total switch from Windows to Linux would be three to four times more expensive - and take three times as long to deploy - as an upgrade from one version of Windows to a newer release.
The words sound plausible from what I know, and I'm a Linux user. It would be more expensive to move to Linux from Windows than to move to a new version of Windows.
But where Ballmer's credibility falls down is in the mortgaged cost of continuing on the Windows path for years and years vs the lesser cost of Linux. Enough years on the Microsoft upgrade treadmill should convince anybody that they ought to:
look at alternatives
test out alternatives in their environment
consider long term costs
try to think about all the costs and benefits
Yes, even Linux users should do all of those things. My assessment is that people migrating to Linux have done their hard homework early rather than rely upon the sales droids reassuring them that they're in a big boat with lots of other clients, getting lots of buzzword-compliant advantages.
If somebody was disenfranchised, the blame lies solely on the Election Supervisor of the county that he/she lives in.
You'd think and hope that accountability and trasparency in government would make it difficult for partisans to game elections because public officials are accountable.
In The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Palast details how the felon purging of the voter lists was subcontracted out to a private corporation that could refute inquiries by claiming that revealing details of its operations would compromise trade secrets, proprietary information. Nevertheless, Florida chose to contract out this service.
Palast's book is an interesting read, and he takes the Clinton administration to task, too, for its shortcomings, too, lest you think he is fixated on only one party's dirty laundry. His exposure of influence peddling in Tony Blair's government got him a lot of heat - I respect someone who goes in to ugly places and shines lights where the roaches crawl.
...which, according to the estate's lawyers, is downloadable from the United States.
That the work is downloadable is not a problem, any more than leaving the front door to your house unlocked. If someone actually enters and takes something, then it is a crime under whatever statutes apply.
Let them prosecute U.S. citizens who violate U.S. copyright laws by downloading a copy of GWTW to which they're not entitled. Recall that if the downloader already has purchased a copy of the book, then it's hard to see where they might be in violation by having an electronic copy - so long as they don't redistribute it for money.
It just brings up that internationally consistent laws for so-called intellectual property need to be setup. Cynic that I am, I expect any such effort to come up with laws to combine the worst and most regressive parts of IP law from around the world.
I haven't heard any conservative talk show hosts advocating violence or property destruction against their opponents.
You must live in a tame part of the world.
This particular sample
On his September 17 radio show, host Michael Savage called Senator John Kerry "a clear and present danger to the survival of America" who has "committed sedition," for which Kerry "should be immediately shackled and arrested."
is typical of what I hear on nationally syndicated radio. The leftists are usually confined to local FM college stations, and at odd hours.
To be fair, the leftists do call Bush a criminal in some cases, but I haven't heard any local radio host call for Bush's imprisonment with quite the same vitriol that Michael Savage uses, nor to as large an audience.
When you vote, you don't know whether you'll win or not.
The candidates will generally do their best to shield you from knowing what they will really do; they still might do something different from what they say or what they've done in the past. The candidate you vote against might actually do more for your well-being.
If you're smart and have enough money, you'll vote with dollars placed on all the horses in the race using campaign contributions.
[Not saying I like it this way; just that's the way it is....]
Windows has become one of the most costly components to add for computer manufacturers.
On low end boxes, it can amount to 20% of the cost.
People have noticed that computers today are orders of magnitude higher in performance and for less money than in years past. They haven't seen that same breathtaking commoditization happening in software, largely because a monopoly completely controls the intellectual property that runs their computers.
I don't mind if Microsoft sells Windows. The big issue is that the complete, open, public, freely-available Windows API should make Microsoft compete against other implementors of that API. Ditto for the specifications that control how a.doc file renders on your screen or on your printer. Not "what Word does", but what is in the written specification of the standard.
Not being an optics expert, I still have to wonder whether the quality of pictures from a 5 mp camera will be wasted with the typically small and cheap-looking lenses on these phones.
