You should assume that by 100% of cars, he meant 100% of gasoline/diesel cars. I suspect by 2020 the need to Toyota (and other manifacturers) to produce pure electric vehicles will become apparent. As well as vehicles with other fuels.
Pure electric vehicles are especially efficient and suitable for city driving.
All of which is to say - no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company.
There's not a single company doing OS though. You give the OSS a shinier role than it is in reality.
What does OSS do? In the vast majority of cases, it takes existing solutions that work, and creates a new solution learning from this experience, but usually taking a simpler and more practical approach.
When a certain feature, art or technology are present in everybody's commercial offerings, OSS will take that and turn it into an open source solution.
As such, the kind of software the commercial companies produce, and the software OSS produces is always a moving target. We're approaching a time where commercial vendors can't offer substantial improvements in their OS over what a simpler base solution is (Linux/BSD), and thus there's only two roads: either commercial vendors find a new unique way to improve their solution, or they die and get eaten by the OSS solution.
But commercial companies will in most cases be faster, smarter, and first on the market. They have a lot more reasons to, compared the OSS community to get in quickly and profit. OSS doesn't even want to profit (companies providing support etc. do not pertain to the OSS community).
This is funny. Dell has only recently decided to acknowledge Linux (technically for the second time), and people already found something to worry about! After years and years of moaning and whining that Dell sells Linux, it's suddenly a possibility that Dell may be bad for Ubuntu.
I have a little folk tale for this situation, coming from Bulgaria where I'm natively from.
Peter was a very poor villager. He was saving some money to buy eggs and grow chickens with which to feed his family. One day he took the money, went to the market and bought the eggs, then headed to home.
On the way, he started thinking "nice, nice, nice, I have 4 fertile eggs, from those eggs I'll grow 4 chicken. Those chickens will give eggs, and they'll grow into chickens too. I'll soon have hundreds of chickens, and I'll buy a farm house to keep them in. Those hundreds of chickens will give me hundreds of eggs, which I'll sell, and I'll buy four cows. Those cows will have many calves, and each of them will grow into a cow and all those cows will give me lots of milk. I'll be rich, and buy a second farm for my cows and calves. I'll buy a house in the city, and meet with the mayor and all important people. People will recognize me on the street and say, hello Peter! That'll be great!"
And while he was thinking about all those things, he tripped in a stone and broke the eggs.
I'm currently 25, I'm certain before I retire, the only kind of work 90% of the people in a modern country will do, will be intellectual. Be it design, engineering, research, medical (which is mostly intellectual, and surgery will likely rely more and more on guided tools in time).
I can imagine it. How about this: since Canada has public health care, why don't they use the money to fund that? Then the people, who paid for the CDs, will get their money back!
Brilliant!
Oh yea, brilliant. If you can arrange that only people who buy CD-s get sick. And the more CD-s they bought, the worse the illness.
Since, I mean, what if the whole RIAA becomes hella sick. The whole pan goes to pieces.
So we pay a little more for CD's, and that money goes to the copyright holders (we hope).
Umm, maybe this isn't such a bad idea? After all, there is a TV Tax in the UK for the same reason. Everyone complains about it, but not *that* much.
Maury
Oh even better, it's a great idea. Pure capitalism economics forces in place.
So you buy blank CD-s and copy hard metal all day long, and the fee you paid goes to... Britney Spears' come-back album. Since according to "statistics" she has much larger market share than anyone.
Of course it's even worse than this, since right now the actual singers don't see a single cent from the blank media fee. It goes back to RIAA (and equivalent in other countries) and the labels.
The millions of dollars in overpayment from these media will go into the pockets of manufacturers, importers, and retailers, not back to the consumers who paid in the first place.
Right, always finding something bad even in a good news, aren't you Mike.
How on Earth would this "return in the hands of the consumers" be organized. How do you imagine the logistics of such an outcome. Maybe you bring your receipts and they give you 1 cents for each disk or something?
