Copies of SuSe and support that Microsoft can sell to it's customers as part of total solutions. Microsoft will also get a proportion of Novells sales of SuSe for the next 5 years. If SuSe sells well it could (but is unlikely to) be profitable for Microsoft.
The deal is supposed to be about interoperability. Microsoft has a couple of standards that they would like to see adopted wider..NET is a major one at the moment. I'll bet they'd rather Mono be the open source alternative (once embraced it can be extended and extinguished later with ease) than a whole different system controlled by someone else like Sun.
Microsoft paid Apple to use Internet Explorer and it gave IE important extra marketshare to crush Netscape.
Novell are willing to play ball with Microsoft and it will now be easy for Novell to add some proprietary software packages co-authored by Microsoft which plays nice with Microsoft products like Exchange or even runs IE7 on Linux. This would all be well covered with lots and lots of patents to prevent wider adoption.
End result is Novell have an advantage for companies which mix Windows and Linux which keeps companies tied to core Microsoft technologies long enough for Microsoft to come up with (copy) the next big thing.
That's true. On the other hand many people have more than one TV. Even if they don't already it's pretty simple. Buy a HD TV, put your old TV in your bedroom or somewhere (if you're buying HD you probably already had a good TV) and hook your wii up to that.
When I was a kid playing my Amiga we had only one TV and I couldn't play when someone else wanted to watch TV. Consoles aren't social that way. If you're playing a lot and sharing the TV with someone else then additional TVs are a must.
Getting content for HD screens is still a problem. Blu-Ray/HD-DVD hasn't played out yet and it could be a couple of years before it's clear which way to go. There's a limited choice of broadcast HD and not everyone can get it in their area. Some people have HD already (or soon) and for them a PS3 or Xbox 360 might be a better idea but I reckon that this battle in the console war will be decided before HD takes over.
I couldn't agree more. The scouring of the Shire was one of the most important things in the book. In the classical tradition of epic the journey home is an essential part. In the Odyssey and the Aeneid the troubles experienced by the heroes on their arrival are very important parts of the story.
I was most disappointed that the scouring wasn't even in the extended edition because it has been hinted at in the Two Towers. Instead we were left with a derivative Hollywood ending with 1/2 hour of hugging.
The whole point of the scouring is that Frodo isn't regarded as a hero in the Shire even though he saved Middle Earth. The hobbits had their own problems and weren't interested in hearing about difficult to understand adventures on the other side of the world. Merry and Pippin fought in a war though and when they came back they saved the Shire.
It's removing the ending which was the point to the story in the first place. It's what completes the explanation of hobbits as characters.
In the Western world it can be argued that there hasn't been selection pressure for 50 years. I don't agree with that as I think that changes in our current society have been very stressful for people who aren't suited to it. Literacy is an example of something which is very important nowadays but wasn't as much in the past. People with learning difficulties find it harder to cope and anti-social aggression doesn't have the side benefits it once did.
Previous to the last 50 years there have been massively historical events that caused millions of deaths. The World Wars and mechanised warefare, Spanish Flu, antibiotics (are recent enough), American Civil War, the end of slavery, millions of people colonising areas totally unlike the areas of their ancestors, coal mines, pollution, universal education, polio, smallpox.
People are still under selection pressure today. There are millions of people starving and fighting malaria or Aids. Selection pressure has changed. In Western Society there's a stronger focus on beauty as opposed to brawn.
The world is a big place and evolution happens more slowly in large populations especially ones with highly asynchronous (and changing from generation to generation) selection pressures. Evolution also becomes much harder to predict and understand.
That's interesting because a 4 way stop sign is an example of a junction which in Europe would have traffic lights or a roundabout. There's no equivalent and in Europe and anytime I drive in the US it always strikes me how disciplined and courteous drivers are at 4 way stop signs.
I've heard about the idea of removing footpaths etc in many small towns for years and to be honest I'm not a fan. It works ok on certain forms of street (especially narrow lanes with very little through traffic).
