Without getting into the whole Postgres vs MySQL thing, I'm not sure that XE and MySQL are so evenly matched.
I never said they are evenly matched. I said that they have a lot of overlap in the purpose they can be seen as serving for Oracle (which isn't exactly the same as having overlap in the purpose they serve for users.)
It might perform better, or be more easily upgraded to something that performs better, but if you have a huge but relatively low-load database you're not going to want to use it.
Clearly, if you have a database that is too big for its limits, then -- no matter what the load is -- you won't want to use it. But XE vs. MySQL isn't just a matter of load, Oracle (incl. XE) has a lot of SQL features that MySQL doesn't have. If you are using a RDBMS as a dumb row store, that probably doesn't matter, but that's not really where Oracle's business is focussed.
Lots of people use MySQL, which I think is a big driver for Oracle to try to stagnate it.
It would be if stagnating MySQL would drive people to Oracle, but stagnating MySQL is likely to drive people to other low-cost options. That might be Oracle XE in some cases (but, as you note, XE isn't usable for all the things that MySQL is), but its at least as likely to be other open source RDBMS's that Oracle has no hand in.
As a general rule, I find that conservatives and libertarians tend to think about consequences to tax policy, regulation, etc.
As a general rule, I find that conservatives and libertarians have a few simple articles of faith about tax policy, regulation, etc., rather than thinking about the consequences.
I've encountered people who really analyze the situation in which the policy is proposed and the specific policy and think about the consequences, but in my experience they've been more often liberals than libertarians or conservatives, and the ones that I wouldn't normally call liberals are very much not libertarians and far to the left of the modern Republican Party, and so would probably be considered "liberal" in today's political landscape.
Well, that's not entirely true. There are plenty of people advocating policies in line with the modern Republican party that deeply and carefully consider the impacts of policy on a particular corporation or industry (though this is rarely reflected in their public characterization of the policy!), rather than the social harms or benefits, but they are mostly corporate lobbyists who represent the interests of a particular firm or industry.
Good one, Governor Moonbeam! You just killed the revenue stream of roughly 25k Amazon affiliates. So instead of just being content with the revenue collected from the income tax of those affiliates, you decide to double-dip and tax not only the income earned by the affiliate but the transaction as well. Instead of allowing you to double-dip, Amazon pulls the plug on their affiliate program in CA and your projected $200+M tax revenue increase goes up in smoke.
Well, no. First, the $200M isn't just from Amazon, and the other affected e-tailers aren't all trying to take similar steps to eliminate their business nexus with California. Second, the revenue from Amazon would only be simply lost if the transactions still occur, and still go to Amazon: but that presupposes that the affiliate program had no value to Amazon whatsoever. That supposition is unreasonable.
So, considering the effect of the Amazon transactions, if we suppose instead that the affiliate program actually does drive business to Amazon that would otherwise not go to Amazon, then those transactions will either: * Not happen, and the California residents who would have engaged in them will use the money for other purposes, some of which is likely to be subject at least to California sales tax (and some of which may be subject to other California taxes as well); * Happen, but go to some other e-tailer, which may either already be subject to sales tax before the expansion (e.g., Barnes & Noble or any other e-tailer which also has a physical retail presence in the State) or may have a business nexus in the State that has not been severed (because, unlike Amazon, the e-tailer prefers to preserve sales even if it means paying tax on them.) * Happen, but go to some brick-and-mortar retailer in the State, which is already subject to State sales tax.
I just want to know why it is that when times are tough everyone except the government is expected to make due with less.
The reason that intelligent policy works this way is that countercyclical government spending reduces the depth and severity of recessions, and the times when you need government doing more is when times are bad (when the private sector economy is doing well on its own, you want government doing less; when it isn't, you want government doing more.)
But, in any case that's not what is happening in California: while there are some revenue enhancements that are taking place in California, the budget gap has been closed largely by spending cuts (Gov. Brown's initial proposal was a half-cuts, half-revenue plan, but California requires a supermajority to pass tax increases or extensions and only a simple majority to pass a budget, so the actual budget passed has less, realistically, on the revenue side; in theory its about the same because instead of some of the tax extensions there are more favorable revenue forecasts on the revenue side, but those are probably overly optimistic and there are additional triggered spending cuts programmed mid-year if those revenue forecasts don't turn out to be right.)
Why don't liberals seem to understand that imposing a tax has a net effect of reducing economic activity?
Because, despite the fact that this is an article of faith among anti-tax Republicans, its not actually supported by facts. It is possible for a particular tax increase to be a net drain compared to a particular spending cut of the same magnitude, but whether or not it is depends on what the tax increase is and what the spending increase is. (For a government which can relatively freely borrow, a tax increase is probably usually a short-term economic drain compared to maintaining spending without increasing taxes, i.e. deficit spending, but both due to Constitutional requirements for a budget that is at least nominally balanced, and credit conditions resulting from California's fairly free borrowing during good economic conditions, Cali
Oracle won't release MySQL. MySQL is a long-term, strategic threat to their primary product, Oracle database.
No, its not.
Now, only customer-facing services get an Oracle or Sybase license bought for them - the rest got MySQL.