What they did is the best they could do. Manifacturers/retailers/importers get back the money and they can pass the savings on to their future customers.
Of course they won't, since it's not how business works, but that's a completely different matter.
I, for one, give you those 2 cents and not look back.
Yes, Scientology is nutty, but that's about normal for a religion. Could be worse. They don't have a big pedophile problem, suicide bombers, or televangelists, like some of their competitors.
Nutty? So, Scientology is in fact a mental illness, which doesn't acknowledge mental illnesses. What a cosmic irony.
I suppose in this case you're right, we gotta be more PC to Scientologists and their "special condition".
Sam: Dude, we're tainted by the souls of aliens blown with nukes by alien space invador from a galaxy far far away! Jim: Man, you're a f***ing idiot or something? STFU! Sam: No, I'm a scientologist... Jim: OH! Oh... oh buddy, sorry I had no idea. I really had no idea.. but you'll be fine, yea.. you'll be just fine.
Thousands of people die in car accidents each year. All of them drove facing the steering wheel and front windshield of the car [showing big charts on the presentation screen to show some convincing statistics]. The bottom line: we should drive facing the rear end of our cars.
---
But damn, I'd rather drive my car sitting backwards than believe some alien sci-fi story since they just discovered there are bad psychiatrists, like there are bad professionals in every area of life.
Why are wasting our time with a bunch of delusional cultists?
Their material calls that there's not a shred of "scientific" evidence that mental illnesses exist, instead it's all about the alien ghosts lord Xenu imprisoned.
I mean, for Christ's sake, people. Is there a limit to how ridiculous you can get?
Yeah, it was especially curious considering that you're probably wrong. Maybe it was informative in the sense that it informed us of your incorrect beliefs? It never ceases to amaze me what lack of respect Slashdotters oftentimes seem to have for science, despite their assurances to the contrary.
In the kingdom of blind, the one-eyed is a king.
Slashdot is a community like any else, have you never been out with friends, and sometimes they seem to say something really insightful, only to turn out in research later that it was complete non-sense.
That said, there's the other side of the coin: the vast majority of the "research" projects that get into the mainstream press are actually poorly conducted student projects, or people trying to get support for their silly little projects by spouting out sensationalist or curious-sounding research information.
I mean: this is research in smilies, for christ's sake. And I still have seen enough asians to know they don't smile vastly differently than any human being does.
Something that's prevalent in poorly conducted research nowadays is too much wishful thinking: coming into a research to get certain outcome and consciously or not tweaking the evidence to fit your bias.
Not to mention there is no doubt that the low power nature of it makes it ready for solar power, making it an incredible communication tool in non-power friendly places, like say deserts or jungle for military use. The fact that it's flexible makes it able to handle harsh environments - simply roll it up, stick it in a tube and keep on going. Computer on top of Everest, anyone?
While I also expect we'll (of course) see more and more e-paper around us (it's already widely used on airports and other such building to print large and mostly static information), the relation to a "communication device on Everest" escapes me.
The TFT screen was never a power issue in mobile devices. The receiver/transmitter is, and the backlight is. And a present day TFT is also visible in plain sunlight if it's put against white bg (versus put a backlight).
So don't get too excited. Also "soft" and "durable" aren't synonyms.
Now you just know the advertisers are gonna get a hold of this technology and slap animated ads on cereal boxes or something.
Minority Report anyone?
Oh yea, Minority Report! We better stop those e-paper guy before they also come up with the maglevs and precogs.
Seriously though, Minority Report used lots of real world scientific data about upcoming technologies in the next 20 to 60 years, this is why Minority Report features a lot of the technology it does. As we see, their research was accurate about the e-paper.
Of course, if a cereal-box sized epaper sheet costs $100, that'd be some hella expensive cereal.
It's funny to read an article like this after reading how technology makes people drive their cars off a cliff or into a speeding train.
I can imagine the news:
Suzy, 23, said her bionic implants made her drink boiling water until her jaw dropped. "The implant said it's room temperature, and I have absolute trust in my bionic implants".
