This will of course benefit ChromeOS and will force Microsoft into implementing html5 and H264 negating its strategy of killing adobe and becoming king of the online video.
But there is a bad smell about this. Google could achieve this as well by adding Theora to the supported codecs. Google is putting Firefox in a position where it is either encumbered with patents therefore losing the status of "pure" open source project, or looking bad in the feature front. I don't like this.
Mozilla should just link to the distribution's provided ffmpeg and just let you decide what codecs you compile in. That would mean that at least in FOSS operating systems the problem is sorted.
That would also mean less code to manintain, and to give an advantage to FOSS operating systems.
Ironically, as a musician or band, you won't get a major label offer until you are successful enough to attract the attention of a label. That means you're making enough money that they could make money off of you. So at that point, why sign?
Well, now there is no reason any more. The reason used to be that labels owned the distribution channels, so you couldn't sound on radio or TV without them, even if you were a huge gig. Without them, you would not sound on TV or radio.
Now things are different, but labels still pretend to own the media and some bands fall for it, like OK go did.
Yes, but it wont be certified to run Linux. If you are happy with that, more power to you, but I expect my hardware to work with Linux and to be able to read all code that run on my machine. This product makes it very easy.
By the way, prize is 359 Euro. I haven't seen any computer with 3G ram for 175 Euro, much less with Windows. Could you give me a pointer to the products you have in mind?
We're not exactly out of Microsoft's clammy clutches yet.
Not indeed. And I think a most important part of this story is Microsoft shutting up and taking it from the Chinese goverment, happily.
That means that now when you use hotmail, or office live or msn, or any of the Microsoft web properties, there is a chance that not only the NSA and the US courts can access your data, but also unelected and corrupt Chinese officials.
I mean honestly do you expect 6% of the population to produce 50+% of the worlds intellectual property?
Well I don't think that was the idea exactly. The idea was that by having the most obnoxiously expansive patent system in the world, and granting obvious patents for a number of things, the USA would have an economic advantage over its neighbors, where patent laws are saner. The USA corporations could attack foreign corporations using this stupid laws and this would give the USA a competitive advantage.
In other words, it wouldn't mean that 6% of the population produces 50+% of the worlds intellectual property, but that corporations based on a country with 6% of the population file 50+% of the world's patents. Thats a very different proposition.
But of course foreign corporations are adapting to USA laws and now they patent stupid and obvious things on the USA like native companies do. This negates USA the benefit of this strategy and means that it will likely be changed in the future.
And that is the problem. I am a "veteran" as well (20 years working on the field) and what I can see is that people is always too willing to engage, forgetting about what they should be getting back.
By nature, our work involves a lot of learning and a lot of looking at how things are done and trying to improve them, making procedures more efficient or finding new ways of achieving goals. If you ask me this is quite close to the kind of work executives do.
More and more, companies depend on IT both for efficiencies and for competitive advantage. This is not only on "Tech" companies like it used to be, but in most of the big ones, and it is starting to spill on the medium size ones as well. TFA acknowledges this.
We manage a critical part of their operations, yet many of us enjoy work so much that we are happy with giving economic rewards a secondary position. That is a mistake.
I went freelance consultant and the economic rewards are much better, but you know what? respect for my work also went up, and so did working conditions. Now I feel like if someone wants me on his organization they'll have to provide far more than what they are offering to cubicle workers.
If more IT people would take this view where you have to be rewarded for everything you do for your organization, things would be quite different. It works for salespeople and MBAs really well. They don't move a finger without getting something back. Either money or better working conditions.
if you are a corporate entity that wants to have certain employees "connected" at all times, then there is no other choice. The only confusing part to me is why people buy themselves a non-corporate blackberry.
I agree with you, and that means the dead of Blackberry.
When people sees it, it looks like a phone, so they assume that they can do the things people do with a phone usually. Shortly after, they find out that this is only useful for work. It means that they are available to their bosses 24x7 and they get none of the fancy gadgets that iphone and Android users have installed on their phones.
When they realize that they would like to have another phone for personal use, they hate the blackberry and resist having one as much as possible.
On the other hand, you have the iphone and Android. People buy them and take them to work. They manage to force the IT department to write stuff for them. There are lots of security issues, but that is what users want.
