The Sega Dreamcast was about as powerful in practice as the PS2, but got killed by hype. Microsoft realized that Sony can kill a good system simply through hype and is trying to build up mindshare and marketshare before the PS3 can come out. The fact that they are shooting for solid backward compatibility is a good thing, and Sega could no doubt have done better if they'd worked on providing a download service for old Sega games or at least had backward compatibility with Saturn and SegaCD.
As a fan of the DC, I hope Microsoft succeeds and whips the shit out of Sony this round.
Did the guy do this after he quit his job? If he emailed the customers using a company server after he left, I can see the company having a legitimate case. Another thing, did he bring these problems up to management and get the ball rolling on a fix or did he just drop the bomb on his employer after he left? There have been enough guys who seem innocent on the surface on slashdot, that I'm now hesitant to not believe there may be some malfeasance on the guy's part.
If he quit his job and then emailed the customers on his own time/equipment with a polite notice saying that he used to work for them and wanted to alert them to problems that management refused to fix, that could cause substantial harm to the clients, I seriously don't think a judge would have given his former employer the time of day.
It's not like our universities are exactly bastions of free speech with all of their speech codes, free speech zones on campus and things like that. America really doesn't have any moral high ground because we tolerate things like "if you laugh at a joke that is perceived as sexist, you're a harasser." Sorry, but that is the same type of discressionary censorship power that this student has. Just swap out the usual litany of left-wing victim group terms for "subversive," "pornographic" and "state secrets" and you find that our universities and China have a lot in common. The only difference is that China is more hardcore... and a lot more honest when you think about it.
And before the yahoos come out complaining, most universities in the US are state agencies, they have no legal right to impose speech codes on non-employees. As private citizens we have every legal right to express ourselves on campus, provided that we do so in accordance with the constitutional standards of the state and federal governments and the law duly passed by the state legislature.
Just why is this news? This man would find Pong offensive and dangerous because a modder could change the ball into a CGI testicle. Even worse, the modder could turn the launch sites in Missile Command into big 36DDs that shoot milk at the incoming targets!
Give up on him on Jack. He's a kook and won't change.
But then, you forget that the West has a tradition of liberalism that tempers the excesses of its big government policies. Few countries around the world have that. Egypt has no such tradition and there is no cultural barrier between big government and Fascism in countries without that liberalism.
And we do have a problem with "power brokers" in the US. The judiciary, the FCC, the FTC and other "high-level bureaucrats" frequently interject themselves into areas where they have no business. They just aren't as bad because they have public scrutiny in a country that still half-heartedly cares about these things.
It serves the interests of those in power. It's why Socialism, Communism, Fascism, "state Capitalism" and all other big government ideologies fail spectacularly. Every law that enacts a new police power that isn't objectively strictly needed to do basic law enforcement, every new agency, every new unneeded spending bill and especially fiat currency play into the hands of the tyrants and would-be tyrants. What has happened here should be a lesson to every Democrat or Republican who believes that if only their guy was in office, big government would work. It doesn't, it just goes after those that challenge it because the more that people start to question small excesses, the more they question their very relationship with the state.
A big part of what made OSS get off the ground outside of its core area was the belief that it'd lead to better bug fixes, delivered faster because of all of the eyeballs looking at the code. Well, that's a little hard to argue if 90% of those eyeballs are dedicated to looking at new things, not fixing outstanding issues.
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
In other words, you have rights only when we like how you're using them. I wish I was making it up, but it's in the official text.
The sooner we abolish the UN, the better. If its "peacekeeping operations" and the standard procedures of its international court are any indication, it'd be an organization matched in its evil toward decent people around the world only by its bitter and vicious incompetence. And please, spare me the bullshit about them being hampered by member states. If they can barely ever get anything right with only occassionally being asked to keep the peace, just imagine what their bureaucrats would be like when tasked with doing it as the official, one world body.