You know, Oracle already has a free-for-production-use version of Oracle Database (Oracle Database XE) that has been around longer than they've owned MySQL. It may be true that low-cost (open source or not) database alternatives have reduced the number of licenses Oracle can sell, but Oracle has long ago figured out that it was better off if it was supplying the low-cost alternatives (and thus, using them as a vehicle to push upgrades to its more expensive products, or as vehicles to sell optional services) than if those were provided only by its competitors.
MySQL might eventually get cut because it doesn't have a clear distinct market role for Oracle that isn't better served (from Oracle's perspective) by the existing XE product, but its not getting cut on the basis that the existence of low-cost and/or open-source DBs are a strategic threat to Oracle Database (indeed, keeping MySQL as the most visible open-source DB probably is the best way to keep mindshare off of open-source DBs that have the potential to be a strategic threat to Oracle Database, something PostgreSQL, for instance, stands a lot bigger chance of doing than MySQL does.)
its wifi printing over apples BS, it only matters if your an airport user with an apple printer and accessories
Well, actually, the whole point of TFA is that you can now use it with an AirPrint client (e.g., an iOS device like an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch) without the rest of Apple's stack of supporting gadgetry if you have an Ubuntu system and any printer that the Ubuntu system can drive.
or in other words less than a percentage of your typical apple user cause its on linux and was not installed by a genius
It may be of use only to a small fraction of Apple users, but I suspect the fraction of Ubuntu users that are also iOS mobile device users (and who benefit from this since they can now use the mobile devices print functionality without anything Apple other than the iOS mobile device) is larger.
So what is AirPrint? Is it software made by Apple which can somehow now run on Ubuntu to support printing over wifi? And how does an incompatible printer suddenly become compatible because of Ubuntu?
AirPrint is a protocol for driving printers over networks, largely intended to allow printing from iOS devices like the iPad or iPhone (it may or may not be usable from other devices, as well.) The Ubuntu software components involved presumably act as a server for AirPrint and then send the actual print job to the attached printer; the printer doesn't "become compatible", the software acts like an AirPrint printer to the AirPrint client, but uses the printer to do the actual printing.
You missed the point of my post by confusing gratis with libre
No, I didn't.
For a service to implement a feature you want, they had to spend money and time they could have spent on something else.
True, but irrelevant to me, particularly if the "something else" is a feature I do not want.
The fact that there is not an infinite supply of free, on-demand programming resources (including, for that matter, my own) means that "you are free to implement X yourself or have someone implement it for you" is not a perfect substitute for, and is quite often not even remotely a worthwhile alternative to, "X is implemented for you".
If you organize a bunch of users and advocate for a change, you're investing your collective time (and the goodwill of people you petition) in creating goal alignment, which may result in the win-win situation that eludes people who too often think in zero-sum terms.
Yes, and that's true whether or not the root product at issue is open; after all, I can just as easily organize a bunch of users of a commercial, closed-source, closed-data-format as an open (source or data) one, and vendors of closed products do, frequently, respond to demands from their user community.
OTOH, that's a rather long-term option in either case. If an otherwise comparable, competing product has the feature I want now, the fact that I could organize a group of users to lobby for (or build) the feature I want in a product -- closed or open -- that lacks it is a small consolation.
"Open" is all about win-win- the provider generates loyalty/goodwill, the user gains freedom.
The freedom for users, as such, of "open" software is often not a real benefit. To the extent that openness benefits users qua users, it is through choice which only materializes when third-party developers, as well as being free to build the add-ons users demand, are also motivated to do so. OTOH, its often possible for third-party developers to do that for non-"open" software as well: it may often be more difficult to do so, but often the incentives are stronger, as well.
If you want something custom-made, it'll cost you, whether in time spent doing it yourself, cash as a feature bounty, or the goodwill of geeks if you're excessively demanding of their time.
Yes, obviously true. Which is why a product which does not include an feature that is important to a particular user or audience, but which merely provides the necessary hooks on which you might hang a custom implementation is often, by far, inferior -- for that user or audience -- to an otherwise similar product that does include the feature.
Today, most everyone knows a programmer, or at least knows someone who does.
Not everyone knows a programmer with infinite free time and willingness to take on all the "it would be nice if the software or online service I use offered this feature, but it doesn't, please implement for me" requests for free.
What is the ultimate objective of a person? Just as the latter varies from person to person, the former varies from corporation to corporation. Its true that with corporations -- particularly widely held and/or publicly traded ones -- the shared interests of their stockholders weighted according to the ratio in which they hold voting rights (which is what, approximately, a corporation exists to serve) tends to heavily favor financial returns as the dominant goal, that's not the universal and exclusive goal of all corporations, or even all publicly traded corporations, and Google's unusual structuring of stock voting rights when it went public makes it particularly plausible that Google's pre-IPO shareholders didn't see that as their only goal and wanted to take steps to avoid it becoming the company's only goal.
Continuing to require Ubuntu to only be released as a CD-sized ISO is a backward step IMHO. At least also provide a DVD image.
Ubuntu provides a number of alternative images besides the normal desktop install CD image, including a DVD image, and has for several years.
It seems to me a more likely reason for dropping Synaptic is that the marketing minds behind Ubuntu are gradually eliminating support for those pesky power users.