Is this going to be an issue on these devices, or have manufacturers been able to mass produce high quality optics so that even 16 megapixel cell phones will be affordable and useful?
It is interesting that the broadcast flag applies to over the air transmission, but not to IP networks (I gather the FCC wants VoIP to flourish free from regulatory encumbrance and protection that cloaks the local BabyBell monopolies).
And I'm sure that owners of copyrighted content will apply pressure to anyone on the Net that retransmits video of owned programming, just like the Internet radio stations were shutdown.
But there will be friction, as users local in-house networks expand using things like WiMax. At that point, the content owners might try to get the FCC to use over the air broadcast protections that will be in effect then (July 2005 drop dead date, IIRC) to enforce Bflag usage, etc.
Well, the public telephone network suffered from the problem of unsolicited bulk marketers calling people during dinner.
It still survives. But it did have a few adjustments made to it.
CallerIDs to screen calls.
Answering machines to screen calls. Turning off the ringers to remove the sense of urgency that used to be ascribed to incoming phone calls.
Legislation for donotcall.gov.
Paying the telephone company more for unlisted landlines.
Not giving out phone numbers to any entry point to the direct marketing industry databases.
Moving to cell phones that are automatically unlisted.
I guess I see the internet just evolving around the problems in multiple ways.
I hate to say goodbye to anonymity in email that is abused by spammers because it has a special place for whistleblowers. But perhaps blog postings can still serve that purpose.
The technology industry group, which is a staunch supporter of electronic voting technology, made that argument in a document that was distributed to "help journalists put election equipment-related snafus in context."
So this is standard practice in this day and age. Diffuse focus away from the real issue.
By now any advocate with money tries to cloak their position in an "infotainment" package that is ready-made, not requiring any expensive or embarrassing reporter leg-work to dig out all the details of an issue like ACM's position on e-voting, and is sure not to upset any sponsors of the media-outlet.
The unfortunate fact is that U.S. Constitutional protections against government suppression of free speech are insufficient to prevent the development of a lapdog press that relies on money and ratings.
There is absolutely no reason why the press must be factual, truthful, unbiased, complete, or even relevent to the issues of the day.
What about later, if new features are added to the standards? Can developers count on continued free access to the improved versions with bug fixes and new features?
Secondly, AFAIK, you need to purchase a Microsoft Windows operating system in order to run those free applications. Even if it's lumped into the cost of the computer, that part is still not free.
The key difference is that the extent to which Germany really was systematically trying to kill of Jews, Gypsies was not really known at the time the decision was made to go to war.
In fact, anti-Semitism, with a long tradition in Europe and Russia, enjoyed a following in the United States in the 1930's (lookup Father Coughlin, radio show host) and prominent Americans like Charles Lindbergh and Britains like former monarch Edward were Third Reich sympathizers. Most Americans preferred isolationism and figured Europe should fight its own messy wars.
It was only during the liberation of occupired territories that the extent of German atrocities in the concentration camps became apparent.
[And, while we're on the subject of victors writing history, we can mention that the Allies needlessly bombed Dresden and that no war crimes tribunal comparable to Nurnburg was ever held in Japan to call leaders to account for what they did in East Asia.]
before any new album is released, someone at each label is charged with asking, "Do we have any Wal-Mart issues?"
Frequently an argument is made that American culture is becoming bland and homogenized through forces like Wal-mart and McDonalds.
This is just one indication of just how cultural diversity gets clamped.
You could argue that Wal-mart's version of culture is just the one that sells, but that's not entirely what drives their selection of stock to sell. The upper managment of Wal-mart makes decisions that affect the direction taken by American and, increasingly, world culture.
And, by actively excluding alternative expressions of culture and values, Wal-mart alienates many. Notwithstanding all the recent feel-good sponsorship of NPR and folksy good-will commercials about reviving inner cities and providing Good Jobs ® wearing blue vests and still qualifying for public assistance.