Now, which one of the two has more future in small/medium companies right now?
And do you think that Blackberry will be able to live if only big enterprises use its terminals?
If IE wasn't glued to the operating system, in order to help Microsoft use it's monopoly on operating systems to kill a little company called Netscape, then IE would be a regular application and you would be able to have two versions of it installed. You would run IE6 for your intranet apps, and then something else, (maybe IE8) for the rest of the stuff. The way things are, you have to stick to IE6 and install firefox. It really has backfired.
Who could have possibly predicted that accepting hundreds of billions of dollars from governments over the last couple of decades could have somehow politicized Science?
Well, science by definition can't finance itself. So what do you propose, corporations? bean counters would not allow any basic science, only applied and only in situations where ROI is clear enough.
Will people even begin to doubt the most rigorous sciences like Mathematics and Physics
The answer is no. The good thing about science is that it is open source. For mathematics, you can go through all of the proofs from your text books. For physics you would need a bit of gear to reproduce some of the experiments, but again, that is just a question of money and interest.
The basic point is that the scientific method don't expect you to accept anything without proof. If you can falsify any of the theories by experiment, people will pay attention to you, regardless of politics.
Well, GNOME and KDE ( I prefer one of them but it is not relevant to this post ) have done lots for Linux on the desktop. I have been running it for a number of years because I find it more pleasant to use than Windows. And I am not alone.
And the millions of people using it are doing so against active attacks from a number of organizations. Mainly closed software companies, and also (mainly in the past) political organizations and governments.
I tell you what -- setup a linux install for your "non-technical users", give them the root password, and leave them alone for six months. Assuming they don't find a new techie who will let them actually play games on their machine, I'll be they'll wind up every bit as bogged down as as similarly-configured and abandoned windows installation.
You forgot we are talking about Chrome OS. No software installation allowed. Please read TFA.
The fact that a chrome install will allow absolutely no crapware and yet will be updated is the main advantage of this idea.
Every time this speed comparison between Linux and Windows is done, it is done on newly installed systems. My experience is that after six months of running by a regular (read non technical) user, the windows system will be bogged down by all kinds of crap that make it unbearably slow.
After six months of use, it seems a safe bet the chrome OS computer will run at the same speed as the first day. After a year, the windows user will need to find someone that reinstalls his system or at least cleans it up a bit. The chrome OS user will not have noticed any problem whatsoever.
No viruses, no trojans, no crapware, no slowing down with use, no windows registry, no backups to care about. That is very convenient for your regular user.
Also consider that this is a netbook operating system. For most people needing a full desktop experience a netbook is not enough anyway (too small keyboard, too small screen), so why bothering running Windows on an underpowered box? what people will do is keeping a desktop and a netbook. The netbook will be used to book movie tickets, read the news, check email, watch news...(you don't want to wait for four minutes for windows to start just to check your email). The desktop will be used for word processing, games, work applications (if they do not run in a browser), power users, programming, design, egineering...
With arm netbook prices between 100 and 200 bucks, the netbook is a no brainer.
On one hand they tell us to forget any expectation of privacy, and on the other hand governments, politicians, companies and executives are very effective at using copyright, trade secret laws and national security laws to protect their own privacy.
Regardless of what happens with regular citizens privacy, we should start removing any and all expectations of privacy from corporate entities and politicians. Every payment they make or receive, all external and internal communications and all contracts they sign should be recorded and kept for later inspection by law enforcement. If they have nothing to hide they should't worry. And in a post Lehman Brothers world, this is completely justified.
Doom is like tetris. You learn the game mechanics and you play and play and never get bored.
If it had a story, once you go through it and learn how the story ends, that's it. you are not going back to play. This may be good for the publishers that can sell you a new game with a new story, but I contend that a game that is as enjoyable as Doom without a story is better.
You are thinking smart-phones, but the day you have 50+ models, they are just regular phones. So people will look at external design and at the bundled applications and that's it.
You have the same thing with Symbian. People don't say: "I am going to buy a symbian phone". They just look at the phone hardware and bundled apps and mostly forget about the OS.