Need an analogy to understand why SixApart should sue? It'd be like a corrupt police unit grabbing a school bus full of kids to use as human shields in the middle of a gun battle with a gang while the cops try to fall back and call for backup.
And then make MSN a part of Yahoo, not the other way around. With Microsoft's power, Yahoo could pose a more credible threat to Google, but Microsoft would have to mostly leave them alone and push them through its other products. Who knows, Microsoft might be in a good position to actually force Yahoo to clean up some of their advertising and things like that.
You got it all wrong. We're back to protecting the kids. Get your talking points right, junior. It'll be back to the terrorists in a year when that's back in style--or when Bush needs to stop making history as the first President to get negative approval rating numbers.
Firefox, Opera and Safari together have at a minimum 10% of the market, and by some estimates probably have at least more realistically around 15-20% now. Have you forgotten that Microsoft ceded the entire Mac browser market to Apple? Every desktop Linux installation is in a similar situation.
Yes, that's such a monopoly. There's no viable competition since the competition only has a low double digit marketshare as opposed to 50% or more!
Why aren't you bitching about Google trying to buy its way into the same monopoly that you allege Microsoft to have? Don't you think it's "bad for competition" that people are "forced" to use Google by default in Firefox and Opera? Oh the horror, people might have to learn how to switch their default search engine!
It's unpopular to say it around here, but you need to be able to pay for bandwidth costs. AdSense is a decent way to do that. As long as you put just one ad on the page in a good location that isn't flashy and annoying, who cares? Anyone who bitches can damn well pitch in a few dollars of their own money up front to pay the costs of bandwidth on such a site. Don't waste your time with people who expect you to run an expensive website on your own dime and who object to all advertising and other fundraising efforts. They just want a free lunch. The people who would rather give you a few bucks up front every so often for no ads, those are some of the people you ought to take most seriously on this.
By migrating from a costly UNIX platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on its workstations, servers and at the hub site, the FAA was able to eliminate costs and ineffective systems, while creating a scalable architecture that met their high-demand environment today and for the future.
I think that puts it into perspective quite clearly. This was just a conversion from say... Solaris over to Linux. It's not an agency convinced that Linux was better than Windows and then converted over to Linux. Making a really big deal out of this is like saying that it's bold step for environmentalism to replace a hybrid civic with a Prius instead of a 250mi/gal future version of the smartcar.
Are they modifying code, distributing it and not respecting the terms of the license? I thought OSS was supposed to be "free as in speech" AND "free as in beer." So... why is anyone expecting them to give code and money back now? It's one thing to ask them politely for donations to help pay for the development, or to request services like 0% interest loans for development groups that support them, but what's up with this welfare baby entitlement mentality?
Don't give your code away if you intend to try to squeeze code or money out of them later. The time to ask for an equitable exchange is when things get started, not well after you've given them the product with no notice that it'll cost them anything and then try to squeeze some cash out of them. This is to OSS, what try to tax used CD sales is to the RIAA.
I'd call it outrageous, were it not for the hypocrisy and downright idiocy of much of the "community." I can't even count the number of times that the "community" (as opposed to the developers and sincere, committed supporters who actually had basic social skills) has acted counter to OSS interests in front of me and those I know be it at school, online or at work. Imagine being called a "fucking idiot" by the local Linux know-it-alls back in 2000 because you think that BeOS was a far more sophisticated desktop than Linux with KDE 1.0. Please, someone tell me how the "community" is typically something more than a mob.
I don't understand why Microsoft doesn't just rewrite Internet Explorer in.NET. They can leave the existing rendering engine behind as a legacy component and work on a new IE that can take advantage of.NET's security mechanisms. Not only would it be a good excuse for a clean break, but it would also give them a chance to show off what.NET can do for desktop apps.
Did they rip off the actual work, or did they borrow the style from the artists? Last I checked, borrowing the style is legal. I guess this means that pretty much all anime is in for a lawsuit fest if this be the case...