As a Linux user in a corporate world full of Windows site licenses, is it possible to make it easy for OO.o users to take advantage of the Windows fonts for which they already paid?
Not a 12 step program involving grungy details of xset fp, but something in the form of an easy script that looks around and automatically does the Right Thing.
Powerpoint presentations are decipherable under OO.o, but frequently look ugly, mostly from the font problem.
OO.o has gotten a lot better over the past few years; I'm looking forward to it improving even more.
[But I still think a cross-platform, SVG+MathML editor with TeX-like math rendering would be a nice way to publish both web and paper documents, much better than the WYSIWYG word processors most people abuse.]
We have a volunteer army. Every soldier in Iraq signed up of his or her own volition. They aren't children.
I would say anyone old enough to decide to put themselves in the position of killing or being killed aren't children. At all.
And they shouldn't be treated as such.
Any laws on the books requiring an age of majority of 21, for example, but allow an age of 18 for this most responsible of all decisions, should be striken.
The initials are the same as the founder of the FSF, author of the GPL and crusader for software freedom.
Perhaps this joke could be carried further if someone were to inquire of Microsoft whether RMS protection involved release under the GPL, which RMS has indicated best preserves our digital rights?
Slashdot Mirror
So, suppose you happened to be a lobbyist and wanted to get the most bang for your buck in terms of legislation?
Who's your man and who should you avoid?
(And conversely, if you're paying with votes instead of dollars.)
total switch from Windows to Linux would be three to four times more expensive - and take three times as long to deploy - as an upgrade from one version of Windows to a newer release.
The words sound plausible from what I know, and I'm a Linux user. It would be more expensive to move to Linux from Windows than to move to a new version of Windows.
But where Ballmer's credibility falls down is in the mortgaged cost of continuing on the Windows path for years and years vs the lesser cost of Linux. Enough years on the Microsoft upgrade treadmill should convince anybody that they ought to:
Yes, even Linux users should do all of those things. My assessment is that people migrating to Linux have done their hard homework early rather than rely upon the sales droids reassuring them that they're in a big boat with lots of other clients, getting lots of buzzword-compliant advantages.
If somebody was disenfranchised, the blame lies solely on the Election Supervisor of the county that he/she lives in.
You'd think and hope that accountability and trasparency in government would make it difficult for partisans to game elections because public officials are accountable.
In The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Palast details how the felon purging of the voter lists was subcontracted out to a private corporation that could refute inquiries by claiming that revealing details of its operations would compromise trade secrets, proprietary information. Nevertheless, Florida chose to contract out this service.
Palast's book is an interesting read, and he takes the Clinton administration to task, too, for its shortcomings, too, lest you think he is fixated on only one party's dirty laundry. His exposure of influence peddling in Tony Blair's government got him a lot of heat - I respect someone who goes in to ugly places and shines lights where the roaches crawl.
That the work is downloadable is not a problem, any more than leaving the front door to your house unlocked. If someone actually enters and takes something, then it is a crime under whatever statutes apply.
Let them prosecute U.S. citizens who violate U.S. copyright laws by downloading a copy of GWTW to which they're not entitled. Recall that if the downloader already has purchased a copy of the book, then it's hard to see where they might be in violation by having an electronic copy - so long as they don't redistribute it for money.
It just brings up that internationally consistent laws for so-called intellectual property need to be setup. Cynic that I am, I expect any such effort to come up with laws to combine the worst and most regressive parts of IP law from around the world.
The developers are obviously using the random HTML script
Isn't the EULA kind of restrictive on that product?
I haven't heard any conservative talk show hosts advocating violence or property destruction against their opponents.
You must live in a tame part of the world.
This particular sample
is typical of what I hear on nationally syndicated radio. The leftists are usually confined to local FM college stations, and at odd hours.To be fair, the leftists do call Bush a criminal in some cases, but I haven't heard any local radio host call for Bush's imprisonment with quite the same vitriol that Michael Savage uses, nor to as large an audience.