Synaptic has been replaced by the Ubuntu Software Center as the primary package management UI for Ubuntu for a while; the decision not to include it on the CD is a change with little actual effect, especially on power users, who can presumably figure out how to install something that is in the repositories but not on the CD. If they really don't like USC, they can do it through the command line, since the command line tools aren't being taken out of the CD, or even the base install.
Any more dumbing down of Ubuntu and I for one will be dropping it.
Ubuntu is, overtly, intended to be, first and foremost, Linux for casual mass-market users, and the default install (and the packages available on the default install media) reflect that. Now, Ubuntu continues to support other users with packages available in the repositories and on alternate install media (and in alternate distributions in the Ubuntu family; e.g., Ubuntu Server is, naturally, not intended for casual mass-market users), but complaining that the default Ubuntu install and default install media are exactly what Ubuntu markets itself as is, well, somewhat pointless.
So Google pushing their own services to voluntary users of it's free service warrants an anti-trust investigation, but for some reason net neutrality isn't taken seriously by hardly anyone in washington?
The net neutrality rules that the FCC adopted were the results of a process that started with an investigation, the FTC action that is reported to be imminent (but which has not actually occurred) with regard to Google is starting an investigation. The former is obviously more serious than the latter, so I don't think the comparison you present is defensible.
Those points are all valid, but we're talking about the mid-term future here, not looking at things as they are right now.
Actually, no. Google's point seems to be that Gigabit-to-the-home shouldn't be considered "mid-term future".
It just seems likely that once we have gigabit internet, we'll probably be using entire walls to watch TV, and we'll be wanting suitably high-definition video.
The Google Kansas City gigabit network deployment is scheduled to start being available in 1Q 2012. So, you know, that kind of depends on your definition of "we".
As for your other points, if the internet connection is so fast that it can download the entire stream in 15 seconds, skipping foward/backwards won't be a problem, nor will downloading it again.
Skipping forward and back, etc., involve network roundtrips, and thus the user experience problems involved center around latency more than bandwidth, and gigabit speed doesn't mean substantially better average latency. Using a surplus of bandwidth to download the whole video at the outset means you don't have to worry about network latency.
It also may mean you can transfer the film to watch on a portable device that may not have gigabit (or, depending on where you go, any) network access when you want to watch the film.
Should the emphasis be on providing a few people, in select metropolitan areas, unbelievable bandwidth or should it be on providing reasonable bandwidth for the rest of the country?
The focus should be on providing everyone unbelievable bandwidth. To do that, you start with a demonstration project in one area that shows that you can do it, and that motivates incumbent ISPs to work on doing it elsewhere before you get around to doing it there and take their captive markets away from them.
Out of curiousity, who will pay for this increased bandwidth/pipe?
Initially, content providers that want consumers to have usable access to their high-bandwidth services and aren't satisfied with the speed of improvements by incumbent ISPs. That's what the whole Google effort in Kansas City is about.
After that, incumbent ISPs will probably bear much of the costs; some of it will be born by consumers, but a lot of it will come in reduced profits to ISPs that currently extract monopoly rents through lack of competition and combined with substantial barriers to entry in most locations.
there's no way AT&T/Verizon/Warner/comcast would willingly spend money to do that since that hurt profits.
If Google successfully rolls it out (as a "demonstration") starting in one locality and then expanding to others, it will hurt AT&T/Verizon/Warner/Comcast/etc's profits not to do it themselves, since otherwise they'll lose their customers in the areas where Google deploys it to Google.
Google decides "browser vendors aren't doing the things we'd like them to do", builds it own browser that focusses on the things that Google wants browsers to do, starts grabbing market share, and suddenly incumbent browser vendor start moving in the direction Google wants.
Next, Google decides "ISPs aren't doing the things we'd like them to do", and starts building its own consumer broadband network. Same basic strategy. Note that Google's deployment in Kansas City (KS and MO, both) is targetting availability starting 1Q 2012, with gigabit speeds, and pricing "at a competitive price to what people are paying for Internet access today".
Incumbent ISPs aren't going to be able to get many customers for megabit-range internet service if someone is offering price-competitive gigabit service in the same area. And if Kansas City goes well for Google, I wouldn't expect them to stop there.
Why should ISPs invest in infrastructure outlay when they can just raise rates on "bandwidth hogs"?
Well, if Google starts rolling it out (even if it is initially billed as a technology demonstration), then it starts to threaten ISPs ability to just raise the rates on "bandwidth hogs", which is entirely dependent on the lack of competition from anyone who does things differently.
So, yeah, if ISPs can just milk "bandwidth hogs", they will. OTOH, if someone else is providing gigabit WAN connections at reasonable cost -- and applications exist that make effective use of those connections -- then incumbent ISPs won't be able to milk bandwidth hogs, because the bandwidth hogs will defect. Incumbent ISPs will be forced to adapt or die.
Next, someone will have the idea that it would be a great feature if your browser pre-fetched all the other episodes for the same season or additional sequel/prequel movies, just in case you may want to watch them later.