I know as well as everyone else here that there is a technical difference between the way that Windows Media Player is bundled and the way that MPlayer and VLC are bundled with a Linux distribution. But I am completely against this attack against Microsoft because what we see as a modest technical difference is semantics to a non-technical bureaucrat. Time and again, the governments of Europe, the USA and Australia have shown that they have effectively zero technical know-how when it comes to forumlating public policy. Why trust the EU to get this right and then not go after SuSE and RedHat for bundling only one or two players and integrating them into KDE and GNOME?
Government has a nasty habit of saying "semantics, shmantics" when it comes to regulation. It's only a matter of time before they go after another target in order to justify their own existance as an agency. The next targets are Apple with QuickTime and Linux distributors. Apple would probably be next, but Linux would not be too far behind.
How are you going to create a disk image that is applicable to very different systems? The point of a disk image is point, click, restore to the original state. It's... well... a little difficult to do that when the state that the image must restore to is different for each machine.
You might want to try installing a really light-weight Linux distribution and running VMWare Player with a lot of hard drive space and memory for the Windows virtual machine. You could try something like Damn Small Linux or Gentoo that can get pretty low on the requirements if SuSE or something else is too much of a pig to fit well.
They get a lot of good packages with the purchase. Are they going to integrate them into Oracle's product offerings? I'm personally not very convinced that they should be using SuSE for an Oracle Linux Server type product. It's a good desktop, but pretty bloated. It would seem to me that the best alternative would be to get a light-weight distribution for free and build on that. Oracle already has an installed base, and I'm sure they could get people to use Oracle Linux on a server that is going ot be purely for database use.
Hell, the only people in the equation that might gripe would be the Oracle DBAs who would face the threat posed by an easier to install and configure Oracle system. Once they have full control over the operating system, Oracle could do a lot to really streamline the process of getting Oracle up and running in a secure way.
Anyone else also wondering if this is not in fact a response to Sun's warming up to PostgreSQL?
They've been so obsessed with Microsoft that they failed to see that their biggest threat was IBM. Sun could have easily come in and preempted IBM by making the transition to OpenSolaris sooner, heavily supporting Linux in a real way earlier and making a name for itself in open source sooner. Imagine if they'd started 7-8 years ago with supporting PostgreSQL on their systems and actively developing it into something that was a quality part of their software stack (not saying it's a bad DB). How about if they'd done the official port of Java to Linux, instead of making Blackdown do work on it until Linux became too strong to ignore?
Their leaders are arrogant and resistant to change. That's a bad combination when you're in a competitive field where swallowing your pride and accomodating your users is the most important way of making money.
I bought one and had to return it after a week of various things. First it was the flaky battery, then the flaky software that ended up becoming all but unusable. To put it nicely, the software is crap. Not only that, but it's incredibly slow. I would gladly have paid an extra $150 for a system based on embedded Qt with 128MB of RAM, a better processor and a real, fast SD card system. Basically, it is a short cut looking for a quality product. They cut so many corners that's nearly a perfect circle.
It doesn't have all of the apps that regular Windows users have so OSX will continue to be perceived by most people as not fitting their needs. The worst thing that could happen to Apple is that Windows on a Mac ends up becoming 2/3 of their userbase. While it would increase their profits, it'd do nothing to actually get more companies to port over to OSX. If anything, it might convince some of the dumber executives that what people really want is Windows and that a OSX port is not necessary.
If companies could only do a one time patent that lasted up to three years, it'd be non-issue. The current time span (what is it, 17-20 years at least?) is far beyond the useful lifespan of the technology.
I am a strong supporter of patents, but get really pissed off at the "pro-innovation" camp (who isn't pro-innovation?) that has the audacity to draw a parallel between software "innovation" and genuine innovation in other industries. There hasn't been a radical new technology except in niche markets for some time that justifies a patent for more than three years. Not only that, but the cost to make one drug, test it and get it widely used by its target audience is probably closing in on the cost of writing several commercial applications.
