Plus, how will GPL's clauses about not having to release code for things you do on-site relate to the contractor/subcontractor relationships that are present in DoD projects and if parts are sold to other countries (like selling an F-16 to Israel, for example)?
What's wrong with Israel modifying F-16 flight software and submitting patches back to the US? If they sell the planes they're friendly enough to share source code. And besides, if they write their own software rather than modify or link GPLed stuff, they don't have to release anything. Just like VMWare, Cedega, Nero Linux and others.
If you think routers are hot, check your car stereo. Mine is placed *inside* the ventilation pipe that delivers all heat into the passenger compartment in Winter. Worked perfectly for ~5 years (and is still working!)
I once bought a relatively cheap Gigabyte Geforce 2 MX video card. It worked fine for two days then died. After trying to fix it I found out that the video card worked if you bent it the right way (on one corner) while the computer was booting. After that I added some cardboard and duct tape so that the card would always stay bent. It worked something like two years, occasionally failing because the duct tape would move and the whole thing returned to normal. After I replaced the thing, I finally took it out. It was twisted by 10 degrees in its normal state!
How about watching one (good) movie, playing one (good) game, reading one (good) book all over again? After forgetting the plot and characters you'll get the same experience as reading/watching/playing for the first time.
Google behaves like it's a lot of unrelated companies. Try finding a link from Google's homepage to Google Earth, or Google's hardware business, or even Gmail (which I think is the most popular thing after search). And because their search is nearly perfect (at least I haven't seen anything better, although I've tried Yahoo, Ask, Live and a bunch of others), why not spend some time having fun doing other stuff that may get profitable and serve as a backup if they lose their search business? Most stuff that isn't search-related seems to be pet projects and experiments (e.g. Gtalk, Orkut, Spreadsheets, Pack) that are free to use and test but may evolve into something bigger and actually create new markets.
Well, in my university computers are really crappy (celeron-1500 with 256 megs of RAM and 20Gb HDDs) and have horrible mechanical mice. And bringing your own keyboard & mouse (as well as installing any software) is forbidden. And most tasks performed on these machines need lots of RAM and CPU power, so bringing my own laptop is the only option. And you can't seriously take a PDA to Starbucks and do some debugging while drinking your favorite coffee, because of the tiny screen, no full-size keyboard and the embedded OS.
Suppose the idea of paying a fixed monthly fee (around $10) and being able to play any game from the Virtual Console (like Napster's current offering)? Nintendo has already made tons of money on the older games, and porting them isn't going to be really difficult. OTOH, generating a constant revenue flow from stuff that paid for its development years ago is a viable business model. I'd pay a small monthly fee so that I can play any game I want rather that buy a lot of games and find out that they're not fun anymore. Also, the storage space on a Wii is limited and games can't be copied, so if you buy a lot of these you'll fill up all memory and will have to either delete games (the ones you paid for!) or buy a new Wii (just because of the memory!) in order to get more.
Mobile phones and custom, in-house developed apps that must work no matter what OS the company is using *still* need Java. Show me a popular Python app that works on Windows, Mac, Linux (and doesn't look alien in either system) and I promise I'll throw away all my Netbeans CDs.
Lean and mean Java implementations is all we need. "Works on Sun's, IBM's and XYZ's Java but not on gjc and others. And Kaffe needs some hacks and updates in order to make this app work". We are already seeing this kind of problems with.NET and Mono: you can either write simple apps that work in both, or advanced apps that work in Mono (and need GTK# in.NET Framework), or advanced apps in.NET Framework (and hope that it will work in Mono, although will look ugly on Linux and won't support Windows Native calls). As for deprecated stuff, it should be avaliable as an easy-to-install packages that aren't installed by default. It's a real shame that some of Sun's own demos in Java Tutorial designed for an old VM don't work on 1.5 (maybe they've fixed this now, I don't know). One of the strong points in Java is that it's abstracted so that if you write an app you're sure it will work pretty much the same after ~5-10 years. If an OS's API changes, Java's classes can be rewritten so that older apps still work. That's why many educational stuff is written in Java (or Flash) - because if you buy an encyclopedia or dictionary (things that don't change over time and don't need to do any platform-specific stuff), you won't be buying upgrades every year just because some library is "deprecated"; after all, these things are pretty much like music and videos, platform-independent and not changed every year.