Actually, it would be, if the prefetch is done as a low-priority operation with spare bandwidth so as not to impact whatever your current interactive demands are, and you have sufficient local storage. This reduces latency once you decide to watch one of the other episodes. (Though, really, you probably don't want the system to prefetch all the other episodes; if it takes 15 seconds to download a one hour episode, for instance, there is really very little reason to prefetch more than the next episode if usage data suggests that viewers usually consume the show in a serial fashion.)
Adding bandwidth is never a BAD idea, however it should obviate the need for these types of practices, not encourage them.
Local storage reduces latency (and setting a task to prefetch data when convenient so its available on demand can also mitigate issues with network availability on either end, which might be particularly important for mobile devices that occasionally, but not always, have access to the high speed connection, such a netbook that comes home to a hookup to the home gigaWAN being discussed, but the rest of the time travels and only has access to 3G or 4G networks, and perhaps not always even that.) Adding all the bandwidth in the world doesn't reduce the need to reduce latency. In fact, once you've dealt with the bandwidth problem, the latency problem is the next obvious target.
Why not? Doctors are held personally liable for their mistakes.
No, they aren't.
They are held personally responsible for failing to practice at the "level at which an ordinary, prudent professional having the same training and experience in good standing in a same or similar community would practice under the same or similar circumstances" (not the average professional of those descriptions, but essentially the minimum level at which an 'ordinary, prudent' professional would operate.)
The vast majority of all medical mistakes don't reach the level. Just like most patent mistakes don't involve failing below the standard of an ordinary, prudent professional with the same training and experience in good standing within the community of patent examiners under the same or similar conditions.
So extending professional malpractice liability of the kind that applies in the medical (or legal, etc.) profession to patent examiners would probably not imply liability for the kind of "errors" at issue here, which are fairly endemic to the patent system and not the result of unusual personal failures.
With first to file, if you sit on an invention and don't file the patent, you can't get a patent.
That's actually true with first to invent if you simply adopt a maximum time limit between invention and patent filing. (Even better would be to also set the maximum duration of the patent from the date of invention, with protection only running from the date of grant.)
If someone else independently invents it and tries to patent it, then you simply show prior art and neither gets the patent.
Wrong; with first to file, if someone else independently develops it and tries to get a patent while you "sit on it", you can't show prior art (because prior art requires a prior public disclosure, not mere prior invention) so the later "inventor" does, in fact, get the patent, and you get nothing except possibly the right to continue using a doctrine of prior user rights (assuming the system incorporates such rights.)
With first to invent, the best strategy is to sit on your invention.
Presuming there are neither time limits to filing nor rules running the duration of the patent from the date of invention, this is correct; of course, this is obviously addressable within first to invent without switching to first to file.
First to invent is better, if you're a patent troll. Keep the evidence that you invented first, wait for someone else to start shipping a product, wait for them to apply for the patent, then get it assigned to you and start charging license fees.acquiring patents and extorting licensing agreements from people already using the inventions described in the patents.
Of course, that is a fairly high risk model, since it requires you to invent something that meets all the requirements for patentability (including non-obviousness) and hope that somebody stumbles onto the same thing and starts using it, when you could be patenting it and actually encouraging people to use it rather than hoping someone else stumbles across it.
And, again, time limits on filing and on the duration of patents based on the date of invention neatly solve any incentive there might be to sit on patentable inventions in a first-to-invent system without switching to first-to-file. (Which is really good for patent trolls using a slightly different model; instead, the troll just devotes resources to having a good patent filing shop, and having an optimized patent filing process then trumps speed of invention.)
Prior art is relevant to "first to file" as well as "first to invent". You cannot invent something which already exists, so prior art is an absolute obstacle in either case.
That is, indeed, an argument against "first to file" entirely, since if you can't invent something which already exists (which I agree is true), then the only inventor is the "first to invent", and the "first to file", if they aren't first to invent as well, isn't an inventor at all, and thus there is no rational basis for granting them a patent (and, arguably, no Constitutional basis; the U.S. doesn't have parliamentary soveriegnty, and Congress can't just do whatever it wants: it has a Constitutional authority to grant inventors exclusive rights but, if you can't invent something that already exists, then that power cannot extend to anyone who isn't "first to invent".)
Chrome's success is not linked to its version number. It's more that it's constantly and painlessly updated with little to no breakage.
Which, like the version number, is intimately tied to Chrome's release practices, including their focus on one supported stable release plus a small number of future versions (the beta, dev, and canary versions.) Eliminating waste is an essential component of an effective focus on quality, and the Chrome release process that Firefox is emulating is an example of that (obviously, the schedule and version numbering of that release process aren't the only critical components in focus on quality, and it remains to be seen if Firefox will be as effective as Chrome has been.)
Granting, arguendo, the truth of that assertion, that's irrelevant because Firefox isn't commercial software.
Try telling your customer that you've unilaterally decided to stop supporting the product they paid a million dollars for last month and that they need to upgrade.
Uh, sure, with commercial software where someone has paid a million dollars for the last version and will be charged a substantial fraction of that too upgrade to the next major version, the traditional version numbering practice and supporting multiple major versions makes a lot of sense. Which, you know, isn't surprising, since those practices evolved in that environment.
