Actually, I think the $200 Asus EEE is more the way to go than cheap desktops. Laptops are already outselling desktops, so a mobile offering makes more sense to focus on.
More specifically, the $200 Asus EEE and things like Intel's Mobile Internet Device may bring in a new era of computer use. (The iPhone can be seen as part of that trend, btw - a small, mobile internet-capable machine; also the Nokia Tablet.) The goal should be an affordable (sub-$300) device with an attractive design, that people can use for email, social networking, web browsing, etc. It could take off among college students, for example. In fact this may be the exact goal of Intel's MID partnership with Ubuntu.
For some reason looking at their OSS site gives me a weird feeling in my stomache.
Me too. Possibly the horrible Flash thing that is hardly responsive and maxes out my CPU for no reason. Yet, I would be willing to bet that the site is very usable under Windows. And that is sort of the point.
Microsoft sees that open-source is being adopted - for example, MySQL has about the same market share as Microsoft SQL Server, despite being far newer. Ditto, languages such as Ruby and Python. Fact is, if these tools don't run well on Windows, it may push people to other platforms, and that is Microsoft's only fear. By working 'with' the open-source community, they will be trying to make Windows the platform on which major FOSS projects work best.
In other words, if lots of people are going to be using MySQL anyway, then Microsoft might be willing to help MySQL work well on Windows, just so those people aren't forced to use Linux. Simple tactics.
The trickier strategy here will be this, I think: Microsoft open-source projects will have the Windows side heavily-funded by Microsoft. Support for other platforms will be left 'to the community', and perhaps discouraged in various minor ways. The goal will be to get those projects to work on Linux, but work better on Windows, hence motivating use of the Windows platform. The FOSS community should be prepared for this.
This isn't news. MS has already (unofficially) said they'd rather India and China used their software illegally than use the competition.
+1. Here is another source that is often quoted in this context: Bill Gates: "[P]eople don't pay for the software [...] Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." This quote is from the year 2000, mind you.
That piracy is a useful tool for Microsoft has been clear even far before the year 2000, during the period in which it was useful to Microsoft in the US and Europe. Businessweek's article here in TFA is therefore nothing more than preaching to the choir; Microsoft knows this already, and is already doing this, in fact, they practically wrote the book about this. What's next, a Businessweek editorial about how Walmart should cut prices in order to run Mon&Pop stores out of business?
The Taboo.
So the Ministry can detect when and where a certain word is said throughout the whole country? Why didn't they use it before to find out when someone used the Unforgivables? Or when someone mentioned Death Eaters? Or plenty of other ways it could have been used.
My assumption was that the Ministry can't, but Voldemort can. That is, some special magic of his made it possible to detect when his name was said.
Percy's sudden change of allegiance, apology and starting to joke?
The joking may be a bit much, but the change in allegiance makes sense. The Ministry of Magic turned from a cold bureaucracy into as evil an organization as you can possibly imagine, pretty much overnight.
I also felt that she let Dumbledore off the hook, and his character would have been much more compelling if he had killed his sister
We are purposely left not knowing who actually killed her. So he might have.
or maybe, just maybe, we didn't have to have Dumbledore re-appear and explain everything?
Well, that was the format of all the previous books, I don't blame her for not breaking it on the last one. But yes, it isn't too subtle.
basically all the other major deaths were random, they had no purpose in the story and didn't advance the plot in any major way
True, but is this a bad thing? It shows the randomness and unfairness of war. Plenty of people died (I think the figure was 40 or 50), stands to reason several would be characters we know.
Generally, I think the book was missing most of JKR's trademark wit, that made the rest of the story so enjoyable...
I might agree with you on that one, there was less wit in this book. Far darker and more serious.
and had too much of her maddening 'hand of god' habit of introducing new magical concepts to get the characters out of sticky situations instead of them having to figure a way out themselves.
Yep, that's about right as well. Although this book was actually less so than previous ones.
