You are comparing apples to oranges. The windows OS is designed to allow third-party applications to run on it for a nominal additional cost (price of a dev kit) to the third party developer. The Xbox is not. Please, examine Microsoft's license terms carefully before you blindly assume the xbox is open.
More specifically, Why let consumers pay for their media once with a blue-ray player when Microsoft and the media distribution cartel can (and will) earn far more money passing it through the xbox?
I'm calling you out on this one because your comments may apply to some kind of Linux-equipped PC, but not the Everex products in discussion.
1. I personally downloaded the and built the package sources of the e17 desktop that everex uses and ran it on Debian Etch. It's all.debs. Presumably they are running some kind of ubuntu core, but there are no RPM's.
2. It is quite plausible that there was no gcc/compiler/dev packages included. The last ubuntu I installed did not include them either. They were only as far away as their repository though.
3. Their tech support may actually be one guy because a $299 PC has no margin to have any support whatsoever in it. This is not new or unique. Adobe, Microsoft to name two have very poor support despite the outrageous prices paid for their products.
Grandparent is exactly right. It's time for a brief lesson in big-box retail.
1. Profit is measured in square feet. If something is more profitable to Walmart than an Everex pc. Goodbye Everex.
2. Vendors need to be able to afford Walmart's promotional costs. Vendors must be able to afford the other costs of being in the retailer. There are many. Verrry many.
3. A $299 PC relies on accessories to make the sale profitable. Otherwise it's a loss-leader that drags down the whole category. Maybe Walmart wasn't getting the accessory sales.
Economic reality is such that it may not make sense for Everex or Walmart to keep a $299 PC. I don't know if a $299 PC would make much sense at most retailers brick-and-mortar or even online without higher margin accessories.
That Microsoft's behavior isn't unique in any way, shape or form. That what microsoft does is standard operating procedure for all mega-corporations.
Paying taxes in the state with the lowest corporate tax rate and forming corporations in Delaware is done for the same reason. It's the best deal.
If this is outrageous to the submitter, then I hope he never discovers how most electronics firms with an office in the U.S. work.
As an FYI, they are set up as subsidiaries that "buy" their product from the most attractive exporting/manufacturing office from some other part of the world of the same corporation. The U.S. office then operates at a perpetual loss (paying less tax) by hiding the income generated as the cost paid to "buy" the goods from some other part of the world.
It reminds me of Team America World Police, "We will write you an open letter asking you to explain your motives!"
And yet, nearly all of the righteous./'ers continue to consume the cartel's product, or steal it. Both of which are wrong and just start another round of circle jerk.
Don't pin your hopes for lower-cost, widely available internet access on this auction.
In the current political/business climate in the U.S. the chances that nothing good for the consumer will come from this auction are excellent.
It's not just about the auction itself. Imagine for a moment a telco doesn't win the spectrum. The telcos still have the experience and access to the senate and congress to write regulations that increase the cost of doing business with the spectrum. Recent history is filled with examples.
-VOIP regulations, patent litigation parties -Limited consumer access to bandwidth. -Limited throughput. -NSA shenanigans. The get out of jail free cards have already been issued.
1. Engineering was likely given a number of constraints that can not be ignored. For example, build it in 6 months at a final BOM cost of $Y.
2. Picture a small hill with the railroad purchasing agents on the top. On one side is the manufacturer of switch, on the other, the boy. Sh!t rolls downhill onto both parties.
That any of this behavior morally questionable is an endless flamefest. It's an observation that this kind of thing happens everywhere regardless of the legal/social structure.
Yahoo and probably lots of other companies are obligated to do as the Chinese authorities say if they wish to stay involved in the Chinese economy. In the U.S. AT&T ignored the obvious legal issues and gave the NSA exactly what they wanted, warrantless domestic survielance. Look what probably happened to qwest when they didn't do as the NSA asked. I'm too lazy to post a link, but there's a story about the CEO of qwest's troubles as a result of doing the legally right thing on/.
The problem the company has is not technical. They could have the technical and mass production issues worked out and yet not a single disk will be made.
It didn't come from the companies mentioned in the wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD so they cannot possibly get OEM/IT/Entertainment industry adoption. Furthermore, "Not invented here" is the typical media conglomerate response to all of these innovations.