Slashdot Mirror
The Sega Dreamcast was about as powerful in practice as the PS2, but got killed by hype. Microsoft realized that Sony can kill a good system simply through hype and is trying to build up mindshare and marketshare before the PS3 can come out. The fact that they are shooting for solid backward compatibility is a good thing, and Sega could no doubt have done better if they'd worked on providing a download service for old Sega games or at least had backward compatibility with Saturn and SegaCD.
As a fan of the DC, I hope Microsoft succeeds and whips the shit out of Sony this round.
Did the guy do this after he quit his job? If he emailed the customers using a company server after he left, I can see the company having a legitimate case. Another thing, did he bring these problems up to management and get the ball rolling on a fix or did he just drop the bomb on his employer after he left? There have been enough guys who seem innocent on the surface on slashdot, that I'm now hesitant to not believe there may be some malfeasance on the guy's part.
If he quit his job and then emailed the customers on his own time/equipment with a polite notice saying that he used to work for them and wanted to alert them to problems that management refused to fix, that could cause substantial harm to the clients, I seriously don't think a judge would have given his former employer the time of day.
It's not like our universities are exactly bastions of free speech with all of their speech codes, free speech zones on campus and things like that. America really doesn't have any moral high ground because we tolerate things like "if you laugh at a joke that is perceived as sexist, you're a harasser." Sorry, but that is the same type of discressionary censorship power that this student has. Just swap out the usual litany of left-wing victim group terms for "subversive," "pornographic" and "state secrets" and you find that our universities and China have a lot in common. The only difference is that China is more hardcore... and a lot more honest when you think about it.
And before the yahoos come out complaining, most universities in the US are state agencies, they have no legal right to impose speech codes on non-employees. As private citizens we have every legal right to express ourselves on campus, provided that we do so in accordance with the constitutional standards of the state and federal governments and the law duly passed by the state legislature.
Just why is this news? This man would find Pong offensive and dangerous because a modder could change the ball into a CGI testicle. Even worse, the modder could turn the launch sites in Missile Command into big 36DDs that shoot milk at the incoming targets!
Give up on him on Jack. He's a kook and won't change.
But then, you forget that the West has a tradition of liberalism that tempers the excesses of its big government policies. Few countries around the world have that. Egypt has no such tradition and there is no cultural barrier between big government and Fascism in countries without that liberalism.
And we do have a problem with "power brokers" in the US. The judiciary, the FCC, the FTC and other "high-level bureaucrats" frequently interject themselves into areas where they have no business. They just aren't as bad because they have public scrutiny in a country that still half-heartedly cares about these things.
It serves the interests of those in power. It's why Socialism, Communism, Fascism, "state Capitalism" and all other big government ideologies fail spectacularly. Every law that enacts a new police power that isn't objectively strictly needed to do basic law enforcement, every new agency, every new unneeded spending bill and especially fiat currency play into the hands of the tyrants and would-be tyrants. What has happened here should be a lesson to every Democrat or Republican who believes that if only their guy was in office, big government would work. It doesn't, it just goes after those that challenge it because the more that people start to question small excesses, the more they question their very relationship with the state.
A big part of what made OSS get off the ground outside of its core area was the belief that it'd lead to better bug fixes, delivered faster because of all of the eyeballs looking at the code. Well, that's a little hard to argue if 90% of those eyeballs are dedicated to looking at new things, not fixing outstanding issues.
In other words, you have rights only when we like how you're using them. I wish I was making it up, but it's in the official text.
The sooner we abolish the UN, the better. If its "peacekeeping operations" and the standard procedures of its international court are any indication, it'd be an organization matched in its evil toward decent people around the world only by its bitter and vicious incompetence. And please, spare me the bullshit about them being hampered by member states. If they can barely ever get anything right with only occassionally being asked to keep the peace, just imagine what their bureaucrats would be like when tasked with doing it as the official, one world body.
