NASA is terrible with arbitrary deadlines. Remember how the Mars rovers were only supposed to work for 90 days? They've been at it for years now. The date will be pushed back over and over again.
If all you read is Slashdot you'd think Windows would've been gone long ago and Linux would reign supreme. Fortunately in the real world that's not how things work. You're just the equivalent of a Neo-Con who gets all his news from the Free Republic.
Microsoft needs to take a lesson from Sony and ignore the outright lies being pushed on the internet. The PS3 is, in reality, selling quite well. It's selling better than the 360 did at this juncture. Vista is the same way. It is selling just as every new OS sells initially. I remember the same stories being pushed around Slashdot when XP came out about how this was finally Linux's time to shine. Fortunately XP took off and now it's Vista's turn to weather the storm of FUD from the FOSS community and go on to be a successful operating system just like previous generations. That's the thing about Microsoft, instead of spending time creating FUD like the FOSS community does it actually develops software and that's why it is the clear winner. It seems that the FOSS community needs to take it's (correct) philosophy and apply it to software instead of trying to steal Republican tactics and smear the competition.
Actually for anyone who's actually tried Vista and Office 2k7 it is clear that there are massive improvements in security, stability, and most importantly ease of use. I haven't shut down my Vista box since I installed it almost 2 months ago and it's still snappy even on a Pentium M with 1GB of RAM. What's more important is that the intuitive interface and time saving features such as searching and sorting significantly decrease the time spent mucking around with the OS and leave you to do your work. As such Vista would have a huge impact in increasing productivity not only through its stability but through the amount someone can get done with it relative to XP, its only real competition. Further, Office 2k7 has similar improvements which allow you to get more things done quicker. Instead of digging blindly through cascading menus the things you need most are there on the ribbon when you need them. The instant preview feature means less guesswork when applying formatting. There are scores of other usability improvements that in total allow me to save a significant amount of time. As a bonus it loads and runs much quicker than OO.o ever did on the same box in Ubuntu. Those are simple facts. Those people claiming Vista and Office 2k7 are somehow not ready for the big time are sadly mistaken and perhaps shouldn't be in charge of making decisions when their decisions will amount to their companies and governments missing the opportunity to dramatically increase their productivity.
When Dell decided to follow through with the Idea Storm idea I was reminded of something that happened after the Super Bowl a couple years back and keeps happening occasionally. Something will happen on TV or radio and about 20 people from Focus on the Family will freak out about it and complain to the FCC over and over again. The FCC then freaks out and does something stupid like increasing censorship or fines. Similarly when the dedicated Linux community decided to take over Idea Storm they should've been ignored as they are simply an extremely vocal minority. That Dell is considering wasting that money is a sign that Dell is desperate and instead of making better looking or cheaper computers they will instead cater to the extremist elements in the IT society. It's too bad. I really like my Dell but if they are going to waste their resources on this fruitless endeavor then I'll take my money elsewhere.
On my 2 year old laptop Vista is much faster than Ubuntu was. Applications load faster. It starts up and shuts down faster. Memory intensive applications such as GIMP or Firefox open and close much faster. Furthermore after running for more than a month straight Vista has lost none of this quickness.
So all you people saying that producers whose products are "copied for free" should just stop making them are willing to lose the entirety of the music, movie, and software industries? You may say to yourself "but the FOSS community will back me up." You'd be wrong. Without the for profit software industry very few people would pursue careers in software and universities would be forced to cut their CS and likely their CE programs down to the core. Without universities the FOSS community would be nothing. Without for profit companies like Google funding the FOSS movement it would be nothing. It's not a good idea to destroy several industries simply because a majority of people are completely unscrupulous when they think no one is watching.
I've always found it hard to take Slashdot seriously when they don't even have a category for the company that makes the most used software in the world yet they have categories for obscure operating systems and failed computer companies that only make gadgets now.
It's not. Right now with Firefox using its requisite huge amount of memory, WMP11 playing a video, mail, and Aero at full Vista is using about 450MB and 0% of the CPU on my machine. The reason you think Vista is a resource hog is that you fell for the FUD.
