If the menu system worked for millions of people why would you yank it out? Transition it out.
This is one case where you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Their options:
Keep the status quo: people complain the interface lacks advancement; "there's no innovation!"
Keep the status quo + the new interface: people refuse to learn the new system, inevitably everyone just sticks with the old. Even if a subset of users migrate away, you're now stuck supporting two methods for doing the same thing.
Ditch the old interface, replace it with the new one: People complain they have to learn something new.
There is no winning situation here. It's like giving a medicine to a baby, no matter what you're scolded in the short term. But in the long term the change is necessary for improvements.
Why is Google supposed to change its business model because Disney has a different business model?
Because the current opinion is the youtube business model doesn't work. It is similar to a coffee shop trying to make money off of random local performances while the radio stations get contracted to play Britney Spears a certain percentage of the time.
I'm not saying that I know the solution, but it is inevitable for an internet video content provider to start partnering with the "professional" studios and move the from the broadcast TV service business model to the streaming online video business model. Investors will take a hard look at this and if Google either says "we still make money with youtube" or "we're not in that market", then the investors might be okay with that. But I'm certain a good portion of investors think that markets are similar and may change their investments based on this type of news.
It's simple to install. Adding applications is easy. Updating is easy. Seriously, what's not to like
It doesn't run photoshop and itunes.
Before you harp "run wine or gimp" normal people don't know about wine, gimp, or why they should use it. They want to attach their iphone to their computer like Steve Jobs says they can with a Mac or Windows box. They want to run photoshop because it is already what they know. They don't want to be told a random piece of software won't run because it's not open source or a random device won't work because the manufacturer didn't open their specs. They don't care about FSF's definition of "free" or even "free as in beer" since they'll gladly throw cash at expensive gadgets and software sold by Apple, MS, and Adobe. It is the same reason why you don't see people changing their own oil filters on their cars. They don't care. They'll gladly pay a mechanic to do the job and fix the problem for them even if the markup is 200% or 400%. Software is no different.
The problem is that it's hard to pin down the advantages in a manner that people will "get it".
You know, maybe that's just it. Maybe there is nothing in linux that people actually want. To bring up a car analogy, linux is like the car you can buy with all of the drawings and part/assembly specifications freely available along with the freedom of the customer to go out and have a shop build an exact copy of each and every part of the car. No sane customer looking for a car cares about that. They first care that the car works and the second they pony up the cash, they will be able to drive it out of the lot. They're not paying for specs and documentation on how the product was built, they're paying for the finished product. People don't go to grocery stores to learn how to grow apples and make cheese, they go there expecting to buy products.
That's right, customers don't care about if something is open source or the benefits of open source. They will only see how the product (open source or not) benefits them with the default settings.
The first company or organization that gets this (in other parts of the world, this is called marketing, not to be confused with slashdot's version of marketing which is only advertising) will be the first organization to make money.
The truth is linux's current target market is very small and they're not going to get desktop penetration by beating the open source drum because everyone else doesn't care about that stuff.
Wait a minute, you're telling me you don't have a water gun pistol with a wii-mote strapped onto it and a custom bluetooth driver installed? Get with the times!
Now anything I do gets done with a "pow" sound. Click that link: "pow". Go back: "pow". Stop: "pow". Close windows: "pow""pow""pow". Are you sure you want to leave this page? Hell yeah! "pow". Do you want to debug? Hell no! "pow".
I even threw out my keyboard and use the on screen keyboard. Now programming in Java is actually fun. Just to type "System.out.println();" takes 24 "pow" with no mistakes! And changed my mouse cursor to a cross hair, set all the event sounds to a "pow" sound, and the window theme to the "High Contrast Black".
Best of all is when something doesn't work or when a page takes too long to load: "pow""pow""p-p-p-p-pow". Double and tripple clicking is equally fun: "p-pow!" "p-p-pow!".
Working with computers is so much fun now. You wouldn't believe how much fun I had posting this.
"pow""pow""p-p-p-pow"!!!
Because the phone manufacturers and networks would love you to buy a new phone and sign a new 2 year contract. If they allowed you to upgrade your software, the only company that wins is Google.
He just wants a couple of technical features built into the OSS browsers to support loading custom client-side code and for you to more easily know which license the code is under.