Need an analogy to understand why SixApart should sue? It'd be like a corrupt police unit grabbing a school bus full of kids to use as human shields in the middle of a gun battle with a gang while the cops try to fall back and call for backup.
And then make MSN a part of Yahoo, not the other way around. With Microsoft's power, Yahoo could pose a more credible threat to Google, but Microsoft would have to mostly leave them alone and push them through its other products. Who knows, Microsoft might be in a good position to actually force Yahoo to clean up some of their advertising and things like that.
Guess what class? Field trip to Cuba!
You got it all wrong. We're back to protecting the kids. Get your talking points right, junior. It'll be back to the terrorists in a year when that's back in style--or when Bush needs to stop making history as the first President to get negative approval rating numbers.
Firefox, Opera and Safari together have at a minimum 10% of the market, and by some estimates probably have at least more realistically around 15-20% now. Have you forgotten that Microsoft ceded the entire Mac browser market to Apple? Every desktop Linux installation is in a similar situation.
Yes, that's such a monopoly. There's no viable competition since the competition only has a low double digit marketshare as opposed to 50% or more!
Why aren't you bitching about Google trying to buy its way into the same monopoly that you allege Microsoft to have? Don't you think it's "bad for competition" that people are "forced" to use Google by default in Firefox and Opera? Oh the horror, people might have to learn how to switch their default search engine!
It's unpopular to say it around here, but you need to be able to pay for bandwidth costs. AdSense is a decent way to do that. As long as you put just one ad on the page in a good location that isn't flashy and annoying, who cares? Anyone who bitches can damn well pitch in a few dollars of their own money up front to pay the costs of bandwidth on such a site. Don't waste your time with people who expect you to run an expensive website on your own dime and who object to all advertising and other fundraising efforts. They just want a free lunch. The people who would rather give you a few bucks up front every so often for no ads, those are some of the people you ought to take most seriously on this.
I think that puts it into perspective quite clearly. This was just a conversion from say... Solaris over to Linux. It's not an agency convinced that Linux was better than Windows and then converted over to Linux. Making a really big deal out of this is like saying that it's bold step for environmentalism to replace a hybrid civic with a Prius instead of a 250mi/gal future version of the smartcar.
Are they modifying code, distributing it and not respecting the terms of the license? I thought OSS was supposed to be "free as in speech" AND "free as in beer." So... why is anyone expecting them to give code and money back now? It's one thing to ask them politely for donations to help pay for the development, or to request services like 0% interest loans for development groups that support them, but what's up with this welfare baby entitlement mentality?
Don't give your code away if you intend to try to squeeze code or money out of them later. The time to ask for an equitable exchange is when things get started, not well after you've given them the product with no notice that it'll cost them anything and then try to squeeze some cash out of them. This is to OSS, what try to tax used CD sales is to the RIAA.
I'd call it outrageous, were it not for the hypocrisy and downright idiocy of much of the "community." I can't even count the number of times that the "community" (as opposed to the developers and sincere, committed supporters who actually had basic social skills) has acted counter to OSS interests in front of me and those I know be it at school, online or at work. Imagine being called a "fucking idiot" by the local Linux know-it-alls back in 2000 because you think that BeOS was a far more sophisticated desktop than Linux with KDE 1.0. Please, someone tell me how the "community" is typically something more than a mob.
I don't understand why Microsoft doesn't just rewrite Internet Explorer in .NET. They can leave the existing rendering engine behind as a legacy component and work on a new IE that can take advantage of .NET's security mechanisms. Not only would it be a good excuse for a clean break, but it would also give them a chance to show off what .NET can do for desktop apps.
Did they rip off the actual work, or did they borrow the style from the artists? Last I checked, borrowing the style is legal. I guess this means that pretty much all anime is in for a lawsuit fest if this be the case...