As far as I can tell any means of electric vehicle would be an absolutely kickass offroad vehicle. The extreme torque and smootheness of electric motors are ideal for rock crawlers and other similar 4wd vehicles. It doesn't really matter where you get the electricity from. Heck, imagine one truck carries a giant fuel cell and tows the rock crawlers to the hills while powering them up too. Hybrid would be cool too, but you'd still have the gas/diesel engine to deal with.
I think Symantec is afraid that their entire security business is possibly going to go away because even morons will no longer have an excuse to have viruses or spyware. It's either that or Symantec is just in the business of filing frivolous lawsuits now instead of trying to invent new things.
That was the general point. The only people who would engage in unproven and unprovable FUD like this are either Mac users (black turtlenecks) or Linux users (kernel recompilers.)
I'm thinking this "Gartner Group" might be citing sources who wear black turtlenecks or are too busy recompiling their kernels to accurately fact check.
Sounds like the manufacturers fault
on
Viiv Falls Flat
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This situation reminds me of the problems that Microsoft has with its visions for a cheap Origami device. The ones that are coming out are quite expensive because manufacturers insist on putting Intel chips in them instead of the ones from Via that Microsoft wanted. In this case, it's likely that the manufacturers just aren't designing viiv boxes that live up to Intel's idea of what viiv should be. If Intel wants viiv done right, it's going to have to do viiv itself.
What Intel really needs to do is ignore AMD and just do what Intel does best, produce huge numbers of good chips and use the huge numbers to lower prices. Intel has proved it has what it takes to make good chips, look at the reviews of the upcoming Conroe chips. These chips are gonna be awesome and it only gets better from there. If Intel just looks out for Intel, they won't have to worry about AMD because Intel will be making a superior product anyway. As for the lawsuit, if, and that's a big if, AMD can prove anything happened in the past, Intel will just have to do whatever it takes to make the situation better and then move on and continue to ignore AMD. Ultimately consumers win when companies aren't fettered by their competitors and just endeavor to make the best product.
You're right in general, but you forgot one thing in the list of things that most Linux distros need to fix. Namely, they need to fix the fact that to simple get an install running, you need to read a million man pages, go to hundreds of threads and mailing lists online, and use the deprecated IRC format to ask Linux snobs questions. If these distros ever want to be anything but hackjobs and fixer uppers, they should spend enough time on the distro that the software isn't buggy and unfriendly.
Microsoft are using their desktop OS monopoly to bundle a free media player and leverage the use of their proprietary media codecs and DRM, which will lock customers into MS toolchains.
I understand that to an extent except that the EU has demonstrated that with the exception of France, none of them are willing to take action against Apple for the same exact offense regarding iTunes and the iPod or OSX and Apple hardware.
The rules about bundling are different for monopolies and non-monopolies
That seems very sketchy from a legal standpoint. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsof t#Government_anti-trust_suits/ it appears that Microsoft originally was considered a monopoly for the sole reason that they had a large percentage of the desktop market. I fail to see how making Microsoft sell their OS piece by piece somehow decreases their ability to keep a monopoly. Furthermore, allowing other companies to engage in potentially monopolistic behavior simply because Microsoft has a monopoly seems just plain backwards. Perhaps the best end would be if the other shoe dropped and Microsoft were eventually split into a software and an OS company. At this point though, I fail to see how anything besides another company making a decent product, as Apple tries to do, and the FOSS movement is doing decent at with Linux/BSD/etc... would impact Microsoft's dominance in the operating system market.
I know that Microsoft has a genuinely shady past in terms of business practices, but the "new charges" seem to be awfully weak to me. From TLFA "as well as the bundling of Windows Media Player and Windows Media Server with its desktop and server operating system respectively." Now I could be wrong, but last time I checked every OS comes with a Media Player. At some point you just have to wonder what the real point of these suits is if they're not going to call MS on its real bad business practices and will instead throw questionable charges at Microsoft. That's an awfully weak case IMHOP.
Umm, nice tinfoil hat you've got there, and tons of people were killed on the roads leading into Tiananmen, but there is actually video tape of wave after wave of people running into Tiananmen then being shot down and being carried back out. That's just from the day after when the parents were trying to come in and get the bodies of their children who had been shot the night before. The night video is pretty chaotic, but you can distinctly hear and see the people being shot because they had the lights to the square on for a while and then after shutting those off, they turn on the giant floodlights that cover the front of the Great Hall of the People. That of course provided a fairly eery situation when perhaps thousands of troops began marching into the square from the Great Hall, then the shooting began and all hell broke loose.