However, I always saw it as a way for Microsoft to loosen its illegal monopoly status: by letting free software use some of its patents, its leveling the playing field.
Dude, it's not *illegal* to be a monopolist by simply having a large market share. Don't be ridiculous. Punish them for people use their products, what a great concept!
It's illegal to abuse it, which what Microsoft has done in the past and still doing in some areas. But for christ's sake, get some common sense, all of you, will ya?
Ok just get rid of software patents. Software should've never been permitted to be patented in the first place.
When faced with law abuse, see when the law is used properly and when it's abused and correct it. Software alrogithms of sufficient complexity and innovation should be patentable.
You have no idea how much work it takes to create new technologies in the areas of genetical programming, smart image recognition, neural networks, extracting 3D objects from series of 2D photos, fuzzy logic decisions etc etc etc.
There are plenty of things worth patenting. It's just the majority of patents right patent vague common sense ideas, that people came to hate software patents so much. "Patent 9017230: Patenting a progress bar with little squares that show progress"... WTF?!
Chalk me up to another non-average Linux user. I've got a 3 foot wide bookshelf with boxes of commercial Linux games I've bought (most of Loki's offerings while they were still operational, stuff from LGP, NWN, iD's offerings, etc). I wonder how many of us it takes to make a market.
Oh, well about a hundred of you will be just great!
Actually, you are incorrect. Loki Software died mainly because of managerial incompetence and mismanagement.
Did part of that include marketing games for Linux?
You know, since I'm not guite the gamer, I can't bring game company examples, but I've lots of experience with development tools.
What happened to Kylix, which Borland developed for Linux (Delphi for Linux). They had almost no sales and abandoned it a couple of years later.
Macromedia was actively researching Linux version of their entire Studio MX, and as an initial version rolled out a modified version which uses Wine to provide a "test port" to research the market for Linux Studio MX. They abandoned efforts in about year, due to no interest at all.
And now we have Dell about to sell Ubuntu machines.
Thing is, Linux users are VERY vocal, VERY demanding, and promise VERY big things (offer us the world and we'll buy it!). But when it comes to action, most of those users don't do anything "hey I just thought about the other folks who might want that, I'm just fine as it is", or stick to "free" (or cracks on wine).
It's the same story every time. Apparently we're through it once more.
I think we also have to take into account the fact that the Linux landscape has changed drastically in the last five years. How popular was the iPod in 2002?
Apparently it has, since a company saying they may release proper drivers for Linux is some kind of very hot news.
Well, if there is a good video card support on linux, linux gaming will just strengthen. It isn't a godgiven that you can play games only on Vista.
The problem is, most Linux desktop users use it to develop or manage it as a server. They won't pay for a game. They will not pay for anything at all, most of the time. The only companies paying for Linux are enterprises who need support and closed software. The rest are there for the free ride.
Sophisticated open source games basically can't happen, since you need a lot more than good developers to make a good game. Check the open source games around. You'll notice lots of smart programming, poor graphics and poor or non-existing story line. Let alone high quality music and voice overs.
We've seen how much the open source community understands design and graphics with GIMP, and it's best we stop beating that dead horse.
They're just trying to get them some press. Unfortunately Linux gamers are an edge case. People needing video card support on Linux above vanilla SVGA as a whole is an edge case.
Slashdot Mirror
You should assume that by 100% of cars, he meant 100% of gasoline/diesel cars. I suspect by 2020 the need to Toyota (and other manifacturers) to produce pure electric vehicles will become apparent. As well as vehicles with other fuels.
Pure electric vehicles are especially efficient and suitable for city driving.
All of which is to say - no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company.
There's not a single company doing OS though. You give the OSS a shinier role than it is in reality.
What does OSS do? In the vast majority of cases, it takes existing solutions that work, and creates a new solution learning from this experience, but usually taking a simpler and more practical approach.