The 4k random writes number is after simulating a "used" drive. Fill up your SSD with random files and deletions and then test your 4k random writes again.
Without real advertising, iPhone devs are beholden to blind chance when they post their app in the store.
Wrong answer. Without a good marketing plan, even if the best ideas will fail. This is the primary reason why any sane business plan must have a marketing strategy. The basic way it works is this: you can built the best product to ever exist, but as long as it only exists in cave separated from the rest of the world, it will never sell.
Want to learn more? Take a marketing class. And for the record, advertising is just a small portion of marketing activities.
Sure it does. But you're not going to leave it in sleep mode overnight. If you forget to plug it in at night or for a long period of time you may find your battery dead or low.
Correct. I'm one of the first owners of the first eee 900 (mine has a celeron). I purposely bought the linux version because it came with a larger SSD for the same price. I have the stock linux install a shot but it was too anemic for my needs. Later I tried ubuntu but it was too slow. Now I mostly use windows XP on it.
Dell also probably has a somewhat more tech savvy crowd since most of the sales are through a website. These aren't the same people that walk into bestbuy and don't know the difference between types of memory (as in hard disk and ram).
The GPL was made specifically for fighting against big proprietary vendors that abuse selling proprietary software/hardware in order to increase profits. If that's your mission, then GNU Linux is your friend.
But after a while, you simply don't care anymore. You just want the damn video card to work as advertised and display all the eye candy it possibly can. You want to use an ipod because it is actually a decent device, or you actually feel that paying individually for songs (drm or not) is actually a justified price. If that's the case, things like Haiku (MIT license) or BSD licensed OSes begin to make much more sense than the GPL and its associated "holy war."
In the U.S., minors may at any time void contracts they enter into. Supposedly this law exists to protect minors from things they may not understand. Fortunately for most retailers, most minors do not know this law exists, therefore they are willing to take the risk and enter into sales contracts with minors. More important things like bank accounts, however, are too risky and this law is the primary reason why every bank requires an adult to open a joint account with a minor.
IANAL but you can certainly find more information online by Googling: minor contract law. I became aware of this law through a business law class.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the people on the mailing list are accurate or that they have reviewed the software in its entirety. The grand parent's logic is incorrect. Open source is easier to verify because the source is available. That doesn't necessarily mean that the source is verified.
An analogy is in running a business and filing taxes. Let's say I run my small business, and file taxes myself. I make my books available to all and my accounting transactions available to the public. I then claim that my accounting computations and tax calculations are accurate because my books are available to the public. Any sane person would laugh at that logic because clearly the public doesn't necessarily mean that someone has reviewed my books. The only way to verify is to have an external agency audit my books and publish their findings. (And even then, the auditing agency can spoof the audit.)
So open source is not verified just because it is open source. Now if another entity went out of their way to verify a particular version of an open source software, published their results, and were reputable, then you could at least appeal to higher authority that the software is verified. But that doesn't mean it is perfect. The only way to fully convince yourself that a piece of software is verified is to audit it yourself.
The same is true for proprietary software. The only difference is no public entity has immediate access to the source. Thus it is certainly harder to audit proprietary software.
Answer me this, How did China invent paper, compass, press printing, and gunpowder then?
That's so easy. In the beginning they had their science slider at 100% and culture at 0%. Paper, compass, and printing press are pretty easy to get to anyway. Gunpowder they probably made a bee-line for. After that they probably dropped the science slider to 0% and pushed the culture slider to 100%. That works great for happiness in your cities. They did it wrong though, seeing as we (the US) were able to produce a bunch of pop singers and a bunch of rock bands. They also just tried to spam farms and everyone knows that doesn't work. You gotta do cottage spam (US suburbs) so you bring in the commerce. And you can't just stop at gunpowder, you gotta at least go for rifling--that's probably why Japan set them so far back in the war.
The problem I have with any grouping is that it always degenerates to stereotypes. And before you know it, you are the stereotype, simply because you're grouped with those people. I'm not saying that there are not lawyers that are not sharks, and that there are not techies that teach, but that because of these assholes in each camp along with the stereotype, everyone in that group carries the blame.
This is all fine if made in good humor, but when it gets personal, or taken too far, the result is enemies and flaming rather than meaningful discussion. Simply put, there is no discussion if either side or both sides choose to close their minds to criticism.