I don't think you can say that Tiananmen had no effect on policy at all. The stuff that happened in Beijing before Tiananmen and during Tiananmen had a distinct chilling effect on the ability and want of the citizens to challenge the government.
If you'll look, after the mess in Tiananmen in 1989 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_prot ests_of_1989 the Chinese government basically said something to the effect of "ok, you know we'll kill you if you embarass us again like that" and that they were going to turn the country capitalist in the sense that foreign companies could do whatever they want and they decided to invest heavily in technology and modernization. Their bread and circuses decision has lead China to be one of the fastest growing economies in the world if not the fastest. There were sweeping reforms economically that took place while the political landscape remained as barren as before. True communists they are not in any sense.
You're definitely right on the aspect that companies would be able to compete on features, but it's a possibility that features depend on the data protocols used. For example, imagine a new boot loader that a company does massive amounts of research into which allows for instant on computers. I'd suppose the boot loader would function on a set of protocols. If a company were to implement this boot loader in a way that only their OS would boot immediately, they could gain a sizable advantage over the competition. However, if they were forced to open the protocols for the boot loader, other operating system manufacturers could design their OS to function using the new boot loader and the company who developed the boot loader would not get any gain from developing the boot loader. Thus, the temptation would be to stay with the status quo and not do the research.
Where will it end though? If every software protocol is forced to be open, no company will be willing to produce an innovative product because their product's formats will no longer be poprietary, thus some other company can essentially use the same format without paying for the research, thus be able to charge less for a similar product and still make money. Imagine if MS opened up Exchange, how long before there was a free Exchange alternative with some catchy name like Freexchange? People would use the free alternative and Microsoft wouldn't make any money off the format that they put all the research into creating. Having seen that, companies would certainly think twice about developing new data/software formats because there isn't any money to be made by being innovative.
Slashdot Mirror
How many people were still using 3.1 in 2002? If you're still using XP at this point you deserve every problem you get.
NASA is terrible with arbitrary deadlines. Remember how the Mars rovers were only supposed to work for 90 days? They've been at it for years now. The date will be pushed back over and over again.
If all you read is Slashdot you'd think Windows would've been gone long ago and Linux would reign supreme. Fortunately in the real world that's not how things work. You're just the equivalent of a Neo-Con who gets all his news from the Free Republic.
Microsoft needs to take a lesson from Sony and ignore the outright lies being pushed on the internet. The PS3 is, in reality, selling quite well. It's selling better than the 360 did at this juncture. Vista is the same way. It is selling just as every new OS sells initially. I remember the same stories being pushed around Slashdot when XP came out about how this was finally Linux's time to shine. Fortunately XP took off and now it's Vista's turn to weather the storm of FUD from the FOSS community and go on to be a successful operating system just like previous generations. That's the thing about Microsoft, instead of spending time creating FUD like the FOSS community does it actually develops software and that's why it is the clear winner. It seems that the FOSS community needs to take it's (correct) philosophy and apply it to software instead of trying to steal Republican tactics and smear the competition.
Actually for anyone who's actually tried Vista and Office 2k7 it is clear that there are massive improvements in security, stability, and most importantly ease of use. I haven't shut down my Vista box since I installed it almost 2 months ago and it's still snappy even on a Pentium M with 1GB of RAM. What's more important is that the intuitive interface and time saving features such as searching and sorting significantly decrease the time spent mucking around with the OS and leave you to do your work. As such Vista would have a huge impact in increasing productivity not only through its stability but through the amount someone can get done with it relative to XP, its only real competition. Further, Office 2k7 has similar improvements which allow you to get more things done quicker. Instead of digging blindly through cascading menus the things you need most are there on the ribbon when you need them. The instant preview feature means less guesswork when applying formatting. There are scores of other usability improvements that in total allow me to save a significant amount of time. As a bonus it loads and runs much quicker than OO.o ever did on the same box in Ubuntu. Those are simple facts. Those people claiming Vista and Office 2k7 are somehow not ready for the big time are sadly mistaken and perhaps shouldn't be in charge of making decisions when their decisions will amount to their companies and governments missing the opportunity to dramatically increase their productivity.
