have you tried reading much of anything in full sunlight outside using a netbook? And what about mesh networking, drop tests and all the other engineering which makes the XO more than just a little computer.
you've obviously never understood what the original requirements for the OLPC project was. Google for how Intel loaded up a classroom with their little ClassmatePC netbooks and then had to go back and drop a large diesel generator outside the classroom so the kids could use the devices throughout the day.
Negroponte said it would be running Linux. I think he finally figured out that Microsoft sucks and they don't tell the truth or at least the truth we are familiar with. All he has to do is open his eyes to what's gone on in the smartphone market where the not stuff is running a form of *nix under the hood and not Windows. Or talk to Dell or HP about how poor Windows CE is as a platform OS and how resource expensive Windows 7 is.
It sounds like he learned his mistake having listened to Microsoft instead of his own technical group. I sure hope so.
but like so many muggles out there, Negroponte believed the crap Microsoft was telling him. He, and others, also believed that Intel would be interested in helping with the project when in fact, technologically they had nothing to help him with. Intel processors are not the most energy efficient and even after years of "new" mobile processor work, they still are no where near what the RISC designs for power and performance.
Negroponte was sucked into thinking his technical people were Linux and open source fanatics by the very people who were out to stop the project because it gutted their profit margins for existing products.
So it sounds like he's now seen the light but at what cost? Years have been lost and many who were behind the project left it because of the ignorance of yet another 'business' type guy believing the crap Microsoft tells them. He couldn't even figure it out that there was only one or two Microsoft guys working on Windows on the XO and not much of anything like a team and just the memory footprint Windows required should have been enough to know it was a joke.
But who knows, maybe a <$100 tablet with all the Sugar and spice of the original XO but running on a cool ARM Cortex a8 or even a9 processor might get things moving again. I'm not sure about Android though since Sugar has lots going for it as a platform for educational software.
along with eliminating all the areas where dirt and water can muck things up. A tablet has all the same sealing issues as the top portion of the existing XO and eliminates all the sealing areas of the lower keyboard, touchpad, and hinge areas.
What it may be missing is a screen protector and in harsh outdoors environments, the lower keyboard area makes a great screen protector. So I hope they include a screen protector as an integral part of the tablet device.
I've not seen any indications they were also injecting dispersant into the BOP along with the mud. Have they been doing that all along or was that started with the top kill procedure?
They had been injecting it into the open end of the riser stack and that could be seen as a very light colored liquid exiting at the top of the pipe. It seems strange they'd want to mix that with the mud if the mud has really stopped the oil flow.
if the oil flow has been plugged and only the high pressure mud is still flowing out the other end, why does it look like there's different flow materials coming from the ejected blooms? Specifically, the breaks in the bent over riser just above the BOP shows very light colored material on the left and darker material in the center and right side leaks. Shouldn't it all be the same consistency and material?
currently, the cnn.com alt view is what shows the top of the BOP view.
"Does anyone remember Windows?" was something I've heard that Bill Gates said when Microsoft engineers and management were attempting to develop Java tools following Sun's rules. Bill Gates and others knew and know that without Windows, Microsoft is weak and can't control the market nor the developers. That is why they fought so hard to kill off cross platform C++ frameworks in the early 90s, why they went so far to kill off the Netscape Navigator browser, etc, etc. Their livelihood depends on Windows and any device which can be considered a computing device is a threat to their existence because of a theory and book called "The Innovators Dilemma". Little things grow up to become big things and replace old things.
In a way, Microsoft is a 'one trick pony'. They've only ever made any money off of Dos and Windows. So, it is indeed part of their DNA and their DNA sequence is very limited. Even I thought they'd have been smarter about Vista and designed it as a completely modular OS and was shocked when they didn't ship a Vista Embedded version. And even more shocked when they had to stop the End of Live for Windows XP to allow it on netbooks to fight off the growth of GNU/Linux on netbooks. Aren't they currently showing some new MS.Net stuff where applications specially written can run on Windows CE/Mobile and a Windows desktop? DNA is right IMO.
ok, that nails it then. HP Slate running Windows is dead. thx. That article also made me wonder what HP might have up its sleeve with a WebOS based tablet. They have done some nice UI work on many consumer based products so I know they can do it and now it's been confirmed, they know Windows on tablets suck and they've told Steve Ballmer that and are going their own way, the Linux way.
