...what was it that allowed Microsoft to win out over the various waring Unix operating systems a few years ago?
Oh, yes, I remember, they couldn't work together to provide a unified user experience, each wanted to be distinct and make stuff different just for the sake of being different.
There seems to be a general forgetting of who the real enemy is.
In many countries, if the market leader is caught paying to prevent a compeditors product being stocked they have broken the law. While a near monopoly is perfectly legal, using that position to prevent others from attempting to gain market share will land the company in the courts.
Monopolies are almost always bad for the customer. A monopoly may talk about "innovation" and "invention" but they will limit change to the absolute minimum so as to maximise profit (real research and marketing is expensive so why waste the money when there is no competition.)
Zune will sell because most people don't know nor care about DRM.
However, in a couple of years time when the early adopters want to move on to a different player there will be seven kinds of sh*t flying about because they can't move their legal music to the new toy.
Network security needs widespread attention to detail. Some guy in a Washington office won't make one jot of difference unless he starts investigating why most government computer services are based on a product that is insecure by design.
Sadly, this is a fallicy that is widespread in people who are clueless about security. Take a closed source product from Microsoft for example. How many people within MS have access to that code? How many still work for MS? How many outside the US both have had access to the code and no longer work for MS? How many are pissed that they were fired or laid off?
You have to look at security as a cost v. reward thing. It may be very expensive to obtain and reverse engineer a binary program which is used as part of a security system. But if it uses "Security through obscurity", you only have to do it once. If you use a real security system, it has to be cracked every time the keys change.
"The real goal is to figure out a way to get an 'operating system' royalty per TV. 10's of millions of TV's per year at $10-$20 per TV is a nice little 'operating system' business." -- Jeff Raikes of Microsoft
``Hey, I've got an ebook that is difficult to read, let's sell it to students. We'll fix the readability problems later.''
The world is in serious need of open textbooks to put an end to the ripping off of students. This problem existed 30 years ago and so far nothing has been done to prevent the publishers making education more expensive than it need be.
SNS are in the fashion business which is both to their advantage and disadvantage. Millions will flock to a currently fashionable site but equally an unfashionable site will die overnight as the users move elsewhere.
...I'm all in favour of wireless peripherals as it's a lot easier to monitor what is going on. Having to break in and attach bugs to CAT5 was getting to be boring.
Brent O. Hatch is one of SCOs many lawyers. One wonders if any part of the new law would be of any help to SCO grabbing the work on many Linux programmers?
No, at this point IBM is being accused of many things by TSG and clearly wants either the accusations to be thrown out by the court or a trial to clear their name.
Sometimes reputation has to be publically defended.
Of course, there is the alternative theory, IBM lawyers like to play with their lunch before eating it:-)
If you have a 1 core and a 4 core CPU, the manufactoring cost of the 4 core CPU is little greater than the 1 core CPU. Indeed, it soon makes more sense to make only 4 core CPUs and sell those with failed cores as 1, 2 or 3 core CPUs.
Within 12 months 4 core CPUs will be common for top of the range PCs; 12 months after that 4 cores will be the minimum acceptable CPU.
As the production of 8 core CPU ramps up the same thing will happen.
It may not be rational, but then this $1000 laptop is about 10 times faster than the first $5 million supercomputer I used.
...is strongly dependent on the interfaces it presents to the world. The pressure is to push more and more functions onto a chip so that external interfaces can be eliminated. This is the victory of the general purpose computer. While in the short term it is always possible to build faster, more speciallised hardware to perform a function, eventually a faster CPU chip which implements the same facility in software becomes cheaper and generic.
The piracy that costs the companies that the RIAA represents are the undocumented pressings that appear from CD factories throughout the world. Compared to that, the kids sharing a few files is inconcequential.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yes, I remember, they couldn't work together to provide a unified user experience, each wanted to be distinct and make stuff different just for the sake of being different.
There seems to be a general forgetting of who the real enemy is.
...exactly how well did prohibition work last time?
If you treat everybody you meet as a criminal eventually someone will lose their cool and there will be a major incident.