With free software where users paid $0 for the current major version and will be charged $0 for the upgrade to the next major version, the same rationale for supporting multiple major versions doesn't exist. Major version upgrades as the avenue to maintain support make more sense in that environment than in the commercial software environment.
(They also can make sense in a commercial software environment where, instead of separate charges for major version upgrades, you pay a support cost that is the same regardless of what version you use and includes the right to major version upgrades; the main reason to support multiple major versions in this environment, or the free software one, is that you may introduce incompatible changes in a new major version and you want to provide customers that have other software that would be affected the opportunity to be insulated from any resulting incompatibilities: OTOH, treating backward incompatibilities that cause major customer disruptions as bugs and assuring that the new major version is available to customers for testing before general release is a way of mitigating that; whether that is sufficient mitigation really depends on the audience you are targetting, and the audience targetted by a mass-market browser isn't the same as the audience targetted by most B2B software; much of the latter is included in the former, but not vice versa.)
Even if the upgrade is free I've got customers with a 6 month QA cycle and they're not happy with frivolous updates.
A 6-month QA cycle is indicative of a fundamentally broken process. At any rate, unless those customers of yours are providing a substantial revenue stream to Mozilla, I'm not sure exactly why you think this is a concern for Mozilla.
Almost ever commercial developer I know supports old versions because they want to keep their old customers.
And that certainly makes sense in certain commercial software business models, but the Mozilla Foundation is not a commercial developer, and trying to judge Mozilla Foundation's approach to software development and support by what makes sense for commercial developers is about as useful as trying to judge Oracle's approach to what makes sense for purveyor's of Facebook-based games.
And that's the problem. It needlessly pisses people off. Who are the developers who start using this scheme when I don't know a single developer who thinks it makes sense?
Clearly, they are developers you don't know.
And many of them work for projects that have been very successful using this approach, which is more relevant to assessing the utility of the approach than random people on the internet claiming that it "needlessly pisses people off".
Its a pretty obvious approach that reduces waste and duplication of effort inherent in the traditional release cycle that is built around a commercial software model where there is a different charge to customers for major version upgrades versus ongoing support for a prior major version (sometimes with the latter free and the former a significant charge.)
This is the exact behavior that will drive users away.
Which is exactly why IE and Firefox, which didn't (and in IE's case, still don't) use this style of release cycle, have been losing browser share to Chrome, which does -- because this approach will "drive users away".
Somehow, I think the facts do not support your assertion.
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I never said they are evenly matched. I said that they have a lot of overlap in the purpose they can be seen as serving for Oracle (which isn't exactly the same as having overlap in the purpose they serve for users.)
Clearly, if you have a database that is too big for its limits, then -- no matter what the load is -- you won't want to use it. But XE vs. MySQL isn't just a matter of load, Oracle (incl. XE) has a lot of SQL features that MySQL doesn't have. If you are using a RDBMS as a dumb row store, that probably doesn't matter, but that's not really where Oracle's business is focussed.
It would be if stagnating MySQL would drive people to Oracle, but stagnating MySQL is likely to drive people to other low-cost options. That might be Oracle XE in some cases (but, as you note, XE isn't usable for all the things that MySQL is), but its at least as likely to be other open source RDBMS's that Oracle has no hand in.
As a general rule, I find that conservatives and libertarians have a few simple articles of faith about tax policy, regulation, etc., rather than thinking about the consequences.
I've encountered people who really analyze the situation in which the policy is proposed and the specific policy and think about the consequences, but in my experience they've been more often liberals than libertarians or conservatives, and the ones that I wouldn't normally call liberals are very much not libertarians and far to the left of the modern Republican Party, and so would probably be considered "liberal" in today's political landscape.
Well, that's not entirely true. There are plenty of people advocating policies in line with the modern Republican party that deeply and carefully consider the impacts of policy on a particular corporation or industry (though this is rarely reflected in their public characterization of the policy!), rather than the social harms or benefits, but they are mostly corporate lobbyists who represent the interests of a particular firm or industry.
Well, no. First, the $200M isn't just from Amazon, and the other affected e-tailers aren't all trying to take similar steps to eliminate their business nexus with California. Second, the revenue from Amazon would only be simply lost if the transactions still occur, and still go to Amazon: but that presupposes that the affiliate program had no value to Amazon whatsoever. That supposition is unreasonable.
So, considering the effect of the Amazon transactions, if we suppose instead that the affiliate program actually does drive business to Amazon that would otherwise not go to Amazon, then those transactions will either:
* Not happen, and the California residents who would have engaged in them will use the money for other purposes, some of which is likely to be subject at least to California sales tax (and some of which may be subject to other California taxes as well);
* Happen, but go to some other e-tailer, which may either already be subject to sales tax before the expansion (e.g., Barnes & Noble or any other e-tailer which also has a physical retail presence in the State) or may have a business nexus in the State that has not been severed (because, unlike Amazon, the e-tailer prefers to preserve sales even if it means paying tax on them.)
* Happen, but go to some brick-and-mortar retailer in the State, which is already subject to State sales tax.
The reason that intelligent policy works this way is that countercyclical government spending reduces the depth and severity of recessions, and the times when you need government doing more is when times are bad (when the private sector economy is doing well on its own, you want government doing less; when it isn't, you want government doing more.)