It made me wonder where they would be if they were allowed to ship Jornada's running Linux with Chai( HP Java eVM ) 10 years ago. I would have liked to see them get onboard Android but another option such as WebOS could be good.
Microsoft has or had limits like this too. They'd set those limits and tie them to cheap subsidized versions of Windows which was crippled in some way. XP Home, Windows 7 Starter, etc.
Microsoft actively went after any company which made cross platform development packages and in the 90s that was mostly C++ frameworks. Borland was a target and so was Watcom. These were the main compiler vendors and once Microsoft removed those, they only had IBM to deal with and even then, they were only a potential threat since OS/2 was effectively blocked by Microsoft's vast distribution channel strangle hold.
No industry continues to product good products for fair value when all the competition has been eliminated. But so many companies will wait until Microsoft comes out with sub par versions of things because they are "a Microsoft shop".
they said it would run on HP tablets but did not say it would be on the HP Slate they showed earlier this year. But the silence regarding that product means something too. They are probably having problems getting Windows 7 to run well enough on it to be competitive or you know they'd be taking the marketing $$ from Microsoft to be spreading the love for Windows 7.
What is also interesting is how they are staying off of netbooks with WebOS. As you all know, Microsoft now owns and controls the netbook segment and they are doing a good job at killing it off. More specifically, they dictate what screen size a "netbook" has, what the maxium processor size can be and other specifics which pin the device down. And because Microsoft controls OEMs regarding netbooks, HP and others are not going to go up against Microsoft now that MS has stuck their flag into that segment. Only Google and a few independents have the balls to oppose MS there. Remember, the Thai manufacturing association said they fear Microsoft so they are staying away from putting Linux on anything which looks like a PC/notebook.
HP has to dance lightly around what they do with WebOS for fear of upsetting Microsoft so don't expect too much from them. IMO
and if those instructions are like 'jumping through hoops' then go back to selling flowers on the street corner. My gawd, there's less than 10 steps involved and they are all simple one line explanations for each step. And if you can't follow those how do you dare go outside? And I sure hope you're not driving a car.
This 'give me one button to push so I can get what I want' mentality is getting old.
Get back on your bicycle AC and go back to chasing the ice cream truck around.
you'll notice that the pipe they show leaking is horizontal on the sea floor. When the Deep Sea Horizon sank, they had nothing holding up the pipe running to the surface and so it all dropped to the sea floor buckling and folding as it collapsed. From what I heard, another piece of equipment failed which was supposed to prevent this from happening. So now, there's all this buckled piping on the sea floor and it's leaking in a few places but alot of it is coming out a cleanly broken end of the pipe. Once they block the pipe at one location, it could blow at another location and that location could be where there's not much flow restriction in the remaining pipe.
Think of it like having a crappy old garden hose all folded up on the ground. You turn on the water and some of it comes out the end of the pipe but not the full force because there are folds and restrictions in the hose. When you try to stop that flow at the end of the hose, pressure will rise throughout the hose and it's likely to blow somewhere else and it's also likely to result in much more water flowing out of that broken part of the hose.
It appears they have no understanding or capability to cap this in a known and controlled way. But that should be obvious by now after so long and so lame attempts.
you brought up the "car accident" and from what I've seen of so many of lifes failures, the people or businesses are not allowed to clean up the mess once the accident occurs. In the case of a car accident, the police, fire department, and healthcare systems are brought in and those involved and those around are removed from any further control of the situation. Fires are the same way, the police and fire department take over.