The problem with the US is suburbs and city planning around automobiles. Go on Google maps, look at Los Angeles. Next to every large building you'll see giant parking lots. Next to many homes you'll see driveways and/or roads wide enough for street parking.
Now go to a large city in Europe or Japan. You'll still see parking lots and roads. But you'll find that there are fewer parking lots and the roads are narrow. If you have street view you'll see the buildings are taller and less spread out.
All I'm pointing out is car culture leads to less density. This leads to poor public mass transit systems because they need a high level of ridership to be viable. But we may never get that because everyone is too convinced they need a car and a place to park it everywhere they go.
No, the rest is reinvested to "allow for the continued funding of foundation programs and grant making". That's straight from the article you referenced.
This is like a perpetuity. The goal is to keep the foundation around forever so that it can continuously hand out money forever.
Furthermore, investigations have found that the Foundation's attitude to ethical investment to be lacking.
This is true, however, I think it is more lack of insight into determining the investments chosen. For example most people have access to investment funds like 401k and such, however, I'm pretty sure nobody really looks at the list of companies or bothers to keep track of the list of companies within each fund.
What use is it to have 1 Gig bandwidth to every house in the country?
You can put all communications on it like voice (phone), video (tv), and data (internet). Internet storage services would actually mean something (1gbps can't be saturated by a single cheap hard disk sustained read). Thumb drives would be useless since you'd just put it on a server somewhere and for most purposes, you could access that data anywhere within the country.
High speed internet lowers the barriers to entry for content and data services providers. For example before the internet, you were stuck what was broadcasted or what was sent to you in the mail. So if you wanted to write your own articles, you'd have to get them printed on paper and distributed. Today you pay a small monthly fee and anyone can access your blog or whatever for essentially zero dollars. Marketing is still an issue but at least distribution and publishing are essentially zero. I expect the same to happen for other media (music, video) as internet bandwidth increases.
Slashdot Mirror
If the menu system worked for millions of people why would you yank it out? Transition it out.
This is one case where you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Their options:
There is no winning situation here. It's like giving a medicine to a baby, no matter what you're scolded in the short term. But in the long term the change is necessary for improvements.
Why is Google supposed to change its business model because Disney has a different business model?
Because the current opinion is the youtube business model doesn't work. It is similar to a coffee shop trying to make money off of random local performances while the radio stations get contracted to play Britney Spears a certain percentage of the time.
I'm not saying that I know the solution, but it is inevitable for an internet video content provider to start partnering with the "professional" studios and move the from the broadcast TV service business model to the streaming online video business model. Investors will take a hard look at this and if Google either says "we still make money with youtube" or "we're not in that market", then the investors might be okay with that. But I'm certain a good portion of investors think that markets are similar and may change their investments based on this type of news.
It's simple to install. Adding applications is easy. Updating is easy. Seriously, what's not to like
It doesn't run photoshop and itunes.
Before you harp "run wine or gimp" normal people don't know about wine, gimp, or why they should use it. They want to attach their iphone to their computer like Steve Jobs says they can with a Mac or Windows box. They want to run photoshop because it is already what they know. They don't want to be told a random piece of software won't run because it's not open source or a random device won't work because the manufacturer didn't open their specs. They don't care about FSF's definition of "free" or even "free as in beer" since they'll gladly throw cash at expensive gadgets and software sold by Apple, MS, and Adobe. It is the same reason why you don't see people changing their own oil filters on their cars. They don't care. They'll gladly pay a mechanic to do the job and fix the problem for them even if the markup is 200% or 400%. Software is no different.
The problem is that it's hard to pin down the advantages in a manner that people will "get it".
You know, maybe that's just it. Maybe there is nothing in linux that people actually want. To bring up a car analogy, linux is like the car you can buy with all of the drawings and part/assembly specifications freely available along with the freedom of the customer to go out and have a shop build an exact copy of each and every part of the car. No sane customer looking for a car cares about that. They first care that the car works and the second they pony up the cash, they will be able to drive it out of the lot. They're not paying for specs and documentation on how the product was built, they're paying for the finished product. People don't go to grocery stores to learn how to grow apples and make cheese, they go there expecting to buy products.
That's right, customers don't care about if something is open source or the benefits of open source. They will only see how the product (open source or not) benefits them with the default settings.