It would be worthless to immunize against most diseases after they've been contracted anyway, since the body has already been presented with immunogens and should be developing a response
Just a comment: As far as I know, the only disease for which post-infection immunization works is rabies. This is apparently because rabies travels so slowly, immunization can protect the central nervous system before the virus spreads there, even days after being bitten by a contagious animal.
At what point does it stop being short-sighted to question repeated 9+ figure (before the decimal) quarterly losses on a product? Could any company other than Microsoft have afforded to maintain "loss leader" status for so long?
Wrong perspective, I think. The reality is, Microsoft doesn't care about losses in its 'entertainment' division. It cares about overall profits. If the XBOX project helps maintain their other monopolies (meaning mainly Windows here), then it is worth it. For example, XNA helps bolster gaming on Windows by tying PC and XBOX development; ditto XBOX success gets more people developing for DirectX and less for OpenGL (and yes, I know they aren't the same category of tool, but you know what I mean); people buying movies via their XBOX keeps them from doing so through iTunes and perhaps buying an AppleTV. And so forth.
Microsoft can afford to lose $2 billion on 'entertainment' if it helps to maintain many more billions in profits from their other areas. Does the XBOX actually help that much? I don't know, but Microsoft apparently thinks that it does, or soon will.
Until you can run native code on the thing, it's a closed platform. There is no middle ground.
Call it whatever you want, it's just a name. Clearly it 'allows you to do more' than the iPhone without the ability to run AJAX apps. That's all I mean.
Almost half of researchers working in US establishments are foreign. We just don't have the homegrown talent any more.
No, that's not it. The simple facts are
The top US academic institutions have the most money of any in the world, by far.
Money can facilitate research, and hence the top researchers tend to go where the money is (so they can accomplish the most they possibly can).
The US is a large country, but small compared to the entire world. Japan has almost half as many people as the US. The EU has more. Let's not forget Russia. And then there are China and India.
Speaking of China and India, education is rapidly increasing there, leading them to actually generate an 'industrialized nation' share of scientists proportional to their population.
Given all these factors, you shouldn't be surprised at all that the faculty at top US academic institutions are diverse. It might have nothing to do with any 'decline' of US capabilities (I'm not saying there isn't such a thing, just that this particular observation doesn't really support it).
Oh, and he never does mention if he checked his fucking spam folder. I wonder what's in there.
That's a valid point, he didn't check his spam folder. However, let's say that Hotmail flagged 80% of the emails in this test as 'spam', despite the emails not being spam - that's not very good either.
Overall TFA did attempt to control for various factors, but the spam issue is indeed an oversight. Another problem is the lack of control for not having attachments - no emails were tested that lacked attachments. This might show if having an attachment raises the chance to 'vanish' (/be flagged as spam).
That is only a problem for countries that enforce software patents, that is, IIRC, the USA
Yep (possibly also Japan, though - I was never clear on that one).
Amazingly, TFA completely ignores the obvious:
"Please NOTE that downloading and installing w32codecs, libdvdcss2 and other non-free codecs without paying a fee to the concerned authorities constitutes a CRIME in the United State of America."
The message continues like this for a couple more paragraphs and I'm left wondering: who are these codecs aimed at? People who just don't mind breaking the law (like file-sharers) or people who never read EULAs and dialog boxes and simply click the OK button?
...or perhaps simply people that don't live in the US? No, wait, nobody lives outside of the US, that's just a myth anyway. Everybody knows modern humans evolved in the US, the cradle of ancient civilization/sarcasm .
As to the issue itself: It is 100% legitimate for a user to want to purchase legal codecs if that is the legal status in his country, and Linux should let people be free to do so (yes, I said 'free'). Ubuntu should think about facilitating this somehow, as an option (CNR may be one way, but since the Linspire-Microsoft deal, it doesn't sound as good anymore).
Just because an argument's ancient doesn't mean it's not still valid. Plus, after all, the number of distributions has been rising for a long time. Maybe the argument carries more weight now than it used to.
In theory, an old argument that was false can become true (or vice versa) if the facts change - of course. But actually the argument is less true today.