But in cases like this, it is left to the corporations who failed to do the work to limit the failure and as we've seen, they are not open with what they are doing, what's going on, etc. This has been leaking for way too long and IMO, there should be a 3rd party or committee which is made of technicians and engineers with the power to hire, collect data, access all corporate assets and have a 51% command over what is going on. Leaks like this are devastating to huge areas yet those who screwed up are left to try and clean up?
When I heard they were sticking a 6" pipe into the 21" riser pipe gushing oil at high pressure I could not figure out how the animations could show the leak would be stopped. Sure enough, we find out that only about 20% of the leaking is making it to the surface ship. Wouldn't it not be smart to measure the flow and pressure before resorting to guesses at what might or might not work to stop the flow? Some engineering types have tried to use estimates based on guesses at what kinds of pressures are involved and they've come up with far closer estimations on the flow rate than BP let on. I think they are now collecting more barrels per day through that 6" pipe sucking up 20% of one leak than they said the max end of the leak was.
Billions of dollars, livelihoods spanning generations, and entire ecosystems are at stake yet BP is left to stop this? WTF is this different from other emergencies where those who caused the "accident" are removed from the job of cleanup and recovery ASAP? What's that saying, "Putting the fox in charge of the hen house is not a good idea".
I was giving them the benefit of the doubt that the reason they had to resort to giving away their robotics software( run ontop of Windows ) was because most robotics systems were opting for a more stable and scalable OS under the robotics APIs. And those examples were showing how their business methods work and those have not changed.
Microsoft has a LONG LONG LONG history of doing all things legal and illegal to win market share. So dah, blindly thinking they are giving out the SDK free, as in beer, has a high probability it will not feel free or really be free if they win much market share. Look at how they handled the browser for a good example of how they work. They even tried making MS IE free but that wasn't working very well so they had to tie it to the OS, spread its bits all over the OS to fight orders to keep it separate, and even buy up Netscape contracts and pay companies for every unit shipped. And then they shipped a browser with many tied directly to proprietary features of only their platform.
So, dah, who would trust Microsoft to actually compete by making better products? Not too many who've seen them operate over the past 20+ years. If they are so good, let them sell API's which run on top of Linux. Oh wait, they die without the ties to Windows. IMO
Especially when you can tell them that the required EULA won't allow people to publish benchmarks. You get out of this one easy but don't let them read any of the EULA or they might wonder how businesses can accept that and run Windows.
yes, this was the phone Google wanted HTC to make and most likely the phone they wanted others to make. Before the N1, all the other Android phones were underpowered ~600MHz ARM9 based instead of using any of the other ARM Cortex a8 chips which were available. It seemed to me that Google wanted to up the ante for what it meant to be an Android phone and from the number of kick butt Android phones on the market, the N1 did was it would appear it was supposed to do.
Apple will have to leapfrog what the N1 and others put out there and it's all good. It would have been nice if customers took to purchasing the N1 off contract to put pressure on the carriers to provide more options but we can't have it all at once.
It's one thing to have no load on the output and show how things move at certain speeds without much input power to rotate that 2nd/lower shaft. But, put a load on the output( novel idea I guess ) and now you have to put much more power into keeping that lower shaft running at the speed you need to get the desired output at the load.
I also see the system located closer to the input motor as a problem if that gear system is moving at any kind of RPM because it is so large and unbalanced.
And, I'm surprised they can't do even basic testing on the current prototype to see how well it does under loads and how much energy that 2nd shaft system requires compared to input and output power. Just measure the current loads of the motors and put another motor(AC maybe) on the output to act as a variable load to see how the others react. Getting someone to 'invest' in his machine without doing any proof of concept besides a noload prototype sounds like he's unlikely to have anything valuable here or he lucked out getting to where he did. I hope any investors do some cheap evals before spending too much on this and doing a full metal prototype.
we should all know by now that Microsoft is a major partner of the BSA and we also should know that Microsoft claims that Linux included dozens of its patented software. So, I figure the BSA must be counting all Linux users in those $billions "stolen". I wonder what price Microsoft and the BSA put on Linux software.