There's no real-world scenario where this thing sees the light of day. Something like it and most likely quite inferior and more expensive from the DVD cartel? Sure.
I'm not trivializing the work that would need to be done to work in a DOD environment where most of the CAC-enabled apps need a osX port. The low-level strong authentication portion is done.
In true government contracting fashion, the bulk of the work is done by Axalto, with some DC-based project management middleman cashing the Fed's checks. Axalto is probably barely breaking even on the project despite the huge volume of cards in the field.
They would have gotten the answer a long, long time ago if only more mathematicians would race bicycles.
There is nothing worse than flying along at 40+ KMh and having some inexperienced joker using her brakes to back off the wheel in front of her. It sends the riders behind her into convulsions.
FYI: that's why bicycle track racing (fixed gears) is much safer despite fantastic speeds and tight(!) groups.
The Chinese government selected Yahoo! from a wide number of global dot-com companies cooperating with the Chinese government in not-so-appealing ways. It's impossible to know the details of why Yahoo! was called out.
I'm not selectively bashing the Chinese because it's only slightly different in the U.S. Look at how the Telco's gave the NSA what they wanted with no questions asked.
Most business-level ISP's are hosting or at bare minimum reselling VOIP service. Let them handle it. VOIP (like POTS) is its own special terminology and way of working.
You should learn/run an openser server with Asterisk as the voicemail/POTS out. Or possibly freeswitch if you are ready to get in the steep and deep end.
My pet peeve: KDE does not include print selection in the 3.3.x series!
Now the 4.x series uses trolltech's (QT?) printing backend there's STILL no print selection.
I've been flipping between the e17 that ships with the everex/walmart pc, which is buggy as hell and has a number of big-time gotchas and XFCE4 on Debian Etch. I enabled compositing on XFCE4 and it is an excellent balance of speed, eye candy and functionality. The default XFCE4 in Etch doesn't do it justice.
Linux/BSD and OSX have a totally sane security model. Anything that comes in is read only. Anything. Download a file? Read only. Email? Read only. I can't execute anything without specifically jumping through some hoops to get there.
Most importantly, I'm not interrupted and I don't need antivirus software. I work/waste time/whatever safely. Most importantly the people who come to me for IT advice who don't care to know IT have nothing to worry about.
From an enterprise perspective, the whole ACL system is fantastically complex. It's mind boggling once you wade into it. There's the gui tools and another set of command line tools to get stuff done. A different example is trying to keep track of who logs into servers on a domain when and from where. You just can't do it easily in win2k, 2003, 2003r2.
One of the myriad of benefits of owning a monopoly is the ability to set price. (price maker) Economic history is full of examples where the monopoly owner temporarily lowers prices to eliminate low-end competitors.
This low-end desktop market is owned by Microsoft. They allow it to exist to give the illusion of competition. If they want that segment, they'll take it simply by throwing some money at it and eliminate the competitor. Meanwhile, the low-end provider scrapes by. Novell certainly isn't going to beat Microsoft. Mark Shuttleworth doesn't have the resources to do it either.
Where it counts, Linux distros are simply a negotiating tool for enterprises/agencies to get a lower price/bigger bribe out of Microsoft. That lower price is STILL HIGHER than the price in a vaguely competitive market.
Vista? Oh yeah, you'll be able to pirate it just like XP because every software company knows that's the best way to introduce future customers.
This kind of mea culpa is a way to deflect the obvious control of global media distribution. They are still going to overcharge you for a DVD, and screw most of the creative/production people with questionable accounting. Please don't start a "but actors are getting paid..." discussion. A FEW actors get paid ridiculous sums, media conglomerates get paid even more and no one is the wiser.
Whether/.'ers like it or not, there's no reason to celebrate.
This doesn't look particularly revolutionary from an end-user perspective. The video uses a bunch of different buttons to do stuff, so I don't know how a touch screen would improve matters dramatically.
If someone says, "Just wait. It'll be great!" I dunno, there appears to be a bunch of gui-stuff already done and that's the hardest and least sexy part of the work that hardly anyone is willing to re-do.