But, in any case that's not what is happening in California: while there are some revenue enhancements that are taking place in California, the budget gap has been closed largely by spending cuts (Gov. Brown's initial proposal was a half-cuts, half-revenue plan, but California requires a supermajority to pass tax increases or extensions and only a simple majority to pass a budget, so the actual budget passed has less, realistically, on the revenue side; in theory its about the same because instead of some of the tax extensions there are more favorable revenue forecasts on the revenue side, but those are probably overly optimistic and there are additional triggered spending cuts programmed mid-year if those revenue forecasts don't turn out to be right.)
Because, despite the fact that this is an article of faith among anti-tax Republicans, its not actually supported by facts. It is possible for a particular tax increase to be a net drain compared to a particular spending cut of the same magnitude, but whether or not it is depends on what the tax increase is and what the spending increase is. (For a government which can relatively freely borrow, a tax increase is probably usually a short-term economic drain compared to maintaining spending without increasing taxes, i.e. deficit spending, but both due to Constitutional requirements for a budget that is at least nominally balanced, and credit conditions resulting from California's fairly free borrowing during good economic conditions, Cali
No, its not.
You know, Oracle already has a free-for-production-use version of Oracle Database (Oracle Database XE) that has been around longer than they've owned MySQL. It may be true that low-cost (open source or not) database alternatives have reduced the number of licenses Oracle can sell, but Oracle has long ago figured out that it was better off if it was supplying the low-cost alternatives (and thus, using them as a vehicle to push upgrades to its more expensive products, or as vehicles to sell optional services) than if those were provided only by its competitors.
MySQL might eventually get cut because it doesn't have a clear distinct market role for Oracle that isn't better served (from Oracle's perspective) by the existing XE product, but its not getting cut on the basis that the existence of low-cost and/or open-source DBs are a strategic threat to Oracle Database (indeed, keeping MySQL as the most visible open-source DB probably is the best way to keep mindshare off of open-source DBs that have the potential to be a strategic threat to Oracle Database, something PostgreSQL, for instance, stands a lot bigger chance of doing than MySQL does.)
Well, actually, the whole point of TFA is that you can now use it with an AirPrint client (e.g., an iOS device like an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch) without the rest of Apple's stack of supporting gadgetry if you have an Ubuntu system and any printer that the Ubuntu system can drive.
It may be of use only to a small fraction of Apple users, but I suspect the fraction of Ubuntu users that are also iOS mobile device users (and who benefit from this since they can now use the mobile devices print functionality without anything Apple other than the iOS mobile device) is larger.
AirPrint is a protocol for driving printers over networks, largely intended to allow printing from iOS devices like the iPad or iPhone (it may or may not be usable from other devices, as well.) The Ubuntu software components involved presumably act as a server for AirPrint and then send the actual print job to the attached printer; the printer doesn't "become compatible", the software acts like an AirPrint printer to the AirPrint client, but uses the printer to do the actual printing.
No, I didn't.
True, but irrelevant to me, particularly if the "something else" is a feature I do not want.
The fact that there is not an infinite supply of free, on-demand programming resources (including, for that matter, my own) means that "you are free to implement X yourself or have someone implement it for you" is not a perfect substitute for, and is quite often not even remotely a worthwhile alternative to, "X is implemented for you".
Yes, and that's true whether or not the root product at issue is open; after all, I can just as easily organize a bunch of users of a commercial, closed-source, closed-data-format as an open (source or data) one, and vendors of closed products do, frequently, respond to demands from their user community.
OTOH, that's a rather long-term option in either case. If an otherwise comparable, competing product has the feature I want now, the fact that I could organize a group of users to lobby for (or build) the feature I want in a product -- closed or open -- that lacks it is a small consolation.
The freedom for users, as such, of "open" software is often not a real benefit. To the extent that openness benefits users qua users, it is through choice which only materializes when third-party developers, as well as being free to build the add-ons users demand, are also motivated to do so. OTOH, its often possible for third-party developers to do that for non-"open" software as well: it may often be more difficult to do so, but often the incentives are stronger, as well.
Yes, obviously true. Which is why a product which does not include an feature that is important to a particular user or audience, but which merely provides the necessary hooks on which you might hang a custom implementation is often, by far, inferior -- for that user or audience -- to an otherwise similar product that does include the feature.
No, Circles is one of three major components of Google+ (the others being Hangouts and Sparks.)
Not everyone knows a programmer with infinite free time and willingness to take on all the "it would be nice if the software or online service I use offered this feature, but it doesn't, please implement for me" requests for free.
What is the ultimate objective of a person? Just as the latter varies from person to person, the former varies from corporation to corporation. Its true that with corporations -- particularly widely held and/or publicly traded ones -- the shared interests of their stockholders weighted according to the ratio in which they hold voting rights (which is what, approximately, a corporation exists to serve) tends to heavily favor financial returns as the dominant goal, that's not the universal and exclusive goal of all corporations, or even all publicly traded corporations, and Google's unusual structuring of stock voting rights when it went public makes it particularly plausible that Google's pre-IPO shareholders didn't see that as their only goal and wanted to take steps to avoid it becoming the company's only goal.