Sure, there are over 300 'distros' registered on DistroWatch. But the combination of essentially only two distros focusing in a major (and successful) way on enterprise users - Red Hat and SUSE - and, on the other hand, Ubuntu becoming the major enthusiast distro by far, leads to a world in which we have basically 3 main distros: Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu. If you include derivatives of them, then you really have the vast majority of users using one of three choices: Add Fedora and CentOS to Red Hat, and all the Ubuntu-based derivatives to Ubuntu (although, some of the latter are quite divergent - Linspire, for example - so this isn't clear cut. But most - like Linux Mint, for example - are close enough to Ubuntu to count as 'the same' for our purposes).
There are some great distros with small userbases, and there is also BSD (and other non-*NIX OSes). But, in Linux, you basically have 3 major players these days, which represents the market consolidating compared to the past. Is that a good thing? I think the range of 3-6 makes sense (to foster healthy competition), so actually 3 might be a tad low. But still very reasonable.
I think that when you say devices need to be entirely locked-down, you are going a bit too far. Computers aren't locked down. Cellphones have varying degrees of being locked-down (even the iPhone, a locked-down system, can run AJAX apps through the browser).
Many devices can allow certain parts of them to not be locked down. Those parts can utilize GPL3 code. Others can't. This makes the GPL3 suitable only for parts of those systems, we agree on that part.
As you and others said, if Microsoft is so worried about the GPL3, then the GPL3 must be on the right track. However, that isn't the real story here, as I see it.
The real story is how Microsoft changed its patent covenant, after the deal with Linspire was already finalized. Is Microsoft free under that deal to alter the patent covenant however they want - making it useless?
Not that the deal was useful for anything previously either. It doesn't cover 'clone products' - which perhaps includes OpenOffice and Wine, and it doesn't cover 'video game applications designed to run on a computer', nor 'unified communications', nor a long list of other things. Does it cover anything at all?
Does the linux version stil suck? It was pretty unusable back then.
On Ubuntu here. Started up ok, downloaded some media pretty fast, but failed to play them (clicking on play started some process, but then nothing happened, not even an error message).
I'll wait for the next major version before trying it again, I guess.
The GPLv3 requires you to make the hardware capable of being end-user modifiable, so that the end-user can install modified versions of the code onto the device.
[emphasis mine]
Exactly, you must be able to run modified versions of the GPL3 code on the device. But not the rest of the code. So, in the original example, the code that runs the networking stack on a cellphone can be proprietary and Tivoized, while other parts of the phone might be GPL3 (and others have other licenses).
If you must Tivoize an entire device, then GPL3 is not a possibility. However, cellphones are not such a case (for example, the OpenMoko phone has a proprietary network stack, but is otherwise open-source). In any case, the GPL3 will make sense for some projects and not others, just like any FOSS license.
>> They can write that part of the code separately, run it in userspace, under whatever license they want. Even a GPL3 kernel couldn't stop them from doing that.
> Actually, it would. Read the damn thing closer. What do you think "tivoization" is anyway?
If I have a product that runs various types of code: some GPL3 code and some (say) BSD code, then I can keep the BSD code closed-source, prevent it from running if modified (Tivoization), and so forth. I can't do the same to the GPL3 code, of course, but the GPL3 license doesn't apply to the BSD code. Or what am I missing?
For many Americans it conjured up an image of yet another left wing media project, and to the rest of the world it was, rather bizarrely, being associated with the policies of the Bush administration.
Not 'bizarre' at all. Actually I and everyone I know expected exactly those reactions, and were therefore puzzled by the name choice of 'Democracy Player'. It was just a half-step better then 'Freedom Player' (to make the comparison to 'Freedom Fries' even clearer, not that there is any need).
The project itself is a nice idea. Hopefully the misguided name choice didn't set it back too much.
