sprite - "No, sorry sir, we only carry Slice. Would you like that?" They don't simply say no and leave it at that.
What would be similar is if you order a Sprite and then find out when you take your first sip that it's a Slice. The court basically ruled that if you order a Sprite and they don't have it, they have to tell you about it before you take your first sip. And that seems pretty reasonable to me.
No, it's not a reversal. The court decided on one situation that had been left open by the earlier ruling.
Apparently, displaying competitors' ads in response to a query for a trademark is permissible; the court ruled, however, that the competitors' ads may not contain the trademarked query terms.
It seems to me that that strikes a pretty good balance. Allowing the trademarked query terms to appear in the ads carries too much risk for confusion, and it has little benefit for consumers.
So,is OK in response to a query for GEICO, butis not.
However, even under the current ruling, the target of the ad link can still do price comparisons between Acme and GEICO. Consumers really don't lose anything through this ruling; the court just came up with a simple rule by which targeted ads can be made a little clearer and less confusing.
Misusing someone's trademark to link to other companies is not legal.
That's not true in general and it's not what the court says. The court allowed using someone's trademark to link to another company, but it limited what the text of that link could say.
A quick way of terraforming mars that has been suggested and that would supposedly work with current technology is to use nuclear explosions to spread dust over the polar ice caps. The result would be that they absorb more solar radiation and supposedly melt within a few years (you have to keep exploding devices). You can read more here. The nuclear approach strikes me as more practical than the synthesis of large amounts of octafluoropropane.
(Incidentally, it's hard to see why this particular person got cited; the idea of using greenhouse gases to terraform mars certainly didn't come from her.)
My family has 7 people in it. To travel semi-comfortably on vacation, we pretty much have to use a Suburban. A minivan, while it does have room for 7, doesn't have room for luggage. We're not anywhere near alone in this.
Easy: commute in a fuel-efficient small car, and rent the big car when you need to travel with the whole family. Works for me.
You could just use a laptop; they have everything you need, and you should be able to get something suitable for under $1000.
Archos also has a media player based on Linux with 802.11b built in (I believe it comes in 40G and 100G versions); if you want something really small, that's your best bet. But it's probably also a little more work to configure than a laptop, and not much cheaper.
So in summary, I'm not saying there isn't a dark side to our industry (like every single other friggin industry in existence), I'm just saying that everybody seems to focus on the bad and ignore the good.
Most of the industry is "dark": it manipulates emotions and drives in order to increase consumption and profits. Often, you manipulate people into harming themselves. Whether you use viral advertising, pornography, music, comedy, or high art, it all amounts to the same thing.
It will take decades more until psychologists will have worked out what ought to be permissible and what ought not to be permissible, but I have no doubt that most of today's advertising will eventually be considered analogous to toxic waste and harmful drugs and will be banned under stiff penalties. And, yes, we will figure out how to do that without infringing on free speech rights, because psychological manipulation by advertisers is not the same as free speech rights for citizens.
Yes. I don't see the problem with that. We accept that in many other areas. Let's make it 20 years, then it's the same as for patents. If it's OK that some life-saving drug or new source of energy becomes public domain after 20 years, then it should be OK for any novel to become public domain after 20 years.
Furthermore, I doubt many people are motivated to write novels so that they can get turned into movies by Hollywood, and novels that are written with that goal in mind tend to suck.
Apple patents, Microsoft patents, IBM patents, Sun patents. They all claim they are only doing it for good, but then they all go around suing people.
And the patents themselves are pretty iffy. If you only allow Microsoft's narrow claims, than Apple probably doesn't infringe and could trivially work around them. If you allow Microsoft's broadest claims, then they just patented finding other songs you like based on a bunch of examples--a trivial and obvious idea implemented by many people.
Patents really only serve two purposes: they make money for lawyers, and they create barriers to entry for small, new companies. That's why all the big players love them so much. It's also why we really have to do something about them if we care about our high-tech economy, because innovation comes from the little startups.
If it's over 10 years old, the book is free knowledge for all.
The "knowledge" may be free, but the copyright will be in effect for at least another half century or so.
If you are saying that copyright should be 10-15 years after first publication, then I fully agree with you. But that's not what the law says right now.
But is the purpose of government really to protect business models?
It can be, if we, the people, decide we want government to do that.
However, whining on the part of companies is not sufficient reason for the government to protect their business model.