When a certain feature, art or technology are present in everybody's commercial offerings, OSS will take that and turn it into an open source solution.
As such, the kind of software the commercial companies produce, and the software OSS produces is always a moving target. We're approaching a time where commercial vendors can't offer substantial improvements in their OS over what a simpler base solution is (Linux/BSD), and thus there's only two roads: either commercial vendors find a new unique way to improve their solution, or they die and get eaten by the OSS solution.
But commercial companies will in most cases be faster, smarter, and first on the market. They have a lot more reasons to, compared the OSS community to get in quickly and profit. OSS doesn't even want to profit (companies providing support etc. do not pertain to the OSS community).
This is funny. Dell has only recently decided to acknowledge Linux (technically for the second time), and people already found something to worry about! After years and years of moaning and whining that Dell sells Linux, it's suddenly a possibility that Dell may be bad for Ubuntu.
I have a little folk tale for this situation, coming from Bulgaria where I'm natively from.
Peter was a very poor villager. He was saving some money to buy eggs and grow chickens with which to feed his family. One day he took the money, went to the market and bought the eggs, then headed to home.
On the way, he started thinking "nice, nice, nice, I have 4 fertile eggs, from those eggs I'll grow 4 chicken. Those chickens will give eggs, and they'll grow into chickens too. I'll soon have hundreds of chickens, and I'll buy a farm house to keep them in. Those hundreds of chickens will give me hundreds of eggs, which I'll sell, and I'll buy four cows. Those cows will have many calves, and each of them will grow into a cow and all those cows will give me lots of milk. I'll be rich, and buy a second farm for my cows and calves. I'll buy a house in the city, and meet with the mayor and all important people. People will recognize me on the street and say, hello Peter! That'll be great!"
And while he was thinking about all those things, he tripped in a stone and broke the eggs.
ooh your thoughts are sooo precious
I'm currently 25, I'm certain before I retire, the only kind of work 90% of the people in a modern country will do, will be intellectual. Be it design, engineering, research, medical (which is mostly intellectual, and surgery will likely rely more and more on guided tools in time).
We'll be making our money with precious thoughts.
How about a copyright moratorium for a month?
In order to compensate consumers for overpaying, we can download and copy anything we want royalty-free.
If it works out well, we can do it every year.
Don't forget: copyright isn't your enemy, RIAA/MPAA and organisations like them who abuse copyright, are.
As someone who produces something worthwhile myself, I don't want everything I did copied around for a month, thanks.
I can imagine it. How about this: since Canada has public health care, why don't they use the money to fund that? Then the people, who paid for the CDs, will get their money back!
Brilliant!
Oh yea, brilliant. If you can arrange that only people who buy CD-s get sick. And the more CD-s they bought, the worse the illness.
Since, I mean, what if the whole RIAA becomes hella sick. The whole pan goes to pieces.
So we pay a little more for CD's, and that money goes to the copyright holders (we hope).
Umm, maybe this isn't such a bad idea? After all, there is a TV Tax in the UK for the same reason. Everyone complains about it, but not *that* much.
Maury
Oh even better, it's a great idea. Pure capitalism economics forces in place.
So you buy blank CD-s and copy hard metal all day long, and the fee you paid goes to... Britney Spears' come-back album. Since according to "statistics" she has much larger market share than anyone.
Of course it's even worse than this, since right now the actual singers don't see a single cent from the blank media fee. It goes back to RIAA (and equivalent in other countries) and the labels.
The millions of dollars in overpayment from these media will go into the pockets of manufacturers, importers, and retailers, not back to the consumers who paid in the first place.
Right, always finding something bad even in a good news, aren't you Mike.
How on Earth would this "return in the hands of the consumers" be organized. How do you imagine the logistics of such an outcome. Maybe you bring your receipts and they give you 1 cents for each disk or something?
What they did is the best they could do. Manifacturers/retailers/importers get back the money and they can pass the savings on to their future customers.