When Dell decided to follow through with the Idea Storm idea I was reminded of something that happened after the Super Bowl a couple years back and keeps happening occasionally. Something will happen on TV or radio and about 20 people from Focus on the Family will freak out about it and complain to the FCC over and over again. The FCC then freaks out and does something stupid like increasing censorship or fines. Similarly when the dedicated Linux community decided to take over Idea Storm they should've been ignored as they are simply an extremely vocal minority. That Dell is considering wasting that money is a sign that Dell is desperate and instead of making better looking or cheaper computers they will instead cater to the extremist elements in the IT society. It's too bad. I really like my Dell but if they are going to waste their resources on this fruitless endeavor then I'll take my money elsewhere.
On my 2 year old laptop Vista is much faster than Ubuntu was. Applications load faster. It starts up and shuts down faster. Memory intensive applications such as GIMP or Firefox open and close much faster. Furthermore after running for more than a month straight Vista has lost none of this quickness.
So all you people saying that producers whose products are "copied for free" should just stop making them are willing to lose the entirety of the music, movie, and software industries? You may say to yourself "but the FOSS community will back me up." You'd be wrong. Without the for profit software industry very few people would pursue careers in software and universities would be forced to cut their CS and likely their CE programs down to the core. Without universities the FOSS community would be nothing. Without for profit companies like Google funding the FOSS movement it would be nothing. It's not a good idea to destroy several industries simply because a majority of people are completely unscrupulous when they think no one is watching.
I've always found it hard to take Slashdot seriously when they don't even have a category for the company that makes the most used software in the world yet they have categories for obscure operating systems and failed computer companies that only make gadgets now.
It's not. Right now with Firefox using its requisite huge amount of memory, WMP11 playing a video, mail, and Aero at full Vista is using about 450MB and 0% of the CPU on my machine. The reason you think Vista is a resource hog is that you fell for the FUD.
As far as I can tell any means of electric vehicle would be an absolutely kickass offroad vehicle. The extreme torque and smootheness of electric motors are ideal for rock crawlers and other similar 4wd vehicles. It doesn't really matter where you get the electricity from. Heck, imagine one truck carries a giant fuel cell and tows the rock crawlers to the hills while powering them up too. Hybrid would be cool too, but you'd still have the gas/diesel engine to deal with.
I think Symantec is afraid that their entire security business is possibly going to go away because even morons will no longer have an excuse to have viruses or spyware. It's either that or Symantec is just in the business of filing frivolous lawsuits now instead of trying to invent new things.
That was the general point. The only people who would engage in unproven and unprovable FUD like this are either Mac users (black turtlenecks) or Linux users (kernel recompilers.)
I'm thinking this "Gartner Group" might be citing sources who wear black turtlenecks or are too busy recompiling their kernels to accurately fact check.
This situation reminds me of the problems that Microsoft has with its visions for a cheap Origami device. The ones that are coming out are quite expensive because manufacturers insist on putting Intel chips in them instead of the ones from Via that Microsoft wanted. In this case, it's likely that the manufacturers just aren't designing viiv boxes that live up to Intel's idea of what viiv should be. If Intel wants viiv done right, it's going to have to do viiv itself.
What Intel really needs to do is ignore AMD and just do what Intel does best, produce huge numbers of good chips and use the huge numbers to lower prices. Intel has proved it has what it takes to make good chips, look at the reviews of the upcoming Conroe chips. These chips are gonna be awesome and it only gets better from there. If Intel just looks out for Intel, they won't have to worry about AMD because Intel will be making a superior product anyway. As for the lawsuit, if, and that's a big if, AMD can prove anything happened in the past, Intel will just have to do whatever it takes to make the situation better and then move on and continue to ignore AMD. Ultimately consumers win when companies aren't fettered by their competitors and just endeavor to make the best product.