And too bad the BSA isn't going after school systems these days like they used to. We were right at the edge of a huge chunk of the US school system market jumping over to GNU/Linux. That was just after the BSA started threatening some school systems and they then found out about LTSP and GNU/Linux and it was just before a national conference or something. Microsoft came in and told them they didn't have to pay up or something like that and most of them all went back to pushing that MS-crack to the kids. So close. So please please BSA, start banging on school system and library doors for 100% compliance with those EULAs they didn't read.
but the problem is that the little guys had their chance in the beginning of the search engines race and people voted for google. Now you have a pretty mature segment and yes, it is now going to be very tough for a little(r) guy to enter that market. But the market is somewhat baked.
Where the problems arise is when companies like Microsoft come in and use their market power to prevent new little(r) guys grow a new business. Some thing called the Innovators Dilemma is what drives companies like Microsoft to crush every startup with any tie to the desktop. Google just wants everything to have search, their search. What I don't see yet is google forcing companies and customers away from some other product. They tend to let the market pick what they like and when they do, google puts more effort behind it. Microsoft on the otherhand lets the small guys build a segment just a little bit and then they do all the backroom deals to kill it. Look at the netbooks. They kicked butt running Linux but in comes Microsoft to pay the vendors to install WinXP( yes charging $15 for WinXP and a deal paying $25 for putting a Windows sticker on the box would be paying them ) harmed the sector and it's on its way down. Very few purchase $450 netbooks and that's how Microsoft likes it. Protect the money maker, Windows desktops.
Google has not shown it is bad but Microsoft has over and over and over.
Slashdot Mirror
what has been taking her/them so long? I love that display, I need that display.
LoB
have you tried reading much of anything in full sunlight outside using a netbook? And what about mesh networking, drop tests and all the other engineering which makes the XO more than just a little computer.
you've obviously never understood what the original requirements for the OLPC project was. Google for how Intel loaded up a classroom with their little ClassmatePC netbooks and then had to go back and drop a large diesel generator outside the classroom so the kids could use the devices throughout the day.
OLPC XO is not a netbook.
LoB
Negroponte said it would be running Linux. I think he finally figured out that Microsoft sucks and they don't tell the truth or at least the truth we are familiar with. All he has to do is open his eyes to what's gone on in the smartphone market where the not stuff is running a form of *nix under the hood and not Windows. Or talk to Dell or HP about how poor Windows CE is as a platform OS and how resource expensive Windows 7 is.
It sounds like he learned his mistake having listened to Microsoft instead of his own technical group. I sure hope so.
LoB
but like so many muggles out there, Negroponte believed the crap Microsoft was telling him. He, and others, also believed that Intel would be interested in helping with the project when in fact, technologically they had nothing to help him with. Intel processors are not the most energy efficient and even after years of "new" mobile processor work, they still are no where near what the RISC designs for power and performance.
Negroponte was sucked into thinking his technical people were Linux and open source fanatics by the very people who were out to stop the project because it gutted their profit margins for existing products.
So it sounds like he's now seen the light but at what cost? Years have been lost and many who were behind the project left it because of the ignorance of yet another 'business' type guy believing the crap Microsoft tells them. He couldn't even figure it out that there was only one or two Microsoft guys working on Windows on the XO and not much of anything like a team and just the memory footprint Windows required should have been enough to know it was a joke.
But who knows, maybe a <$100 tablet with all the Sugar and spice of the original XO but running on a cool ARM Cortex a8 or even a9 processor might get things moving again. I'm not sure about Android though since Sugar has lots going for it as a platform for educational software.
LoB
along with eliminating all the areas where dirt and water can muck things up. A tablet has all the same sealing issues as the top portion of the existing XO and eliminates all the sealing areas of the lower keyboard, touchpad, and hinge areas.