Ubuntu provides a number of alternative images besides the normal desktop install CD image, including a DVD image, and has for several years.
Synaptic has been replaced by the Ubuntu Software Center as the primary package management UI for Ubuntu for a while; the decision not to include it on the CD is a change with little actual effect, especially on power users, who can presumably figure out how to install something that is in the repositories but not on the CD. If they really don't like USC, they can do it through the command line, since the command line tools aren't being taken out of the CD, or even the base install.
Ubuntu is, overtly, intended to be, first and foremost, Linux for casual mass-market users, and the default install (and the packages available on the default install media) reflect that. Now, Ubuntu continues to support other users with packages available in the repositories and on alternate install media (and in alternate distributions in the Ubuntu family; e.g., Ubuntu Server is, naturally, not intended for casual mass-market users), but complaining that the default Ubuntu install and default install media are exactly what Ubuntu markets itself as is, well, somewhat pointless.
The net neutrality rules that the FCC adopted were the results of a process that started with an investigation, the FTC action that is reported to be imminent (but which has not actually occurred) with regard to Google is starting an investigation. The former is obviously more serious than the latter, so I don't think the comparison you present is defensible.
Actually, no. Google's point seems to be that Gigabit-to-the-home shouldn't be considered "mid-term future".
The Google Kansas City gigabit network deployment is scheduled to start being available in 1Q 2012. So, you know, that kind of depends on your definition of "we".
Skipping forward and back, etc., involve network roundtrips, and thus the user experience problems involved center around latency more than bandwidth, and gigabit speed doesn't mean substantially better average latency. Using a surplus of bandwidth to download the whole video at the outset means you don't have to worry about network latency.
It also may mean you can transfer the film to watch on a portable device that may not have gigabit (or, depending on where you go, any) network access when you want to watch the film.
The focus should be on providing everyone unbelievable bandwidth. To do that, you start with a demonstration project in one area that shows that you can do it, and that motivates incumbent ISPs to work on doing it elsewhere before you get around to doing it there and take their captive markets away from them.
Initially, content providers that want consumers to have usable access to their high-bandwidth services and aren't satisfied with the speed of improvements by incumbent ISPs. That's what the whole Google effort in Kansas City is about.
After that, incumbent ISPs will probably bear much of the costs; some of it will be born by consumers, but a lot of it will come in reduced profits to ISPs that currently extract monopoly rents through lack of competition and combined with substantial barriers to entry in most locations.
If Google successfully rolls it out (as a "demonstration") starting in one locality and then expanding to others, it will hurt AT&T/Verizon/Warner/Comcast/etc's profits not to do it themselves, since otherwise they'll lose their customers in the areas where Google deploys it to Google.
Google decides "browser vendors aren't doing the things we'd like them to do", builds it own browser that focusses on the things that Google wants browsers to do, starts grabbing market share, and suddenly incumbent browser vendor start moving in the direction Google wants.
Next, Google decides "ISPs aren't doing the things we'd like them to do", and starts building its own consumer broadband network. Same basic strategy. Note that Google's deployment in Kansas City (KS and MO, both) is targetting availability starting 1Q 2012, with gigabit speeds, and pricing "at a competitive price to what people are paying for Internet access today".
Incumbent ISPs aren't going to be able to get many customers for megabit-range internet service if someone is offering price-competitive gigabit service in the same area. And if Kansas City goes well for Google, I wouldn't expect them to stop there.
Well, if Google starts rolling it out (even if it is initially billed as a technology demonstration), then it starts to threaten ISPs ability to just raise the rates on "bandwidth hogs", which is entirely dependent on the lack of competition from anyone who does things differently.
So, yeah, if ISPs can just milk "bandwidth hogs", they will. OTOH, if someone else is providing gigabit WAN connections at reasonable cost -- and applications exist that make effective use of those connections -- then incumbent ISPs won't be able to milk bandwidth hogs, because the bandwidth hogs will defect. Incumbent ISPs will be forced to adapt or die.
Actually, it would be, if the prefetch is done as a low-priority operation with spare bandwidth so as not to impact whatever your current interactive demands are, and you have sufficient local storage. This reduces latency once you decide to watch one of the other episodes. (Though, really, you probably don't want the system to prefetch all the other episodes; if it takes 15 seconds to download a one hour episode, for instance, there is really very little reason to prefetch more than the next episode if usage data suggests that viewers usually consume the show in a serial fashion.)
Local storage reduces latency (and setting a task to prefetch data when convenient so its available on demand can also mitigate issues with network availability on either end, which might be particularly important for mobile devices that occasionally, but not always, have access to the high speed connection, such a netbook that comes home to a hookup to the home gigaWAN being discussed, but the rest of the time travels and only has access to 3G or 4G networks, and perhaps not always even that.) Adding all the bandwidth in the world doesn't reduce the need to reduce latency. In fact, once you've dealt with the bandwidth problem, the latency problem is the next obvious target.
No, they aren't.
They are held personally responsible for failing to practice at the "level at which an ordinary, prudent professional having the same training and experience in good standing in a same or similar community would practice under the same or similar circumstances" (not the average professional of those descriptions, but essentially the minimum level at which an 'ordinary, prudent' professional would operate.)