When you vote, you don't know whether you'll win or not.
The candidates will generally do their best to shield you from knowing what they will really do; they still might do something different from what they say or what they've done in the past. The candidate you vote against might actually do more for your well-being.
If you're smart and have enough money, you'll vote with dollars placed on all the horses in the race using campaign contributions.
[Not saying I like it this way; just that's the way it is....]
Amazes me how polarized things have become.
I can believe it.
Vehement uninformed opinion rules the AM radio these days.
Plus, marketing tests have shown that mud-slinging attack ads work. So we get more of them.
Anger and fear drive many voters. That's why there's so much of it around.
Dead on.
Windows has become one of the most costly components to add for computer manufacturers.
On low end boxes, it can amount to 20% of the cost.
People have noticed that computers today are orders of magnitude higher in performance and for less money than in years past. They haven't seen that same breathtaking commoditization happening in software, largely because a monopoly completely controls the intellectual property that runs their computers.
I don't mind if Microsoft sells Windows. The big issue is that the complete, open, public, freely-available Windows API should make Microsoft compete against other implementors of that API. Ditto for the specifications that control how a .doc file renders on your screen or on your printer. Not "what Word does", but what is in the written specification of the standard.
Not being an optics expert, I still have to wonder whether the quality of pictures from a 5 mp camera will be wasted with the typically small and cheap-looking lenses on these phones.
Is this going to be an issue on these devices, or have manufacturers been able to mass produce high quality optics so that even 16 megapixel cell phones will be affordable and useful?
It is interesting that the broadcast flag applies to over the air transmission, but not to IP networks (I gather the FCC wants VoIP to flourish free from regulatory encumbrance and protection that cloaks the local BabyBell monopolies).
And I'm sure that owners of copyrighted content will apply pressure to anyone on the Net that retransmits video of owned programming, just like the Internet radio stations were shutdown.
But there will be friction, as users local in-house networks expand using things like WiMax. At that point, the content owners might try to get the FCC to use over the air broadcast protections that will be in effect then (July 2005 drop dead date, IIRC) to enforce Bflag usage, etc.
the West (which includes the USA and Japan)
Traditionally, Japan has been considered part of the orient, while the USA has been lumped in the occident.
I agree that dedicating supercomputer time to investigating new technologies is good.
Low impact alternative energy sources to supplant existing technologies would be a good start.
Well, the public telephone network suffered from the problem of unsolicited bulk marketers calling people during dinner.
It still survives. But it did have a few adjustments made to it.
- CallerIDs to screen calls.
- Answering machines to screen calls. Turning off the ringers to remove the sense of urgency that used to be ascribed to incoming phone calls.
- Legislation for donotcall.gov.
- Paying the telephone company more for unlisted landlines.
- Not giving out phone numbers to any entry point to the direct marketing industry databases.
- Moving to cell phones that are automatically unlisted.
I guess I see the internet just evolving around the problems in multiple ways.I hate to say goodbye to anonymity in email that is abused by spammers because it has a special place for whistleblowers. But perhaps blog postings can still serve that purpose.
The technology industry group, which is a staunch supporter of electronic voting technology, made that argument in a document that was distributed to "help journalists put election equipment-related snafus in context."
So this is standard practice in this day and age. Diffuse focus away from the real issue.
By now any advocate with money tries to cloak their position in an "infotainment" package that is ready-made, not requiring any expensive or embarrassing reporter leg-work to dig out all the details of an issue like ACM's position on e-voting, and is sure not to upset any sponsors of the media-outlet.
The unfortunate fact is that U.S. Constitutional protections against government suppression of free speech are insufficient to prevent the development of a lapdog press that relies on money and ratings.
There is absolutely no reason why the press must be factual, truthful, unbiased, complete, or even relevent to the issues of the day.
Free for now.
What about later, if new features are added to the standards? Can developers count on continued free access to the improved versions with bug fixes and new features?