What it may be missing is a screen protector and in harsh outdoors environments, the lower keyboard area makes a great screen protector. So I hope they include a screen protector as an integral part of the tablet device.
LoB
I've not seen any indications they were also injecting dispersant into the BOP along with the mud. Have they been doing that all along or was that started with the top kill procedure?
They had been injecting it into the open end of the riser stack and that could be seen as a very light colored liquid exiting at the top of the pipe. It seems strange they'd want to mix that with the mud if the mud has really stopped the oil flow.
LoB
if the oil flow has been plugged and only the high pressure mud is still flowing out the other end, why does it look like there's different flow materials coming from the ejected blooms? Specifically, the breaks in the bent over riser just above the BOP shows very light colored material on the left and darker material in the center and right side leaks. Shouldn't it all be the same consistency and material?
currently, the cnn.com alt view is what shows the top of the BOP view.
LoB
it does not help me one bit with building a beowulf cluster of javascript engines.
LoB
"Does anyone remember Windows?" was something I've heard that Bill Gates said when Microsoft engineers and management were attempting to develop Java tools following Sun's rules. Bill Gates and others knew and know that without Windows, Microsoft is weak and can't control the market nor the developers. That is why they fought so hard to kill off cross platform C++ frameworks in the early 90s, why they went so far to kill off the Netscape Navigator browser, etc, etc. Their livelihood depends on Windows and any device which can be considered a computing device is a threat to their existence because of a theory and book called "The Innovators Dilemma". Little things grow up to become big things and replace old things.
.Net stuff where applications specially written can run on Windows CE/Mobile and a Windows desktop? DNA is right IMO.
In a way, Microsoft is a 'one trick pony'. They've only ever made any money off of Dos and Windows. So, it is indeed part of their DNA and their DNA sequence is very limited. Even I thought they'd have been smarter about Vista and designed it as a completely modular OS and was shocked when they didn't ship a Vista Embedded version. And even more shocked when they had to stop the End of Live for Windows XP to allow it on netbooks to fight off the growth of GNU/Linux on netbooks. Aren't they currently showing some new MS
LoB
ok, that nails it then. HP Slate running Windows is dead. thx. That article also made me wonder what HP might have up its sleeve with a WebOS based tablet. They have done some nice UI work on many consumer based products so I know they can do it and now it's been confirmed, they know Windows on tablets suck and they've told Steve Ballmer that and are going their own way, the Linux way.
It made me wonder where they would be if they were allowed to ship Jornada's running Linux with Chai( HP Java eVM ) 10 years ago. I would have liked to see them get onboard Android but another option such as WebOS could be good.
LoB
Microsoft has or had limits like this too. They'd set those limits and tie them to cheap subsidized versions of Windows which was crippled in some way. XP Home, Windows 7 Starter, etc.
LoB
Microsoft actively went after any company which made cross platform development packages and in the 90s that was mostly C++ frameworks. Borland was a target and so was Watcom. These were the main compiler vendors and once Microsoft removed those, they only had IBM to deal with and even then, they were only a potential threat since OS/2 was effectively blocked by Microsoft's vast distribution channel strangle hold.
No industry continues to product good products for fair value when all the competition has been eliminated. But so many companies will wait until Microsoft comes out with sub par versions of things because they are "a Microsoft shop".
LoB
they said it would run on HP tablets but did not say it would be on the HP Slate they showed earlier this year. But the silence regarding that product means something too. They are probably having problems getting Windows 7 to run well enough on it to be competitive or you know they'd be taking the marketing $$ from Microsoft to be spreading the love for Windows 7.
What is also interesting is how they are staying off of netbooks with WebOS. As you all know, Microsoft now owns and controls the netbook segment and they are doing a good job at killing it off. More specifically, they dictate what screen size a "netbook" has, what the maxium processor size can be and other specifics which pin the device down. And because Microsoft controls OEMs regarding netbooks, HP and others are not going to go up against Microsoft now that MS has stuck their flag into that segment. Only Google and a few independents have the balls to oppose MS there. Remember, the Thai manufacturing association said they fear Microsoft so they are staying away from putting Linux on anything which looks like a PC/notebook.