The first company or organization that gets this (in other parts of the world, this is called marketing, not to be confused with slashdot's version of marketing which is only advertising) will be the first organization to make money.
The truth is linux's current target market is very small and they're not going to get desktop penetration by beating the open source drum because everyone else doesn't care about that stuff.
Wait a minute, you're telling me you don't have a water gun pistol with a wii-mote strapped onto it and a custom bluetooth driver installed? Get with the times!
Now anything I do gets done with a "pow" sound. Click that link: "pow". Go back: "pow". Stop: "pow". Close windows: "pow" "pow" "pow". Are you sure you want to leave this page? Hell yeah! "pow". Do you want to debug? Hell no! "pow".
I even threw out my keyboard and use the on screen keyboard. Now programming in Java is actually fun. Just to type "System.out.println();" takes 24 "pow" with no mistakes! And changed my mouse cursor to a cross hair, set all the event sounds to a "pow" sound, and the window theme to the "High Contrast Black".
Best of all is when something doesn't work or when a page takes too long to load: "pow" "pow" "p-p-p-p-pow". Double and tripple clicking is equally fun: "p-pow!" "p-p-pow!".
Working with computers is so much fun now. You wouldn't believe how much fun I had posting this. "pow" "pow" "p-p-p-pow"!!!
why do we need to feature new phones?
Because the phone manufacturers and networks would love you to buy a new phone and sign a new 2 year contract. If they allowed you to upgrade your software, the only company that wins is Google.
He just wants a couple of technical features built into the OSS browsers to support loading custom client-side code and for you to more easily know which license the code is under.
Well, we already have a bunch of popular open source web browsers. How about he use his open source ideals and implement it himself.
The 4k random writes number is after simulating a "used" drive. Fill up your SSD with random files and deletions and then test your 4k random writes again.
Without real advertising, iPhone devs are beholden to blind chance when they post their app in the store.
Wrong answer. Without a good marketing plan, even if the best ideas will fail. This is the primary reason why any sane business plan must have a marketing strategy. The basic way it works is this: you can built the best product to ever exist, but as long as it only exists in cave separated from the rest of the world, it will never sell.
Want to learn more? Take a marketing class. And for the record, advertising is just a small portion of marketing activities.
Sure it does. But you're not going to leave it in sleep mode overnight. If you forget to plug it in at night or for a long period of time you may find your battery dead or low.
But it's a Sony!!!
Correct. I'm one of the first owners of the first eee 900 (mine has a celeron). I purposely bought the linux version because it came with a larger SSD for the same price. I have the stock linux install a shot but it was too anemic for my needs. Later I tried ubuntu but it was too slow. Now I mostly use windows XP on it.
Dell also probably has a somewhat more tech savvy crowd since most of the sales are through a website. These aren't the same people that walk into bestbuy and don't know the difference between types of memory (as in hard disk and ram).
The GPL was made specifically for fighting against big proprietary vendors that abuse selling proprietary software/hardware in order to increase profits. If that's your mission, then GNU Linux is your friend.
But after a while, you simply don't care anymore. You just want the damn video card to work as advertised and display all the eye candy it possibly can. You want to use an ipod because it is actually a decent device, or you actually feel that paying individually for songs (drm or not) is actually a justified price. If that's the case, things like Haiku (MIT license) or BSD licensed OSes begin to make much more sense than the GPL and its associated "holy war."
In the U.S., minors may at any time void contracts they enter into. Supposedly this law exists to protect minors from things they may not understand. Fortunately for most retailers, most minors do not know this law exists, therefore they are willing to take the risk and enter into sales contracts with minors. More important things like bank accounts, however, are too risky and this law is the primary reason why every bank requires an adult to open a joint account with a minor.
IANAL but you can certainly find more information online by Googling: minor contract law. I became aware of this law through a business law class.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the people on the mailing list are accurate or that they have reviewed the software in its entirety. The grand parent's logic is incorrect. Open source is easier to verify because the source is available. That doesn't necessarily mean that the source is verified.
An analogy is in running a business and filing taxes. Let's say I run my small business, and file taxes myself. I make my books available to all and my accounting transactions available to the public. I then claim that my accounting computations and tax calculations are accurate because my books are available to the public. Any sane person would laugh at that logic because clearly the public doesn't necessarily mean that someone has reviewed my books. The only way to verify is to have an external agency audit my books and publish their findings. (And even then, the auditing agency can spoof the audit.)