At other times it's looked very dangerous. Deliberately making a road dangerous in the hope of slowing down traffic is not a good idea. Speed ramps are possibly an exception but eliminating footpaths and lines from the centre of a road just cause confusion and exacerbate bad driving habits. You get people parking everywhere and turning right (driving on the left in Ireland) with the car pulled so far over to the left that cars behind get stuck unnecessarily and drivers get pissed off and aggressive.
This is where whitelisting would be useful. Warn people when a site they are visiting is less than two days old (and probably isn't in Google cache). Mail servers could add links from spam messages automatically to a temporary black list so that they get added much faster.
That would reduce the effectiveness of most phishing sites to almost nothing.
A Novell/Microsoft patent case against Linux has something else to think about now. I don't think Sun are in any rush to GPL Solaris but they're letting Microsoft know that Sun are the big winners in a big legal case between Windows and Linux.
They're basically saying "go ahead, drive an army of developers and users to us, see what good that does ya".
Personally I'd prefer if Wikipedia had a small few (maybe adsense) ads so that I could support them by viewing ads.
Wikipedia could even have it set to logged in users don't see ads or have an opt-in ads system. Instead what I see are dozens of sites which copy wikipedia content, add ads and make it more difficult to search Google (Google is less relevant if 5 of the top 20 searches are just rehashed wikipedia articles further down the list).
Microsoft pay Universal money for each Zune sold. Maybe that helps them get a better deal with Universal songs on the Zune Marketplace. The songs will still be $0.99 though.
The other record labels don't get any money so they seem to be losing out.
What about European/rest of world customers? Does this mean that the Zune will be a different price in each country due to licensing requirements? What about not available?
To me this looks like honest customers being charged for music twice. The RIAA has been quite vocal about p2p piracy. Does this mean they won't go after Zune owners? I don't think so.
Or more specifically Novell will stay out of any patent based legal attack by Microsoft on another distro/application developer because they're indemnified.
Novell own a lot of IP such as original UNIX copyrights. Microsoft suing over Linux patent violation might have been a problem if it broke the agreement Novell and Microsoft came to after the previous round of litigation. Going after someone who's already got money off you for antitrust violations might not be a risk they're willing to take.
That wouldn't work. The GPL includes freedom to fork. Any improvements added to Linux would be available to everyone else. There'd still be 100s of distros out there and Microsoft would never get a chance to kill anything GPL with bloat.
Microsoft could add a proprietary application stack on top of Linux and then hope people started using it. To do that they'd need to offer Office/Exchange etc on Linux (if they stayed close source they could be set to only run on MS Linux). To get significant marketshare it would need to take people away from Windows at least as fast as it takes people within Linux.
It'd be a big risk for Dell. In fact almost of the manufacturers with any reach would be too scared to try something like that. Microsoft are too strong.
Dell started as a one man operation.
For a company to become a significant PC manufacturer selling pre-installed Linux they'll be a mostly unknown company or one which isn't currently in that market. There's also the outside possibility that a PC manufacturer about to go bankrupt might be willing to bet everything on windows.
Companies which aren't currently in the PC market but could contract to Asustek et al. might include Red Hat, Suse, Sun, Canonical or IBM. There'd be a certain attraction to some customers (especially enterprise) knowing that they can get guaranteed hardware compatibility.
It's free as in.... not ripping off the customer for the moment. They're charging customers once instead of twice. That's as close are you're going to get to free in the cell phone business. You can't extract money from a market that doesn't exist. Instead you lower the price to get people hooked and then drive up costs. It was exactly the same thing with downloadable ringtones and SMS messaging.
FTA: "Right now, we're focused on getting people to view mobile music as something that's interesting and exciting. You've got to build a base. Once you do that, there are all sorts of ways to drive revenue from it," says Jim Ryan, vice-president of consumer data services at Cingular.
Yes whatever will Apple do about the Zune? Microsoft don't include either a cable for syncing or an AC adaptor. The Zune is pretty useless out of the box. If they are both part of that ($99) pack then surely it's because it's not already included.
http://www.zune.net/en-us/accessories/zune/zunehom eavpack.htm
Interesting I can't see anywhere on the Zune site where it actually states that the Zune comes with headphones. Does it? If it does include them then what are they like?