That's the upgrade price. It means that if you have any other version of OSX you can pay $129 or $199 to upgrade that to the newest version. If you have a computer without OSX installed, there's nothing to be upgraded, right? Apple has the real price of OSX hidden in the cost of hardware, pretty much like Dell, HP and others. It's like a mobile phone's firmware - you don't know how much it costs (only the upgrade price) and you can't install Motorola software on a Samsung phone.
Apple didn't steal the kernel from BSD. They had the Mach kernel from NeXT and used a lot of non-kernel stuff from FreeBSD. Exactly how Linus "stole" GNU, replacing Hurd with Linux.
Time Machine is nothing new. GoBack allowed you to create a virtual drive that was exactly what you hard drive looked like some time ago. And I used it seven years earlier, back in 1999. However I admit that Time Machine is much easier to use and does it the "right way".
Of course if you're one of Steve's Commandos type of Mac owners I can see where this article is Pearl Harbor all over again, especially where he alludes to the RDF.
That's why Sony AIBO is quite popular in AI labs - it's a relatively cheap walking robot with vision and a basic SDK. If AI researchers can teach AIBO to learn about our world from what it sees and hears, then creating artificial intelligence could be developed simply by sending the robot to kindergaten, school etc. where it will learn things exactly like a human. Tha's much easier than creating a DB by hand or chatting with the bot.
And carry gigs of music with them. And one thing that drives me mad in all phones, even without MP3 - if you're navigating menus, typing an SMS, playing games or listening to music and you suddenly get an incoming call, you always get a 50% chance of pressing the wrong button (end call) before you actually realise you were actually getting a call and not doing your task anymore.
Most spammers do this when they send an image-only ad. You can't detect spamwords in images (and downloading any image you prove that the mailbox is active), so if there's no text in a message it's probably an image-spam. So they add a bit of non-spam text to confuse spamfilters. An alternative theory is that spammers are brute-forcing all kinds of email addresses (and are just sending random messages and collect emails that exist).
IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo years ago. They make their money on enterprise-grade servers, software and consulting. And all those consoles - Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii are all using IBM's CPUs.
Vista's Avalon addresses the resolution issue in an elegant way (at least as Microsoft described it): display resolution and font size are NOT related. So you can have a 4000x3000 resolution on a 15" monitor and all the fonts will be the correct size; in fact most sizes are defined as they will appear on the screen (e.g. cm, inches) and not as they are stored (pixels). However I think this applies only to fonts and not images; I'm not entirely sure.
And Opera alows you to zoom html pages scaling everything including images and fonts. Great feature because the layout never breaks (unlike IE and Firefox).
Although I agree on the easiness part of your argument, I think price still plays a significant role. My current PC costs something like $150 and I could get a new one for something like $300 (including a 17" TFT monitor). Now, Windows XP Pro costs $250 and that's nearly the cost of a new PC! When hardware cost thousands of dollars, a 20-buck game looked like a good deal. Today five games cost as much as a new PC. An even better example is the music industry - the cheapest MP3 player I've seen cost $25, and that's only a small amount more than ONE CD. People are used to the thought that hardware is a lot more expensive than software. When two games cost as much as a Nintendo DS (and keep me entertained for no more that two weeks) I'd rather spend my money on hardware.
Re:Same ol', same ol'. For reference, see the MI
on
Piracy Killing PC Gaming?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Copying is as old as the computer game industry. Granted, it's now easier than it was in the days when you had to travel around with your floppies (or have them sent across the country), and it's easier to get online access than it was in the days of BBSs.