The vast majority of all medical mistakes don't reach the level. Just like most patent mistakes don't involve failing below the standard of an ordinary, prudent professional with the same training and experience in good standing within the community of patent examiners under the same or similar conditions.
So extending professional malpractice liability of the kind that applies in the medical (or legal, etc.) profession to patent examiners would probably not imply liability for the kind of "errors" at issue here, which are fairly endemic to the patent system and not the result of unusual personal failures.
That's actually true with first to invent if you simply adopt a maximum time limit between invention and patent filing. (Even better would be to also set the maximum duration of the patent from the date of invention, with protection only running from the date of grant.)
Wrong; with first to file, if someone else independently develops it and tries to get a patent while you "sit on it", you can't show prior art (because prior art requires a prior public disclosure, not mere prior invention) so the later "inventor" does, in fact, get the patent, and you get nothing except possibly the right to continue using a doctrine of prior user rights (assuming the system incorporates such rights.)
Presuming there are neither time limits to filing nor rules running the duration of the patent from the date of invention, this is correct; of course, this is obviously addressable within first to invent without switching to first to file.
Of course, that is a fairly high risk model, since it requires you to invent something that meets all the requirements for patentability (including non-obviousness) and hope that somebody stumbles onto the same thing and starts using it, when you could be patenting it and actually encouraging people to use it rather than hoping someone else stumbles across it.
And, again, time limits on filing and on the duration of patents based on the date of invention neatly solve any incentive there might be to sit on patentable inventions in a first-to-invent system without switching to first-to-file. (Which is really good for patent trolls using a slightly different model; instead, the troll just devotes resources to having a good patent filing shop, and having an optimized patent filing process then trumps speed of invention.)
That is, indeed, an argument against "first to file" entirely, since if you can't invent something which already exists (which I agree is true), then the only inventor is the "first to invent", and the "first to file", if they aren't first to invent as well, isn't an inventor at all, and thus there is no rational basis for granting them a patent (and, arguably, no Constitutional basis; the U.S. doesn't have parliamentary soveriegnty, and Congress can't just do whatever it wants: it has a Constitutional authority to grant inventors exclusive rights but, if you can't invent something that already exists, then that power cannot extend to anyone who isn't "first to invent".)
Which, like the version number, is intimately tied to Chrome's release practices, including their focus on one supported stable release plus a small number of future versions (the beta, dev, and canary versions.) Eliminating waste is an essential component of an effective focus on quality, and the Chrome release process that Firefox is emulating is an example of that (obviously, the schedule and version numbering of that release process aren't the only critical components in focus on quality, and it remains to be seen if Firefox will be as effective as Chrome has been.)
Granting, arguendo, the truth of that assertion, that's irrelevant because Firefox isn't commercial software.
Uh, sure, with commercial software where someone has paid a million dollars for the last version and will be charged a substantial fraction of that too upgrade to the next major version, the traditional version numbering practice and supporting multiple major versions makes a lot of sense. Which, you know, isn't surprising, since those practices evolved in that environment.
With free software where users paid $0 for the current major version and will be charged $0 for the upgrade to the next major version, the same rationale for supporting multiple major versions doesn't exist. Major version upgrades as the avenue to maintain support make more sense in that environment than in the commercial software environment.
(They also can make sense in a commercial software environment where, instead of separate charges for major version upgrades, you pay a support cost that is the same regardless of what version you use and includes the right to major version upgrades; the main reason to support multiple major versions in this environment, or the free software one, is that you may introduce incompatible changes in a new major version and you want to provide customers that have other software that would be affected the opportunity to be insulated from any resulting incompatibilities: OTOH, treating backward incompatibilities that cause major customer disruptions as bugs and assuring that the new major version is available to customers for testing before general release is a way of mitigating that; whether that is sufficient mitigation really depends on the audience you are targetting, and the audience targetted by a mass-market browser isn't the same as the audience targetted by most B2B software; much of the latter is included in the former, but not vice versa.)
A 6-month QA cycle is indicative of a fundamentally broken process. At any rate, unless those customers of yours are providing a substantial revenue stream to Mozilla, I'm not sure exactly why you think this is a concern for Mozilla.
And that certainly makes sense in certain commercial software business models, but the Mozilla Foundation is not a commercial developer, and trying to judge Mozilla Foundation's approach to software development and support by what makes sense for commercial developers is about as useful as trying to judge Oracle's approach to what makes sense for purveyor's of Facebook-based games.
Clearly, they are developers you don't know.
And many of them work for projects that have been very successful using this approach, which is more relevant to assessing the utility of the approach than random people on the internet claiming that it "needlessly pisses people off".
Its a pretty obvious approach that reduces waste and duplication of effort inherent in the traditional release cycle that is built around a commercial software model where there is a different charge to customers for major version upgrades versus ongoing support for a prior major version (sometimes with the latter free and the former a significant charge.)
Which is exactly why IE and Firefox, which didn't (and in IE's case, still don't) use this style of release cycle, have been losing browser share to Chrome, which does -- because this approach will "drive users away".
Somehow, I think the facts do not support your assertion.