Secondly, AFAIK, you need to purchase a Microsoft Windows operating system in order to run those free applications. Even if it's lumped into the cost of the computer, that part is still not free.
My contention is that Aladdin tells a better story of the current administration.
Cheney = Jafar, the Grand Vizier, the real power behind the throne
Bush = the Sultan, dressed up head of state action figure for public display.
Microsoft already loves Linux.
The overt sexual advances are having the expected effect.
The key difference is that the extent to which Germany really was systematically trying to kill of Jews, Gypsies was not really known at the time the decision was made to go to war.
In fact, anti-Semitism, with a long tradition in Europe and Russia, enjoyed a following in the United States in the 1930's (lookup Father Coughlin, radio show host) and prominent Americans like Charles Lindbergh and Britains like former monarch Edward were Third Reich sympathizers. Most Americans preferred isolationism and figured Europe should fight its own messy wars.
It was only during the liberation of occupired territories that the extent of German atrocities in the concentration camps became apparent.
[And, while we're on the subject of victors writing history, we can mention that the Allies needlessly bombed Dresden and that no war crimes tribunal comparable to Nurnburg was ever held in Japan to call leaders to account for what they did in East Asia.]
Quoting from the article:
Frequently an argument is made that American culture is becoming bland and homogenized through forces like Wal-mart and McDonalds.
This is just one indication of just how cultural diversity gets clamped.
You could argue that Wal-mart's version of culture is just the one that sells, but that's not entirely what drives their selection of stock to sell. The upper managment of Wal-mart makes decisions that affect the direction taken by American and, increasingly, world culture.
And, by actively excluding alternative expressions of culture and values, Wal-mart alienates many. Notwithstanding all the recent feel-good sponsorship of NPR and folksy good-will commercials about reviving inner cities and providing Good Jobs ® wearing blue vests and still qualifying for public assistance.
why he doesn't want to include forever code that'll serve less than 0.5% of all Linux users.
If the patched Linux goes into embedded devices there is a much bigger market than for conventional servers and desktop computers.
The millions of current desktops and servers could become 0.5% of all Linux users if embedded devices run Linux.
But I still agree that Linus' go-slow approach is wise and judicious.
They also think my wife is worth nothing I might add.
Not so.
As a Linux user in a corporate world full of Windows site licenses, is it possible to make it easy for OO.o users to take advantage of the Windows fonts for which they already paid?
Not a 12 step program involving grungy details of xset fp , but something in the form of an easy script that looks around and automatically does the Right Thing.
Powerpoint presentations are decipherable under OO.o, but frequently look ugly, mostly from the font problem.
OO.o has gotten a lot better over the past few years; I'm looking forward to it improving even more.
[But I still think a cross-platform, SVG+MathML editor with TeX-like math rendering would be a nice way to publish both web and paper documents, much better than the WYSIWYG word processors most people abuse.]
We have a volunteer army. Every soldier in Iraq signed up of his or her own volition. They aren't children.
I would say anyone old enough to decide to put themselves in the position of killing or being killed aren't children. At all.
And they shouldn't be treated as such.
Any laws on the books requiring an age of majority of 21, for example, but allow an age of 18 for this most responsible of all decisions, should be striken.
read the names of US soldiers who had died in Iraq, saying the broadcast was politically motivated.
Reading the names of the fallen used to be considered an act of honoring the memory of the soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice.
Honorable and truthful activities should be carried out regardless of whether some political faction or other thinks they can make hay from it.
It's yet another symptom of our society where perception trumps substance. What matters is how something is perceived - not what it actually is.
RMS -protected content in Internet Explorer.
Ooooo. Sweet irony.
The initials are the same as the founder of the FSF, author of the GPL and crusader for software freedom.
Perhaps this joke could be carried further if someone were to inquire of Microsoft whether RMS protection involved release under the GPL, which RMS has indicated best preserves our digital rights?