Starting with the hypothesis that consciousness is purely a physical thing (i.e. the atoms and electric signals firing in your brain, and there is no soul or wonky business like that)--a hypothesis that I happen to agree with. It is a *profoundly* mysterious question if it would, in fact, be the same "you" inside if your brain were switched off for a while and then turned back on. Suppose in the time you were shut off, it were possible to make an exact copy of yourself, down to the atomic level, and then both copies were turned back on. Which one is "you"? Obviously both of you would think you were the original since you share the exact same memories.
It's one of those questions that seem unanswerable.
You appear to contradict yourself. If consciousness is purely physical - just material, no truly 'subjective' side to it - then there is no mystery here. There are now an original system and a copy of that system. Nothing odd about that. Which is 'you', you ask? Well, legally it would probably be the original one. Your friends might also think the original was 'you'. They might be fooled by the other, but then an identical twin might do the same; again, not odd at all. Is there any other meaning to the question "which is 'you'?", assuming that the physical brain is all there is?
The real reason there seems to be a mystery here is the assumption that there is a subjective quality to consciousness. There is 'something it is like' to be you (Nagel), there are subjective qualities to your conscious experience; there is 'someone' that is having sensory experiences when your physical form perceives something using its senses. It is then somewhat odd to think about an identical copy of your body, for then, would that nonphysical 'someone' have subjective experiences corresponding to sensory information arriving at the original physical form, or the copy of it? For 'you' is not the physical body, 'you' is the 'someone' having subjective conscious experiences. To which physical body is the 'you' then bound?
That is the line of thought that many dualists arrive at - if you assume both a physical form, and subjective nonphysical experiences, then this is an issue to be dealt with. However, many non-dualists have no problem with this matter at all, among them, materialists. In other words, I think you haven't fully embraced materialism as much as you think you have;) (Not that I'm recommending it; I'm not a materialist myself - but not a dualist either.)
As opposed to closed commercial software... ...where fending off Microsoft and IBM is a piece of cake.
Exactly what I was thinking. Specifically, they are trying to enter a market in which there is already a powerful, established player, with a successful product - VMWare. And other competitors are also in the wings (Microsoft, in particular, but not directly for virtualizing Linux-on-Linux, perhaps). By going open-source, they gain some benefits in competing with VMWare (which is not open-source), namely, that it can be in the main repos of Linux distros and therefore more convenient to test-drive than VMWare, and so forth.
But yes, there are problems with any business strategy - proprietary, FOSS, or whatever. Each has advantages and disadvantages.
For a lot of companies, code under the GPLv3 is simply not usable. Period. Cell phone companies, to use an earlier example, *cannot* comply with the restrictions of the GPLv3 and still use the necessary code they have to use to make the thing work on the network.
Let's assume that you're right about that (but I have no idea of the particulars of cellphone companies). If so, this would only refer, presumably, to the part of the cellphone software that accesses the network. So that particular part could not be GPL3. So what? They can write that part of the code separately, run it in userspace, under whatever license they want. Even a GPL3 kernel couldn't stop them from doing that.
No single license is suitable for every single project. And, unsurprisingly, we have a multitude of licenses. GPL3 will be just one more of those licenses. Linux distros already have dozens of them.
As for
The end result is that GPLv3 code will, eventually, stagnate. Moving code to GPLv3 basically ensures that nobody will use it other than hobbyists.
Odd, then, that so many corporations (IBM, Sun, Novell, Red Hat) would participate in the GPL3 process and then voice approval for it when it was complete. So clearly something is wrong in your reasoning.
I'm guessing you never used BeOS; by comparison Linux looks weak in terms of responsiveness.
That's true, I haven't had the opportunity. I have looked at videos of BeOS, though, and tried Haiku. But I guess it is possible that neither is representative enough.
My point was that, using Linux, I don't really feel the need for it to be more responsive. But perhaps you are right, and I am just used to a certain type of responsiveness.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think the $200 Asus EEE is more the way to go than cheap desktops. Laptops are already outselling desktops, so a mobile offering makes more sense to focus on.