So open source is not verified just because it is open source. Now if another entity went out of their way to verify a particular version of an open source software, published their results, and were reputable, then you could at least appeal to higher authority that the software is verified. But that doesn't mean it is perfect. The only way to fully convince yourself that a piece of software is verified is to audit it yourself.
The same is true for proprietary software. The only difference is no public entity has immediate access to the source. Thus it is certainly harder to audit proprietary software.
Answer me this, How did China invent paper, compass, press printing, and gunpowder then?
That's so easy. In the beginning they had their science slider at 100% and culture at 0%. Paper, compass, and printing press are pretty easy to get to anyway. Gunpowder they probably made a bee-line for. After that they probably dropped the science slider to 0% and pushed the culture slider to 100%. That works great for happiness in your cities. They did it wrong though, seeing as we (the US) were able to produce a bunch of pop singers and a bunch of rock bands. They also just tried to spam farms and everyone knows that doesn't work. You gotta do cottage spam (US suburbs) so you bring in the commerce. And you can't just stop at gunpowder, you gotta at least go for rifling--that's probably why Japan set them so far back in the war.
Anyhow, cultural victory for the win!
The problem I have with any grouping is that it always degenerates to stereotypes. And before you know it, you are the stereotype, simply because you're grouped with those people. I'm not saying that there are not lawyers that are not sharks, and that there are not techies that teach, but that because of these assholes in each camp along with the stereotype, everyone in that group carries the blame.
This is all fine if made in good humor, but when it gets personal, or taken too far, the result is enemies and flaming rather than meaningful discussion. Simply put, there is no discussion if either side or both sides choose to close their minds to criticism.
The problem with the US is suburbs and city planning around automobiles. Go on Google maps, look at Los Angeles. Next to every large building you'll see giant parking lots. Next to many homes you'll see driveways and/or roads wide enough for street parking.
Now go to a large city in Europe or Japan. You'll still see parking lots and roads. But you'll find that there are fewer parking lots and the roads are narrow. If you have street view you'll see the buildings are taller and less spread out.
All I'm pointing out is car culture leads to less density. This leads to poor public mass transit systems because they need a high level of ridership to be viable. But we may never get that because everyone is too convinced they need a car and a place to park it everywhere they go.
If history is any indication it would actually be:
CTRL+C: (pinky CTRL, index finger C)
WIN+R: (pinky Winkey, index finger R)
Type a captital R: SHIFT+R (similar fingers)
For me ALT+F2 is more awkward since the distance between the ALT+F2 keys is farther than WIN+R.
So in other words they want me to secretly pay for ESPN360 through my ISP even when I don't use the service. Awesome!
The rest is re-invested to maximise profit.
No, the rest is reinvested to "allow for the continued funding of foundation programs and grant making". That's straight from the article you referenced.
This is like a perpetuity. The goal is to keep the foundation around forever so that it can continuously hand out money forever.
Furthermore, investigations have found that the Foundation's attitude to ethical investment to be lacking.
This is true, however, I think it is more lack of insight into determining the investments chosen. For example most people have access to investment funds like 401k and such, however, I'm pretty sure nobody really looks at the list of companies or bothers to keep track of the list of companies within each fund.
Stop browsing for porn and your pop-up issues will go away...
I know lots of old displays still use DSub VGA but when can I get one with HDMI?
It'd be really cool if I could just hook this up to a digital TV which everyone seems to have these days.
What use is it to have 1 Gig bandwidth to every house in the country?
You can put all communications on it like voice (phone), video (tv), and data (internet). Internet storage services would actually mean something (1gbps can't be saturated by a single cheap hard disk sustained read). Thumb drives would be useless since you'd just put it on a server somewhere and for most purposes, you could access that data anywhere within the country.
High speed internet lowers the barriers to entry for content and data services providers. For example before the internet, you were stuck what was broadcasted or what was sent to you in the mail. So if you wanted to write your own articles, you'd have to get them printed on paper and distributed. Today you pay a small monthly fee and anyone can access your blog or whatever for essentially zero dollars. Marketing is still an issue but at least distribution and publishing are essentially zero. I expect the same to happen for other media (music, video) as internet bandwidth increases.