I know as well as everyone else here that there is a technical difference between the way that Windows Media Player is bundled and the way that MPlayer and VLC are bundled with a Linux distribution. But I am completely against this attack against Microsoft because what we see as a modest technical difference is semantics to a non-technical bureaucrat. Time and again, the governments of Europe, the USA and Australia have shown that they have effectively zero technical know-how when it comes to forumlating public policy. Why trust the EU to get this right and then not go after SuSE and RedHat for bundling only one or two players and integrating them into KDE and GNOME?
Government has a nasty habit of saying "semantics, shmantics" when it comes to regulation. It's only a matter of time before they go after another target in order to justify their own existance as an agency. The next targets are Apple with QuickTime and Linux distributors. Apple would probably be next, but Linux would not be too far behind.
How are you going to create a disk image that is applicable to very different systems? The point of a disk image is point, click, restore to the original state. It's... well... a little difficult to do that when the state that the image must restore to is different for each machine.
You might want to try installing a really light-weight Linux distribution and running VMWare Player with a lot of hard drive space and memory for the Windows virtual machine. You could try something like Damn Small Linux or Gentoo that can get pretty low on the requirements if SuSE or something else is too much of a pig to fit well.
They get a lot of good packages with the purchase. Are they going to integrate them into Oracle's product offerings? I'm personally not very convinced that they should be using SuSE for an Oracle Linux Server type product. It's a good desktop, but pretty bloated. It would seem to me that the best alternative would be to get a light-weight distribution for free and build on that. Oracle already has an installed base, and I'm sure they could get people to use Oracle Linux on a server that is going ot be purely for database use.
Hell, the only people in the equation that might gripe would be the Oracle DBAs who would face the threat posed by an easier to install and configure Oracle system. Once they have full control over the operating system, Oracle could do a lot to really streamline the process of getting Oracle up and running in a secure way.
Anyone else also wondering if this is not in fact a response to Sun's warming up to PostgreSQL?
They've been so obsessed with Microsoft that they failed to see that their biggest threat was IBM. Sun could have easily come in and preempted IBM by making the transition to OpenSolaris sooner, heavily supporting Linux in a real way earlier and making a name for itself in open source sooner. Imagine if they'd started 7-8 years ago with supporting PostgreSQL on their systems and actively developing it into something that was a quality part of their software stack (not saying it's a bad DB). How about if they'd done the official port of Java to Linux, instead of making Blackdown do work on it until Linux became too strong to ignore?
Their leaders are arrogant and resistant to change. That's a bad combination when you're in a competitive field where swallowing your pride and accomodating your users is the most important way of making money.
I bought one and had to return it after a week of various things. First it was the flaky battery, then the flaky software that ended up becoming all but unusable. To put it nicely, the software is crap. Not only that, but it's incredibly slow. I would gladly have paid an extra $150 for a system based on embedded Qt with 128MB of RAM, a better processor and a real, fast SD card system. Basically, it is a short cut looking for a quality product. They cut so many corners that's nearly a perfect circle.
It doesn't have all of the apps that regular Windows users have so OSX will continue to be perceived by most people as not fitting their needs. The worst thing that could happen to Apple is that Windows on a Mac ends up becoming 2/3 of their userbase. While it would increase their profits, it'd do nothing to actually get more companies to port over to OSX. If anything, it might convince some of the dumber executives that what people really want is Windows and that a OSX port is not necessary.
If companies could only do a one time patent that lasted up to three years, it'd be non-issue. The current time span (what is it, 17-20 years at least?) is far beyond the useful lifespan of the technology.
I am a strong supporter of patents, but get really pissed off at the "pro-innovation" camp (who isn't pro-innovation?) that has the audacity to draw a parallel between software "innovation" and genuine innovation in other industries. There hasn't been a radical new technology except in niche markets for some time that justifies a patent for more than three years. Not only that, but the cost to make one drug, test it and get it widely used by its target audience is probably closing in on the cost of writing several commercial applications.