Well, at least all you needed to copy a game was a bunch of floppies and pkzip. No DRM, no activation. Now, you need a phone or internet access to run most games. Forget taking a laptop with you on vacation along with some new games you just bought - it probably won't work. The irony is that using pirated software is getting easier while legal games are becoming harder to install and mantain.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen it, but I honestly don't remember the result ;-)
If you think routers are hot, check your car stereo. Mine is placed *inside* the ventilation pipe that delivers all heat into the passenger compartment in Winter. Worked perfectly for ~5 years (and is still working!)
I once bought a relatively cheap Gigabyte Geforce 2 MX video card. It worked fine for two days then died. After trying to fix it I found out that the video card worked if you bent it the right way (on one corner) while the computer was booting. After that I added some cardboard and duct tape so that the card would always stay bent. It worked something like two years, occasionally failing because the duct tape would move and the whole thing returned to normal. After I replaced the thing, I finally took it out. It was twisted by 10 degrees in its normal state!
How about watching one (good) movie, playing one (good) game, reading one (good) book all over again?
After forgetting the plot and characters you'll get the same experience as reading/watching/playing for the first time.
Google behaves like it's a lot of unrelated companies. Try finding a link from Google's homepage to Google Earth, or Google's hardware business, or even Gmail (which I think is the most popular thing after search).
And because their search is nearly perfect (at least I haven't seen anything better, although I've tried Yahoo, Ask, Live and a bunch of others), why not spend some time having fun doing other stuff that may get profitable and serve as a backup if they lose their search business? Most stuff that isn't search-related seems to be pet projects and experiments (e.g. Gtalk, Orkut, Spreadsheets, Pack) that are free to use and test but may evolve into something bigger and actually create new markets.
Well, in my university computers are really crappy (celeron-1500 with 256 megs of RAM and 20Gb HDDs) and have horrible mechanical mice. And bringing your own keyboard & mouse (as well as installing any software) is forbidden. And most tasks performed on these machines need lots of RAM and CPU power, so bringing my own laptop is the only option.
And you can't seriously take a PDA to Starbucks and do some debugging while drinking your favorite coffee, because of the tiny screen, no full-size keyboard and the embedded OS.
Suppose the idea of paying a fixed monthly fee (around $10) and being able to play any game from the Virtual Console (like Napster's current offering)?
Nintendo has already made tons of money on the older games, and porting them isn't going to be really difficult. OTOH, generating a constant revenue flow from stuff that paid for its development years ago is a viable business model. I'd pay a small monthly fee so that I can play any game I want rather that buy a lot of games and find out that they're not fun anymore. Also, the storage space on a Wii is limited and games can't be copied, so if you buy a lot of these you'll fill up all memory and will have to either delete games (the ones you paid for!) or buy a new Wii (just because of the memory!) in order to get more.
Mobile phones and custom, in-house developed apps that must work no matter what OS the company is using *still* need Java. Show me a popular Python app that works on Windows, Mac, Linux (and doesn't look alien in either system) and I promise I'll throw away all my Netbeans CDs.
Lean and mean Java implementations is all we need. "Works on Sun's, IBM's and XYZ's Java but not on gjc and others. And Kaffe needs some hacks and updates in order to make this app work". We are already seeing this kind of problems with .NET and Mono: you can either write simple apps that work in both, or advanced apps that work in Mono (and need GTK# in .NET Framework), or advanced apps in .NET Framework (and hope that it will work in Mono, although will look ugly on Linux and won't support Windows Native calls).
As for deprecated stuff, it should be avaliable as an easy-to-install packages that aren't installed by default. It's a real shame that some of Sun's own demos in Java Tutorial designed for an old VM don't work on 1.5 (maybe they've fixed this now, I don't know). One of the strong points in Java is that it's abstracted so that if you write an app you're sure it will work pretty much the same after ~5-10 years. If an OS's API changes, Java's classes can be rewritten so that older apps still work. That's why many educational stuff is written in Java (or Flash) - because if you buy an encyclopedia or dictionary (things that don't change over time and don't need to do any platform-specific stuff), you won't be buying upgrades every year just because some library is "deprecated"; after all, these things are pretty much like music and videos, platform-independent and not changed every year.