There is another reason for considering Nvidia. They have vpdau:
VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) is an API designed by NVIDIA for its GeForce 8 series and later GPU hardware, targeted at the X Window System on Unix operating-systems (including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris).[1][2][3] This VDPAU API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware.
This would allow them to use fairly quiet and cheap processors, like the atom, and still get flawless HD 1080p output.
To me, of all things that have been considered as a remedy against Microsoft monopoly abuse, the only one that is logical and practical would be to stop them from bundling hardware and software. I can't understand why this hasn't been done by either the EU or USA.
Software and hardware are clearly two different markets. You can install Windows in hardware from a number of vendors, and you can install a number of operating systems on a PC.
So you would buy a computer and you would get two receipts, one for the machine and another one for the OS. The OS can even be preinstalled on the machine and you would only get an activation key with your receipt. If you don't want the operating system, you just buy the hardware and don't pay for the activation key.
What really makes me mad is that the only reason this is not considered by the authorities is because Linux is not commercial, so they are not losing money from Microsoft's monopoly abuse. Only companies matter to government. The fact that the public would benefit from an operating system market where Linux would be allowed to compete on equals grounds is not relevant to the government because there is no single company making money from Linux.
What stops you from doing the exact same thing using wifi? You connect your phone through wifi to a VoIP gateway that will route the call to any phone number you want to call. You just need a VoIP client installed on your handset. If you have a open handset, for example an Android one, that's easy and you can use this today within any wifi network you have access to.
Following the logic of your mob/army analogy, I will point that when Spain was invaded by France, we used guerrilla wars (actually "guerrilla" is a spanish word meaning "small war") and we got them out of our country. This has happened on a number of places.
So the bottom line is, we Linux advocates consider computing something we should control, not some foreign multinational. In that situation, a "mob" has a lot of chances to win the "war".
Slashdot Mirror
This will of course benefit ChromeOS and will force Microsoft into implementing html5 and H264 negating its strategy of killing adobe and becoming king of the online video.
But there is a bad smell about this. Google could achieve this as well by adding Theora to the supported codecs. Google is putting Firefox in a position where it is either encumbered with patents therefore losing the status of "pure" open source project, or looking bad in the feature front. I don't like this.
Mozilla should just link to the distribution's provided ffmpeg and just let you decide what codecs you compile in. That would mean that at least in FOSS operating systems the problem is sorted.
That would also mean less code to manintain, and to give an advantage to FOSS operating systems.
Ironically, as a musician or band, you won't get a major label offer until you are successful enough to attract the attention of a label. That means you're making enough money that they could make money off of you. So at that point, why sign?
Well, now there is no reason any more. The reason used to be that labels owned the distribution channels, so you couldn't sound on radio or TV without them, even if you were a huge gig. Without them, you would not sound on TV or radio.
Now things are different, but labels still pretend to own the media and some bands fall for it, like OK go did.
Yes, but it wont be certified to run Linux. If you are happy with that, more power to you, but I expect my hardware to work with Linux and to be able to read all code that run on my machine. This product makes it very easy.
By the way, prize is 359 Euro. I haven't seen any computer with 3G ram for 175 Euro, much less with Windows. Could you give me a pointer to the products you have in mind?
We're not exactly out of Microsoft's clammy clutches yet.
Not indeed. And I think a most important part of this story is Microsoft shutting up and taking it from the Chinese goverment, happily.
That means that now when you use hotmail, or office live or msn, or any of the Microsoft web properties, there is a chance that not only the NSA and the US courts can access your data, but also unelected and corrupt Chinese officials.
You would be doing good and you would get rich. And you would prove that the market always find a way :-)
I mean honestly do you expect 6% of the population to produce 50+% of the worlds intellectual property?
Well I don't think that was the idea exactly. The idea was that by having the most obnoxiously expansive patent system in the world, and granting obvious patents for a number of things, the USA would have an economic advantage over its neighbors, where patent laws are saner. The USA corporations could attack foreign corporations using this stupid laws and this would give the USA a competitive advantage.
In other words, it wouldn't mean that 6% of the population produces 50+% of the worlds intellectual property, but that corporations based on a country with 6% of the population file 50+% of the world's patents. Thats a very different proposition.