You mean they are going to sit in there and talk to their attorneys and actually do the right thing and flip the Feds the bird? I vaguely remember having a similar sense of fair play and optimism. Too bad reality is so much different.
No. They are going to roll over in exchange for something. That something includes their careers.
"Commissioners of the Elections Board, which has been sued by the federal agency for not complying with election-modernization law, voted 3-1 to take up the matter in closed session." Italics mine.
That's a clear sign it's out of the voters hands. I would guess that when they roll over, they've got plenty of public service jobs waiting for them.
In the U.S. WinCE has a tiny foothold. It is easily outdwarfed by all of the more-or-less locked/low-end phones. That's the biggest market penetration it has because Symbian just hasn't taken off in the U.S.
In Europe, Symbian-based phones are huge compared to WinCE handsets. Things are hardly any different in Asia.
The parent post is **not** insightful, or even informative in any way.
A simpler way to describe it is as a content management system. But that's actually kind of a limited definition of it. Think of it as features on top of Zope.
What's Zope? Zope in this simple example is the guts of the content management system. The big advantage the entire system has is the design is more robust and scalable (ex. clustering) and has far better developer interface than your average PHP cms. (Drupal I'm looking at you)
Change management in general is not pretty and while they claim postgresql support, it's actually quite limited. It's great for more rapid development and small sites. But if your infrastructure already has clusters, then you would want to look very closely at Plone and perhaps even Zope.
Slashdot Mirror
You are comparing apples to oranges. The windows OS is designed to allow third-party applications to run on it for a nominal additional cost (price of a dev kit) to the third party developer. The Xbox is not. Please, examine Microsoft's license terms carefully before you blindly assume the xbox is open.
More specifically, Why let consumers pay for their media once with a blue-ray player when Microsoft and the media distribution cartel can (and will) earn far more money passing it through the xbox?
I'm calling you out on this one because your comments may apply to some kind of Linux-equipped PC, but not the Everex products in discussion.
.debs. Presumably they are running some kind of ubuntu core, but there are no RPM's.
1. I personally downloaded the and built the package sources of the e17 desktop that everex uses and ran it on Debian Etch. It's all
2. It is quite plausible that there was no gcc/compiler/dev packages included. The last ubuntu I installed did not include them either. They were only as far away as their repository though.
3. Their tech support may actually be one guy because a $299 PC has no margin to have any support whatsoever in it. This is not new or unique. Adobe, Microsoft to name two have very poor support despite the outrageous prices paid for their products.
Grandparent is exactly right. It's time for a brief lesson in big-box retail.
1. Profit is measured in square feet. If something is more profitable to Walmart than an Everex pc. Goodbye Everex.
2. Vendors need to be able to afford Walmart's promotional costs. Vendors must be able to afford the other costs of being in the retailer. There are many. Verrry many.
3. A $299 PC relies on accessories to make the sale profitable. Otherwise it's a loss-leader that drags down the whole category. Maybe Walmart wasn't getting the accessory sales.
Economic reality is such that it may not make sense for Everex or Walmart to keep a $299 PC. I don't know if a $299 PC would make much sense at most retailers brick-and-mortar or even online without higher margin accessories.
That Microsoft's behavior isn't unique in any way, shape or form. That what microsoft does is standard operating procedure for all mega-corporations.
Paying taxes in the state with the lowest corporate tax rate and forming corporations in Delaware is done for the same reason. It's the best deal.
If this is outrageous to the submitter, then I hope he never discovers how most electronics firms with an office in the U.S. work.
As an FYI, they are set up as subsidiaries that "buy" their product from the most attractive exporting/manufacturing office from some other part of the world of the same corporation. The U.S. office then operates at a perpetual loss (paying less tax) by hiding the income generated as the cost paid to "buy" the goods from some other part of the world.
Minimize tax, maximize profit!
The process will work wonderfully and it goes something like this:
1. ALL kinds of complaints come in and someone who has no expertise in the matter sifts through them and draw up some kind of summary.
2. Some kind of complaint summary report is generated. Who knows what, if any basis in fact it will have other than "lots of complaints."