The delays in Blu-Ray players probably aren't that big a deal in the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray war. Getting players out for a few early adopters willing to pay huge money won't make a difference in the end.
The PS3 though is in a much more precarious position. Timing is critical in the console industry right now. Sony are doing everything they can do ease supply shortages. That's what this story is about, Blu-Ray players have been delayed indefinitely (probably a few months) so that there's less of a shortage of PS3s.
The PS3 is important for Blu-Ray because it will account for a large proportion of the short and medium term installed base. If the PS3 fails to sell well then HD-DVD players will probably start to outsell Blu-Ray players.
I can imagine that companies like LG are really pissed right now. They're not saying much in public and that's probably because Sony are leaning on them and they know that criticising Sony is counterproductive (for them).
Even when it only takes 10 minutes to go to the video store there's still the problem that you might not like anything (or the video you wanted isn't available). Then you either rent something else or get the next best thing. That's not so much fun. Neither is spending 30 minutes in the video store trying to pick something.
Videos are supposed to be relaxing. People have a low threshold for hassle on something that's supposed to be hassle free.
Picking up the videos is not and never has been the worst part. What's really annoying is having to bring the tape back. Video stores make most of their money from late returns. At $6 a movie you'd have paid for it if it's a day or two late. Invariably, I'm busy the day after I rent something.
TV on iTS isn't really competing with broadcast TV. It's a service for people who miss TV shows or want to watch shows on portable devices.
It competes against buying the DVD box set of a whole series. Selling a single song isn't practical on CD. Buying single episodes of a TV show isn't practical for DVDs. Apple will always have that disadvantage trying to sell movies online. They can't even include the extras usually included on a DVD. Movies are much more sensitive to quality than TV shows. That's why people go to the cinema.
TV shows have been much more successful than movies (on iTS) but that's because it will take time. At the moment movies are just an extra feature for people who happen to own a new hard drive iPod.
Slashdot Mirror
Copies of SuSe and support that Microsoft can sell to it's customers as part of total solutions. Microsoft will also get a proportion of Novells sales of SuSe for the next 5 years. If SuSe sells well it could (but is unlikely to) be profitable for Microsoft.
.NET is a major one at the moment. I'll bet they'd rather Mono be the open source alternative (once embraced it can be extended and extinguished later with ease) than a whole different system controlled by someone else like Sun.
The deal is supposed to be about interoperability. Microsoft has a couple of standards that they would like to see adopted wider.
Microsoft paid Apple to use Internet Explorer and it gave IE important extra marketshare to crush Netscape.
Novell are willing to play ball with Microsoft and it will now be easy for Novell to add some proprietary software packages co-authored by Microsoft which plays nice with Microsoft products like Exchange or even runs IE7 on Linux. This would all be well covered with lots and lots of patents to prevent wider adoption.
End result is Novell have an advantage for companies which mix Windows and Linux which keeps companies tied to core Microsoft technologies long enough for Microsoft to come up with (copy) the next big thing.
That's true. On the other hand many people have more than one TV. Even if they don't already it's pretty simple. Buy a HD TV, put your old TV in your bedroom or somewhere (if you're buying HD you probably already had a good TV) and hook your wii up to that.
When I was a kid playing my Amiga we had only one TV and I couldn't play when someone else wanted to watch TV. Consoles aren't social that way. If you're playing a lot and sharing the TV with someone else then additional TVs are a must.
Getting content for HD screens is still a problem. Blu-Ray/HD-DVD hasn't played out yet and it could be a couple of years before it's clear which way to go. There's a limited choice of broadcast HD and not everyone can get it in their area. Some people have HD already (or soon) and for them a PS3 or Xbox 360 might be a better idea but I reckon that this battle in the console war will be decided before HD takes over.
I couldn't agree more. The scouring of the Shire was one of the most important things in the book. In the classical tradition of epic the journey home is an essential part. In the Odyssey and the Aeneid the troubles experienced by the heroes on their arrival are very important parts of the story.
I was most disappointed that the scouring wasn't even in the extended edition because it has been hinted at in the Two Towers. Instead we were left with a derivative Hollywood ending with 1/2 hour of hugging.