But of course foreign corporations are adapting to USA laws and now they patent stupid and obvious things on the USA like native companies do. This negates USA the benefit of this strategy and means that it will likely be changed in the future.
If I didn't do it as a job, I'd do it as a hobby
And that is the problem. I am a "veteran" as well (20 years working on the field) and what I can see is that people is always too willing to engage, forgetting about what they should be getting back.
By nature, our work involves a lot of learning and a lot of looking at how things are done and trying to improve them, making procedures more efficient or finding new ways of achieving goals. If you ask me this is quite close to the kind of work executives do.
More and more, companies depend on IT both for efficiencies and for competitive advantage. This is not only on "Tech" companies like it used to be, but in most of the big ones, and it is starting to spill on the medium size ones as well. TFA acknowledges this.
We manage a critical part of their operations, yet many of us enjoy work so much that we are happy with giving economic rewards a secondary position. That is a mistake.
I went freelance consultant and the economic rewards are much better, but you know what? respect for my work also went up, and so did working conditions. Now I feel like if someone wants me on his organization they'll have to provide far more than what they are offering to cubicle workers.
If more IT people would take this view where you have to be rewarded for everything you do for your organization, things would be quite different. It works for salespeople and MBAs really well. They don't move a finger without getting something back. Either money or better working conditions.
if you are a corporate entity that wants to have certain employees "connected" at all times, then there is no other choice. The only confusing part to me is why people buy themselves a non-corporate blackberry.
I agree with you, and that means the dead of Blackberry.
When people sees it, it looks like a phone, so they assume that they can do the things people do with a phone usually. Shortly after, they find out that this is only useful for work. It means that they are available to their bosses 24x7 and they get none of the fancy gadgets that iphone and Android users have installed on their phones.
When they realize that they would like to have another phone for personal use, they hate the blackberry and resist having one as much as possible.
On the other hand, you have the iphone and Android. People buy them and take them to work. They manage to force the IT department to write stuff for them. There are lots of security issues, but that is what users want.
Now, which one of the two has more future in small/medium companies right now?
And do you think that Blackberry will be able to live if only big enterprises use its terminals?
If IE wasn't glued to the operating system, in order to help Microsoft use it's monopoly on operating systems to kill a little company called Netscape, then IE would be a regular application and you would be able to have two versions of it installed. You would run IE6 for your intranet apps, and then something else, (maybe IE8) for the rest of the stuff. The way things are, you have to stick to IE6 and install firefox. It really has backfired.
Who could have possibly predicted that accepting hundreds of billions of dollars from governments over the last couple of decades could have somehow politicized Science?
Well, science by definition can't finance itself. So what do you propose, corporations? bean counters would not allow any basic science, only applied and only in situations where ROI is clear enough.
Will people even begin to doubt the most rigorous sciences like Mathematics and Physics
The answer is no. The good thing about science is that it is open source. For mathematics, you can go through all of the proofs from your text books. For physics you would need a bit of gear to reproduce some of the experiments, but again, that is just a question of money and interest.
The basic point is that the scientific method don't expect you to accept anything without proof. If you can falsify any of the theories by experiment, people will pay attention to you, regardless of politics.
Well, GNOME and KDE ( I prefer one of them but it is not relevant to this post ) have done lots for Linux on the desktop. I have been running it for a number of years because I find it more pleasant to use than Windows. And I am not alone.
And the millions of people using it are doing so against active attacks from a number of organizations. Mainly closed software companies, and also (mainly in the past) political organizations and governments.
I tell you what -- setup a linux install for your "non-technical users", give them the root password, and leave them alone for six months. Assuming they don't find a new techie who will let them actually play games on their machine, I'll be they'll wind up every bit as bogged down as as similarly-configured and abandoned windows installation.
You forgot we are talking about Chrome OS. No software installation allowed. Please read TFA.
The fact that a chrome install will allow absolutely no crapware and yet will be updated is the main advantage of this idea.
Every time this speed comparison between Linux and Windows is done, it is done on newly installed systems. My experience is that after six months of running by a regular (read non technical) user, the windows system will be bogged down by all kinds of crap that make it unbearably slow.