More specifically, the $200 Asus EEE and things like Intel's Mobile Internet Device may bring in a new era of computer use. (The iPhone can be seen as part of that trend, btw - a small, mobile internet-capable machine; also the Nokia Tablet.) The goal should be an affordable (sub-$300) device with an attractive design, that people can use for email, social networking, web browsing, etc. It could take off among college students, for example. In fact this may be the exact goal of Intel's MID partnership with Ubuntu.
Microsoft sees that open-source is being adopted - for example, MySQL has about the same market share as Microsoft SQL Server, despite being far newer. Ditto, languages such as Ruby and Python. Fact is, if these tools don't run well on Windows, it may push people to other platforms, and that is Microsoft's only fear. By working 'with' the open-source community, they will be trying to make Windows the platform on which major FOSS projects work best.
In other words, if lots of people are going to be using MySQL anyway, then Microsoft might be willing to help MySQL work well on Windows, just so those people aren't forced to use Linux. Simple tactics.
The trickier strategy here will be this, I think: Microsoft open-source projects will have the Windows side heavily-funded by Microsoft. Support for other platforms will be left 'to the community', and perhaps discouraged in various minor ways. The goal will be to get those projects to work on Linux, but work better on Windows, hence motivating use of the Windows platform. The FOSS community should be prepared for this.
That piracy is a useful tool for Microsoft has been clear even far before the year 2000, during the period in which it was useful to Microsoft in the US and Europe. Businessweek's article here in TFA is therefore nothing more than preaching to the choir; Microsoft knows this already, and is already doing this, in fact, they practically wrote the book about this. What's next, a Businessweek editorial about how Walmart should cut prices in order to run Mon&Pop stores out of business?
Just think... a generation of children in the third world will learn programming just in order to hack around the anti-porn filters.
Microsoft can afford to lose $2 billion on 'entertainment' if it helps to maintain many more billions in profits from their other areas. Does the XBOX actually help that much? I don't know, but Microsoft apparently thinks that it does, or soon will.
-
The top US academic institutions have the most money of any in the world, by far.
-
Money can facilitate research, and hence the top researchers tend to go where the money is (so they can accomplish the most they possibly can).
-
The US is a large country, but small compared to the entire world. Japan has almost half as many people as the US. The EU has more. Let's not forget Russia. And then there are China and India.
-
Speaking of China and India, education is rapidly increasing there, leading them to actually generate an 'industrialized nation' share of scientists proportional to their population.
Given all these factors, you shouldn't be surprised at all that the faculty at top US academic institutions are diverse. It might have nothing to do with any 'decline' of US capabilities (I'm not saying there isn't such a thing, just that this particular observation doesn't really support it).Overall TFA did attempt to control for various factors, but the spam issue is indeed an oversight. Another problem is the lack of control for not having attachments - no emails were tested that lacked attachments. This might show if having an attachment raises the chance to 'vanish' (/be flagged as spam).
Amazingly, TFA completely ignores the obvious:
As to the issue itself: It is 100% legitimate for a user to want to purchase legal codecs if that is the legal status in his country, and Linux should let people be free to do so (yes, I said 'free'). Ubuntu should think about facilitating this somehow, as an option (CNR may be one way, but since the Linspire-Microsoft deal, it doesn't sound as good anymore).
Sure, there are over 300 'distros' registered on DistroWatch. But the combination of essentially only two distros focusing in a major (and successful) way on enterprise users - Red Hat and SUSE - and, on the other hand, Ubuntu becoming the major enthusiast distro by far, leads to a world in which we have basically 3 main distros: Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu. If you include derivatives of them, then you really have the vast majority of users using one of three choices: Add Fedora and CentOS to Red Hat, and all the Ubuntu-based derivatives to Ubuntu (although, some of the latter are quite divergent - Linspire, for example - so this isn't clear cut. But most - like Linux Mint, for example - are close enough to Ubuntu to count as 'the same' for our purposes).
There are some great distros with small userbases, and there is also BSD (and other non-*NIX OSes). But, in Linux, you basically have 3 major players these days, which represents the market consolidating compared to the past. Is that a good thing? I think the range of 3-6 makes sense (to foster healthy competition), so actually 3 might be a tad low. But still very reasonable.