3. Report is vetted and voided of all possible meaningful content.
4. Report is distributed to low-level types who summarize the summary to their rep/congress-critter.
5. Comcast works the pay-to-play system, gives a mea-culpa in front of the committee.
6. Committee agrees to author stern letter to comcast.
7. Comcast execs holiday with committee members and share the good times.
It reminds me of Team America World Police, "We will write you an open letter asking you to explain your motives!"
./'ers continue to consume the cartel's product, or steal it. Both of which are wrong and just start another round of circle jerk.
And yet, nearly all of the righteous
I've been deeply skeptical all along and now the _how_ google wins it is in place with this quote "trade that block to Sprint/Nextel"
The _why_ this spectrum will be neither cheap nor open is in the quote "trade that block to Sprint/Nextel"
Sigh...
Don't pin your hopes for lower-cost, widely available internet access on this auction.
In the current political/business climate in the U.S. the chances that nothing good for the consumer will come from this auction are excellent.
It's not just about the auction itself. Imagine for a moment a telco doesn't win the spectrum. The telcos still have the experience and access to the senate and congress to write regulations that increase the cost of doing business with the spectrum. Recent history is filled with examples.
-VOIP regulations, patent litigation parties
-Limited consumer access to bandwidth.
-Limited throughput.
-NSA shenanigans. The get out of jail free cards have already been issued.
Let's all do a reality check.
1. Engineering was likely given a number of constraints that can not be ignored. For example, build it in 6 months at a final BOM cost of $Y.
2. Picture a small hill with the railroad purchasing agents on the top. On one side is the manufacturer of switch, on the other, the boy. Sh!t rolls downhill onto both parties.
It's a pity the boy has to be made an example of.
That any of this behavior morally questionable is an endless flamefest. It's an observation that this kind of thing happens everywhere regardless of the legal/social structure.
/.
Yahoo and probably lots of other companies are obligated to do as the Chinese authorities say if they wish to stay involved in the Chinese economy. In the U.S. AT&T ignored the obvious legal issues and gave the NSA exactly what they wanted, warrantless domestic survielance. Look what probably happened to qwest when they didn't do as the NSA asked. I'm too lazy to post a link, but there's a story about the CEO of qwest's troubles as a result of doing the legally right thing on
The problem the company has is not technical. They could have the technical and mass production issues worked out and yet not a single disk will be made.
It didn't come from the companies mentioned in the wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD so they cannot possibly get OEM/IT/Entertainment industry adoption. Furthermore, "Not invented here" is the typical media conglomerate response to all of these innovations.
There's no real-world scenario where this thing sees the light of day. Something like it and most likely quite inferior and more expensive from the DVD cartel? Sure.
Mac's have CAC support. Try /usr/sbin/cac_setup
I'm not trivializing the work that would need to be done to work in a DOD environment where most of the CAC-enabled apps need a osX port. The low-level strong authentication portion is done.
In true government contracting fashion, the bulk of the work is done by Axalto, with some DC-based project management middleman cashing the Fed's checks. Axalto is probably barely breaking even on the project despite the huge volume of cards in the field.
They would have gotten the answer a long, long time ago if only more mathematicians would race bicycles.
There is nothing worse than flying along at 40+ KMh and having some inexperienced joker using her brakes to back off the wheel in front of her. It sends the riders behind her into convulsions.
FYI: that's why bicycle track racing (fixed gears) is much safer despite fantastic speeds and tight(!) groups.
The Chinese government selected Yahoo! from a wide number of global dot-com companies cooperating with the Chinese government in not-so-appealing ways. It's impossible to know the details of why Yahoo! was called out.
I'm not selectively bashing the Chinese because it's only slightly different in the U.S. Look at how the Telco's gave the NSA what they wanted with no questions asked.
Most business-level ISP's are hosting or at bare minimum reselling VOIP service. Let them handle it. VOIP (like POTS) is its own special terminology and way of working.
You should learn/run an openser server with Asterisk as the voicemail/POTS out. Or possibly freeswitch if you are ready to get in the steep and deep end.
Keep the fax on a POTS line.
My pet peeve: KDE does not include print selection in the 3.3.x series!
Now the 4.x series uses trolltech's (QT?) printing backend there's STILL no print selection.