Of course they won't, since it's not how business works, but that's a completely different matter.
I, for one, give you those 2 cents and not look back.
Yes, Scientology is nutty, but that's about normal for a religion. Could be worse. They don't have a big pedophile problem, suicide bombers, or televangelists, like some of their competitors.
Nutty? So, Scientology is in fact a mental illness, which doesn't acknowledge mental illnesses.
What a cosmic irony.
I suppose in this case you're right, we gotta be more PC to Scientologists and their "special condition".
Sam: Dude, we're tainted by the souls of aliens blown with nukes by alien space invador from a galaxy far far away!
Jim: Man, you're a f***ing idiot or something? STFU!
Sam: No, I'm a scientologist...
Jim: OH! Oh... oh buddy, sorry I had no idea. I really had no idea.. but you'll be fine, yea.. you'll be just fine.
Bad driving: Industry of Death
Thousands of people die in car accidents each year. All of them drove facing the steering wheel and front windshield of the car [showing big charts on the presentation screen to show some convincing statistics].
The bottom line: we should drive facing the rear end of our cars.
---
But damn, I'd rather drive my car sitting backwards than believe some alien sci-fi story since they just discovered there are bad psychiatrists, like there are bad professionals in every area of life.
Why are wasting our time with a bunch of delusional cultists?
Their material calls that there's not a shred of "scientific" evidence that mental illnesses exist, instead it's all about the alien ghosts lord Xenu imprisoned.
I mean, for Christ's sake, people. Is there a limit to how ridiculous you can get?
Yeah, it was especially curious considering that you're probably wrong. Maybe it was informative in the sense that it informed us of your incorrect beliefs? It never ceases to amaze me what lack of respect Slashdotters oftentimes seem to have for science, despite their assurances to the contrary.
In the kingdom of blind, the one-eyed is a king.
Slashdot is a community like any else, have you never been out with friends, and sometimes they seem to say something really insightful, only to turn out in research later that it was complete non-sense.
That said, there's the other side of the coin: the vast majority of the "research" projects that get into the mainstream press are actually poorly conducted student projects, or people trying to get support for their silly little projects by spouting out sensationalist or curious-sounding research information.
I mean: this is research in smilies, for christ's sake. And I still have seen enough asians to know they don't smile vastly differently than any human being does.
Something that's prevalent in poorly conducted research nowadays is too much wishful thinking: coming into a research to get certain outcome and consciously or not tweaking the evidence to fit your bias.
Not to mention there is no doubt that the low power nature of it makes it ready for solar power, making it an incredible communication tool in non-power friendly places, like say deserts or jungle for military use. The fact that it's flexible makes it able to handle harsh environments - simply roll it up, stick it in a tube and keep on going. Computer on top of Everest, anyone?
While I also expect we'll (of course) see more and more e-paper around us (it's already widely used on airports and other such building to print large and mostly static information), the relation to a "communication device on Everest" escapes me.
The TFT screen was never a power issue in mobile devices. The receiver/transmitter is, and the backlight is. And a present day TFT is also visible in plain sunlight if it's put against white bg (versus put a backlight).
So don't get too excited. Also "soft" and "durable" aren't synonyms.
Now you just know the advertisers are gonna get a hold of this technology and slap animated ads on cereal boxes or something.
Minority Report anyone?
Oh yea, Minority Report! We better stop those e-paper guy before they also come up with the maglevs and precogs.
Seriously though, Minority Report used lots of real world scientific data about upcoming technologies in the next 20 to 60 years, this is why Minority Report features a lot of the technology it does. As we see, their research was accurate about the e-paper.
Of course, if a cereal-box sized epaper sheet costs $100, that'd be some hella expensive cereal.
It's funny to read an article like this after reading how technology makes people drive their cars off a cliff or into a speeding train.
I can imagine the news:
Suzy, 23, said her bionic implants made her drink boiling water until her jaw dropped. "The implant said it's room temperature, and I have absolute trust in my bionic implants".