You're right in general, but you forgot one thing in the list of things that most Linux distros need to fix. Namely, they need to fix the fact that to simple get an install running, you need to read a million man pages, go to hundreds of threads and mailing lists online, and use the deprecated IRC format to ask Linux snobs questions. If these distros ever want to be anything but hackjobs and fixer uppers, they should spend enough time on the distro that the software isn't buggy and unfriendly.
Microsoft are using their desktop OS monopoly to bundle a free media player and leverage the use of their proprietary media codecs and DRM, which will lock customers into MS toolchains.
I understand that to an extent except that the EU has demonstrated that with the exception of France, none of them are willing to take action against Apple for the same exact offense regarding iTunes and the iPod or OSX and Apple hardware.
The rules about bundling are different for monopolies and non-monopolies That seems very sketchy from a legal standpoint. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsof t#Government_anti-trust_suits/ it appears that Microsoft originally was considered a monopoly for the sole reason that they had a large percentage of the desktop market. I fail to see how making Microsoft sell their OS piece by piece somehow decreases their ability to keep a monopoly. Furthermore, allowing other companies to engage in potentially monopolistic behavior simply because Microsoft has a monopoly seems just plain backwards. Perhaps the best end would be if the other shoe dropped and Microsoft were eventually split into a software and an OS company. At this point though, I fail to see how anything besides another company making a decent product, as Apple tries to do, and the FOSS movement is doing decent at with Linux/BSD/etc... would impact Microsoft's dominance in the operating system market.
I know that Microsoft has a genuinely shady past in terms of business practices, but the "new charges" seem to be awfully weak to me. From TLFA "as well as the bundling of Windows Media Player and Windows Media Server with its desktop and server operating system respectively." Now I could be wrong, but last time I checked every OS comes with a Media Player. At some point you just have to wonder what the real point of these suits is if they're not going to call MS on its real bad business practices and will instead throw questionable charges at Microsoft. That's an awfully weak case IMHOP.
Umm, nice tinfoil hat you've got there, and tons of people were killed on the roads leading into Tiananmen, but there is actually video tape of wave after wave of people running into Tiananmen then being shot down and being carried back out. That's just from the day after when the parents were trying to come in and get the bodies of their children who had been shot the night before. The night video is pretty chaotic, but you can distinctly hear and see the people being shot because they had the lights to the square on for a while and then after shutting those off, they turn on the giant floodlights that cover the front of the Great Hall of the People. That of course provided a fairly eery situation when perhaps thousands of troops began marching into the square from the Great Hall, then the shooting began and all hell broke loose.
I don't think you can say that Tiananmen had no effect on policy at all. The stuff that happened in Beijing before Tiananmen and during Tiananmen had a distinct chilling effect on the ability and want of the citizens to challenge the government.
If you'll look, after the mess in Tiananmen in 1989 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_prot ests_of_1989 the Chinese government basically said something to the effect of "ok, you know we'll kill you if you embarass us again like that" and that they were going to turn the country capitalist in the sense that foreign companies could do whatever they want and they decided to invest heavily in technology and modernization. Their bread and circuses decision has lead China to be one of the fastest growing economies in the world if not the fastest. There were sweeping reforms economically that took place while the political landscape remained as barren as before. True communists they are not in any sense.
You're definitely right on the aspect that companies would be able to compete on features, but it's a possibility that features depend on the data protocols used. For example, imagine a new boot loader that a company does massive amounts of research into which allows for instant on computers. I'd suppose the boot loader would function on a set of protocols. If a company were to implement this boot loader in a way that only their OS would boot immediately, they could gain a sizable advantage over the competition. However, if they were forced to open the protocols for the boot loader, other operating system manufacturers could design their OS to function using the new boot loader and the company who developed the boot loader would not get any gain from developing the boot loader. Thus, the temptation would be to stay with the status quo and not do the research.
Where will it end though? If every software protocol is forced to be open, no company will be willing to produce an innovative product because their product's formats will no longer be poprietary, thus some other company can essentially use the same format without paying for the research, thus be able to charge less for a similar product and still make money. Imagine if MS opened up Exchange, how long before there was a free Exchange alternative with some catchy name like Freexchange? People would use the free alternative and Microsoft wouldn't make any money off the format that they put all the research into creating. Having seen that, companies would certainly think twice about developing new data/software formats because there isn't any money to be made by being innovative.