The whole point of the scouring is that Frodo isn't regarded as a hero in the Shire even though he saved Middle Earth. The hobbits had their own problems and weren't interested in hearing about difficult to understand adventures on the other side of the world. Merry and Pippin fought in a war though and when they came back they saved the Shire.
It's removing the ending which was the point to the story in the first place. It's what completes the explanation of hobbits as characters.
In the Western world it can be argued that there hasn't been selection pressure for 50 years. I don't agree with that as I think that changes in our current society have been very stressful for people who aren't suited to it. Literacy is an example of something which is very important nowadays but wasn't as much in the past. People with learning difficulties find it harder to cope and anti-social aggression doesn't have the side benefits it once did.
Previous to the last 50 years there have been massively historical events that caused millions of deaths. The World Wars and mechanised warefare, Spanish Flu, antibiotics (are recent enough), American Civil War, the end of slavery, millions of people colonising areas totally unlike the areas of their ancestors, coal mines, pollution, universal education, polio, smallpox.
People are still under selection pressure today. There are millions of people starving and fighting malaria or Aids. Selection pressure has changed. In Western Society there's a stronger focus on beauty as opposed to brawn.
The world is a big place and evolution happens more slowly in large populations especially ones with highly asynchronous (and changing from generation to generation) selection pressures. Evolution also becomes much harder to predict and understand.
That's interesting because a 4 way stop sign is an example of a junction which in Europe would have traffic lights or a roundabout. There's no equivalent and in Europe and anytime I drive in the US it always strikes me how disciplined and courteous drivers are at 4 way stop signs.
I've heard about the idea of removing footpaths etc in many small towns for years and to be honest I'm not a fan. It works ok on certain forms of street (especially narrow lanes with very little through traffic).
At other times it's looked very dangerous. Deliberately making a road dangerous in the hope of slowing down traffic is not a good idea. Speed ramps are possibly an exception but eliminating footpaths and lines from the centre of a road just cause confusion and exacerbate bad driving habits. You get people parking everywhere and turning right (driving on the left in Ireland) with the car pulled so far over to the left that cars behind get stuck unnecessarily and drivers get pissed off and aggressive.
This is where whitelisting would be useful. Warn people when a site they are visiting is less than two days old (and probably isn't in Google cache). Mail servers could add links from spam messages automatically to a temporary black list so that they get added much faster.
That would reduce the effectiveness of most phishing sites to almost nothing.
A Novell/Microsoft patent case against Linux has something else to think about now. I don't think Sun are in any rush to GPL Solaris but they're letting Microsoft know that Sun are the big winners in a big legal case between Windows and Linux.
They're basically saying "go ahead, drive an army of developers and users to us, see what good that does ya".
Personally I'd prefer if Wikipedia had a small few (maybe adsense) ads so that I could support them by viewing ads.
Wikipedia could even have it set to logged in users don't see ads or have an opt-in ads system. Instead what I see are dozens of sites which copy wikipedia content, add ads and make it more difficult to search Google (Google is less relevant if 5 of the top 20 searches are just rehashed wikipedia articles further down the list).
Yeah. The Flying Spaghetti Monster was obscuring the camera as a practical joke on creationists.
Microsoft pay Universal money for each Zune sold. Maybe that helps them get a better deal with Universal songs on the Zune Marketplace. The songs will still be $0.99 though.
The other record labels don't get any money so they seem to be losing out.
What about European/rest of world customers? Does this mean that the Zune will be a different price in each country due to licensing requirements? What about not available?
To me this looks like honest customers being charged for music twice. The RIAA has been quite vocal about p2p piracy. Does this mean they won't go after Zune owners? I don't think so.
It's the latest slashdot meme
By tomorrow every article will also be tagged "crywolf"
read Isaac Asimov
s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foundation_Serie
Or more specifically Novell will stay out of any patent based legal attack by Microsoft on another distro/application developer because they're indemnified.
Novell own a lot of IP such as original UNIX copyrights. Microsoft suing over Linux patent violation might have been a problem if it broke the agreement Novell and Microsoft came to after the previous round of litigation. Going after someone who's already got money off you for antitrust violations might not be a risk they're willing to take.