I think that when you say devices need to be entirely locked-down, you are going a bit too far. Computers aren't locked down. Cellphones have varying degrees of being locked-down (even the iPhone, a locked-down system, can run AJAX apps through the browser).
Many devices can allow certain parts of them to not be locked down. Those parts can utilize GPL3 code. Others can't. This makes the GPL3 suitable only for parts of those systems, we agree on that part.
The real story is how Microsoft changed its patent covenant, after the deal with Linspire was already finalized. Is Microsoft free under that deal to alter the patent covenant however they want - making it useless?
Not that the deal was useful for anything previously either. It doesn't cover 'clone products' - which perhaps includes OpenOffice and Wine, and it doesn't cover 'video game applications designed to run on a computer', nor 'unified communications', nor a long list of other things. Does it cover anything at all?
I'll wait for the next major version before trying it again, I guess.
Exactly, you must be able to run modified versions of the GPL3 code on the device. But not the rest of the code. So, in the original example, the code that runs the networking stack on a cellphone can be proprietary and Tivoized, while other parts of the phone might be GPL3 (and others have other licenses).
If you must Tivoize an entire device, then GPL3 is not a possibility. However, cellphones are not such a case (for example, the OpenMoko phone has a proprietary network stack, but is otherwise open-source). In any case, the GPL3 will make sense for some projects and not others, just like any FOSS license.
>> They can write that part of the code separately, run it in userspace, under whatever license they want. Even a GPL3 kernel couldn't stop them from doing that.
> Actually, it would. Read the damn thing closer. What do you think "tivoization" is anyway?
If I have a product that runs various types of code: some GPL3 code and some (say) BSD code, then I can keep the BSD code closed-source, prevent it from running if modified (Tivoization), and so forth. I can't do the same to the GPL3 code, of course, but the GPL3 license doesn't apply to the BSD code. Or what am I missing?
Not 'bizarre' at all. Actually I and everyone I know expected exactly those reactions, and were therefore puzzled by the name choice of 'Democracy Player'. It was just a half-step better then 'Freedom Player' (to make the comparison to 'Freedom Fries' even clearer, not that there is any need).
The project itself is a nice idea. Hopefully the misguided name choice didn't set it back too much.
The real reason there seems to be a mystery here is the assumption that there is a subjective quality to consciousness. There is 'something it is like' to be you (Nagel), there are subjective qualities to your conscious experience; there is 'someone' that is having sensory experiences when your physical form perceives something using its senses. It is then somewhat odd to think about an identical copy of your body, for then, would that nonphysical 'someone' have subjective experiences corresponding to sensory information arriving at the original physical form, or the copy of it? For 'you' is not the physical body, 'you' is the 'someone' having subjective conscious experiences. To which physical body is the 'you' then bound?
That is the line of thought that many dualists arrive at - if you assume both a physical form, and subjective nonphysical experiences, then this is an issue to be dealt with. However, many non-dualists have no problem with this matter at all, among them, materialists. In other words, I think you haven't fully embraced materialism as much as you think you have
But yes, there are problems with any business strategy - proprietary, FOSS, or whatever. Each has advantages and disadvantages.
Let's assume that you're right about that (but I have no idea of the particulars of cellphone companies). If so, this would only refer, presumably, to the part of the cellphone software that accesses the network. So that particular part could not be GPL3. So what? They can write that part of the code separately, run it in userspace, under whatever license they want. Even a GPL3 kernel couldn't stop them from doing that.
No single license is suitable for every single project. And, unsurprisingly, we have a multitude of licenses. GPL3 will be just one more of those licenses. Linux distros already have dozens of them.
As for Odd, then, that so many corporations (IBM, Sun, Novell, Red Hat) would participate in the GPL3 process and then voice approval for it when it was complete. So clearly something is wrong in your reasoning.
My point was that, using Linux, I don't really feel the need for it to be more responsive. But perhaps you are right, and I am just used to a certain type of responsiveness.