I've been flipping between the e17 that ships with the everex/walmart pc, which is buggy as hell and has a number of big-time gotchas and XFCE4 on Debian Etch. I enabled compositing on XFCE4 and it is an excellent balance of speed, eye candy and functionality. The default XFCE4 in Etch doesn't do it justice.
Linux/BSD and OSX have a totally sane security model. Anything that comes in is read only. Anything. Download a file? Read only. Email? Read only. I can't execute anything without specifically jumping through some hoops to get there.
Most importantly, I'm not interrupted and I don't need antivirus software. I work/waste time/whatever safely. Most importantly the people who come to me for IT advice who don't care to know IT have nothing to worry about.
From an enterprise perspective, the whole ACL system is fantastically complex. It's mind boggling once you wade into it. There's the gui tools and another set of command line tools to get stuff done. A different example is trying to keep track of who logs into servers on a domain when and from where. You just can't do it easily in win2k, 2003, 2003r2.
One of the myriad of benefits of owning a monopoly is the ability to set price. (price maker) Economic history is full of examples where the monopoly owner temporarily lowers prices to eliminate low-end competitors.
This low-end desktop market is owned by Microsoft. They allow it to exist to give the illusion of competition. If they want that segment, they'll take it simply by throwing some money at it and eliminate the competitor. Meanwhile, the low-end provider scrapes by. Novell certainly isn't going to beat Microsoft. Mark Shuttleworth doesn't have the resources to do it either.
Where it counts, Linux distros are simply a negotiating tool for enterprises/agencies to get a lower price/bigger bribe out of Microsoft. That lower price is STILL HIGHER than the price in a vaguely competitive market.
Vista? Oh yeah, you'll be able to pirate it just like XP because every software company knows that's the best way to introduce future customers.
You forgot collusion, which the Kazaa owners have mysteriously settled http://www.sharmannetworks.com/content/view/full/321/
/.'ers like it or not, there's no reason to celebrate.
Other collusion investigations have quietly ended (surprised?) as well. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,1000000097,39118776,00.htm
A nice summary of how the whole thing works: http://techdirt.com/articles/20060112/1223218.shtml
This kind of mea culpa is a way to deflect the obvious control of global media distribution. They are still going to overcharge you for a DVD, and screw most of the creative/production people with questionable accounting. Please don't start a "but actors are getting paid..." discussion. A FEW actors get paid ridiculous sums, media conglomerates get paid even more and no one is the wiser.
Whether
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb2N0QzX1NI
This doesn't look particularly revolutionary from an end-user perspective. The video uses a bunch of different buttons to do stuff, so I don't know how a touch screen would improve matters dramatically.
If someone says, "Just wait. It'll be great!" I dunno, there appears to be a bunch of gui-stuff already done and that's the hardest and least sexy part of the work that hardly anyone is willing to re-do.
You mean they are going to sit in there and talk to their attorneys and actually do the right thing and flip the Feds the bird? I vaguely remember having a similar sense of fair play and optimism. Too bad reality is so much different.
No. They are going to roll over in exchange for something. That something includes their careers.
"Commissioners of the Elections Board, which has been sued by the federal agency for not complying with election-modernization law, voted 3-1 to take up the matter in closed session." Italics mine.
That's a clear sign it's out of the voters hands. I would guess that when they roll over, they've got plenty of public service jobs waiting for them.
In the U.S. WinCE has a tiny foothold. It is easily outdwarfed by all of the more-or-less locked/low-end phones. That's the biggest market penetration it has because Symbian just hasn't taken off in the U.S.
In Europe, Symbian-based phones are huge compared to WinCE handsets. Things are hardly any different in Asia.
The parent post is **not** insightful, or even informative in any way.
I run both so I have some insight.
Plone is a content management framework
A simpler way to describe it is as a content management system. But that's actually kind of a limited definition of it. Think of it as features on top of Zope.
What's Zope? Zope in this simple example is the guts of the content management system. The big advantage the entire system has is the design is more robust and scalable (ex. clustering) and has far better developer interface than your average PHP cms. (Drupal I'm looking at you)
Change management in general is not pretty and while they claim postgresql support, it's actually quite limited. It's great for more rapid development and small sites. But if your infrastructure already has clusters, then you would want to look very closely at Plone and perhaps even Zope.