That wouldn't work. The GPL includes freedom to fork. Any improvements added to Linux would be available to everyone else. There'd still be 100s of distros out there and Microsoft would never get a chance to kill anything GPL with bloat.
Microsoft could add a proprietary application stack on top of Linux and then hope people started using it. To do that they'd need to offer Office/Exchange etc on Linux (if they stayed close source they could be set to only run on MS Linux). To get significant marketshare it would need to take people away from Windows at least as fast as it takes people within Linux.
I sense a disturbance in the source
No 13 is a vicious lie! There's no truth in it whatsoever
Dell started as a one man operation. For a company to become a significant PC manufacturer selling pre-installed Linux they'll be a mostly unknown company or one which isn't currently in that market. There's also the outside possibility that a PC manufacturer about to go bankrupt might be willing to bet everything on windows. Companies which aren't currently in the PC market but could contract to Asustek et al. might include Red Hat, Suse, Sun, Canonical or IBM. There'd be a certain attraction to some customers (especially enterprise) knowing that they can get guaranteed hardware compatibility.
It's free as in.... not ripping off the customer for the moment. They're charging customers once instead of twice. That's as close are you're going to get to free in the cell phone business. You can't extract money from a market that doesn't exist. Instead you lower the price to get people hooked and then drive up costs. It was exactly the same thing with downloadable ringtones and SMS messaging.
FTA: "Right now, we're focused on getting people to view mobile music as something that's interesting and exciting. You've got to build a base. Once you do that, there are all sorts of ways to drive revenue from it," says Jim Ryan, vice-president of consumer data services at Cingular.
From that page:
In the box * iPod * Earphones * USB 2.0 cable * Dock adapter for use with Universal Dock * Case * Quick Start guide
Interesting I can't see anywhere on the Zune site where it actually states that the Zune comes with headphones. Does it? If it does include them then what are they like?
But then you may as well just take his wallet, sell the PS3, his iPod and his shoes. Crafty Sony, they've thought of everything.
Step 1 doesn't work. Where are you going to get a PS3?
The delays in Blu-Ray players probably aren't that big a deal in the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray war. Getting players out for a few early adopters willing to pay huge money won't make a difference in the end.
The PS3 though is in a much more precarious position. Timing is critical in the console industry right now. Sony are doing everything they can do ease supply shortages. That's what this story is about, Blu-Ray players have been delayed indefinitely (probably a few months) so that there's less of a shortage of PS3s.
The PS3 is important for Blu-Ray because it will account for a large proportion of the short and medium term installed base. If the PS3 fails to sell well then HD-DVD players will probably start to outsell Blu-Ray players.
I can imagine that companies like LG are really pissed right now. They're not saying much in public and that's probably because Sony are leaning on them and they know that criticising Sony is counterproductive (for them).
$2, I wish!
Even when it only takes 10 minutes to go to the video store there's still the problem that you might not like anything (or the video you wanted isn't available). Then you either rent something else or get the next best thing. That's not so much fun. Neither is spending 30 minutes in the video store trying to pick something.
Videos are supposed to be relaxing. People have a low threshold for hassle on something that's supposed to be hassle free.
Picking up the videos is not and never has been the worst part. What's really annoying is having to bring the tape back. Video stores make most of their money from late returns. At $6 a movie you'd have paid for it if it's a day or two late. Invariably, I'm busy the day after I rent something.
I'm not the only one. DVD sales are huge.
TV on iTS isn't really competing with broadcast TV. It's a service for people who miss TV shows or want to watch shows on portable devices.
It competes against buying the DVD box set of a whole series. Selling a single song isn't practical on CD. Buying single episodes of a TV show isn't practical for DVDs. Apple will always have that disadvantage trying to sell movies online. They can't even include the extras usually included on a DVD. Movies are much more sensitive to quality than TV shows. That's why people go to the cinema.
TV shows have been much more successful than movies (on iTS) but that's because it will take time. At the moment movies are just an extra feature for people who happen to own a new hard drive iPod.