After six months of use, it seems a safe bet the chrome OS computer will run at the same speed as the first day. After a year, the windows user will need to find someone that reinstalls his system or at least cleans it up a bit. The chrome OS user will not have noticed any problem whatsoever.
No viruses, no trojans, no crapware, no slowing down with use, no windows registry, no backups to care about. That is very convenient for your regular user.
Also consider that this is a netbook operating system. For most people needing a full desktop experience a netbook is not enough anyway (too small keyboard, too small screen), so why bothering running Windows on an underpowered box? what people will do is keeping a desktop and a netbook. The netbook will be used to book movie tickets, read the news, check email, watch news...(you don't want to wait for four minutes for windows to start just to check your email). The desktop will be used for word processing, games, work applications (if they do not run in a browser), power users, programming, design, egineering...
With arm netbook prices between 100 and 200 bucks, the netbook is a no brainer.
On one hand they tell us to forget any expectation of privacy, and on the other hand governments, politicians, companies and executives are very effective at using copyright, trade secret laws and national security laws to protect their own privacy.
Regardless of what happens with regular citizens privacy, we should start removing any and all expectations of privacy from corporate entities and politicians. Every payment they make or receive, all external and internal communications and all contracts they sign should be recorded and kept for later inspection by law enforcement. If they have nothing to hide they should't worry. And in a post Lehman Brothers world, this is completely justified.
Nobody talks about this, of course.
Doom is like tetris. You learn the game mechanics and you play and play and never get bored.
If it had a story, once you go through it and learn how the story ends, that's it. you are not going back to play. This may be good for the publishers that can sell you a new game with a new story, but I contend that a game that is as enjoyable as Doom without a story is better.
You are thinking smart-phones, but the day you have 50+ models, they are just regular phones. So people will look at external design and at the bundled applications and that's it.
You have the same thing with Symbian. People don't say: "I am going to buy a symbian phone". They just look at the phone hardware and bundled apps and mostly forget about the OS.
Mod parent up. The only reason the Internet is not augmented TV by now is that nobody had the ability to "fix" it.
There is another reason for considering Nvidia. They have vpdau:
VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) is an API designed by NVIDIA for its GeForce 8 series and later GPU hardware, targeted at the X Window System on Unix operating-systems (including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris).[1][2][3] This VDPAU API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware.
This would allow them to use fairly quiet and cheap processors, like the atom, and still get flawless HD 1080p output.
To me, of all things that have been considered as a remedy against Microsoft monopoly abuse, the only one that is logical and practical would be to stop them from bundling hardware and software. I can't understand why this hasn't been done by either the EU or USA.
Software and hardware are clearly two different markets. You can install Windows in hardware from a number of vendors, and you can install a number of operating systems on a PC.
So you would buy a computer and you would get two receipts, one for the machine and another one for the OS. The OS can even be preinstalled on the machine and you would only get an activation key with your receipt. If you don't want the operating system, you just buy the hardware and don't pay for the activation key.
What really makes me mad is that the only reason this is not considered by the authorities is because Linux is not commercial, so they are not losing money from Microsoft's monopoly abuse. Only companies matter to government. The fact that the public would benefit from an operating system market where Linux would be allowed to compete on equals grounds is not relevant to the government because there is no single company making money from Linux.
Thats perfectly fine and well, but can you put two different schemas in two different boxes? no, you canÂt.
What stops you from doing the exact same thing using wifi? You connect your phone through wifi to a VoIP gateway that will route the call to any phone number you want to call. You just need a VoIP client installed on your handset. If you have a open handset, for example an Android one, that's easy and you can use this today within any wifi network you have access to.
Following the logic of your mob/army analogy, I will point that when Spain was invaded by France, we used guerrilla wars (actually "guerrilla" is a spanish word meaning "small war") and we got them out of our country. This has happened on a number of places.
So the bottom line is, we Linux advocates consider computing something we should control, not some foreign multinational. In that situation, a "mob" has a lot of chances to win the "war".
Patent a gene and then sue anyone who has it. Even better would be to copyright it and then get $700 per copy in the body.
Also, you could ban human reproduction as it involves unauthorized copying of copyrighted genes.