HP has to dance lightly around what they do with WebOS for fear of upsetting Microsoft so don't expect too much from them. IMO
LoB
and if those instructions are like 'jumping through hoops' then go back to selling flowers on the street corner. My gawd, there's less than 10 steps involved and they are all simple one line explanations for each step. And if you can't follow those how do you dare go outside? And I sure hope you're not driving a car.
This 'give me one button to push so I can get what I want' mentality is getting old.
Get back on your bicycle AC and go back to chasing the ice cream truck around.
LoB
I like that awholelot but I get it, the grammar police are out.
LoB
you'll notice that the pipe they show leaking is horizontal on the sea floor. When the Deep Sea Horizon sank, they had nothing holding up the pipe running to the surface and so it all dropped to the sea floor buckling and folding as it collapsed. From what I heard, another piece of equipment failed which was supposed to prevent this from happening. So now, there's all this buckled piping on the sea floor and it's leaking in a few places but alot of it is coming out a cleanly broken end of the pipe. Once they block the pipe at one location, it could blow at another location and that location could be where there's not much flow restriction in the remaining pipe.
Think of it like having a crappy old garden hose all folded up on the ground. You turn on the water and some of it comes out the end of the pipe but not the full force because there are folds and restrictions in the hose. When you try to stop that flow at the end of the hose, pressure will rise throughout the hose and it's likely to blow somewhere else and it's also likely to result in much more water flowing out of that broken part of the hose.
It appears they have no understanding or capability to cap this in a known and controlled way. But that should be obvious by now after so long and so lame attempts.
LoB
you brought up the "car accident" and from what I've seen of so many of lifes failures, the people or businesses are not allowed to clean up the mess once the accident occurs. In the case of a car accident, the police, fire department, and healthcare systems are brought in and those involved and those around are removed from any further control of the situation. Fires are the same way, the police and fire department take over.
But in cases like this, it is left to the corporations who failed to do the work to limit the failure and as we've seen, they are not open with what they are doing, what's going on, etc. This has been leaking for way too long and IMO, there should be a 3rd party or committee which is made of technicians and engineers with the power to hire, collect data, access all corporate assets and have a 51% command over what is going on. Leaks like this are devastating to huge areas yet those who screwed up are left to try and clean up?
When I heard they were sticking a 6" pipe into the 21" riser pipe gushing oil at high pressure I could not figure out how the animations could show the leak would be stopped. Sure enough, we find out that only about 20% of the leaking is making it to the surface ship. Wouldn't it not be smart to measure the flow and pressure before resorting to guesses at what might or might not work to stop the flow? Some engineering types have tried to use estimates based on guesses at what kinds of pressures are involved and they've come up with far closer estimations on the flow rate than BP let on. I think they are now collecting more barrels per day through that 6" pipe sucking up 20% of one leak than they said the max end of the leak was.
Billions of dollars, livelihoods spanning generations, and entire ecosystems are at stake yet BP is left to stop this? WTF is this different from other emergencies where those who caused the "accident" are removed from the job of cleanup and recovery ASAP? What's that saying, "Putting the fox in charge of the hen house is not a good idea".
LoB
I was giving them the benefit of the doubt that the reason they had to resort to giving away their robotics software( run ontop of Windows ) was because most robotics systems were opting for a more stable and scalable OS under the robotics APIs. And those examples were showing how their business methods work and those have not changed.
geesh, another AC douche bag.
LoB
Microsoft has a LONG LONG LONG history of doing all things legal and illegal to win market share. So dah, blindly thinking they are giving out the SDK free, as in beer, has a high probability it will not feel free or really be free if they win much market share. Look at how they handled the browser for a good example of how they work. They even tried making MS IE free but that wasn't working very well so they had to tie it to the OS, spread its bits all over the OS to fight orders to keep it separate, and even buy up Netscape contracts and pay companies for every unit shipped. And then they shipped a browser with many tied directly to proprietary features of only their platform.