That's the upgrade price. It means that if you have any other version of OSX you can pay $129 or $199 to upgrade that to the newest version. If you have a computer without OSX installed, there's nothing to be upgraded, right?
Apple has the real price of OSX hidden in the cost of hardware, pretty much like Dell, HP and others.
It's like a mobile phone's firmware - you don't know how much it costs (only the upgrade price) and you can't install Motorola software on a Samsung phone.
Two years ago Warty (4.10) was still in beta. Don't use betas, they're evil and can lose all your data!
Apple didn't steal the kernel from BSD. They had the Mach kernel from NeXT and used a lot of non-kernel stuff from FreeBSD. Exactly how Linus "stole" GNU, replacing Hurd with Linux.
Time Machine is nothing new. GoBack allowed you to create a virtual drive that was exactly what you hard drive looked like some time ago. And I used it seven years earlier, back in 1999. However I admit that Time Machine is much easier to use and does it the "right way".
Exposé was copied to Linux in the form of Komposé.
That's why Sony AIBO is quite popular in AI labs - it's a relatively cheap walking robot with vision and a basic SDK. If AI researchers can teach AIBO to learn about our world from what it sees and hears, then creating artificial intelligence could be developed simply by sending the robot to kindergaten, school etc. where it will learn things exactly like a human. Tha's much easier than creating a DB by hand or chatting with the bot.
And carry gigs of music with them.
And one thing that drives me mad in all phones, even without MP3 - if you're navigating menus, typing an SMS, playing games or listening to music and you suddenly get an incoming call, you always get a 50% chance of pressing the wrong button (end call) before you actually realise you were actually getting a call and not doing your task anymore.
IE, Netscape killer :-(
Most spammers do this when they send an image-only ad. You can't detect spamwords in images (and downloading any image you prove that the mailbox is active), so if there's no text in a message it's probably an image-spam. So they add a bit of non-spam text to confuse spamfilters.
An alternative theory is that spammers are brute-forcing all kinds of email addresses (and are just sending random messages and collect emails that exist).
IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo years ago. They make their money on enterprise-grade servers, software and consulting. And all those consoles - Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii are all using IBM's CPUs.
In America, you spy on keyboard! (the one you secretly installed on somebody else's computer)
Vista's Avalon addresses the resolution issue in an elegant way (at least as Microsoft described it):
display resolution and font size are NOT related. So you can have a 4000x3000 resolution on a 15" monitor and all the fonts will be the correct size; in fact most sizes are defined as they will appear on the screen (e.g. cm, inches) and not as they are stored (pixels). However I think this applies only to fonts and not images; I'm not entirely sure.
And Opera alows you to zoom html pages scaling everything including images and fonts. Great feature because the layout never breaks (unlike IE and Firefox).
Although I agree on the easiness part of your argument, I think price still plays a significant role.
My current PC costs something like $150 and I could get a new one for something like $300 (including a 17" TFT monitor). Now, Windows XP Pro costs $250 and that's nearly the cost of a new PC! When hardware cost thousands of dollars, a 20-buck game looked like a good deal. Today five games cost as much as a new PC.
An even better example is the music industry - the cheapest MP3 player I've seen cost $25, and that's only a small amount more than ONE CD.
People are used to the thought that hardware is a lot more expensive than software. When two games cost as much as a Nintendo DS (and keep me entertained for no more that two weeks) I'd rather spend my money on hardware.
Now, you need a phone or internet access to run most games. Forget taking a laptop with you on vacation along with some new games you just bought - it probably won't work.
The irony is that using pirated software is getting easier while legal games are becoming harder to install and mantain.