The airport goons exist merely to enforce stupid security theatre. Nothing they do makes you one jot safer.
There I was expecting a Jetsons-like future and we seem to be getting a Startrek-like future.
Very disappointing.
Monopolies are almost always bad for the customer. A monopoly may talk about "innovation" and "invention" but they will limit change to the absolute minimum so as to maximise profit (real research and marketing is expensive so why waste the money when there is no competition.)
Zune will sell because most people don't know nor care about DRM.
However, in a couple of years time when the early adopters want to move on to a different player there will be seven kinds of sh*t flying about because they can't move their legal music to the new toy.
Network security needs widespread attention to detail. Some guy in a Washington office won't make one jot of difference unless he starts investigating why most government computer services are based on a product that is insecure by design.
Sadly, this is a fallicy that is widespread in people who are clueless about security. Take a closed source product from Microsoft for example. How many people within MS have access to that code? How many still work for MS? How many outside the US both have had access to the code and no longer work for MS?
How many are pissed that they were fired or laid off?
You have to look at security as a cost v. reward thing. It may be very expensive to obtain and reverse engineer a binary program which is used as part of a security system. But if it uses "Security through obscurity", you only have to do it once. If you use a real security system, it has to be cracked every time the keys change.
"The real goal is to figure out a way to get an 'operating system'
royalty per TV. 10's of millions of TV's per year at $10-$20 per TV
is a nice little 'operating system' business." -- Jeff Raikes of Microsoft
As a serial animal botherer, it was bound to happen eventually.
...PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. -- Edward Tufte
16Gb of storage would allow you to hold the text of about 40,000 average length paperback books.
The world is in serious need of open textbooks to put an end to the ripping off of students. This problem existed 30 years ago and so far nothing has been done to prevent the publishers making education more expensive than it need be.
There is a company out there that cannot reliably program a computer to add up and announce the total.
I guess that their next step is to patent voting and do a SCO and sue everybody in sight...
I wouldn't be at all surprised if 90% of the functionality could not be provided by secure web servers and good quality wiki.
But that would be cheap and quick to implement and not much chance of making a vast profit.
SNS are in the fashion business which is both to their advantage and disadvantage. Millions will flock to a currently fashionable site but equally an unfashionable site will die overnight as the users move elsewhere.
...I'm all in favour of wireless peripherals as it's a lot easier to monitor what is going on. Having to break in and attach bugs to CAT5 was getting to be boring.
Brent O. Hatch is one of SCOs many lawyers. One wonders if any part of the new law would be of any help to SCO grabbing the work on many Linux programmers?
First to file still allows prior art - why wouldn't it?
No, at this point IBM is being accused of many things by TSG and clearly wants either the accusations to be thrown out by the court or a trial to clear their name.
:-)
Sometimes reputation has to be publically defended.
Of course, there is the alternative theory, IBM lawyers like to play with their lunch before eating it
If you have a 1 core and a 4 core CPU, the manufactoring cost of the 4 core CPU is little greater than the 1 core CPU. Indeed, it soon makes more sense to make only 4 core CPUs and sell those with failed cores as 1, 2 or 3 core CPUs.
Within 12 months 4 core CPUs will be common for top of the range PCs; 12 months after that 4 cores will be the minimum acceptable CPU.
As the production of 8 core CPU ramps up the same thing will happen.
It may not be rational, but then this $1000 laptop is about 10 times faster than the first $5 million supercomputer I used.
...is strongly dependent on the interfaces it presents to the world. The pressure is to push more and more functions onto a chip so that external interfaces can be eliminated. This is the victory of the general purpose computer. While in the short term it is always possible to build faster, more speciallised hardware to perform a function, eventually a faster CPU chip which implements the same facility in software becomes cheaper and generic.
Knowing Microzoftz liking to own the content (or at least partner rather than license) can we expect a take over of Zony in the near future?
Microzoft-Zony -- a marriage made in DRM-even.
The piracy that costs the companies that the RIAA represents are the undocumented pressings that appear from CD factories throughout the world. Compared to that, the kids sharing a few files is inconcequential.
...should be biodegradable.