However, I always saw it as a way for Microsoft to loosen its illegal monopoly status: by letting free software use some of its patents, its leveling the playing field.
Dude, it's not *illegal* to be a monopolist by simply having a large market share. Don't be ridiculous. Punish them for people use their products, what a great concept!
It's illegal to abuse it, which what Microsoft has done in the past and still doing in some areas. But for christ's sake, get some common sense, all of you, will ya?
Ok just get rid of software patents. Software should've never been permitted to be patented in the first place.
... WTF?!
When faced with law abuse, see when the law is used properly and when it's abused and correct it. Software alrogithms of sufficient complexity and innovation should be patentable.
You have no idea how much work it takes to create new technologies in the areas of genetical programming, smart image recognition, neural networks, extracting 3D objects from series of 2D photos, fuzzy logic decisions etc etc etc.
There are plenty of things worth patenting. It's just the majority of patents right patent vague common sense ideas, that people came to hate software patents so much. "Patent 9017230: Patenting a progress bar with little squares that show progress"
Chalk me up to another non-average Linux user. I've got a 3 foot wide bookshelf with boxes of commercial Linux games I've bought (most of Loki's offerings while they were still operational, stuff from LGP, NWN, iD's offerings, etc). I wonder how many of us it takes to make a market.
Oh, well about a hundred of you will be just great!
Actually, you are incorrect. Loki Software died mainly because of managerial incompetence and mismanagement.
Did part of that include marketing games for Linux?
You know, since I'm not guite the gamer, I can't bring game company examples, but I've lots of experience with development tools.
What happened to Kylix, which Borland developed for Linux (Delphi for Linux). They had almost no sales and abandoned it a couple of years later.
Macromedia was actively researching Linux version of their entire Studio MX, and as an initial version rolled out a modified version which uses Wine to provide a "test port" to research the market for Linux Studio MX. They abandoned efforts in about year, due to no interest at all.
And now we have Dell about to sell Ubuntu machines.
Thing is, Linux users are VERY vocal, VERY demanding, and promise VERY big things (offer us the world and we'll buy it!). But when it comes to action, most of those users don't do anything "hey I just thought about the other folks who might want that, I'm just fine as it is", or stick to "free" (or cracks on wine).
It's the same story every time. Apparently we're through it once more.
I think we also have to take into account the fact that the Linux landscape has changed drastically in the last five years. How popular was the iPod in 2002?
Apparently it has, since a company saying they may release proper drivers for Linux is some kind of very hot news.
Oh yea, things have changed, baby.
Yeah, but we are not omnipotent and dog's wouldn't think so either. Ever brought a dog that's been dead for 3 days back to life?
I once told a dog to kill its puppy, but stopped it in the last moment. "No, no! Ok, leave the puppy. Good dog, good dog. God loves dog. Dog goody.".
Well, if there is a good video card support on linux, linux gaming will just strengthen. It isn't a godgiven that you can play games only on Vista.
The problem is, most Linux desktop users use it to develop or manage it as a server. They won't pay for a game. They will not pay for anything at all, most of the time. The only companies paying for Linux are enterprises who need support and closed software. The rest are there for the free ride.
Sophisticated open source games basically can't happen, since you need a lot more than good developers to make a good game. Check the open source games around. You'll notice lots of smart programming, poor graphics and poor or non-existing story line. Let alone high quality music and voice overs.
We've seen how much the open source community understands design and graphics with GIMP, and it's best we stop beating that dead horse.
They're just trying to get them some press. Unfortunately Linux gamers are an edge case. People needing video card support on Linux above vanilla SVGA as a whole is an edge case.
[Let me think...] No. Next question.
Great, I'll take that as a yes. When do we start?
- A delusional web 2.0 bubble guy
I suggest the first app to port to the browser to be Apache+PHP.
Once we have the AJAX Apache+PHP, we can run PHP in it, which can generate more AJAX pages.
In those pages, we can host Apache+PHP again.