So, dah, who would trust Microsoft to actually compete by making better products? Not too many who've seen them operate over the past 20+ years. If they are so good, let them sell API's which run on top of Linux. Oh wait, they die without the ties to Windows. IMO
LoB
Especially when you can tell them that the required EULA won't allow people to publish benchmarks. You get out of this one easy but don't let them read any of the EULA or they might wonder how businesses can accept that and run Windows.
LoB
yes, this was the phone Google wanted HTC to make and most likely the phone they wanted others to make. Before the N1, all the other Android phones were underpowered ~600MHz ARM9 based instead of using any of the other ARM Cortex a8 chips which were available. It seemed to me that Google wanted to up the ante for what it meant to be an Android phone and from the number of kick butt Android phones on the market, the N1 did was it would appear it was supposed to do.
Apple will have to leapfrog what the N1 and others put out there and it's all good. It would have been nice if customers took to purchasing the N1 off contract to put pressure on the carriers to provide more options but we can't have it all at once.
LoB
It's one thing to have no load on the output and show how things move at certain speeds without much input power to rotate that 2nd/lower shaft. But, put a load on the output( novel idea I guess ) and now you have to put much more power into keeping that lower shaft running at the speed you need to get the desired output at the load.
I also see the system located closer to the input motor as a problem if that gear system is moving at any kind of RPM because it is so large and unbalanced.
And, I'm surprised they can't do even basic testing on the current prototype to see how well it does under loads and how much energy that 2nd shaft system requires compared to input and output power. Just measure the current loads of the motors and put another motor(AC maybe) on the output to act as a variable load to see how the others react. Getting someone to 'invest' in his machine without doing any proof of concept besides a noload prototype sounds like he's unlikely to have anything valuable here or he lucked out getting to where he did. I hope any investors do some cheap evals before spending too much on this and doing a full metal prototype.
LoB
we should all know by now that Microsoft is a major partner of the BSA and we also should know that Microsoft claims that Linux included dozens of its patented software. So, I figure the BSA must be counting all Linux users in those $billions "stolen". I wonder what price Microsoft and the BSA put on Linux software.
And too bad the BSA isn't going after school systems these days like they used to. We were right at the edge of a huge chunk of the US school system market jumping over to GNU/Linux. That was just after the BSA started threatening some school systems and they then found out about LTSP and GNU/Linux and it was just before a national conference or something. Microsoft came in and told them they didn't have to pay up or something like that and most of them all went back to pushing that MS-crack to the kids. So close. So please please BSA, start banging on school system and library doors for 100% compliance with those EULAs they didn't read.
LoB
and we, still in the Slow Zone, can't understand it. But what gave it the upgrade?
LoB
but the problem is that the little guys had their chance in the beginning of the search engines race and people voted for google. Now you have a pretty mature segment and yes, it is now going to be very tough for a little(r) guy to enter that market. But the market is somewhat baked.
Where the problems arise is when companies like Microsoft come in and use their market power to prevent new little(r) guys grow a new business. Some thing called the Innovators Dilemma is what drives companies like Microsoft to crush every startup with any tie to the desktop. Google just wants everything to have search, their search. What I don't see yet is google forcing companies and customers away from some other product. They tend to let the market pick what they like and when they do, google puts more effort behind it. Microsoft on the otherhand lets the small guys build a segment just a little bit and then they do all the backroom deals to kill it. Look at the netbooks. They kicked butt running Linux but in comes Microsoft to pay the vendors to install WinXP( yes charging $15 for WinXP and a deal paying $25 for putting a Windows sticker on the box would be paying them ) harmed the sector and it's on its way down. Very few purchase $450 netbooks and that's how Microsoft likes it. Protect the money maker, Windows desktops.
Google has not shown it is bad but Microsoft has over and over and over.
LoB